Why They Hate Us

The left is very big on blaming foreign interventionism for why Islamofascism has been at war with the U.S. for several decades. (Unfortunately, we have only been at war with Islamofascism since 9/11.)

First, a long explanation of my position--then the interesting news item.

I have some sympathy for the point of view that says that U.S. intervention in the internal affairs of other countries have often been counterproductive to democracy, capitalism, and human rights. Libertarian critics of U.S. foreign policy claim that our intervention in Central American countries in the early twentieth century was driven by commercial interests. Major General Smedley Butler's War is a Racket makes this claim concerning Nicaragua and Haiti--both places where Butler played a major role in the operations. (There's nothing quite as gauche as Butler walking into the Haitian Congress in 1915 and telling them to go home; he was now in charge.)

However: when I have dug through newspapers of the period, for example, the 1909 intervention at Bluefields, Nicaragua, I often find that the evidence as to intent is complex. Yes, there were often commercial interests that had a clear reason to encourage those interventions. The U.S., for example, ran Nicaragua's customs service for a couple of decades until the tariffs paid off the debts that Nicaragua owed to certain U.S. banking interests.

But there were often legitimate reasons for U.S. intervention as well, such as protection of U.S. citizens in the midst of chaotic civil wars. Sometimes, we stepped in because the locals were behaving in a manner that was offensive to any proper notion of civil rights--for example, when the President of Haiti was literally ripped limb from limb in the streets of Port-au-Prince. And sad to say, in many of these countries, it wasn't that we were intervening on the side of bad guys at the expense of the good guys. Nicaragua, El Salvador, Haiti, and Cuba are all examples of places where the differing factions were arguing over who got to exploit and brutalize the peasants.

Cold War realpolitik took a bad situation in many parts of the world, and made it worst. Lyndon Johnson's famous remark, "He may be a sonofabitch, but he's our sonofabitch" captures this rather well. We often chose one thug over another thug because the other thug had allied himself with Moscow. Aggravating this was that local thugs played Moscow vs. Washington for their benefit as well--and usually to the detriment of the peasants who just wanted to be left alone.

Sometimes, we picked local thugs who used horrifying methods to accomplish what were certainly noble objectives. The Shah of Iran was trying to bring most of his country out of the fourteenth century--but much of the population of Iran had no interest in leaving the fourteenth century, because then women would be able to go to school, vote, and otherwise enjoy the benefits of what we in the West imagine are universal human rights. Savak, the Shah's secret police, was quite prepared to use torture to deal with the dissenters who liked the fourteenth century. The results, after the overthrow of the Shah, were to put a crowd in charge that was arguably more brutal than the Shah's government--and was our enemies on top of that.

All of this ugly history is part of why the left continues to blame 9/11 on U.S. foreign policy. Now, if the 9/11 hijackers had been Nicaraguans, or Salvadorans, Guatemalans, or Mexicans, or Canadians--all countries where the U.S. has a long and often sordid history of intervention--I would find the argument offensive but at least there would be some merit to it. But most of the hijackers came from Saudi Arabia--a country where the U.S. has never intervened.

So what are the motivations for Islamofascist attacks on the West? I've made the point before that ferocious Islamofascist hostility to the United States dates back many decades--far enough that to blame U.S. foreign policy for it makes absolutely no sense. But that's just my opinion. The British newspaper the Daily Mail carried an article today by someone who speaks with considerable expert authority on why they hate us:

When I was still a member of what is probably best termed the British Jihadi Network - a series of British Muslim terrorist groups linked by a single ideology - I remember how we used to laugh in celebration whenever people on TV proclaimed that the sole cause for Islamic acts of terror like 9/11, the Madrid bombings and 7/7 was Western foreign policy.

By blaming the Government for our actions, those who pushed this "Blair's bombs" line did our propaganda work for us.

More important, they also helped to draw away any critical examination from the real engine of our violence: Islamic theology.

The attempts to cause mass destruction in London and Glasgow are so reminiscent of other recent British Islamic extremist plots that they are likely to have been carried out by my former peers.

And as with previous terror attacks, people are again saying that violence carried out by Muslims is all to do with foreign policy.

For example, on Saturday on Radio 4's Today programme, the Mayor of London, Ken Livingstone, said: "What all our intelligence shows about the opinions of disaffected young Muslims is the main driving force is not Afghanistan, it is mainly Iraq."

I left the British Jihadi Network in February 2006 because I realised that its members had simply become mindless killers. But if I were still fighting for their cause, I'd be laughing once again.

Mohammad Sidique Khan, the leader of the July 7 bombings, and I were both part of the network - I met him on two occasions.

And though many British extremists are angered by the deaths of fellow Muslim across the world, what drove me and many others to plot acts of extreme terror within Britain and abroad was a sense that we were fighting for the creation of a revolutionary worldwide Islamic state that would dispense Islamic justice.

If we were interested in justice, you may ask, how did this continuing violence come to be the means of promoting such a (flawed) Utopian goal?

How do Islamic radicals justify such terror in the name of their religion?

There isn't enough room to outline everything here, but the foundation of extremist reasoning rests upon a model of the world in which you are either a believer or an infidel.

Formal Islamic theology, unlike Christian theology, does not allow for the separation of state and religion: they are considered to be one and the same.

For centuries, the reasoning of Islamic jurists has set down rules of interaction between Dar ul-Islam (the Land of Islam) and Dar ul-Kufr (the Land of Unbelief) to cover almost every matter of trade, peace and war.

But what radicals and extremists do is to take this two steps further. Their first step has been to argue that, since there is no pure Islamic state, the whole world must be Dar ul-Kufr (The Land of Unbelief).

Step two: since Islam must declare war on unbelief, they have declared war upon the whole world.

Along with many of my former peers, I was taught by Pakistani and British radical preachers that this reclassification of the globe as a Land of War (Dar ul-Harb) allows any Muslim to destroy the sanctity of the five rights that every human is granted under Islam: life, wealth, land, mind and belief.

In Dar ul-Harb, anything goes, including the treachery and cowardice of attacking civilians.