09/10/10 – Juan Cole – The Scott Horton Show

Alright y'all, welcome to the show, it's Anti-War Radio.
I'm Scott Horton, we got a good one lined up for you today, folks.
Mostly Angela's got one lined up.
I did a third of the lining up, in fact it's our first guest, Professor Juan Cole from the University of Michigan, he teaches history there and he keeps the blog that of course y'all read all the time, right, informedcomment at juancole.com.
His latest book is called Engaging the Muslim World.
Welcome back to the show, Juan, how are you sir?
Hey Scott, it's always great to be on.
Great, I really appreciate you joining us this morning, especially on the short notice I was thinking since it's September 10th and everything, we needed to talk about the twisted, perverted form of Islam that drove Mohammed Atta and his buddies to kill 3,000 Americans back on September 11th, 2001, in order that they may get a bunch of virgins in heaven as a prize.
Right.
And destroy our Bill of Rights, which they can't stand.
Right.
Well, you know, first of all, there are rules in Islam about warfare.
And some of them come from the Quran, some of them were codified by later great Islamic jurists, kind of like the Christian Church Fathers.
And the rules are, you know, medieval rules, they were reflecting a kind of society of knights in shining armor and chivalry and so forth.
So in the Islamic law of war, you can't have a sneak attack.
You've got to let the other side know you're coming.
And part of the reason for that is that the war was about religion in the medieval times, and if you were attacking non-Muslims, you had to give them a chance to reconsider and maybe join your side.
So you couldn't just attack people out of the blue.
Second of all, you can't kill non-combatants, you can't kill women or children in the course of the war.
And that's the Islamic war, that's what's called jihad, those are the rules.
So what bin Laden did, and then the other thing is, the war has to be authorized by duly constituted authority, it can't be a vigilante thing, you can't just wake up in the morning and declare jihad on Europe if you're some undergraduate engineer.
So what bin Laden did contravened all the Islamic laws of war, it's not Islam, it's just there's no relationship to Islam.
All right, well, didn't he though say in the various fatwas from 1996, 98, etc., that look, I'm giving you a chance, convert to Islam and do what I say or else?
Well, you know, I mean, bin Laden didn't speak in that way, for the most part, as a Muslim figure.
He was quite political, and of course, from the beginning, when the United States and Saudi Arabia fingered him to raise money to fight the Soviets in Afghanistan, because he was a US ally in the 80s and was put up to things by US and Saudi intelligence for us, he's been a political figure.
He said that the reason he wanted to hit the US was, he was upset about the US and UN sanctions on Iraq in the 1990s after the Gulf War, which he claimed were killing a lot of innocent children.
You know, they didn't let chlorine into Iraq, because chlorine can be used for chemical weapons, but it's also a key ingredient in water purification.
So for some time, the water in Iraq was dirty, and especially babies, infants, toddlers, if you give them even slightly dirty water, it'll kill them dead.
So there was a very high infant mortality, which was reported by the United Nations and the World Health Organization, owing to those sanctions, and the ban on chlorine was lifted.
Anyway, Bin Laden said that was the kind of thing that was making him angry at the United States.
He also instanced what he called the Israeli occupation of Jerusalem, he instanced the stationing of US troops in Saudi Arabia, which he considered to be holy land, because Islam developed in Mecca and Medina.
So the reasons he gave for going to war against the United States were political.
It wasn't about, you know, infidel or non-infidel.
It was specific US policies that was driving his response.
Well now, so what about the guys that they recruited?
Mohammed Atta and Ramzi bin al-Shibh, and those guys, for that matter, what about Khalid Sheikh Mohammed?
These guys are all political.
What about the 72 virgins?
I thought that was why they did the attack, Juan.
Okay, I didn't think that.
That's what they said on TV?
Yeah.
Well, no, actually, these guys thought they were James Bond.
They were living the high life.
Khalid Sheikh Mohammed was an undercover Al-Qaeda operative in the Philippines, in Manila.
And from every evidence is that he spent his evenings at nightclubs.
He had the pure silver cigarette lighter and wore white-on-white suits with white ties and all that.
He was a real pimp, that Khalid Sheikh Mohammed, right?
Yeah.
Well, he was hanging out with the Filipino girls, and these guys, even the Atta of the others, maybe not so much Atta, they would go to strip clubs, they would go to bars.
And part of this was probably what's called an intelligence work, false flag tradecraft.
That is to say, they were trying to throw any surveillance off.
So they had permission from bin Laden to live the high life and to be libertine, to contravene Islamic law, in order to avoid being fingered by, say, Egyptian intelligence or other intelligence agencies that might be trying to track them, because they wouldn't look like Muslim fundamentalists.
And some of them weren't.
Zia Jarrah, who was Lebanese, was from a secular family, they didn't have much to do with Islam.
In fact, he had a live-in Turkish girlfriend in Germany, and so forth.
And bin Laden himself, at one point, said that these young men are not like other Muslims, and they have no fiqh, they have no Islamic law.
So they were what scholars would call antinomians, they weren't following a law.
So they don't sound like Muslims to me, and I think most Muslim jurists, if you laid out this pattern of behavior, would say, well, those guys weren't Muslim.
Well, you know, I just actually read a joke the other day that said that the Christians don't recognize Muhammad, or as a prophet, the Jews don't recognize Jesus as a savior, and the Baptists don't recognize each other at Hooters, or the adult bookstore.
And it's the same sort of thing, right?
If a bunch of Southern Baptists were going on suicide missions, they'd stop at the titty bar first, wouldn't they?
Well, as I said, I think they were doing that to throw people off, but they also...
Also the naked girls, for looking at, you know.
Yeah, I think it's also a complex thing.
I think that bin Laden gave them permission to do those things because it would create a certain amount of guilt, and make them more likely to think, well, their ordinary lives are over with anyway, and they may as well go through with the suicide bombing.
But in my view, all of this came out of a kind of radical nationalism, which was set off initially by the Soviet invasion of Afghanistan.
These guys were from a generation that saw what they thought of as atheist Europeans come in and destroy a Muslim country, you know, commit massive ethnic cleansing.
There were accusations of rape of Muslim women, attempt to incorporate it into the Soviet Empire.
And the U.S. public was, at the time, outraged, and of course, many U.S. figures gave a lot of help to the mujahideen, or the holy warriors on the Muslim side, that gathered to fight this threat.
And I'm afraid that the American position, the Reagan administration position, was that a vigilante holy war against a superpower is all to the good.
We fostered this kind of thinking and this kind of organization.
As long as we were deploying against the Soviets, we thought it was a great idea.
Well, you know, that's what they say about how the blind cleric Omar Abdel Rahman got into the country in the first place, was, oh, we know this guy, he's a friend of ours from Egyptian Islamic Jihad.
He's fine.
Let him in.
All right.
Everybody, hold tight.
It's Juan Cole from informedcomment.com, the University of Michigan, author of the book Engaging the Muslim World.
We'll be right back.
You can sign up for the Liberty Radio Network email updates at updates.lrn.fm and join us on Facebook at facebook.lrn.fm.
Ground zero.
So this is where the first guy got AIDS.
Peter, this is the site of the 9-11 terrorist attacks.
Oh, so Saddam Hussein did this?
No.
The Iraqi army?
No.
Some guys from Iraq?
No.
That one lady who visited Iraq that one time?
No.
Peter, Iraq had nothing to do with this.
It was a group of Americans, Arabians, Lebanese, and Egyptians, financed by a Saudi Arabian guy living in Afghanistan and sheltered by Pakistanis.
So you're saying we need to invade Iran?
All right, Joe.
Welcome back to the show.
It's antiwar radio.
I'm Scott Horton.
I'm talking with Juan Cole.
And Juan, the reason I'm asking you all these stupid questions about the amount of Islam or the kind of Islam or whatever that these hijackers supposedly believed in, well, you can pretty much guess.
It's because the Republicans at the time, nine years ago, asserted that there was no motive for the attack other than how good we are, which means that there's something about the belief system of the people who attacked us that makes them hate good things.
Whatever is good and true and beautiful and honest, Islam is determined to destroy it.
So we must resist them and defend ourselves.
And even though Bush said, no, we're not at war with Islam, just some of them, they still, the basic premise still was Islam was the motive of the attack, twisted version or otherwise.
Is that true?
No, Islam was not the motive of the attack, otherwise, you know, more than 19 people would be involved.
You know, I saw Chris Matthews, he made me so mad yesterday on MSNBC, I turned it to it for just a second because all the stories about the mosque, the Koran burning had maybe been called off and maybe the New York Islamic Center had been moved and whatever.
And there's a truther standing in the background with a sign about controlled demolition and whatever.
And Matthews goes off on a tangent about the truthers.
And he says, this is what he says, I swear to you, I wrote it down.
In fact, here, let me turn to my page so I get my quote right.
It's just right here.
He said, you know, these truthers, you know how they are.
They're always just trying to blame 9-11 on Washington, D.C. or whoever, instead of quote the Islamic people.
My Lord.
So that's who did it.
1.3 billion Muslims attacked us on 9-11.
Why haven't we hydrogen bombed them all off the face of the earth then?
What are we waiting for?
I said, if 1.5 billion people were actually gunning for us, we'd know about it.
Yeah, it seems like it, right?
There'd be fires everywhere.
Yeah.
I mean, this kind of generalization from this small fringe, weird terrorist group, Al-Qaeda, to Islam in general, it's just baffling to me.
First of all, they're all kinds of Muslims.
You know, the people who were caught up in Al-Qaeda were from what is usually called the Salafi branch of Islam, which is a modernist reform, and it has a fundamentalist form, it has a more liberal form.
But it's not something that most Muslims agree with.
Most Muslims are traditionalists, they're Sufis, they're Shiites in Iran.
And so the thing already starts as a sectarian minor thing.
And then the specific ideas that the Al-Qaeda folks had of being vigilantes, of taking affairs into your own hands, of planning out a terrorist attack, the specific grievances they had against the United States, which came out of their experiences with it during the Afghanistan war, were peculiar to them.
So to take this small group of Salafis and Wahhabis who had been in this maelstrom of superpower rivalry, had been involved in fighting and so forth, and generalize them to, you know, your ordinary, everyday Muslim housewife in Cairo, is just bizarre.
And we would never do this inside our own culture.
So, you know, David Koresh was obviously a whack job, and was diddling the young girls in his compound, and all kinds of unsavory things were going on.
I don't know, 17 years later, I'm still waiting for a shred of evidence of that, but go ahead.
Well, we would never say in any case that David Koresh was, you know, a typical Christian.
Or that, why did the Christians stockpile weapons at Waco?
We were able to make a distinction between a cult and the general religion.
And, or, you know, Timothy McVeigh and Terry Nichols were in the Christian identity movement, and we don't talk about Oklahoma City being blown up by Christians.
So it's just, when we come to a different culture, all of a sudden we want to generalize to a billion and a half people.
Right, well it's because most of them are on the other side of salt water from here, which makes them not even real.
Well, I mean, the fact is that we probably have about 6 million Muslims in the United States, which is substantially more than we have Quakers, Unitarians, all kinds of other groups that are perfectly recognizable.
I think it's time for the United States to recognize there's a multicultural society.
American Muslims are a very important part of our society.
A lot of them are physicians, they're keeping our children healthy.
You know, there was a story in the press that a small town in Wisconsin, the local Muslim community petitioned the city council to build a mosque.
And they got all this pushback and this rage and this trash talk from the community, and they were taken aback because they were part of the community, they had been interacting with people, and one of the men who was leading this effort to get a mosque was a physician.
They said, people came to me, they were treated by me, I had my hands on them, you know, we made them well.
They never brought up anything about my religion, but all of a sudden when he wants to worship in a dedicated building for the purpose, then all of this hatred came out.
And I think he was shaken by it.
Yeah, you know, I saw Ron Paul on TV just completely dismiss the accusations about Islam by saying, in the medical profession, I've known so many Muslims, I just forget that.
I absolutely reject any of this.
I'm done discussing that.
Let's talk about foreign policy some more.
I mean, just forget about that.
You know, give me a break.
And this is the thing that really gets me.
Like you say, there's six million Muslims in this country.
And I wonder, and see, here's the thing.
It's been all this time and we had Bush kind of kept a lid on this by saying we're not on a crusade.
Sorry I said that.
We're not a war against Islam.
Just, you know, the countries we want to invade and conquer and keep forever and whatever.
But nine years later, Juan Cole, Michael Scheuer, Eric Margulies, Scott Horton, Robert Pape narrative about how we got into this mess, i.e.history began before 9-11.
And this was a tactic in a war that we were in, you know, one shot in a war.
And that it was about this, that and the other specific thing on Earth.
We haven't won that fight about what this is even about yet.
And the idea that it was at least a twisted form of Islam, a fringe form of Islam as the motive.
That still reigns.
That is still the dominant narrative in this society.
So no wonder everybody's scared of Muslims.
Even though they weren't on 9-10, they never thought we had to have a permanent clash of civilizations with a billion and a half people on 9-10.
But as I read somebody pointing out the other day.
But now all of a sudden, hey, if they attacked us for being good because of their Islam, then no wonder we have to fear them.
The people are right to be afraid based on their false premise.
Juan, that's what I'm saying.
The reason for which we're losing this argument is because the Republican National Committee sat down in a room in August of 2006 and decided that scaring people with terrorists wasn't working anymore and they had to get more specific.
And they rolled out Islamic terrorism and Islamofascism as their campaign point for the 2006 midterm.
And you saw Bush suddenly start using this rhetoric, which he had never had before.
And it was generalized.
And then you saw it in the presidential election and the Republican primaries.
Giuliani, Huckabee, all of these people were using this discourse.
And now it's become, you know, Rick Lazio thinks that he can get to be governor of New York by attacking Islam.
So in the old days, the Republicans used to use communism for this purpose.
And in the 19th century, the know-nothings used to use Catholicism for this purpose.
But, you know, if you're representing a narrow group of people and the Republicans are basically about supporting the super wealthy, that's the ultimate goal.
And that's not going to make them popular with most people.
They've got to give the other people something.
And they've decided that, well, we'll support the super wealthy in our legislation, but in our talks and in our discourse, we'll scare the ordinary people with Islam.
And that way we can get into power and we can keep this country from being egalitarian.
We can keep throwing the lion's share of all the new wealth created in the country to the top 1%.
And it's a shell game and the American people shouldn't fall for it.
Muslims in the United States have been, you know, the FBI has counted the hairs on the back of their head.
They can't hardly find anybody who is a threat to security.
There are far more Christians who are dangerous in the United States than there are Muslims.
Well, look, there hasn't been a real terrorist prosecution since Moussaoui because there ain't no Al-Qaeda in America.
There only ever were a couple hundred Al-Qaeda in the world and the CIA and the Air Force killed 90% of them in 2001.
And so this whole thing is a war against a shadow anyway.
You know, the best that they can do is try to create more Al-Qaeda by invading more countries, which seems to be, you know, Obama's plan too.
And the people who live out in Afghanistan who are just pushed to nationalists, they call them Al-Qaeda.
Well, wait, now, I'm sorry, because we're way out of time, but I just I got to say this for my own part, and I'll let you get the last word.
And I'm not afraid of Muslims.
I love Muslims just as much as everybody else.
I'm glad they're my friends and my neighbors and live in my town back home in Austin, here in Los Angeles and all over the place.
And I refuse to be demagogued into fearing and hating the weak.
And if it's not just obvious on its face how stupid that is, that we all have all our hatred diverted toward the voiceless instead of the people, the top 1%, you just named, who just finished ripping off $12 trillion from us and killing a million people.
Then I forgot how I started that sentence.
But forget that noise, man.
That's not what it's about.
You know, if you're going to demagogue, demagogue up and leave the weak alone.
I can't imagine what it's like to be a Muslim in this country right now and fearing.
They're like, geez, could we actually get to a point where there's a pogrom here, where something gets completely out of hand?
And I say, I love you.
So for what that's worth.
Well, Scott, it's a wonderful sentiment.
I associate myself with your sentiments in this regard.
And I think it's worth noting for all of our listeners that today is the festival of the breaking of the month-long Ramadan fast.
And let's wish all of our Muslim listeners a happy Eid and wish a happy Eid to all of our American listeners in solidarity with the Muslims.
Right on.
You're a good man, Juan Cole.
Thank you, sir.
It's my pleasure, Scott.
Thanks for having me on.
Everybody, that's Juan Cole.
The website is juancole.com for the informed comment.
And the book is Engaging the Muslim World.