It’s hard to believe, but it’s been just over three years since I posted anything on this blog. I received a couple of emails over the last year asking if it’s dead and buried. The short answer is no, but other committments have unfortunately left me with little time and/or energy to devote to it. Something reminded me last week, however, of the reasons that spurred me to create this blog in the first place, almost eight years ago. It seemed to me, and still seems, that a process of distorting recent history, of suppressing key parts and overemphasising others, has been going on over the last thirty years or so in relation to Muslims and the Islamic world. This started as an eccentric interpretation of events back in the 1990s, grew to become one possible interpretation of them, and after 9-11 went into overdrive to become at this stage, more or less the standard framework in which conflicts in the Muslim world are understood in the western imagination.
It’s all about changing our common narrative of the past in order to suit the version of events our governments and elites find more conjenial to their current policy objectives. Of course, history—the narrative which we construct of the past out of the bits and pieces of evidence at our disposal—changes all the time, as it should. New evidence comes to light, new interpretive frameworks emerge, blind spots and prejudices disappear (and new ones appear) changing our shared understanding of the past. This is different, however. The process I’m referring to here is not just about interpretation, it’s about subtracting from our knowledge of the past, the store of evidence on which we draw, to make us less aware of what went on in the past, and the not-very distant past at that.
Almost two weeks ago, the Guardian removed a letter from its website written by Osama Bin Laden, his well-known ‘Letter to America’ which had first appeared in November 2002 on a Saudi website linked to al-Qaeda and was then translated into English and posted on the Observer and Guardian websites. The letter was standard al-Qaeda stuff, criticising American foreign policy, justifying attacks on the United States and its allies by their attacks on Muslims in places as far afield as Somalia and Kashmir. A markedly-large proportion of the text was concerned with Palestine, and the injustices suffered by the Palestinians at the hands of Israel and, by extension, their American backers.
Whatever you think of bin Laden and his ideas, this is a key historical document. It gave a coherent and articulate account of the grievances of the al-Qaeda movement and what was driving their campaign of violence against the west. It made apparent how central the open sore of Palestine was, and still is. So why was it removed on the 15 November 2023 and replaced by the following statement:
There are chilling Orwellian overtones here. As Frederick Joseph, an American author on racism and social justice, explained in a video about the removal on TikTok:
This is a really good example of narrative control and censorship. It started going viral, not because people were necessarily agreeing with Osama Bin Laden’s actions or his moral clarity, but rather because the letter offered perspective into the hypocrisy of America, the hypocrisy of settler colonial nations, so on and so forth, and discussing the atrocities people in the Middle East have faced. They’re afraid of people having information so they decided to take it down.
Joseph’s video has itself since been removed from TikTok, but I couldn’t have put it better myself. To take the Guardian’s article that allegedly contextualises the letter first: it doesn’t. It tells you practically nothing except the channels through which the letter was transmitted. Perhaps that’s the point. A big part of the corporate news media’s agenda seems to be about making people ignorant of the historic context in which events occur. It led to the absurd spectacle of people reacting as if Hamas’ attack on Israel last month was the beginning of the conflict instead of something that had been going on for seventy years.
Secondly, where does the Guardian get off telling us in what context documents like this should be read? Do they see themselves as the ‘Guardians Of The Context’ itself? How do they know in what context (more likely contexts) people have been sharing the letter online? Claims have been made that the letter (or rather videos by people who had read the letter) was trending—going viral as they say—on TikTok, claims which TikTok denies and which, it has been argued elsewhere, are a gross exaggeration. TikTok has nevertheless felt compelled to release a statement that it is ‘proactively and aggressively removing this content’ which it (rather obscurely) claimed constituted ‘promoting this letter’ and supporting terrorism.1 Having seen a fair few of these videos, I can confidently state that practically none of them agreed with its sentiments or the justifications therein. What was an eye-opener, especially to many younger readers who don’t remember 9-11 personally, was that there were reasons behind the rage of bin Laden and his followers, that it wasn’t rooted in some inexplicable, irrational religious fanaticism but in a litany of atrocities comitted by the West against Muslim countries to which the jihadists were reacting.
Thanks to resources like the Wayback Machine, this ability to retrospectively change the past is not as easy for our elites as it was for the Ministry of Truth in 1984. You can, for example, look at the last cached version of the page on the Guardian’s website before it disappeared here.
Any sane person should reject al-Qaeda’s (and Israel’s, the United States, Russia’s, whoever’s) indiscriminate targeting of civilians, their collective punishment of entire populations because of the actions of their elites and governments, but you are forced, when confronted with the historical source, to admit that there was a causality and a logic to this conflict. And this is precisely what the Guardian (and most other mainstream media outlets) are uncomfortable with: the idea that people—especially young people—might have unmediated access to the facts and start thinking for themselves instead of having the context (as opposed to a fabricated context) spoonfed to them, and that they might start realising the conflict is explicable. It threatens elite control of the narrative.
Hearing so much nonsense about Muslims and Islam and why the current conflict has arisen was my main motivation for starting this blog in the first place. It also forced me to look into the origins of the ‘alternative facts’ that are peddled by right-wing politicians and commentators these days. For want of a better word you might call this the ‘Clash of Civilisations’ narrative. Samuel P. Huntington did not invent the idea or use it primarily to refer to a clash between the west and Islam specifically. In fact, the phrase was used by Bernard Lewis years earlier, in a 1990 article, to outline what he saw as ‘The Roots of Muslim Rage’.
This was the title of Lewis’ article, and the most noteworthy thing about ‘The Roots of Muslim Rage’ is that it studiously ignores the roots of Muslim rage. He could not be said to have blind spots, because Lewis was clearly aware of western imperialism as a potential source of that rage, but he dismissed it in less than two pages. Instead, he put it down to a mixture of jealousy and resentment inherent in Muslim culture (as if such a thing was uniform from Mauritania to Afghanistan), an intolerance of other religions which he contrasts with the tolerance and secularism of the West.2 This view sees history primarily as the interaction of ideas, with humans as mere ciphers for mystical cultural processes. It is a man lost in books, wilfully (and that is important to acknowledge) lost in an academic understanding of the Muslim world as it appears in texts rather than outside his window. It is as if people don’t primarily respond to things like their houses being bombed and their food supply destroyed, but are instead manifestations of the Manichean dualities inherent in Islam, blah blah.
America’s support for repressive and reactionary governments in Iran, Saudi Arabia, its unconditional backing for Israel’s crimes against the Palestinians, it is as if none of this was worth taking into account. You can imagine an impressionable Tony Blair or Bush Jr. reading this nonsense:
…we are facing a mood and a movement far transcending the level of issues and policies and the governments that pursue them. This is no less than a clash of civilizations— the perhaps irrational but surely historic reaction of an ancient rival against our Judeo-Christian heritage, our secular present, and the worldwide expansion of both…
There’s that phrase again. This was 1990, before they got around to waging war on Iraq twice and Afghanistan once (for twenty years). In light of that, there is a grim irony to the sentence that follows:
It is crucially important that we on our side should not be provoked into an equally historic but also equally irrational reaction against that rival.
Oops.
The mindset articulated here is, of course, almost-completely useless as an explanation for the conflict between the Muslim world and the West that has been intensifying for the last half century and more. It leads to people like Blair (who was so ignorant about Iran he had never heard of Mohammad Mosaddegh) or Bush explaining the violence of Al-Qaeda with vacuous nonsense such as: ‘they hate us for our freedoms‘. Imagine starving and bombing a people for years and when they finally retaliate, claiming it’s because they hate your ‘freedoms’.
To believe that some kind of intellectual/cultural crisis within Islam led to an otherwise-inexplicable upsurge in anti-western feeling and violence from around the 1970s onwards requires a staggeringly degree of historical ignorance and arrogance. Certainly, Islam as a worldview acted as a means of articulating and acting on that rage, but it is unbelievably wrongheaded (wilfully so in some cases, in others not) to insist that that was its source. This fantasy robs the present of context. It allowed Americans to be baffled when they were attacked in 2001, it allowed some to claim with a straight face that the Hamas attacks of 7 October on Israel were somehow ‘unprovoked’.
It confuses effect for cause, turning history on its head so that it seems like the current period of crisis was incited by Muslims against us. It conveniently ignores decades of western aggression towards the Middle East, Iran and Afghanistan, cynical meddling that intensified during the Cold War, largely stemming from the West’s growing reliance on petroleum and the importance of controlling its price. The rise of political Islam was a consequence of this, and a force that was as often backed by the west rather than against it, as the United States sought to undermine secular, Soviet-aligned movements. Listening to some of its ideologues, you would imagine that there had been a clear trend of the west encouraging democracy, secularism, tolerance, women’s rights etc. in the Middle East for the last century, only for these progressive ideals to be thrown back in its face. If anything, the opposite is the case. The existence of a secular, left-leaning movement in the Muslim world is the great missing piece of the puzzle and is being written out of history because it doesn’t fit with fantasies about a West fighting fundamentalist Islam.
Palestine is a perfect example of this. We have seen in recent weeks the promotion of a completely made-up account of the history of the Israel-Palestine conflict as one rooted in Hamas’ intractable hatred of Israel/Jews, that this is somehow the cause of the conflict. Even a passing familiarity with recent history will tell you that this simply isn’t the case. This is not a question of interpretation or perspective or opinion, it’s simply factually untrue. As awful as Hamas is, they are clearly symptom rather than cause: a consequence of decades of a brutal occupation by Israel, indiscriminate killing of civilians, the nihilistic despair engendered by an abandoned peace process etc. What is being erased from the story is that the Palestinian cause was led until the 1990s by the secularist, socialist PLO (of which Fatah is a constituent party), but failure to make headway in the peace proces (not to mention corruption) undermined these forces.
It should also be said that the undermining of that peace process was largely the work of the Israeli right led by Netanyahu (and lavishly funded by the US right). It was Netanyahu, after all, who led the opposition to Yitzhak Rabin, who engaged in peace negotiations with the PLO. It was Netanyahu who marched in front of a mock funeral for the latter, his supporters chanting ‘Death to Rabin’, burning an effigy of him dressed in a Nazi uniform. When Rabin was assassinated on November 4 1995, his widow, Lehea, reflected that Netanyahu and his supporters had played a role in her husband’s murder.3 The murder of the peace process (Ariel Sharon played a central role too) could be added to his list of victims.
The point of this narrative is, of course, to create the illusion of an Israel acting as some kind of bastion of ‘western values’ (whatever they might be…bombing maternity wards?) against a barbaric, hate-filled Islamist enemy who ‘hate us for our freedoms’. Again, the facts tell a different story. If anything, you could argue that Hamas was effectively nurtured by Israel during its formative years in the 1980s and 1990s. This is well documented. Avner Cohen, Israel’s head of religious affairs in Gaza at the time of Hamas’s emergence, has admitted as much.4 During this period, Israel and Hamas shared a common enemy: Palestine’s secularist political establishment. The Israel authorities officially registered the Islamist group as a charity, allowing its members to spread its message and develop a network of institutions.5 Only later, when the monster it had helped create became the preeminent political force in Gaza, did Israel suddenly start pretending they had been battling Islamists all along.
In some ways this is reminiscent of the United States’ assistance to the fundamentalist Mujahideen in Afghanistan (and all that spawned) when they were a convenient ally against the Soviet Union, only to have it blow up in its face when the Jihadists turned their attention to the ‘Great Satan’ itself. But there are differences. Israel has certainly had to come to terms with the fact that it helped create a massive security problem in Hamas, but it has continued to nurture it as a useful means of dividing and weakening the Palestinian resistance. As recently as March 2019, for example, Netanyahu told his Likud colleagues:
Anyone who wants to thwart the establishment of a Palestinian state has to support bolstering Hamas and transferring money to Hamas … This is part of our strategy – to isolate the Palestinians in Gaza from the Palestinians in the West Bank.
So there you have it, straight from the horses mouth (with apologies to horses).
This is just one more instance of the underlying point I set out to make with this blog: that this supposed conflict between Islam and The West is not rooted in some ancient ideological struggle between the two as people as Bernard Lewis and others have argued. It may seem like that at this stage, but this was a narrative made up in the not-too-distant past to explain tensions arising in the 20th century. These tensions arose from assaults and interventions in the Middle East by outside actors—not only the United States but also the Soviet Union—that caused untold suffering to ordinary people in countries as far afield as Afghanistan and Egypt. From propping up repressive regimes in Egypt or Iran to direct military intervention in Afghanistan or Iraq, not to mention the establishment of what is effectively a European cololony in the Levant with Israel or as US Secretary of State Alexander Haig described it: ‘the largest American aircraft carrier in the world that cannot be sunk’.
These horrors have been inflicted upon the people of the region in the interests of western elites’ greed and lust for power. They have aroused considerable rage among those same people, and their reaction has convinced a lot of people in the West lacking knowledge of the historical context, that Muslims ‘hate us’ for some obscure reason. It no doubt appears perfectly plausible to many people in Muslim countries that people in the West hate them. I am still of the opinion that hate isn’t the main problem. Hate there is no doubt, but it is a consequence of ignorance, ignorance of the past, the recent past, and the only way to wake up from this nightmare is knowledge. This clarity got lost a bit as this blog became a more detailed history of the Muslim World in the last century, but I hope to kickstart it again soon.
- https://twitter.com/TikTokPolicy/status/1725198557936852994?s=20 ↩︎
- The West is, incidentally, absolved of all blame on the imperialism front; indeed, it gets a pat on the back for developing its own critiques of imperialism, although Lewis confusingly disparages these same critiques from the left as ‘the new mystique of Third Worldism’ and dismisses it as romantic nonsense based on fantasies of ‘the goodness and purity of the East and the wickedness of the West’. ↩︎
- https://open.substack.com/pub/chrishedges/p/israels-final-solution-for-the-palestinians?utm_campaign=post&utm_medium=web ↩︎
- https://theintercept.com/2018/02/19/hamas-israel-palestine-conflict/ ↩︎
- https://www.analystnews.org/posts/how-israel-helped-prop-up-hamas-for-decades ↩︎
Two legs bad 