Fighting Terrorism Read online

  Iran, Hizballah, and their satellite organizations have rapidly replaced both Communism and Pan-Arab fascism as the driving force behind international terror. For years after the Iranian revolution, the potential of this force was suppressed by the interminable Iran-Iraq war, which began when the militant Iranian regime had barely come to power. But by 1989, this war came to an end, allowing Iran a breathing space in which to flex its international muscles in new directions and try its hand at a new kind of militant Islamic diplomacy. A hint of the potential power of this policy was provided by the convening of a special Islamic conference called by Iran and held in Teheran in October 1991, on the eve of the Madrid Peace Conference between Israel and its Arab neighbors; the Teheran conference was attended by radical Islamic movements and terrorist groups from forty countries, and declared itself to be against making any kind of peace with the Jewish state. While Libya and Iraq have chafed under the yoke of Western sanctions (imposed on Libya in 1986 in the wake of its complicity in the bombing of a discotheque in Germany frequented by American servicemen, and on Iraq in 1991 after its invasion of Kuwait), and while the other Pan-Arabist state, Syria, has had to tone down its more overt associations with international terrorism to win U.S. pressure on Israel, Iran has gone virtually unscathed, carefully cultivating a modern international terrorist network of which the Soviets would have been proud.

  But while many people are aware of this Iranian practice, few have yet recognized that the Iranian-sponsored terrorist web is not the only source of militant Islamic terror. After all, the Iranians are mainly Shiites, and they therefore do not command the automatic attention and allegiance of Sunni militants, who stem from the other great branch of Islam. Yet one event served to activate this hitherto dormant Sunni potential for violence. The Soviet invasion of Afghanistan in 1979 resulted in a dramatic inpouring of volunteers into the ranks of the Afghani Mujahdeen fighting the Soviet occupation, a Who’s Who of zealots from throughout the world of Sunni Islam. Funded by the United States and Saudi Arabia—the Americans alone poured in $3 billion—the war in Afghanistan became to Sunni Islam what the Spanish Civil War was to the Communists; it created an international brotherhood of fighting men, well versed in the ways of terrorism. And while the Islamic resistance during the Afghan war was more similar to the Unita insurgents in Angola than it was to the world of Arab terrorism, times have changed. The Soviet Union completed its withdrawal from Kabul in 1989, and the Islamic resistance forces have since dispersed. Unlike the volunteers in the war against Franco, the Islamic resistance won, offering proof of the innate faithful supremacy of Islam over the infidel powers. In many cases these providential warriors have since been in search of the next step on the road to the triumph of Islam. Often they have had to move from country to country, having been denied the right to return to their home countries for fear that their excessive zeal would find an outlet there. Since the end of the war in Afghanistan, an international Sunni terrorist network has thus sprung into being, composed in the main of Islamic veterans and their religious leaders. It has built a sympathetic relationship with the government of Sudan and has excellent ties with the fundamentalist side in the simmering civil war in Algeria, the Muslim Brotherhood in Egypt, the Hamas terrorists of Gaza, and the increasingly influential militant Islamicists in Tunisia, Pakistan, and Indonesia. It is this group which is associated with bombers of the World Trade Center in Manhattan. And if it succeeds in its strategic goal of toppling the present Egyptian government, it will have harnessed the most powerful country in the Arab world in the service of the new Islamic terror. On June 26, 1995, this horrible possibility might have become a reality as gunmen opened fire on Egyptian President Hosni Mubarak’s motorcade as it made its way through the Ethiopian capital of Addis Ababa. According to Egyptian sources, a villa by the roadside had been rented by Sudanese nationals, and accusations were leveled at Hassan Tourabi’s militant Islamic group based in the Sudan. Following the abortive attack, tensions flared between the Sudan and Egypt, and both countries amassed troops on their common border. Whatever the true identity of the masterminds, the implications of the attack are clear: The new Sunni militancy is growing bolder, and the old Arab order is running for cover.

  It is impossible to understand just how inimical—and how deadly—to the United States and to Europe this rising tide of militant Islam is without taking a look at the roots of Arab-Islamic hatred of the West. Because of the Western media’s fascination with Israel, many today are under the impression that the intense hostility prevalent in the Arab and Islamic world toward the United States is a contemporary phenomenon, the result of Western support for the Jewish state, and that such hostility would end if an Arab-Israeli peace was eventually reached. But nothing could be more removed from the truth. The enmity toward the West goes back many centuries, remaining to this day a driving force at the core of militant Arab-Islamic political culture. And this would have been the case even if Israel had never been born.

  To fully appreciate the enduring hatred of the West by today’s Islamic militants, it is necessary to understand the historic roots of this enmity. Few Westerners are familiar with even the highlights of the strained history of relations between Islam and the West, a history which is the cornerstone of Islamic education throughout the entire Arab world—how in the year 630 the Arab prophet Muhammad united the Arab peoples, forging them into a nation with a fighting religion whose destiny was to bring the word of Allah and the rule of Islam to all mankind. Within a century, Muhammad and his followers had made the Muslim Arabs the rulers of a vast empire, conquering the Middle East, Persia, India and the Asian interior, North Africa, Asia Minor, and Spain, and lunging deep into France. Had it not been for Charles Martel, who in 732 defeated the Arabs at Poitiers, 180 miles south of Paris, Europe might have been an Islamic continent today—a fact that Arab political culture has never forgotten. Indeed, for 950 years after that defeat, much of Islamic history focused on the struggle to prevent the reconquest of Muslim lands by the Christians, particularly the Holy Land, Spain, and southern Italy, and the longing for a great leader, the caliph, who would set right the historic wrong, resurrecting the glory of Islam by finally achieving the defeat of European power. This was a dream powerful enough to bring the armies of the Ottoman sultan to the gates of Vienna, where the Muslim thrust into Europe was broken in 1683.

  The subsequent decline of Ottoman power relative to the Christian powers, particularly Britain and France, was long and painful. By 1798, Napoleon was in command of a modern citizen-army which was able to seize Egypt without difficulty. By the 1830s, Algeria had become a permanent French base and the British had seized control of ports along the Arabian coast. Within fifty years, all of North Africa and much of the Persian Gulf had become British, French, and Italian possessions. And in 1914, with the beginning of World War I, the final dismantling of what was left of the realm of Islam began. In the aftermath of World War I, Turkey was established as a Western-style secular state, and the Arab world was put under European control: Morocco, Algeria, and Syria under France; Egypt, Arabia, and Iraq under Britain. Iran, too, was placed under the control of a pro-Western royal family in the 1930s. After a tortuous history of fourteen centuries, which had seen triumph and decline, the political independence of the Islamic world appeared to come to a final and complete end.

  There can be no exaggerating the confusion and humiliation which descended on the Arab and Muslim world as a result of these developments. The European powers divided up the map of the former Ottoman lands into several arbitrary entities, and ruled by making alliances with local clans who found the relationship profitable, styling themselves “royal families” and adopting the titles of “king” and “prince” after the European fashion. Many grew wealthy off their special status, some immeasurably so after the great oil discoveries in the 1920s and 1930s. The ruling classes sent their children to study at European universities and gladly assisted in maintaining foreign influence over their economies. No
t surprisingly, the result was bitterness and consternation in Arab society, as expressed by a leading Egyptian intellectual: “Anyone who reflects on the present state of the Islamic nation finds it in great calamity. Practically, changing circumstances have forced it to adopt new laws taken directly from foreign codes … to arrest its ancient [religious] legislation … The nation is tormented and resentful, plagued by inner contradictions and fragmentation, its reality is contrary to its ideals and its comportment goes against its creed. What a horrible state for a nation to live in.”1

  Not long after the establishment of the European protectorates throughout the Arab world, two streams of thought emerged to challenge the “horrible state” in which the Muslim Arabs found themselves. The first, the Pan-Arab nationalism of Egypt’s Nasser and the Baath Party in Syria and Iraq, was consciously modeled after the Pan-German nationalism which had succeeded in unifying the fragmented German people in the nineteenth century and had resurrected a defeated Germany between the two world wars. Pan-Arabism actively supported Hitler’s “achievements” in Europe and collaborated with him against the British in the Middle East during the war. An ideology tailor-made for Arab military men, it dreamed of the creation of a modern and unified Arab-fascist nation. The second stream was that of the Muslim Brotherhood and other Islamic fundamentalist organizations, which rejected Pan-Arabism as yet another alien ideological strain, regarding its proponents as heretics. The Islamicists claimed to be returning to the true roots of Muslim Arab greatness by advocating the unification of all the Arab realms under a “pure” Islamic regime.

  What the two movements had in common was their abiding hatred of the weakness and treachery of the Arab monarchies (and of the Shah’s rule in Iran) and of the Western powers, which they believed to have dismembered the Islamic world, leaving it humiliated, impoverished, divided, and culturally colonized. As soon as the Arab states began to achieve full independence after World War II, these two movements began working to dispose of the Arab monarchs, with no small measure of success: Three decades later, the pro-Western monarchs of Egypt, Iraq, and Libya had been deposed and replaced by Pan-Arabist military regimes of one stripe or another—all of them eager to devote themselves to the task of dismantling the remaining Arab monarchies and adding them to their own realms; all of them sympathetic to the confrontation with the West being spearheaded by the Soviet Union; all of them recognizing the liberation of Jerusalem as a central vehicle for stirring up ultra-nationalist sentiment among their people; and all of them possessing no hesitation about resorting to terrorism to achieve these ends. As Egyptian President Nasser, the leading proponent of Pan-Arab nationalism, said on the eve of the Six-Day War: “We are confronting Israel and the West as well—the West, which created Israel and despised us Arabs, and which ignored us before and after 1948. They had no regard for our feelings, our hopes in life, our rights … If the Western powers disavow our rights and ridicule and despise us, we Arabs must teach them to respect us and take us seriously.”2 It was this school of thought, too, which produced Yasir Arafat’s PLO, whose “Palestine National Covenant”—which to this date has not been officially canceled by its constitutional author, the Palestine National Council—is a hodgepodge of Nasserist Pan-Arab fascism and Marxist clichés about the end of “colonialism,” all of it aimed at destroying Israel as a Western intrusion into the Arab realm.

  After years of Arab propaganda directed at the West, it has become fairly easy to sell the assertion of Western Arabists that if only Israel had not come into being, the Muslim and Arab relationship with the West would be harmonious. But in fact, the antagonism of the Islamic world toward the West raged for a millennium before Israel was added to its list of enemies. The soldiers of militant Islam and Pan Arabism do not hate the West because of Israel; they hate Israel because of the West.

  From virtually the beginning of the contemporary Jewish resettlement in the land of Israel, parts of the Arab world saw Zionism as an expression and representation of Western civilization, an alien implantation that split the realm of Islam down the middle. Indeed, a common refrain in Arab and Iranian propaganda has it that the Zionists are nothing more than neo-Crusaders; it is only a question of time before the Muslims unite under a latter-day Saladin who will expel this modern “Crusader state” into the sea. That in this larger anti-Western context, militant Arabs understand Israel as a mere tool of the West to be used against them can be seen in the constant references made by Saddam, Assad, and Arafat to Saladin—the great Muslim general who liberated Jerusalem from the European Crusaders in 1187, after having signed a treaty avowing peace. As Arafat recently said, “The PLO offers not the peace of the weak but the peace of Saladin.”3 What is not stated explicitly, but what Muslim audiences understand well in its historical context, is that Saladin’s peace treaty with the Crusaders was merely a tactical ruse that was followed by Muslim attacks which wiped out the Christian presence in the Holy Land.4

  Until recently, then, the dominant anti-Western ideology emanating from the Middle East was Pan-Arabism, rooted in an abiding hatred of the West, and of Israel as its principal local manifestation. Yet in recent years, when no new Saladin emerged to unify Arabdom, this ideology has waned, only to flare up again briefly when it was thought that Saddam Hussein was ready to play the part of the Great Redeemer. But when Saddam was ignominiously booted out of the veritable Western protectorate of Kuwait, it became demonstrably clear that Pan-Arabism was no match for the hated West. A new force would now vie for the allegiance of those Arabs and Muslims who kept alive the smoldering historic resentment of the West. That force was militant Islam. Basing themselves on an extreme and narrow interpretation of the tradition of Islamic scripture, the new Islamic purists interpreted this entire great faith as pivoting around the obligation to wage incessant and unrelenting jihad—the Islamic holy war to free the world from the non-Islamic heathen.

  Until the fall of the Shah of Iran, the history of Islamic radicalism was one of agitating against the Pan-Arabist strongmen ruling their countries. Periodically, they would succeed in inflicting a painful blow, as when they assassinated Egyptian President Anwar Sadat in 1981; or in provoking a vicious reprisal, as when Syrian President Hafez Assad leveled the fundamentalist stronghold of Hama, leaving tens of thousands dead, after an abortive uprising there in 1982. These activities gained the militants no operational capacity which could be directed against Israel or the West. Nonetheless they justified directing their terrorist efforts against their own governments by arguing that the jihad had to be waged against the enemy closest to home—in this case the secular Arab rulers. Yet with the Iranian revolution in 1979, monies and logistical support for the first time began to be available for more ambitious Islamic terrorist operations outside the Middle East. While the Pan-Arabist regimes had been painfully punished by the West for their aggression—from the American-British bombing of Libya to the allied war effort against Iraq—the flourishing culture of Islamic terrorism in Iran, Sudan, Lebanon, and Gaza has gone virtually untouched by Western anti-terrorist policies, even as it has spread outward and westward: first against foreigners in Lebanon, then against Israel, later against targets in Europe and South America, and finally against the Great Satan itself, the United States.

  The infiltration of Islamic terrorism into Europe was not immediately obvious. Many of the European countries now have rapidly expanding Muslim communities, with sizable Muslim “ghettos” already existing in Berlin, Cologne, Paris, Marseilles, and many other European cities. The German, French, and British Muslim communities number in the millions. Of course, this fact by itself is in no way significant; in no way does Islam itself advocate lawlessness or violence. It is a great religion that has fostered, as in medieval Spain, some of the world’s most advanced civilizations. Most of the European Muslims, like their co-religionists in the United States and Israel, are law-abiding citizens or residents who would never dream of participating in terrorist activity or in any other illegal act. But a few o
f them have come under the sway of a perverse and primitive interpretation of the faith, which moves them to fanaticism and violence. And as the Muslim communities in the West continue to grow, a widening fringe of their membership invariably becomes susceptible to infection by the message of militant Islam. Europe has in this way come to be dotted with centers of militant Islamic activity. By 1995 at least fourteen militant Islamic groups were known to be operating throughout Europe, their active membership reaching into the tens of thousands. Thus, one of the co-conspirators in the World Trade Center bombing was assisted by a formidable yet hitherto unnoticed Islamic group in Denmark. Similarly, authorities in Belgium in 1994 uncovered a large cache of weapons, apparently intended for the Islamic Salvation Front (FIS), which is attempting to overthrow the military government in Algeria. The FIS was one of the first suspects of the July 1995 bombing of a Paris subway purportedly carried out to deter France from further support of the Algerian regime. Regardless of the identity of the perpetrators of this particular attack, France’s burgeoning Muslim community affords the FIS and other militant Islamic groups ample room for maneuver in that country. A series of weapons smuggling by Italian Muslims ended in June 1995 with the raid by 1,400 Italian police on mosques and other Islamic cultural centers in Milan, Rome, Florence, and other Italian cities. The arrests included the Islamic spiritual leader of Milan and sixteen other activists, who are to be charged with planning the assassination of Egyptian President Hosni Mubarak during a state visit to Italy, as well as attacks against American and Israeli targets. In addition to weapons and forged documents, the Italian authorities seized records linking some of Italy’s central Islamic religious establishments to terrorist attacks throughout the world, including the bombing of the World Trade Center in New York.5