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PEOPLE AND POLITICS “Islamic Terror”, Islam Phobia And All That
The announcement by British intelligence last week that they have uncovered a plot by a group of so-called Islamists to blow up an unspecified number of aircrafts on their way to the United States from the UK, would have come as little or no surprise to most people. Since before 9/11, but more so after it, the governments of the Western world, supported of course by their global media, have succeeded in convincing their peoples to expect nothing but violence from Muslims within and outside their midst. Since 9/11, Islam has been portrayed as a religion of violence and an evil force that has come to replace Communism as the West’s No. 1 Enemy, with a capital E.
Having fabricated a new hideous masquerade to replace an old, expired masquerade, it was only to be expected that the custodians of the new masquerade would evoke it every once in a while, particularly in moments of crises, to scare their peoples into line.
As Nigel West, a prominent British journalist, said in The Spectator of August 16, 2003, in wake of the controversy that surrounded the claim by British Prime Minister, Mr. Tony Blair, that Saddam possessed weapons of mass destruction that he could activate within 45 minutes, “The government is using the intelligence services for political purposes and this Soviet approach is making us a less secure people.”
The war of mindless terror that Israel unleashed on Lebanon four weeks ago or so clearly represented a moment of severe crisis for the West, in particular for the US and Britain, Israel’s principal mentors. It was a war that has not discriminated between civilians and militia or between Muslims and Christians. It has deliberately targeted both civilian and military infrastructures, using the excuse that Hisballah, the Shia armed militia whose capture of two Israeli soldiers in Southern Lebanon prompted the war, routinely used hospitals, schools, civilian airports, etc, to attack northern Israel with rockets.
While much of Europe’s leaders shed crocodile tears about Israel’s invasion of Lebanon, U.S. president, Mr. George Bush, and his poodle, Mr. Tony Blair, the British Prime Minister, completely dispensed with such pretences. Far from shedding any hypocritical crocodile tears for the Lebanese, they edged on Israel to permanently destroy Hisballah as a force which has posed a serious threat to Western hegemony in the Middle East, particularly Anglo-American hegemony.
According to the New York Times, Bush even used his prerogative as a war leader to speed up the delivery of missiles and other arms to Israel to replenish those it was unleashing on Lebanon.
With a crisis like that of Israeli’s invasion of Lebanon, which world opinion has deplored, even if hypocritically in some cases, the Anglo-Americans needed to create a red herring not only to divert the world’s attention from Israel’s horrendous crime against humanity, but even to justify it. That red herring apparently came in the shape of last week’s announcement by British intelligence of a plot by so-called Islamic terrorists to bomb any number of aircrafts out of the sky on their way to the United States from Britain.
As was the case with the propaganda about Iraqi’s weapons of mass destruction which turned out to have been deliberate falsehood, the Western media have parroted the British claims as if they were gospel truth. So also have much of our own local media that invariably take their cue from the Western media.
It is possible of course that this time the British were justified to cry wolf, but whether or not the wolf existed, the announcement couldn’t have been better timed to succeed as a propaganda strategy to soften, if not eliminate, the world’s opposition to the horror Israel has unleashed on the helpless Lebanese.
What we have here is obviously a blatant case of double standards. When desperate and frustrated Muslims and Arabs attack civilian targets in Western countries that support and finance Israeli aggression in the Middle East, it is called “Islamic terror”. However when the West and Israel use their superior war machines to kill and maim civilians and destroy their homes and infrastructure in the Middle East and elsewhere, it is rationalized as being in defense of civilization.
No one, I think, has captured this double-think more accurately than Robert Cooper, a close adviser to Blair. According to Robert Kagan in his book, Paradise and Power: America and Europe in the New World, Cooper once said on an occasion that “The Challenge of post-modern world is to get used to the idea of double standards. Among ourselves we keep the law, but when we are operating in the Jungle (i.e. in the rest of the world) we must also use the laws of the Jungle.” It is obvious from American and British foreign policies, if not those of the rest of the West, that they all subscribe to Cooper’s notion of might being right.
This explains why both Bush and Blair continue to deny any linkage between their policies and the so-called Islamic terror. But as even The Economist, that icon of Western libertarianism has said, “It is absurd to deny the possibility of a connection with Iraq … Mr. Blair himself has talked often of the need to tackle the causes of terrorism – including Israel’s occupation of the West Bank and Gaza” (The Economist, July 23, 2005).
Deny it as they would it is the foreign policies of Western governments, especially those of America and Britain that have planted hatred against the West in the hearts and minds of the victims of those policies. As Noam Chomsky, a professor of Linguistics at Massachusetts Institute of Technology and a leading world essayist said in his book, Power and Terror: Post 9/11, in answer to Bush’s rhetorical question, “Why do they hate us when we are so good?,” the answer lies in what America has been doing abroad in sharp contrast to what it has been preaching.
Said Chomsky, “So if you want to listen to some voices outside the cocoon, it’s not heard to hear them, and they will answer the questions about why there’s a campaign of hatred against us, whether it is now or in1958, and in good part of the rest of the world where people just don’t enjoy being ground to dust under somebody’s boot. They don’t like it and it leads to hatred. You can indulge in fantasies if you like but that’s a choice.”
And just as the foreign policies of Western governments, and one must now add, their worsening domestic ill-treatment of immigrants, especially Muslims and Arabs, are responsible for “Islamic terror” so also have the policies and the ill-treatment spawned Islam phobia among ordinary Westerners.
One famous, or more accurately infamous, manifestation of this Islam phobia occurred, of all places, during the finals of the last World Cup, between France and Italy. During that match the whole world saw Zinedine Zidane, France’s captain and widely acclaimed as the world’s best footballer in the last decade, head butt Marco Materazzi, an Italian player. That head butt earned Zidane a red card and marred what would have been a glorious exit from football as he had announced that he would be retiring from football after the World Cup.
It turned out that Materazzi insulted Zidane by calling his mother, who is an Algerian immigrant, a “terrorist whore”. Only a superhuman could have resisted reacting to that gratuitous insult the way Zidane did.
Here at home we have had our own variant of Islam phobia even at policy levels. The most recent case at this level has been the announcement by Professor Charles Soludo, the Governor of the Central Bank of Nigeria, that our new currencies will no longer carry Arabic inscriptions. This decision must have been approved by President Olusegun Obasanjo himself, who, as a self-proclaimed born-again Christian should have been more circumspect about such a decision which is bound to provoke Muslim anger.
As a born-again Christian and the leader of a multi-religious Nigeria, Obasanjo ought to be pursuing policies that should unite Muslims and Christians and people of other faiths instead of policies that will bring them into conflict.
The apparent assumption of the decision to remove Arabic inscriptions from our currencies is that Arabic is synonymous with Islam. This assumption is widespread among non-Muslims but it is thoroughly mistaken. Nearly seven years ago, the National Interest (October 7, 2000), reported one lawyer, Hya Osahon Ihenyen, as threatening to sue the Federal Government for retaining Arabic inscriptions on our currency because, according to him, those inscriptions were “offensive, undesirable and a violation of his fundamental rights to freedom from discrimination.” Ihenyen was to have gone to court on October 12, 2000. I don’t know if he ever did, but it does seem that his prayers have now been answered. However, as I pointed out in an article in The Comet of October 11, 2000 and subsequently in another article in the New Nigerian and the rested Country of September 9, 2002, following the phasing out of Arabic from the Department of Languages of the Nigerian Defence Academy, Kaduna, nothing could be more ridiculous than Ihenyen’s prayers.
First, even though Arabic was the original language of the Qur’an, Islam’s Holy Book, the language is no longer any more synonymous with the religion than English is with Christianity. Today there are millions of Christian Arabs reading their Bible in Arabic as there are tens of millions of non-Arab Muslims worldwide reading their Qur’an in English. Right here in Nigeria, I remember back in my primary school days in Kano in the late ‘50s and early ‘60s, the Sudan Interior Mission (SIM) used to publish a lot of its Christian tracks in Hausa using Arabic alphabets.
Second, English is no more indigenous to Nigeria than Arabic. Indeed Arabic as the language of scholarship in what was to become Northern Nigeria after colonial conquest has been a much older language in Nigeria than English.
Last, but by no means the least, today’s English numerals themselves are of Arabic origin. That is why they are called Arabic numerals as compared to, say, Latin numerals. So if those asking for the removal of Arabic inscription from our currencies want to do a thorough job of it, they ought to be asking for the removal of the numbers on the currencies as well. But then that would amount to what philosophers would call reductio ad absurdum i.e. the application of the rules to such an extent that the result would be ridiculous.
Evidently the decision to remove the Arabic inscription in our currency is as unwise as it is ill-informed. The inscription merely uses Arabic alphabets to tell the value of the currencies in Hausa. Leaving the inscription does not detract anything from any non-Muslim or non-Hausa speaker. Those who think it does presumably subscribe to the notion that what is good for your enemy, real or imagined, must necessarily be bad for you. The notion is as silly as it is illogical. The Federal Government should therefore rethink its decision even if the new currencies have been printed, since such printing is a continuous exercise. Otherwise the government will stand guilty of Islam phobia. However, whereas such a disease is understandable among ordinary non-Muslims who know no better, it is simply inexcusable among government officials who should know better than to allow their thinking to be swayed by cheap Western Islam phobic propaganda.
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