"Perhaps that is what should really insult the militant Islamists: they think we have always been as obsessed with them as they are with us, when in fact we were scarcely aware of their existence until they started flying planes at skyscrapers in New York."
Source: éditorial de Dominic Lawson paru dans The Sunday Times (extraits)
"There is little doubt that the success of the bombing campaigns against the professedly Christian Serbs on behalf of the terrorised Muslims of Bosnia and Kosovo had emboldened Blair to think that similar action against Saddam Hussein would be equally vindicated. He had been greeted with tearful adulation in Kosovan refugee camps; he must have expected the same welcome from Shi’ite Iraqis after the overthrow of Saddam.
As we now know, it was a different story. Blair is hate figure No 1 for thousands of Muslims, even in his own country, many of whom subscribe to the view, propagated by Al-Qaeda and its Sunni acolytes, that the war in Iraq was anti-Islamic in its entire purpose. Little good would it do Blair to point out that Saddam was a profoundly secular figure hated by the clerics, or that the dictator’s eventual hanging was punctuated by the calling-out of Shi’ite versions of Islamic prayers by his gleeful executioners.
Such observations would not fit in with what has become known as "the single narrative", the Islamist ideology which states that the entire history of the world since the time of the crusades has been that of continuous oppression of Muslims by a Zionist-Christian alliance, represented most recently and heinously by America. Above all, this single narrative becomes entirely aphasic on such matters as the American actions against the Orthodox Christian Serbs on behalf of the Muslims of Bosnia and Kosovo. [...]
I had a similar experience [as Cambridge historian Brendan Simms] when I spoke at a public meeting near the east London mosque, organised by the Muslim group Dialogue with Islam. When I argued that the Nato attack on Serbia in defence of the Muslims of Kosovo hardly suggested a fundamentalist Christian hatred of Islam on the part of the British and American governments, I could see that I might as well have been speaking in Welsh for all the impact it had on that audience of Muslim men and women.
They responded warmly, however, to the argument of Sheikh Dawud Noibi, a leading figure in the Muslim Council of Britain, that the US-led invasion of Afghanistan was motivated by the need to ensure the construction of an American oil pipeline there, implying that the Americans had allowed the attack on the World Trade Center so as to provide a pretext for this colonialist investment. Noibi, by the way, was appointed an OBE on the recommendation of the Blair government: presumably this seal of the state’s approval was just another dastardly trick by the Brits to fool the public into thinking they were not determined to destroy Islam.
Still, I didn’t push the issue as far as Simms, who was bold enough to point out to his Muslim audiences that prominent American Jews such as Richard Perle and Paul Wolfowitz — two of the most controversial so-called neocons in Washington under the Republican White House — had been leading protagonists of military intervention on behalf of Bosnian Muslims: "At this point they had switched off. Bosnia and Kosovo were simply subsumed into their broader narrative of Muslim victimhood. My interlocutors were neither stupid nor insincere. It was just that they were wired in such a way that precluded them from seeing the US as anything other than the global foe of Muslims."
Today the conflict in Afghanistan is the focus of this ideology. Some like to mock the Americans for having supplied the Afghan mujaheddin in the 1980s; the arming of those Muslim warriors was the most expensive single covert operation in the history of the cold war. The Americans may regret it now, yet the real point is that the giving of billions of dollars to the mujaheddin proves the falsity of the single narrative: as recently as 20 years ago the notionally Christian West was sublimely indifferent to Islamism.
Perhaps that is what should really insult the militant Islamists: they think we have always been as obsessed with them as they are with us, when in fact we were scarcely aware of their existence until they started flying planes at skyscrapers in New York."
Aucun commentaire :
Enregistrer un commentaire