 Thursday, February 14, 2002
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There is a new issue of the RWWNL and contributing editor Terence R. Wilken also continues his series on No Safe Ground.
The discussion of GAIA provoked by my article on We Could Save the World has heated up at Future Positive. Also this morning, we have an interesting article from the Asian press giving us a completely different perspective on the War on Terrorism.
Islamophobia and the New Great Game
Pepe Escobar
AsianTimes-OnLine
PESHAWAR - Muslim intellectuals are afraid, very afraid: they fear "Islamophobia" - a deadly virus infiltrating parts of the Western psyche in the middle of the most dramatic shift of geopolitical tectonic plates in living memory.
For Ja'afer Sheik Idris, a respected Islamic scholar, the Western fear of Islam is ancestral. He is fond of quoting former French president Charles de Gaulle, who said, "The future belongs to Islam" - and this was not a French witticism. The West may not fear Islam as a religion of peace and submission (to Allah) - but it does fear the many distorted versions of radical Islam. To complicate matters further, Islamic thinkers and activists haven't been able so far to package Islam as an intellectual challenge to the West.
In purely military terms, the American war on Afghanistan may have achieved very little so far - especially when one considers that the most powerful armada in history took at least four days to establish air supremacy over a wretched heap of ruins - and on top of it managed to turn an intolerant medieval theocracy into a nationalist struggle. Even Afghans who hated the Taliban have now rallied behind them to defend their land against a foreign invader. Did Donald "Gung Ho" Rumsfeld and his Pentagon generals ever learn of a subject called the history of Central Asia?
Not only in Peshawar - the Islamic Rome - but in many enlightened corners of the globe, there is a feeling that the first phase of the Afghan War 2001 did not go to the US. A second phase has already started - and then there is the bio-terror that is spreading like a virus throughout the US, and sooner or later Europe and the Middle East. No-one is reassured by the fact that Osama bin Laden's Al-Qaeda may possess a set of crude chemical weapons - but no high-tech systems to deliver them.
Meanwhile, the "West" keeps equating itself to the "civilized world" and the "free world" - all other "worlds" being, of course, barbaric. Not only did bin Laden bring down the nuclear Soviet empire, but apparently he has also managed to reconfigure the West as a conceptual monolith. At least some voices of reason in Asia, the Middle East and even in Europe are asking what happened to all these lofty Western values during the plunder of Africa, the brutal overthrow of elected governments, such as that of Mohammad Mosadegh in Iran and Salvador Allende in Chile, and the lethal bomb-and-napalm cocktail that decimated 2 million Vietnamese. A lot of enlightened minds in the West are considering that maybe bin Laden is not a product of Islamic civilization's hatred of democracy after all - but a product of the obliteration of democracy in the arrogant, imperial West.
The long-suffering Afghan people are supposed to be the first beneficiaries of the New World Order in the New Great Game. But until Black September, nobody cared about the plight of Afghan women. And nobody cared that millions of Afghans were about to die of hunger. Any United Nations or non-governmental official working in Afghanistan can confirm this. Now the "civilized West" is promising to solve the huge humanitarian crisis that the American bombings have just exacerbated. No wonder in Paris, Berlin and Rome there is widespread talk of "Western fundamentalism" - brilliantly represented in the Indonesian poster of bearded, turbaned Osama bin Bush.
Read the full article...
