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WASHINGTON -- Many columnists, this one included, hate to think like Cassandra, the gloomy Greek lady given the gift of prophecy by Apollo. She made so many dire predictions of misfortune she was generally ignored. But the tea leaves here read worse and worse regarding terrorism and the rapid deterioration of global diplomacy. Prepare yourself, if you read on, for some major hand-wringing.
Many federal officials still would like to think of Sept. 11 and its aftermath as isolated incidents of horror from another world -- perpetrated by a few insane and murderous crackpots from a religion of peace who are being diminished in number, however slowly, by military response. The threat will fade, they hope. Things will go back to normal. Evidence gathered by American intelligence and intellectual communities is to the contrary.
There is ample indication the current state of affairs could sink into that unthinkable miasma -- war with Islam. East versus West. Old Testament stuff. A giant hangover from the Crusades.
The Muslim world, it seems, has a better grasp of history -- and relies more upon it -- than the modern West, which prefers such a mindless pace and devotion to the Now that last Tuesday seems like ancient times. Government types here seem befuddled when they hear constant reference by terrorists and militants in the Middle East, Osama bin Laden among them, to the glories of 7th-century Islam, and a desire to restore them.
Here's what they are shouting about. It wasn't a hundred years after the prophet Muhammad proclaimed the new faith of Islam that Muslim warriors had conquered an empire stretching 4,000 miles from the Atlantic to the Indian Ocean. Islamic thought and scientific and intellectual contribution flourished another seven decades.
As the editors of Time-Life Books described it in their excellent work, "The March of Islam," the new religion "exploded upon the world with the sudden force of a desert whirlwind. With the cry 'Allahu akbar' -- God is great -- ringing across the sands, Arabian armies began to sweep through Syria and Mesopotamia in 633. Within a decade, they had conquered Persia and Egypt and taken the holy city of Jerusalem. In 674 they were poised at the gates of Constantinople. By the early 700s, Islam's banners fluttered in the wind from Spain in the west to India in the east -- an expanse of territory that made all previous empires seem minor by comparison."
OK, OK -- that was 13 centuries ago. The point is, it has thundering relevance to the immediate future of the United States. Much of the Muslim world of one billion souls in 48 nations craves a restoration of pride over early accomplishments of that faith, and believes violence is the key to achieving it. The claims that an arrogant and greedy America is the Great Satan -- a robber of oil, a funder of the murder of Muslim innocents through Israel, an uncaring and greedy dominator addicted to power -- isn't just a wacky public relations campaign concocted for television cameras. It is truly believed by members of a major faith who consider themselves our enemy.
Discourse seems useless on these points. A Gallup poll just last month showed 61 percent of the Arab world flat-out doesn't believe Arabs were involved in the attacks on the Pentagon and World Trade Center. Gilles Keppel, who last month published "Jihad" (Harvard University Press), makes a case that American intelligence agencies have snored through three decades of warning signs about the new Islamic militancy.
Fundamentalist and radical Islam, Keppel wrote, surfaced as a new force after the death of Egypt's Gamal Abdul Nasser in 1970 and replaced his Arab nationalism as the driving intellectual growth product for the Middle East. Walter Laqueur, reviewing the book in "Atlantic Monthly," wrote: "By that time, at the very latest, there could have been no doubt that a new movement had appeared on the international scene, claiming to be (and believed by many to be) the wave of the future. It preached a return to the strictest observation of the Koran ... and the destruction of all its enemies, foreign and domestic."
While Americans are more familiar with Iran's late Ayatollah Khomeini as prophet of the Shiite brand of Islam, they have barely heard of a man named Sayyid Qutb, a secular Egyptian writer, Laqueur notes, who is the "inspiration of the far more numerous Sunni radicals" -- and the reason many of the Sept. 11 hijackers were from Saudi Arabia, where his theories are very popular. Qutb visited the United States in the late 1940s, loathed this country, and returned to the Middle East, according to Laqueur, "a zealot thirsting for martyrdom ... he preached a fanatic obscurantism." Qutb's new twist, notes Laqueur, was advocating violence not only against Christians and Jews (a fairly safe standard in the region) but "also against fellow Muslims who did not accept his version of Islam." Witness last week's swift street executions by refugee town dwellers of Palestinians even remotely suspected of cooperating with the invading Israelis.
This goes beyond military matters. To secular Westerners, reliance on 13-century-old religious rules governing irrelevant social behavior is nuts -- and translates into harm and death. Fifteen Saudi teenaged girls died in a school fire recently when the morality police forced them to stay inside the burning structure because they were not wearing the head scarves and cloaks deemed mandatory for female public wear in that kingdom. Into these underlying developments, mix several new setbacks that do not promise a peaceful future. Muslim intellectuals who caution against reliance on nationalism or Islamic law to govern nations are being tossed in jail on flimsy charges.
The respected Egyptian sociologist, Saad Ibrahim, was caged (literally) for researching the sentiments of Cairo voters regarding why Muslims join militant groups.
European countries, even tolerant Denmark, are electing anti-Muslim, anti-immigration conservatives to office in big numbers. Saudi Crown Prince Abdullah visited the Western White House in Crawford, Texas during the week to warn that American alliance with Israel is undermining previously stable Middle Eastern governments friendly to the United States -- including his own. Never mind cracking down on terrorists, was his message. The Saudis in control have all they can do just to keep power in the Arabian peninsula. Better put your SUV up on blocks.
Here at home, the dithering continues. Congress wanted to rebuke the hounded Immigration and Naturalization Service for failing to keep track of millions of illegal aliens -- about 500,000 new ones entering against the law each year -- and to give the INS a proper beating over its dumb-and-dumber issuance of student visa papers for some of the Sept. 11 hijackers long after their deaths. But in Capitol Hill's typically heavy hand, the legislation turned into a complete abolition of the INS, replacing it with two separate agencies, one for tracking immigration, one for law enforcement concerning such matters.
The White House, seeking to get out in front politically, sidled up to the disciplinary proposals as actually feasible. Now, the abolition has a momentum of its own. Once the INS structure, however creaky, is scrapped, just watch the illegals pouring over our borders and through our airports, unchecked and unnoticed until the ponderous federal government can get a new department up to speed. It could take years, not months.
And at the Washington area's three major airports, an FBI move on suspect employees at midweek netted 140 arrests -- many of them baggage screeners. Most were indicted for lying on their paperwork about things like citizenship, identities, and criminal background. Some of these are the very people charged with enhancing security for the beleaguered commercial air industry. In other words -- seven months after Sept. 11 -- the same people checking the bad guys turn out to be bad guys themselves.
The indictments of the non-baggage screeners are important, too. Despite all the rose-colored pap about the renewed safety of air travel, most American airports, including the Washington area's, have little control over who among employees gets to access tarmac areas, cargo areas, luggage areas, remote gates, and all the other sensitive locations. Any worker with an airport employee card -- including all those just caught lying about their pasts -- can usually swipe the badge through an electronic lock to open it.
Most ominous of all, that hero of the Arab street, Saddam Hussein -- with his new offer of $25,000 to Palestinians whose homes were turned to rubble by the Israelis (to go with his previous awards of $25,000 to families of suicide bombers) -- is still in the Pentagon's crosshairs. Saddam's demands for allowing new United Nations inspections of his chemical, nuclear, and germ warfare machines are completely unacceptable. The Bush administration keeps signaling it believes the only way to solve the Saddam Problem is to take him out. The Palestinian-Israeli bloodshed hasn't stopped the planning.
| Niagara Falls Reporter | www.niagarafallsreporter.com | April 30 2002 |