Recent letters in these pages have attributed the Charlie Hebdo attack to inchoate hatred of Jews. It is inconceivable or insignificant to the writers that American foreign policy or Israeli domestic policy had anything to do with it.
Similarly, writers Left and Right have reframed the story as one in which democracy and freedom of speech are under attack. “They” hate us for what we have, for who we are, for the freedoms we exercise. From Lindsay Graham to Bill Maher, the only conclusions Americans seem able to draw are (1) Western civilization is at war with people who want to live in the Neolithic Age, and (2) Islam is totally incompatible with democracy. No other narratives are ever used to rationally explain Al Qaeda’s and ISIS’s successes. And we won’t hear of it.
Bin Laden’s November 2002 “Letter to America” in the Guardian addresses two issues: why al Qaeda opposes the West and what it wants from it. The first answer to the first question addressed Palestine. He wrote: “Why are we fighting and opposing you? The answer is very simple: (1) Because you attacked us and continue to attack us. a) You attacked us in Palestine…” To Bin Laden Israel in Palestine was just another example of Western imperialism.
But we know better.
Bin Laden’s other talking points concerned Western involvement in the Middle East and the exploitation of the world’s resources to satisfy a consumer culture he regarded as immoral. He took the West to task for coddling Israel, nuclear hypocrisy, and for U.S. foreign policy and military bases throughout the Middle East, particularly in Saudi Arabia.
But we know better.
History tells us: that the West carved up the Middle East; that it unleashed Wahhabism against the Ottomans; that the U.S. built Al Qaeda as a proxy to fight Russia in Afghanistan; that “Western” Israel formed Hamas to challenge the PLO; that the U.S. left Shias to die in the first Gulf War and disenfranchised Sunnis in the next; that it inadvertently armed ISIL; that the West’s “coalition of the willing” destroyed and destabilized Iraq, Syria and Libya through regime change masquerading as defense of civilians suffering state terror; that the new GOP Congress wants to add Iran to our national catalog of military disasters.
But we know better.
Didier Francois, a French journalist who was held almost a year by ISIS, was interviewed recently by CNN reporter Christiane Amanpour. When asked about the Western-educated converts to ISIS, Francois responded, “There was never really discussion about texts or — it was not a religious discussion. It was a political discussion. It was more hammering what they were believing than teaching us about the Quran.”
But we know better.
Analysts in the intelligence agencies know that ISIS and Al Qaeda ranks are swollen with ex-Baathists and anti-Assad Syrians. They also contain a sobering number of Western-born and Western-educated Muslims who are radicalized by domestic racism, growing surveillance states, unemployment and consumer culture. They and their lone-wolf brethren are radicalized in part by the realization that their own countries are not quite the democracies they claim to be, and their heritage permits them to see Colonialism with a clear eye. But ultimately they are radicalized by being told to “go home,” that they don’t belong in England or France or Germany. Or the U.S. And by joining ISIS they think they’re going home.
As Didier Francois tells us, though, it’s not the Quran. It’s politics.
And yet we only see a military solution. Americans all-too-quickly resort to war. War is not our last resort. It is pretty much our only resort. As long as we consistently choose to fight without thinking of the political dimensions, the war against ISIS and any future mutations will have only one casualty: our own civil liberties and democracy.
Only after we finally admit our foreign and domestic policies have been a failure and actually encourage recruitment to ISIS and Al Qaeda — and we alter them — will we be able to have any kind of peace.
Until then, we know better.
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