Don't Blame Islam - Jacobin PDF

Dont Blame Islam | Jacobin
https://www.jacobinmag.com/2015/01/united-states-saudi-ara...
Dont Blame
Islam
Al-Qaeda and ISIS are products of US and
Saudi imperialism.
by David Mizner
Mujahideen fighters during the Afghan War.
After the attack on Charlie Hedbo, certain liberals joined
conservatives in declaring that the killer was Islamic extremism.

Any suggestion of Western culpability would be inaccurate, if not
immoral.
The murders today in Paris are not a result of Frances failure to
assimilate two generations of Muslim immigrants from its former
colonies, wrote George Packer.
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Theyre not about French military action against the

Islamic State in the Middle East, or the American invasion
of Iraq before that. Theyre not part of some general wave of
nihilistic violence in the economically depressed, socially
atomized, morally hollow West the Paris version of
Newtown or Oslo. Least of all should they be understood
as reactions to disrespect for religion on the part of
irresponsible cartoonists . . . They are only the latest blows
delivered by an ideology that has sought to achieve power
through terror for decades.
The sentiment recalls the prevailing view after September 11, 2001,
when Susan Sontag was blasted for pointing out that this was not a
cowardly attack on civilization or liberty or humanity or the
free world but an attack on the worlds self-proclaimed superpower, undertaken as a consequence of specific American alliances
and actions.
Yet this time around, more commentators in mainstream outlets
broke from the they-hate-freedom, blame-Islam chorus. Whether
because the attack didnt happen in the United States or because the
teenage war on terror shades the debate, or because a few more
thoughtful writers now have prominent platforms, truth crept in.
Also in the New Yorker, Teju Cole wrote, Violence from our side
continues unabated. By this time next month, in all likelihood, many
more young men of military age and many others, neither young
nor male, will have been killed by US drone strikes in Pakistan and
elsewhere. If past strikes are anything to go by, many of these people
will be innocent of wrongdoing.
That counts as progress. As does CNNs decision to run a piece by
Noam Chomsky that calls President Obamas drone killings the
most extreme terrorist campaign of modern times. And as does
Seamus Milnes piece in the Guardian pointing out that violence
like the Paris attack is an extension of Western wars.
Yet these pieces are still relatively kind to the United States and its
allies. They downplay the role of the West in producing the violence
that its thought leaders blame on Islam. The truth is not merely
that Team USAs violence is far greater than that of its enemies, or
that the former triggers the latter, but that Western governments
and their client states have actively empowered right-wing jihadist
groups.
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Western imperialists depict Islamic terrorism as a mysterious,

indigenous virus in the way that neocons and their liberal allies
blame black culture for problems caused by racism and
longstanding oppression. Theres nothing ineable in Islam that
produces terrorism.
There is, however, a longstanding US eort to use specific facets of
Muslim theology as weapons. This is part of a larger context that
includes the European colonialism that preceded it and the
American coups and wars that have sown chaos and sectarianism
and undermined the self-determination of people in the region.
Milne oers a familiar take: the West inflicts enormous violence on
people in the Middle East, and as Ward Churchill once put it
some people push back. This is true. Many of those whove carried
out attacks in Western capitals in the name of Islam from
Dzhokhar Tsarnaev to Faisal Shahzad, the would-be Times Square
bomber cite the Wests violence as their motive. Their
explanations jibe not only with common sense but with the research
of University of Chicago political scientist Robert Pape, who found
that by far the most significant cause of suicide bombing across the
world is foreign occupation.
Furthermore, only a tiny fraction of Muslims have joined right-wing
jihadist groups. Attempting to bolster his claim that Islam is
inherently violent, Bill Maher cites (selective) stats showing many
Muslims hold retrograde views on women and gays, but this is a
non-sequitur. Holding such views almost never translates into
al-QaedaISIS membership.
In his book The Missing Martyrs: Why There Are So Few Muslim
Terrorists, Charles Kurzman reports that well over 99 percent
have rejected the call. Despite the Wests routine killing of civilians,
the vast majority of Muslims oppose retaliatory attacks on civilians,
and even most of those who approve of the tactic are loath to sign on
with a movement that kills mostly Muslims.
Beyond a fringe, Muslims dont regard al-Qaeda-ISIS as a legitimate
form of resistance to imperialism.On the contrary, many see
al-Qaeda-ISIS as the spawn of USSaudi imperialism.
Because it is.
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Here we must resort to that bane of liberals: history. The United

States established diplomatic relations with Saudi Arabia in 1933
but didnt get seriously involved in the Middle East until World War
II, when it began to take over regional hegemony from Great
Britain. The US relationship with Saudi Arabia deepened as
Washington sought to secure its hold on the region. Throughout the
Cold War, American officials tried to use right-wing militants
against the two primary threats to its hegemony in the Middle East:
the Soviet Union and Arab nationalism.
Robert Dreyfuss lays out this history in his overlooked 2006 book,
Devils Game: How the United States Helped Unleash Fundamentalist
Islam. The great flaw of the book is that Dreyfuss, like neocons,
lumps together all kinds of Muslim political practice from
Hamas to Irans revolutionaries to al-Qaeda under the useless
term of Islamism. (The AmericanIsraeli permissiveness vis--vis
the rise of Hamas is important but tells us next to nothing about
al-Qaeda).
Nonetheless, Dreyfuss makes a persuasive case, one drawn largely
from the public record. Indeed, its almost certain that the US role
in sparking the right-wing jihadist fire is even greater than the one
he documents because many of the dealings were covert.
In the 1950s there was a problem for the United States called Gamal
Abdel Nasser, whose resolute independence was unacceptable. The
new leader of Egypt was such a threat that Secretary of State John
Foster Dulles took Eisenhowers statement that the Nasser
problem could be eliminated to be an assassination order.
To try to weaken Nasser, the US wooed the Muslim Brotherhood
despite or rather, because of its record of terrorism and
violence against the state. Americans also saw anti-communist
potential in its religiosity. Either we shall walk the path of Islam or
we shall walk the path of Communism, wrote Sayyid Qutb, the
groups chief theoretician.
McCarthy-era Washington was receptive.
In 1953, a covert US government program brought leading thinkers
and activists from the Middle East to Princeton. Among them was
the Brotherhoods Said Ramadan, son-in-law of the groups
founder. He visited the White House that same year and would
become the CIAs man.
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In 1954, a Brotherhood attempt to assassinate Nasser backfired. He

survived and launched a crackdown, arresting thousands. In 1956,
Nassers popularity surged thanks to his nationalization of the Suez
Canal, which led Britain and France to occupy the canal and Israel to
invade the Sinai. All three were forced to withdraw, and Nasser
became a regional hero.
Nasser was a main target of Eisenhowers 1957 speech to Congress
declaring that he would fund Arab governments in an attempt to
diminish Soviet influence. The Eisenhower Doctrine made Saudi
Arabia the regions biggest beneficiary of American money.
(Roosevelt had declared defense of the kingdom a vital national
interest and secured Saudi agreement to host a US military base
until 2003.)
Nasser became even more popular in the 1960s on the strength of
his developmentalist program. At the same time, he continued to
repress the Brotherhood. Nassers government imprisoned,
tortured, and eventually hanged Qutb, a martyr-to-be whose
writings calling for violent revolution would inspire Islamic
militants.
A common misperception is that Arab governments successfully
handled terrorism with repression. In fact, they ended up displacing
and deepening it. The following thesis, laid out by Lawrence
Wright, is overstated but contains a measure of truth:
One line of thinking proposes that Americas tragedy on

September 11th was born in the prisons of Egypt. Human
rights advocates argue that torture created an appetite for
revenge, first in Sayyid Qutb and later in his acolytes,
including Ayman al-Zawahiri.
In the 1960s, Arab nationalism which entailed development and

redistribution, anti-imperialism, and a certain commitment to
anti-Zionism gained traction not just in Egypt but across the
region, from Algeria to Palestine to Iraq. In response, the United
States turned to its despotic friend.
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The US forged a working relationship in the Saudi Arabia, intent

on using its foreign policy arm, Wahhabi fundamentalism,
Dreyfuss writes. The United States joined with King Saud and
Prince Faisal (later King Faisal) in pursuit of an Islamic bloc from
North Africa to Afghanistan and Pakistan. To that end, Saudi
Arabia formed a host of global institutions, including the Wahhabi
Muslim World League, and built thousands of mosques and
madrassas.
Flash forward to the 1980s, when the US teamed up with Saudi
Arabia to fund the Afghan mujahedeen. In the American mythos,
the Soviet invasion led to US involvement; in fact, the US had been
backing the Afghan Muslim Brotherhood and other right-wing
proxies for years. Carters National Security Advisor Zbigniew
Brzezinski would later acknowledge that it was their intent to
trigger a Soviet invasion.
At least as early as 1972, the CIA began funding Afghan fighters.
They included future Mujahideen leaders Rabbani Sayyaf and
Gulbuddin Hekmatyar, who would become close to both Osama bin
Laden and Pakistani Intelligence (ISI). Sayyah is believed to have
invited bin Laden to take refuge in Afghanistan in 1996. In the
1980s, the bulk of US and Saudi aid went to the Mujahideen faction
headed by Hekmatyar, a brutal leader whose specialty, Dreyfuss
reports, was skinning prisoners alive.
US support for such factions intensified after Sardar Daoud seized
power from his fellow royalty in 1973. Breaking with tradition, he
declared himself not Shah but president of a secular democratic
republic. But his non-alignment he kept his distance from both
Washington and Moscow concerned the United States, which
teamed up with ISI to sponsor an unsuccessful coup in 1974. As in
Egypt, the United States joined with right-wing militants to target a
secular, independent government.
While Daouds independent, moderately progressive government
was a problem for the United States, the communist, Soviet-friendly
government that took control in 1978 was anathema. The CIA met
with and funded anti-government forces. Afghanistan became even
more important to the United States when it lost its nearby ally, the
Shah, in January 1979. In July, President Carter formalized
authorized aid to the Mujahideen with a program called Operation
Cyclone.
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In the fall, Prime Minster Hafizullah Amin became the leader of

Afghanistan after he ordered the killing of the president, Nur
Muhammad Taraki. The Soviet Union believed the CIA had
arranged the coup. In December, Soviet troops moved in, killed
Amin, and installed a new leader.
The next sordid chapter in which the US and Saudi Arabia
funneled money through ISI to the Mujahideen and recruited Arab
militants to join them is well known, although details are
disputed. Saudi Arabia deposited hundreds of millions of dollars
into a Swiss bank account controlled by the United States.
The new Saudi king, at the time the governor of Riyadh, was a top
fundraiser, providing $25 million a month to the mujahideen.
British Intelligence, with guidance from the CIA in Pakistan,
headed the training of fighters inside Afghanistan while the US
military trained Arab fighters in Egypt and, according to some
reports, in the United States.
Secrecy makes it impossible to know how much, if any, contact there
was between the CIA and bin Laden in Pakistan, not least because
each would have an interest in concealing it. We know that bin
Laden formed an alliance with longtime CIA beneficiary
Hekmatyar, and that ISI the CIAs primary conduit for
sending money and weapons to the Mujahideen supported bin
Ladens front organization and precursor to al-Qaeda, Maktab
al-Khidamar.
A few weeks after September 11, Prince Bandar bin Sultan of Saudi
Arabia said that in the 1980s bin Laden had thanked him for
bringing the Americans, our friends, to help us against the atheists,
he said the communists.
In any case, the US helped birth al-Qaeda a truth so undeniable
even Hillary Clinton has discussed it, lying only about the sequence
of events:
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The people we are fighting today we funded twenty years

ago, and we did it because we were locked in this struggle
with the Soviet Union. They invaded Afghanistan, and we
did not want to see them control central Asia, and we went
to work. And it was President Reagan in partnership with
the Congress led by Democrats who said, You know what?
Sounds like a pretty good idea. Lets deal with the ISI and
the Pakistani military. Lets go recruit these Mujahadeen.
Thats great lets get some to come from Saudi Arabia and
other places importing their Wahhabi brand of Islam so that
we can go beat the Soviet Union.
During the war in Afghanistan, the West and Saudi Arabia helped
create not just al-Qaeda but related groups, like the Libyan Islamic
Fighters Group (LIGF). Formed in Eastern Libya by Afghan
Arabs, LIGF tried to kill Muammar Qaddafi three times in
199596. British Intelligence sponsored one of the attempts,
according to former agent David Shayler. Former French
intelligence agents confirmed the claim and said it was this secret
that led Britain to thwart the arrest of bin Laden after Qadhaffi had
issued (and Interpol approved) a warrant in 1998.
The United States had also been involved in various attempted
coups against Qaddafi Reagan even tried to kill the Libyan leader
himself in 1986. But after September 11, Qaddafi became an ally in
the war on terror, and the United States helped him crack down on
his enemies. The CIA handed over former LIGF members to
Qaddafi, sometimes torturing them first.
But by the time the uprising broke out in February 2011, the West
had deemed Qaddafi an enemy again, and the United States was
backing an opposition force that included former LGIF members
fighting as the Libyan Islamic Movement. To be a right-wing jihadist
over many years is to be backed by the CIA in one war, tortured by
the CIA in the next, and backed again by the CIA in the next. It
wasnt popular in the United States to mention the fact that the
opposition forces in Libya included extremists. The press preferred
to focus on more appealing factions.
Nor was it popular to discuss a CIA role. Even now its still widely
believed that US involvement was confined to airstrikes. Yet six
weeks after the first protests, the New York Times reported that
C.I.A. operatives have been working in Libya for several weeks as
part of a shadow force of Westerners that the Obama administration
hopes can help bleed Colonel Qaddafis military.
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To cite CIA involvement is not necessarily to deny that there was

also an indigenous rebellion. The two things can coexist, and often
do. Whats undeniable is that amid the chaos and carnage of
post-regime change Libya, extremist groups are thriving. These
include an ascendant affiliate of ISIS in the eastern city of Derna
which has, relatedly, produced an inordinate number of foreign
fighters in Iraq.
The rise of ISIS, like al-Qaedas, implicates US imperialism. Its
hardly radical to note that ISIS is the child of the US war on Iraq, a
fundamental fact that tends to go missing from mainstream
analysis. While violent oppression of Sunnis by the Iraqi
government aided ISIS, former Prime Minister Nouri al-Maliki is
too easy of a scapegoat. As Patrick Cockburn writes, it was the war
in Syria that destabilized Iraq and, in turn, made ISIS a regional
power.
The role of the US inside Syria prior to the 2011 protests is unclear.
Thanks largely to Seymour Hershs 2007 report, we know that
President Bush urged Saudi Arabia to unleash sectarian forces in an
attempt to undermine Assad in Syria and Hezbollah in Lebanon.
This time the primary target was Iran, not the Soviet Union, but this
was the Afghanistan playbook still in vogue despite that
intervening incident in lower Manhattan.
As part of this eort, US officials cultivated ties to the Syrian
Muslim Brotherhood. The plan included covert ops in Syria, but we
dont know what they entailed or how, if at all, they influenced the
events of 2011, or the precise chain of events that led to the uprising
becoming a war.
What happened to the Syrian revolution if, indeed, that term
even applies is disputed. We should be able to agree, however,
that a progressive uprising of indeterminate size gave way to a large
reactionary one as the Syrian government cracked down on leftists
and foreign-backed extremists rushed in.
Gilbert Achcar, a self-described strong and continuous supporter
of the uprising, says the opposition made a grave mistake when it
allied with the Muslim Brotherhood, which was in thrall to Turkey,
Qatar, and the US. In so doing, he says, they got sucked into a
degenerative dialectics of religious extremism that led to the
founding of ISIS.
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The United States supported the uprising against the Syrian

government even as ISIS became a fixture. US policy was one of
malign neglect at best. We can be certain that American officials
were well aware of ISISs rise. They accepted it in Iraq (a country
they wanted to quit and whose president they no longer supported)
and approved of it in Syria (a country they wanted to damage and
whose president they wanted to remove or at least weaken).
With ISIS now public enemy number one, it may be easy to forget
that for months until ISIS became big enough to threaten
American interests US weapons, both rhetorical and actual, were
pointed only at the Syrian government. US officials gave major
speeches on Syria that didnt even mention ISIS.
Saudi-Qatari-Turkish support for extremists had at least tacit
backing from Washington. Documents recently published online
confirm that Turkish Intelligence provided arms to al-Qaeda in
Syria prior to its split with ISIS. Joe Bidens October 2014 scolding
of US allies for supporting ISIS and al-Qaeda only threw into relief
the previous months of silence.
More than that, the United States itself strengthened ISIS. Both
President Obama and his critics on the Right now have an interest in
pushing the myth that he did little to support anti-government
fighters. In fact, beginning at least as early as 2012, the CIA trained
opposition forces and gave them weapons belonging both to the
United States and its allies. Many of these weapons ended up in the
hands of ISIS and al-Qaeda.
Heres Cockburn on the Yarmouk Brigade, part of the US-backed
Free Syrian Army:
Numerous videos show that the Yarmouk Brigade has

frequently fought in collaboration with JAN, the official
al-Qaida affiliate. Since it was likely that, in the midst of
battle, these two groups would share their munitions,
Washington was eectively allowing advanced weaponry to
be handed over to its deadliest enemy.
Those who blame US ineptness are in eect arguing that American

officials were unaware of public information showing it was a near
certainty that arms could flow to al-Qaeda and ISIS. Did they want
to arm their alleged enemies? Or did they just accept it? Is there a
dierence, finally?
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And the Free Syrian Army, insofar as it actually existed as a coherent

entity, contained many right-wing elements. The mainstream press
now acknowledges that right-wing sectarians dominate the
opposition, but this has been the case for some time. Nir Rosen, who
spent months researching the war, goes further. There are no
actual moderate insurgents either ideologically or in terms of their
actions, he writes. Indeed, many FSA fighters have joined ISIS and
al-Qaeda.
The United States claims it has now ditched whats left of the FSA in
favor of its own proxy army. As the US teams up with Arab countries
to train fighters, its policy on Syria resembles its policy on
Afghanistan in the 1980s.
American officials would argue that ISIS is the target of this force,
but regime change remains the chief goal of their partners, and in
any case the result is clear: continued warfare and continued
shattering of Syria. The US now seems to favor a de facto partition
that would destroy the territorial integrity of the Syrian state.
As for the makeup of the new proxy force, President Obama has
repeatedly pressed Congress to exempt his war on ISIS from the ban
on financing torturers and other war criminals. While its quaint
that he feels the need to acknowledge the Leahy Law, his doing so
indicates the kind of force the US and its allies will be sending into
Syria.
Clean fighters are hard to come by, they say. No doubt. But the
truth is that, like their Afghan Mujahideen-supporting predecessors
in the 1980s, American officials probably want to unleash the most
ruthless killers. And in several years, once the force our government
built has merged with ISIS and slaughtered American civilians, well
all rally around the flag, lament the sickness in Islam, and cheer as
the bombs fall.
1.30.15
David Mizner is a novelist and freelance journalist who focuses on war and
peace, human rights, and the security state.
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Dont Blame Islam | Jacobin

Mujahideen fighters during the Afghan War.

After the attack on Charlie Hedbo, certain liberals joined

conservatives in declaring that the killer was Islamic extremism.