Sol Sanders Archive

It is as though having destroyed the fungus that had attacked Muslim society and preached a relatively cohesive doctrine of hate along the lines of Islamofascism, the U.S. and its allies now have scattered its spores. They have taken root in the crevices of corruption and backwardness that characterizes the Muslim world from Casablanca to Zamboanga – and (alas!) the diaspora in Europe and North America..

It is ridiculous, of course, to put the blame for this on what Sen. Barack Obama and the Democrats are calling the misplaced emphasis of the Brush Administration. Going after Saddam Hussein and his dictatorship and its potential threat to the Persian Gulf states was a very high priority in the U.S. national interest.

The present mess – and it is inevitably that – in Afghanistan was predictable as the descent into civil chaos in Iraq was not. Afghanistan is, was, and will continue to be a space between the geopolitical conflicts of Central and South Asia, never a properly defined nor codified nation-state.

Granted that might have been said about Iraq before British and the French mapmakers got together for the Treaties of Sevres and Lausanne. But there was always Baghdad down through the ages – ancient Babylon, the capital of the Persian Empire, and always a leading city of the Muslim world, intellectually and not the least, commercially. That is why, its Jews — as late as the 1920s the largest single ethnic group and until they fled in 1948 perhaps the oldest continual society in the world — were to become so important into the lifeline of the British Empire stretching all the way to Shanghai.

But leaving the evaluation of current events in Iraq aside for the moment, we see all though the Islamic world the increasing growth of what might be called do-it-yourself terrorism.

As has repeatedly happened in the bloody history of Islam, despite the call to equality and unity through submission to Allah, the old ethnic and ideological fissures are cracking open again. Even the electronic calls ostensibly put out by Al Qaida are chastising its followers, whether in Iraq or elsewhere, about abandoning the true faith.

The fact is that the true faith has, again, as so many times in the past, come apart. Osama’s original call to Arab nationalism – to throw the offending infidels out of the holy soil of the Saudi Arabian kingdom – which he coupled with his perverted piety and call to return to a primitive desert belief is gone.

In Turkey, particularly at the moment, we see these currents in the Muslim world in total conflict. It is hard to follow the daily events without a scorecard. But Turkish nationalists are denouncing and trying to overthrow the regime of President Abdullah Gul and Prime Minister Tayyip Erdogan, both once ardent Islamic fundamentalists.

That administration may – or may not – now be an attempt to create a new and modern, moderate synthesis of Islam and capitalism. The new merchant class – including the underclass of ethnic Kurds who have supported Erdogan — which gave it an overwhelming majority in the last election apparently thought so. [But so did the bazaaris in Iran when they brought on the corrupt and ruinous dictatorship of the mullahs!] And that would theoretically go forward with an affiliation to the European Union — which has all but rejected them. The Kemalists, who go back to a founding regime modeled on Westernization [nay, Francoization], are now the exponents of Turkish ethnicity, naming their underground revolutionary movement [apparently] on the mythical homeland of the Turkic peoples in Central Asia.

All this has produced a crisis of the regime, torn apart the Turkish economy, and, of course, apparently leading to the most recent unexplained terrorist incident in Istambul aimed at the U.S. consulate general in that Eurasian mishmash literally between Asia and Europe.

In Pakistan, a year after President General Perbez Muharraf moved, finally, on the most flagrant of the Islamicists at the Red Mosque at the doorstep of his secularist army’s GHQ in Rawalpindi-Islamabad, the scene is as confused.

Musharraf acted, in part at least, because the Lal Masjid and its attached Jamia Hafsa madrassa for women, was attracting potential terrorists not only from the tribal areas on the Pakistan-Afghanistan border but Uzbeks and Uighurs from neighboring Central Asia. The latter were a little much for Islamabad’s “all weather” ally, Beijing, which claims it is bloodily putting down in mid-July in its vast western province of Singkiang Uighur nationalists plotting to obstruct the coming Olympic Games next month.

And Pak gossip has it the Chinese made their demands that Musharraf move, just as later Musharraf was asked to stop in on Singkiang enroute back from Beijing to Pakistan. He had gone to Beijing after being forced into a shotgun marriage by Washington with the martyred Benazir Bhutto and his resultant electoral defeat. He apparently gave his fellow Uighur Muslims the word here that Han Chinese domination was good for their pocketbooks, if not their souls. It could be a hard sell.

Meanwhile, a civilian government which the Americans helped force on Musharraf and the army has apparently rejected his secret agreement – nothing any Pak leader could ever admit in public – for U.S. and NATO forces in hot pursuit of terrorists to enter Pakistan tribal areas. It’s no secret that the resurrected neo-Taliban in Afghanistan is finding sanctuary across the ill defined borders in tribal Pakistan. And more than one American military officer has been loudly proclaiming the growing importance of the sanctuaries for growing American and NATO casualties in Afghanistan.

The Shia-Sunni divide, which seemed to mean so much in Iraq, appears to have gone by the boards with Tehran’s mullahs who often in the past given them an auto de fe. They are nevertheless willing to extend their aid to the Palestinian Hamas, which came to life as the Gaza Wing of the Egyptian Moslem Brotherhood. That gang of killers now turned politicians, assassins dating back to the 1920s, are as Sunni as Cairo’s Al Azhar, the fount of all Sunni learning, could make it.

Now at the receiving end of Tehran’s Shia guns and missiles and petrodollars they constitute a constant threat to the Israelis, after having been properly elected to office against their more “moderate” competitors, the descendants of Yasser Arafat’s PLO. In fact, Hamas, like their Shia brethren Hizbullah who have all but taken over Lebanon – although bitter near civil war has again broken out in Tripoli, Lebanon’s second city – is Iran’s dagger in the sheath. Loosing them on Israel as well as sinking oil tankers in the Gulf of Hormuz would be Tehran’s answer, it says, along with its North Korean and Chinese missiles, if and when either the Israelis or the U.S. attempt to halt its progress toward nuclear weapons by a strike.

In Indonesia, the back of the Jamaah Islamiyah may have been broken. But while Indonesia's Supreme Court turned down the men's final appeal in March 2004, the three Indonesian Muslims on death row for the 2002 Bali bombings have reaffirmed their readiness to die. Their proviso is execution must be in in accordance with Islamic laws, apparently a throat cut from ear to ear. Executions in Indonesia are by firing squad, usually carried out at night in isolated and undisclosed locations.

Government prosecutors said recently the three might soon be executed on the grounds that they will not seek presidential clemency after legal appeals have been rejected by courts at all levels. They apparently want martyrdom. Amrozi, known also as the "smiling assassin", Imam Samudra and Mukhlas, were members of Jemaah Islamiyah who killed killing 202 people, 164 of whom were foreign nationals, and 38 Indonesian citizens Oct. 12, 2002, with a further 209 people injured. But while the Jemaah claims links to al Qaeda, it seems to operate on its own, often inept, if deadly fashion through the whole Southeast Asian archipelago.

If they do not get their throats cut, will that reawaken the organization which claims adherents all over the Malay world – just as the fundamentalist party made big gains in recent elections in neighboring Malaysia?

But then how to explain the recent drive-by killings with heavy earth-moving equipment by a Jerusalem Arab on an Israeli consruction site. Taysir Dwayat, father of Husam Taysir Dwayat, the 30-year-old east Jerusalem man, speaking to Israeli TV, denied that his son had carried out a terrorist attack. He did not want Israeli authorities to bulldoze his house as has been one past punishment for such events.

Perhaps it was true; the 30-year-old had a record of criminal activity including rape of a Jewish woman and drug addiction. But his mother, after the episode where three people were killed, was screaming hysterically on an apartment balcony in celebration of “my son a shaid”, an Islamic martyr.

What we seem to have is a wider and wider spread of individual acts of hysteria and psychotic behavior, masking as Muslim terrorism as the various “headquarters” – not a few of them located in the Syrian capital of Damascus – claim credit for their acts as political.

We will not know for some time what part of the six year respite since 9/11 in the U.S. has been precuations taken by the American government, lack of abilities by the remnants of the Al Qaida after the Afghanistan invasion, or simply luck.

But it is increasingly clear that there is likely to be more random acts of terorism – unfortunately including those by European and American converts to Islam – with their on-the-job training in remaining sanctuaries like the Pakistan-Afghanistan border, Somalia, Yemen, and the other collapsing psuedo-states. And their use as training grounds for acts of terror in the West is also a clear if haphazard part of the patterns developing.

To fight these episodes of violence will take perhaps even more intelligence, more perspicacity by the military police and intelligence forces, and more concerted action to cut off the finances and logistics of their sponsors. Nothing is more outrageous than that American children – apparently sent by their parents — should be cooped up in a Karachi madrassa being subjugated to campaigns of indoctrination of hate and intolerance for all Islamic non-beievers. But then that is what the American taxpayer and the Europeans have been doing for four decades in the schools and refugee camps operated by United Nations Relief and Works Agency for Palestine [UNWRP]. While the Israelis have taken in and resettled 850,000 penniless Jewish refugees from the Arab countries, robbed of their belongings before they were expelled or fled persecution, the UN has nurtured hate and violence in the so-called Palestinian refugee encampments. Unfortunately well-meaning Muslims and others have often contributed through organizations with ties to the terrorists in North American charities. And the petrodollars piling up in the Gulf sheikhdoms have been used to built artificial ski resorts under glass.

If this new version of the war on terror is to be waged successfully, it would have to be done on these fronts as well as with the use of arms and weaponry – a lesson hard learned in the American six years in Iraq.