Nigeria: The West, Media and Islamophobia (ii)

Mohammed Haruna

15 February 2010

Nature, he said, abhorred vacuum and unless the West, America in particular, did something about this threat , the Islamic countries of Turkey, Iran, and Pakistan will make successful in-roads into Central Asia and hence into Europe.

Terrorist attacks of Americans abroad and of American iconic institutions at home like the 1993 bombing of the New York World Trade Centre served only to accentuate this Western phobia of Islam since those who carried out the bombings were either Muslims or claimed to have done so in the name of Islam.

Such was the fear of Islam created by such attacks that when one, Timothy McVeigh, bombed a federal building in Oklahoma City in April 1995 killing 167 people including children, many leading Americans and media organizations like the right acting Wall Street Journal at first attributed the bombing to Muslims.

And not surprisingly when the bomber turned out to be someone with strong Christian fundamentalist views not one media ever referred to him as a "Christian terrorist".

From our various definitions of terrorism it is undeniable that Muslims have carried out terrorist attacks worldwide often in revenge, at times to protest what they perceive as blasphemy against Islam, but essentially to chase foreign forces out of their countries. The violence in the Middle East and other regions with majority or significant Muslim population, as a survey in The Economist of September 13, 2003, entitled "In the name of God" suggested, have had less to do with the faith itself than with Western support for the venal dictators in those regions. This means the picture created by the Western dominated media and their local echo-chambers around the world, that terrorism is essentially or even exclusively, an Islamic phenomenon is more propaganda than fact.

To begin with, Islam does not boast of the first organized campaign of violence by a non-State for political objectives. The credit for this belongs to the Jews whose Zealots used suicide bombing to try and drive out their Roman conquerors in 73AD. And there was, of course, the even more famous mighty Samson whose capture in a bloody war with the Philistines and subsequent display in a temple in Gaza cost the Philistines dearly. This was when he brought down the temple killing himself and his enemies.

Like the Biblical Jews, modern day Zionists also showed the way in terrorism when they formed terror gangs that waged campaigns of violence against the British as the colonial masters of Palestine and also against the Palestinians themselves when they tried to resist the creation of Israel out of their land.

Historical antecedents apart, all other religions including Christianity, Judaism, Hindu and even Buddhism, arguably the most liberal of them all, have spawn terror groups. Perhaps the most notorious of these is the Lord's Resistance Army (LRA) in Uganda which for decades has fought the country's government with the declared aim of establishing a theocratic state governed by the Biblical Ten Commandments, but which itself has consistently violated those commandments by, among other things, the killing and maiming of children and women. Less well known is the Buddhist group, the Japanese Aum Shinrikyo (Supreme truth) which in 1995 released the poisonous gas, serin, in Tokyo's underground train killing about a dozen people and injuring over 5000.

Terrorism is of course not exclusively a religious phenomenon. There have been non-religious terror groups like Marxist/Maoist groups in Latin America, and racist and nationalist groups all over the world, but particularly in Europe.

Of all these groups however, none seems to have attracted the attention of the Western dominated, and American led, global media like those that use violence in the name of Islam.

The big question is why? The answer is at once simple and complex. The simple answer, in my view, was provided, perhaps inadvertently, by General Norman Schwarzkopf, the American soldier who led the first American invasion of Iraq, in a testimony he made before a Congressional hearing in February 1990.

"Middle East oil," he said "is the West's lifeblood. It fuels us today, and being 77% of the free world's proven reserve, is going to fuel us when the rest of the world's has run dry. It is estimated that within 20 and 40 years the US will have virtually depleted its economically available oil reserves, while Persian Gulf region will still have at least 100 years of proven reserves.

"Our allies," he said further, "are even more dependent on Middle East oil. Japan gets almost two-thirds of its oil from the area while our allies in Europe import over one quarter."

In other words, America's and the West's reliance on cheap Middle East oil, and by extension, their reliance on other natural resources from the rest of the world for their economic growth, has been the main source of friction between the West and rest of world.

Naturally America and the West try to hide their attempt to own and control the world's resources under such desirable values as democracy and modernization. At the same time they try to demonize anyone who they regard as standing in their way.

One writer who seems to have in a way accurately captured this strategy of demonizing anyone who stands in the way of Western hegemony was William Blum, an American historian, writer and journalist.

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