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The West, Media and Islamophobia By Mohammed Haruna February 7, 2010
Text of a lecture on “Terrorism, the Media and the growing trend of Global Islamophobia” by Mohammed Haruna under the auspices of Gombe State branch of NACOMYO in Gombe on February 7, 2010
Mr. Chairman, my Muslim brothers and sisters, assalamu alaikum. Permit me to begin this lecture by giving thanks to the National Council of Muslim Youths Organizations (NACOMYO) for giving me an opportunity to express my opinion on the vexed issue of so-called Islamic terrorism which has put Muslims on the defensive world-wide including here in Nigeria, at least half of whose population are Muslims. Thank you.
Next, I’ll like to define the key words in today’s lecture. These are Terrorism, The Media, and Islamophobia. To start with Terrorism, no two persons agree on the meaning of the word “terror” because the word, like beauty, is in the eye of the beholder; to say that one man’s terrorist is another’s hero has since become almost like a cliché.
In the early 80’s the American State Department defined terrorism as “premeditated, politically motivated violence perpetrated against non-combatant targets, by sub-national groups or clandestine agents usually intended to influence an audience”.
The Oxford English Dictionary defines it simply as “The use of violence and intimidation to achieve political aims”.
Yet another definition of the word is that it is “the deliberate use or threat of violence, politically motivated and directed against non-military personnel”.
The discerning listener would have noticed a major difference between the American definition of the word and the other two, namely the American narrow definition of its agents as “sub-national groups or clandestine agents”. This is a highly significant difference as we shall see presently.
For now, I will like to point out that the difficulty in arriving at a universal definition of terrorism was underscored by the fact that in 2005, the 60th United Nations summit tried but failed to decide on a universal legal definition of the word. I should also point out that two years later a commission set up by the government of the United Kingdom concluded that “there is no single definition of terrorism that commands full international support”.
Even then, there is a common denominator in all the innumerable definitions of the word. This is that it is the use of violence or intimation or their threat for political objectives. Opinions differ mainly on the scale of violence and who uses it.
As we have seen from the US State Department’s definition, the Americans regard only non-state actors as agents of terror. Obviously this is a highly problematic and subjective definition, to say the least, because States too can be, and have been, agents of terror, as the history of America itself in its many wars abroad testifies.
States have not merely sponsored terrorism. They have themselves perpetrated it and in so doing the harm they cause as a result of the weapons of violence and the organization at their disposal dwarfs any that non-state actors can inflict as we shall see in due course.
Meantime, let us return to the second key term in our lecture i.e. the media. The Oxford English dictionary defines it as “Television, radio and newspapers as the means of mass communication”. Useful as this is, it is obviously a highly restricted definition because it leaves out many other means of mass communication.
These include traditional means like the gong, the talking drum, the town crier, etc. The definition also leaves out the more modern means of mass communication. These include books, magazines, cinema, CDs, DVDs, cassettes and, not least of all, the internet, perhaps the most revolutionary of them all.
In defining media, it is important to talk not only about what they are. We should also talk about what they do, which, universally are acknowledged as informing, educating and entertaining the public and also shaping public opinion. As it is often said, perception is as important as reality, sometimes even more so.
As the famous American president, Abraham Lincoln, once put it, “Public sentiment is everything … he who moulds public sentiments goes deeper than he who executes statutes or pronounces decisions. He makes statutes or decisions possible or impossible to execute.”
The contemporary American historian Prof. Arthur Schlesinger, Jr. was even more sweeping in his opinion of the importance of the media. “Karl Max”, he once said “held that history is shaped by control of the means of production. In our times history is shaped by control of the means of communication”
The late Malcolm X, the famous Muslim black American, was somewhat more cynical in his opinion of the importance of the media but his insight was useful nonetheless. “If you are not careful,” he once said, “the media will have you hating those who are oppressed and loving those who are doing the oppression.”
Finally, the definition of Islamophobia. The word itself seems a post 9/11 creation even though the sentiments it seeks to capture have existed for centuries going back to the Crusades in the 15th century. A combination of the words Islam and phobia, it simply means an extreme or irrational fear of Islam.
Although this extreme or irrational fear of Islam has existed especially in the West for centuries, 9/11 seems to have raised it to higher level than at anytime in the history of relation of the two.
The collapse of the Soviet Union in 1989 as the greatest obstacle to the spread of Western values seemed to have led to the replacement of Communism, the Soviet creed, with Islam as the West’s main bogeyman. In his 1994 book, Out of Control, for example, the American statesman, Zbigniew Brzezinski, raised an alarm about what he said was Islam’s march northwards in to Europe from its Middle Eastern core through Central Asia with the collapse of the Soviet Union. Nature, he said, abhorred vacuum and unless the West, America in particular, did something about this threat , the Islamic countries of Turkey, Iran, and Pakistan will make successful in-roads into Central Asia and hence into Europe.
Terrorist attacks of Americans abroad and of American iconic institutions at home like the 1993 bombing of the New York World Trade Centre served only to accentuate this Western phobia of Islam since those who carried out the bombings were either Muslims or claimed to have done so in the name of Islam.
Such was the fear of Islam created by such attacks that when one, Timothy McVeigh, bombed a federal building in Oklahoma City in April 1995 killing 167 people including children, many leading Americans and media organizations like the right acting Wall Street Journal at first attributed the bombing to Muslims.
And not surprisingly when the bomber turned out to be someone with strong Christian fundamentalist views not one media ever referred to him as a “Christian terrorist”.
Mr. Chairman, from our various definitions of terrorism it is undeniable that Muslims have carried out terrorist attacks worldwide often in revenge, at times to protest what they perceive as blasphemy against Islam, but essentially to chase foreign forces out of their countries. The violence in the Middle East and other regions with majority or significant Muslim population, as a survey in The Economist of September 13, 2003, entitled “In the name of God” suggested, have had less to do with the faith itself than with Western support for the venal dictators in those regions. This means the picture created by the Western dominated media and their local echo-chambers around the world, that terrorism is essentially or even exclusively, an Islamic phenomenon is more propaganda than fact.
To begin with, Islam does not boast of the first organized campaign of violence by a non-State for political objectives. The credit for this belongs to the Jews whose Zealots used suicide bombing to try and drive out their Roman conquerors in 73AD. And there was, of course, the even more famous mighty Samson whose capture in a bloody war with the Philistines and subsequent display in a temple in Gaza cost the Philistines dearly. This was when he brought down the temple killing himself and his enemies.
Like the Biblical Jews, modern day Zionists also showed the way in terrorism when they formed terror gangs that waged campaigns of violence against the British as the colonial masters of Palestine and also against the Palestinians themselves when they tried to resist the creation of Israel out of their land.
Historical antecedents apart, all other religions including Christianity, Judaism, Hindu and even Buddhism, arguably the most liberal of them all, have spawn terror groups. Perhaps the most notorious of these is the Lord’s Resistance Army (LRA) in Uganda which for decades has fought the country’s government with the declared aim of establishing a theocratic state governed by the Biblical Ten Commandments, but which itself has consistently violated those commandments by, among other things, the killing and maiming of children and women. Less well known is the Buddhist group, the Japanese Aum Shinrikyo (Supreme truth) which in 1995 released the poisonous gas, serin, in Tokyo’s underground train killing about a dozen people and injuring over 5000.
Terrorism is of course not exclusively a religious phenomenon. There have been non-religious terror groups like Marxist/Maoist groups in Latin America, and racist and nationalist groups all over the world, but particularly in Europe.
Of all these groups however, none seems to have attracted the attention of the Western dominated, and American led, global media like those that use violence in the name of Islam.
The big question is why? The answer is at once simple and complex. The simple answer, in my view, was provided, perhaps inadvertently, by General Norman Schwarzkopf, the American soldier who led the first American invasion of Iraq, in a testimony he made before a Congressional hearing in February 1990.
“Middle East oil,” he said “is the West’s lifeblood. It fuels us today, and being 77% of the free world’s proven reserve, is going to fuel us when the rest of the world’s has run dry. It is estimated that within 20 and 40 years the US will have virtually depleted its economically available oil reserves, while Persian Gulf region will still have at least 100 years of proven reserves.
“Our allies,” he said further, “are even more dependent on Middle East oil. Japan gets almost two-thirds of its oil from the area while our allies in Europe import over one quarter.”
In other words, America’s and the West’s reliance on cheap Middle East oil, and by extension, their reliance on other natural resources from the rest of the world for their economic growth, has been the main source of friction between the West and rest of world.
Naturally America and the West try to hide their attempt to own and control the world’s resources under such desirable values as democracy and modernization. At the same time they try to demonize anyone who they regard as standing in their way.
One writer who seems to have in a way accurately captured this strategy of demonizing anyone who stands in the way of Western hegemony was William Blum, an American historian, writer and journalist . “The Soviet Union and something called communism”, he said in his 2003 book, Killing Hope: U.S. military and CIA Interventions since World War II “had not been the object of Washington’s global attacks….. The enemy was, and remains, any government or movement or even individual that stands in the way of the expansion of the American empire; by what name the US gives the enemy - communist, rogue state, drug trafficker, terrorist….”
Blum goes on to show how between 1945 and 2003, “The United States attempted to overthrow more than 40 foreign governments and to crush more than 30 populist/nationalist movements fighting against intolerable regimes. In the process, the US bombed some 25 countries, caused the end of life for several million people, and condemned many millions more to a life of agony and despair”. More often than not the US did all this in cahoots with the rest of the West.
Even blunter than Blum in identifying the root of terrorism was Dr. Rowan Williams, the Archbishop of Canterbury and head of the Church of England since 2002. “It is,” he said in a criticism of America’s second invasion of Iraq, “possible to eliminate one, two or even a 1000 terrorists, but if you don’t go to the cause of terrorism you will never eradicate the terrible phenomenon. And the causes are political, economic and cultural… Not only the United States but the entire West should make an examination of their conscience, of how they oppress the rest of the world.”
Mr. Chairman, The United State is today the World’s sole global power in military terms. In his 2008 book, Understanding Global Security, Peter Hough, published a table of the top 10 biggest military spenders in the world.
Top of the league was America which spent $466 billion on its defense in 2005. Next was China with $65 billion and then Russia with $50. The remaining in that order were France, $45; United Kingdom, $42.8; Japan, $41.8; Germany, $35.1; Italy, $28.2; South Korea, $21.1bn; and India $19.00bn.
Put together, the countries of the world spent $950bn on their defense. This meant that America alone spent nearly half what the entire world spent on arms in 2005. Chances are with America’s new “surge” in Afghanistan the gap has only widened since.
This gap between America and the world simply boggles the mind. America, as pointed out by Harvard Professor Joseph Nye, in an article in The Economist of March 23rd 2002, “the only country with both nuclear and conventional forces with global reach.”
Consider how this gap between America and the rest of the world was illustrated in more graphic terms by Clyde Prestowitz in his 2003 book, Rogue Nation. Only America, he said, has carriers each of which is “more like a nuclear-powered floating city than a mere ship.” These ships which are scattered round the globe, he said, are 1,100 feet long 20 story tall with flight decks 250 feet across. Each carries 70 state of the art fighter jets, is accompanied by a cruise, several frigates and destroyers, one or two submarines and supply vessels.
America, he said, has 13 of these carrier battle groups. “No other country,” he added, “has even one.”
As Blum has shown in his book I have just referred to, America has all too often succumbed to the temptation to use this big stick which it alone possesses. Yet as Malcolm X has observed somewhat obliquely, America has been able to pose as a victim of especially Islamic terrorism, particularly after the 9/11, even though no Islamic country compares with any Western country in the size and use of arms, and only one Muslim country in the world - Pakistan - has nuclear weapons among at least eight in the world, mostly Western countries, that are known to possess them.
It has been able to pose as a country, and with the rest of the West as a civilization, threatened by Islamic terror, simply because along with its military domination of the world it also overwhelmingly dominates the world’s information and cultural order.
To quote Nye from his article in question, “in terms of cultural prominence the US is far and away the number-one film and television exporter in world”.
America, Nye might as well have added, also dominates other forms of media including newspapers, magazines and, of course, the revolutionary Internet.
It is this American, and by extension, Western, domination of the media world that has enabled the West to portrait Islam as a religion of violence even when in the reality the harm caused by Muslim non-state agents of terrorism and even by those America has dubbed “rogue nations” nowhere compares to the harm caused by Western state terrorism in pursuit of their objectives of world hegemony. It is this domination of the global media that has also allowed the Americans and the rest of the West to deny their own roles in creating the terror organizations and some of the state sponsors of terror in the Muslim world that have turned round to haunt them.
Take for example, Saddam Hussein’s Iraq which America accused, falsely it turned out, of possessing weapons of mass destruction (WMD). In 1975, America encouraged Iraq to cede the Shat-al- Arab waterway to Iran then under the Shah, who America regarded as an ally in its fight against communism. When the Shah was overthrown, the same Americans urged Iraq to go to war with Iran over the waterway.
During the course of the war President Ronald Reagan in 1982 removed Iraq from its list of sponsors of terrorism. It also armed Iraq to fight Iran – remember the infamous Iran-Contragate? - and even blocked the United Nation’s condemnation of Iraq when it gassed Iranians in course of the war.
It is a mark of the success of Western propaganda against Iraq as a Muslim country that a country that could not defeat a militarily second rate power like Iran during the Iran/Iraq war of the eighties in spite of all the help it received from the West suddenly became the biggest threat to the world.
Therefore, when William River Pitt in his 2002 book, War on Iraq said that “Saddam Husain is a monster by any definition but he is our monster (and) as much an American creation as Coca cola and the Oldsmobile,” he couldn’t have been more accurate. You could say the same of Al-Qaeda and the Taliban both of which were created by the American CIA and funded with Saudi oil money in Pakistan to chase the Soviets out of Afghanistan.
Yet if you depended on contemporary American and Western media you will never know that America and the West created these organizations to begin with.
Mr. Chairman this lecture will not be complete without addressing the important question of how Muslims should tackle this problem of the demonization of their religion by the West.
The first step is to acknowledge that while Islamophobia is more propaganda than substance the use of terror against innocent civilians by Muslims is simply indefensible and, in the long run, self-defeating because nothing undermines a cause more effectively than its protagonists practicing the opposite of what they preach. Islam, we say, is a religion of peace. The easy resort to violence whenever we feel offended, especially as has been the case here in Nigeria, can only belie our claim.
Second, Muslims must come to terms with the power of the media. Accordingly, Muslims must begin to invest in the ownership and control of the media, not to lunch a counter-propaganda war against America and the West. Muslims must invest in the media to tell the world their own story.
This may be easier said than done given the relative poverty of Muslims worldwide in spite of the God-given natural resources in their lands. However, as Aljazeera has shown abroad and Trust, and lately, Peoples’ Daily, have shown here at home, it is not impossible to meet the challenge of Western anti-Muslim propaganda.
Third, the Muslim leadership must be in the vanguard of the fight for equity locally and globally. A situation where Muslim leaders, religious or secular, shy away from speaking truth to power for whatever reason, as has often being the case, can only expose ordinary Muslims to contempt and to exploitation.
And talking about contempt for the Muslim Ummah takes me to the last but by no means the least step necessary for solving the problem of Islamophobia especially here in Nigeria. This is that the Muslim leadership must rise to the challenge of almajirci in its modern day manifestation whereby Islamic schooling has become associated with child begging on our streets.
This is a serious blight on Islam in Nigeria which Muslims must do everything to remove.
Mr. Chairman, my brothers and sisters in Islam, assalamu alaikum wa rahmatullahi ta’ala wa barakatuhu
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