All right y'all, welcome back to the show.
It's anti-war radio.
Please stop by antiwar.com/donate.
We're starting our fun drive right now, and it's easy to predict that we're going to be way behind, and we really need your help.
So please stop by antiwar.com/donate.
All right, now on to our next guest.
It's Jon Pfeffer.
He's the co-director of foreign policy and focus at the Institute for Policy Studies, writes its regular World Beat column, and is publishing a book on Islamophobia with City Lights Press, will be in 2011.
And his website is jonpfeffer.com, and he's got this new one at tomdispatch.com called Jon Pfeffer Crusade 2.0, The Lies of Islamophobia, Three Unfinished Wars of the West Against the Rest.
And, of course, it's republished today at antiwar.com under Tom Englehardt's column.
Welcome back to the show, Jon.
How are you?
Fine.
Thanks for having me on the show.
Well, I really appreciate you joining us here, and I really appreciate this article.
I'm so scared that the Sharia are going to come and put gays in the military and stuff.
I'm just beside myself.
And so I was hoping you could teach me the history of Islam's unsatiable, irrational, hell-bent war against all that is good, true, and beautiful in the West.
That is the standard narrative we're getting right now from a couple of people here in the United States.
And what we hear in the United States, you can imagine, is magnified about 10 or 20 times in Europe.
So this is the kind of fear-mongering that people would be pretty familiar with if they heard it in, say, circa the year 1095, which was the time of the first crusade that Europe launched in the Holy Land.
Very similar rhetoric then as now.
But hasn't there been an attempt, at least in the past, even if we don't fall for this madness these days that you hear on Sean Hannity's show or whatever about an Islamofascist caliphate, but there used to be a big Islamofascist caliphate that almost took over all of the West forever that had to be defeated in a defensive war, right?
Back in the old days or something?
Well, there was, of course, in the first hundred years after Muhammad's death, the founder of Islam, a quite rapid spread of Islam and an emerging caliphate.
It, of course, not only took over large sections of what had been the Persian Empire, took over North Africa, but also took over what is now known as Spain, spread up through the Balkans, even into Italy.
And it came because basically the Roman Empire and the Persian Empire had knocked each other senseless at that time, and both were reeling from this kind of inter-imperial conflict.
And Islam emerged in this vacuum of authority in this time, which was between the 7th and 8th century AD.
But by the time the First Crusade began, which was in 1095, Islam had basically fragmented the world of its caliphate.
There were a number of competing tendencies.
There was, of course, the emerging split between Sunni and Shia, which, of course, continues today.
And the notion of a caliphate that could take over the world, even by 1095 in the First Crusade, that was a long-lost dream of some in Islam, never to be seen again.
Now, you know, maybe it's partly being American.
I don't really know how it is in Europe.
But the way I learned about the Crusades, you know, in my typical government school in Texas where I grew up, you know, it's pretty much this is a long time ago in a galaxy far, far away.
Yeah, it's the history of the world or whatever, but it's not necessarily tied directly to anything going on now.
Although that was back during the years when the alien enemy force was the Soviet Union, who, you know, basically was run by white people.
Pseudo, you know, even though they were godless atheist communists, there was, you know, Orthodox Christianity in Russia.
But it seems like maybe it's different now, I guess.
I don't know.
The way I grew up learning about the Crusades was some stuff that happened.
But it seems like from the Islamic point of view, it's not so much that way.
It's something that's still happening and has been happening.
Well, you know, when you were growing up and when I was growing up during the Cold War, we actually, the United States and principal Western countries, and Israel as well, had a very different attitude about radical Islam.
We actually partnered with radical Islam against what we saw as the major threat.
And the major threat at that time during the Cold War was the rise of Arab nationalism.
We were very concerned about Nasser in Egypt.
We were very concerned about emerging nationalists in Iran, in Iraq.
And we saw radical Islam as actually a weapon we could use against these emerging nationalists, who we feared would actually partner with the Soviet Union, which in some cases they did, against the West.
And so, you know, we may be familiar, your audience, of course, is familiar with the United States supporting the Mujahideen in Afghanistan against the Soviet Union.
But that actually was just a small part of this campaign of partnering with radical Islam.
So, for instance, the United States and Israel played a key role in the development of Hamas, for instance, because we felt that Hamas, as radical Islam, would be an effective force against the Arab nationalists under Arafat and the PLO.
We were very instrumental in the spread of the Muslim Brotherhood, which was formed in the 1920s, of course, but which got a big boost from U.S., Israel, and Western governments during the Cold War, again, as a weapon against the Soviet Union.
So, the notion of radical Islam as being our enemy was reversed during the Cold War period, because many of the same kind of images we had of Islam during the Crusades, and, say, during the Ottoman Empire, we simply transferred over to the Soviet Union and the Communists.
So many of the kind of preconceptions, many of the stereotypes we had about the world of Islam, about Islam taking over the world in a worldwide caliphate, we simply transferred over to the Soviet Union, and our presumption that the Soviet Union was intent on creating a kind of communist caliphate, so to speak, taking over the entire world.
Well, at least the Soviet Union existed.
I mean, that's what annoys me about this.
I mean, the map of the world, when I was a kid, USSR was a pretty big landmass there, never mind their allies in the world, too, but the Islamofascist caliphate is, you know, chilling in a guesthouse somewhere in the northwestern tribal territories of Afghanistan, in no man's land, in exile.
Uh-huh, exactly, exactly.
It is a fantasy of a very, very small group of people.
But the irony, of course, is that the other place that it exists is in the minds of Islamophobes here in the United States and Europe, who actually, in some sense, sustain this illusion that Al-Qaeda has.
It gives it credence by imagining that not only Al-Qaeda shares this belief in a global caliphate, but that all of Islam does, from the Islamists, they presume, in Turkey, to the PLO, to Hamas, to a wide diversity of actors in the Islamic world.
In some sense, that, too, is a kind of stereotype brought over from the Cold War period.
You know, the Cold Warriors looked at communism as a totalitarian construct, as this kind of undifferentiated mass that was unreformable.
And in some sense, these Islamophobes look at Islam the same way.
Islam is this undifferentiated mass, and it, too, cannot be reformed.
So that's another kind of curious transformation of Cold War ideology into Islamophobia today.
Yeah, the wise old man of Fox News, Bill O'Reilly, was saying just last week that we don't have a radical Islam problem, we have an Islam problem, and apparently that's believable to some giant number of tens of millions of Americans.
So we're going to talk more about how that ain't true, obviously, I hope should be.
John Pfeffer, right after this, y'all, Antiwar Radio.
Hey, I'm Scott.
Welcome back to the show.
It's Antiwar Radio.
Got John Pfeffer on the line from Foreign Policy and Focus.
He's got one for Tom Dispatch that we're running today on Antiwar.com.
I think it was today I saw this thing or late last night or some kind of thing.
Let me see.
Yeah, there it is, Crusade 2.0 by John Pfeffer and Tom Engelhardt.
I've got the viewpoints section on Antiwar.com right now for you.
Okay, so here's the thing.
You made a very convincing case, I think, that there's been this effort to conflate all radical Muslim groups together into jihadist-ism or Islamo-scariness or the caliphate or whatever.
But really what we're talking about is al-Qaeda here, the Taliban here, al-Qaeda in Iraq there, which is quite different, and the Al-Aqsa Martyrs Brigade and Hamas and Hezbollah that aren't even enemies of the United States at all, really.
And for that matter, throw in the Tamil Tigers in Sri Lanka if you want to or any insurgents in the Philippines or lumping all these things together.
So now please explain why that ain't really right.
What is the al-Aqsa Martyrs Brigade and how is it different than, say, for example, the Ayatollah Khamenei who rules Iran?
Well, first we have to distinguish between groups that are state actors and non-state actors.
Because al-Qaeda is a non-state actor.
It has no allegiance to any particular state.
It's one of the reasons why Saudi Arabia, for instance, has waged such a dramatic campaign over the last two or three decades against al-Qaeda and its offshoots.
Because organizations like al-Qaeda represent a major threat to institutional powers like Saudi Arabia, represent a threat even though Saudi Arabia's version of Islam is quite conservative.
And I'm sure your listeners are quite familiar with Wahhabism and the Saudi export of Wahhabi ideology around the world.
It's a very fundamentalist kind of interpretation of Islam.
However, al-Qaeda, when it comes to Saudi Arabia, would like to overthrow that regime.
And they're not conservatives, they're radicals.
Exactly.
They're lunatics.
You know, Loretta Napoleoni says that bin Laden really is kind of a Leninist.
Don't tell him that.
He thinks he ain't.
Absolutely.
At least when it comes to tactics, that's the case.
So, I mean, we have to distinguish between state actors and non-state actors.
But then even within organizations, I mean, take the example of the Taliban, for instance.
Now, we could consider the Taliban, you know, one effective organization.
But, in fact, the Taliban contains a number of different types of allegiances and ideologies.
There's a very interesting report published recently by the USIP that pointed out that the US tactic of striking, of killing, basically, the leadership of the Taliban, has some major unexpected consequences.
The Taliban leadership, for the most part, has been in their mid-30s.
And they are more or less predisposed toward compromise.
Compromise with the government in Kabul.
Compromise, perhaps, with compatriots over the border in Pakistan.
Compromise even with the US troops.
However, when we get rid of that particular generation with our targeted drone attacks, the next generation is coming up.
And the next generation tends to be in their mid-20s, tends to be much harder in their perspective, and tends to be very uncompromising.
If we treat the Taliban as one single unit, then we consistently make those kinds of mistakes.
If, on the other hand, we look at the Taliban as being, you know, actually a rather diverse group, and there being some people within the Taliban that we can actually sit down and talk to, that has a profound impact on the kinds of policy choices we make, and the kinds of wars we either wage or we don't wage.
Yeah, but, pardon me for being so cynical and such a conspiracy nut and whatever, but it seems to me like the General's plan is, great, the more people we kill, the more enemies we have, the more we get to have a long war.
Oh, absolutely.
I'm not disputing what the official US policy is.
I'm just saying it's stupid.
Yeah, well, I guess that's really the question, though.
Is it stupidity or the plan?
I guess it's got to be some of both.
Oh, it's always some of both.
Always some of both.
But this is the problem when we make the mistake of treating all of Islam, and even political Islam, as one undifferentiated group.
I mean, take a look at Hezbollah and Hamas.
These are two organizations that have made the decision to become very political, to engage in political process.
And in the case of Hamas, of course, we have said that they have no right to be running Gaza.
In the case of Hezbollah, we're very uncomfortable with their participation in the Lebanese government.
But the bottom line is that both Hezbollah and Hamas are making the same kind of political transformation that the IRA, the Irish Republican Army, did in Ireland, or that the Labour Party did in Israel.
Both the major political formations in Israel began as terrorist organizations that used assassination and other techniques as part of their everyday struggle in the 1940s.
Hamas and Hezbollah, again, going through that similar transformation, or would be able to make that similar transformation if we recognized that process.
But again, if we say, hey, they're just radical Islam, they're wedded to the same kind of tactics and ideology as Al-Qaeda, we consistently make these mistakes.
Right.
Well, now, here's the thing, too.
You can comment on this if you want, but I'm pretty sure you mostly see it this way anyway, and then we can get on to the consequences.
But Robert Pape has shown, I guess is how you say it in social science, proven is a little more amorphous, but he certainly has shown that suicide bombing across the world always is a reaction to occupation.
And there's a strategic logic behind it.
It's particularly useful against democracies for turning people against their own government's policies and also provoking overreactions.
As Bin Laden says, the plan is to bleed us to bankruptcy and that kind of thing.
But the American people, in order to be made to go along with the policy since 9-11, basically were lied to.
Instead of saying, well, $3,000 is the price we pay for empire, but you still like empire, right?
They had to lie and say, well, this was – they hate us because of their religion makes them hate freedom so much.
And so those planes, rather than representing a reaction, a kind of last gasp, hail Mary, pass, I think as Robert Pape put it, instead represented like the cutting edge of this new Islamic vanguard that will stop at nothing.
And now that has translated to the Muslims in your community are a terrible, scary threat to you.
That's what right-wing talk radio mostly says these days, and it's getting pretty problematic around here.
And I wonder as economic times get rougher and the reality that people argue about becomes less and less the reality that we actually live in on subjects like this.
John, I worry that this could get really bad.
I mean we already had Ashcroft roundups, but that could be seen as just a starting point.
Oh, absolutely.
You know, the relationship between the rhetoric we hear about Islam in America and the reality of Islam in America is unbelievable.
There's such a divergence.
You know, when we look at Islamic communities here in the United States, we're looking at folks who, you know, are American citizens.
Obviously there's some who are not, but most are American citizens who are just trying to get by like anybody else.
And, you know, they worship at mosques in the same way that Christians worship at churches, Jews at synagogues as part of their community.
And when these demagogues get on the radio or, you know, up at Tea Party rallies and say, you know, this is a threat from within, that Muslims are a fifth column, that people like Keith Ellison, who's, you know, a representative from Minnesota, Muslim, that he is, you know, a traitor in this country because he has an allegiance to Islam.
I mean, the rhetoric actually is very, very similar to, if you go back to the 1860s and 1870s in the United States, it was precisely this kind of rhetoric that was used about Catholics in the United States.
That they were coming from the outside, that they were a fifth column within the United States, that they owed allegiance to the Pope outside the United States, that the Pope was, you know, and Catholic Church in general was devoted to creating, you know, the Catholic equivalent of the Caliphate.
Same kind of language, it was political, it was part of a party, and it had a tremendous political effect.
And, you know, as we know, it was another hundred years before we could have a Catholic as a president in the United States.
And even then, he had to say, no, seriously, I'm not going to take secret orders from the Pope, I promise.
Exactly.
He had to explicitly say that, pretty much.
Exactly.
And so, you know, if anti-Catholic bias could have such a profound impact politically in this country, you can imagine the kind of impact anti-Islamic sentiment, especially when demagogues are connecting it to events taking place overseas, like suicide bombing.
You know, as you said, Robert Pape is right on the money when he talks about the true origins of suicide bombing connected to occupation and U.S. military policy.
Well, there you have it, y'all.
Islam is not your enemy, Muslims are not your enemy, not necessarily.
Thank you, John.
Thank you.
That's John Pfeffer from Foreign Policy and Focus, TomDispatch.com, today in the Viewpoint section of Antiwar.com.
See y'all tomorrow.
