Muslims and Liberals

The Daily Star – Lebanon
August 1, 2005

British Prime Minister Tony Blair has waged quite a campaign against a so-called “evil ideology” and the Pakistani madrasas, or Muslim religious schools, which supposedly teach it. In the course of his efforts, British special police have killed an innocent Brazilian electrician who probably looked to them like a madrasa-educated terrorist of Pakistani descent.

Blair borrowed the Bush administration’s dubious intelligence to join the disastrous Iraq war. Now he’s reaching for the administration’s tendentious polemic about Muslim terrorism to wash his hands of the consequences of that war. U.S. President George W. Bush and his neoconservative mentors insist that anti-American terrorism has been spawned by “Islamic extremism,” which Muslim terrorists learn in madrasas and from Islamist ideologues imbued with it.

But there are those in Britain challenging this sophistry, while supporting tough anti-terror measures. Several backbenchers in the British Parliament attributed the terrorist acts in London to Blair’s “involvement in Iraq.” Britain’s leading think tank Chatham House concurred. So do two out of three Britons, according to a poll in The Guardian newspaper.

I worked as a journalist in London in the 1970s, and John Wilkinson, a Conservative member of Parliament from Bradford, the city with Britain’s largest Pakistani population, used to tell me that his Pakistani constituents were “poor but peaceful,” unlike some other minorities who had created a “law-and-order problem.”

The attitudes of Pakistani – and Muslim – youths have since changed dramatically, as I observed during trips to Europe, and Britain in particular. Almost every interview revealed a deep resentment against Western “anti-Muslim” policies. They were especially indignant over the Anglo-American occupation of Iraq, hegemony” over Afghanistan, and U.S. support for the Israeli occupation of Palestinian land.

No sane person would condone, let alone justify, the ghastly crimes committed by the terrorists in London, Madrid or New York and Washington. But bashing madrasas or Islamic “ideology” for these tragedies is a disservice to Westerners as it diverts their attention from the real causes of Muslim terrorism.

Three decades ago I reviewed the curricula of several Pakistani madrasas to write an article for an education supplement of the Pakistan Monitor newsmagazine, published in Lahore. I was troubled to note that they didn’t include any “secular” subjects such as math or science. Today many Pakistani madrasas offer limited secular courses.

In any case, anti-Americanism among Pakistani madrasa students is a new phenomenon. I was a student in Pakistan in 1961 when Lyndon Johnson visited Karachi. His motorcade was applauded by waiting crowds among whom were rows of madrasa students, who were excused by their teachers to welcome the American vice president. The current generation of Pakistani madrasa students is rabidly anti-American and anti-British. But so are most other Pakistanis. Polls show that more than 90 percent of Pakistanis resent the American military presence in Iraq and Afghanistan and its support for Israel and for their own military dictatorship.

Like British Muslims, their most common grievance is against American occupation or support for foreign occupation of Muslim lands. A British Home Office study leaked recently to The Times of London found British Muslims show “strong opposition to terrorism and loyalty to Britain,” but are anguished by “a perception of ‘double standards’ in British foreign policy, where democracy is preached but oppression … practiced or tolerated, e.g. in Palestine, Iraq, Afghanistan, Kashmir, Chechnya.”

Foreign occupation and domination is the real wellspring of terrorism, especially suicide terrorism. In the most comprehensive study yet of suicide terrorist attacks during 1980-2004, Robert Pape found that 95 percent of them were targeted at what the terrorists considered foreign occupation of their or their allies’ homelands.

In his book “Dying to Win,” Pape says Arabs have learned suicide terror techniques from Sri Lankan Tamils and Marxist Kurds in Turkey. Terrorists use religion as an inspiration when they have “a religious difference” with their adversaries.

Blair said recently that he plans to tackle “the roots of terrorism.” If he’s serious, he should heed the findings of the Chatham House, his Home Office and The Guardian poll. Occupation of Muslim lands – and not an Islamic “ideology” or the madrasas – is what is breeding Muslim terrorism.