Hussain Osman, one of the men alleged to have participated in London's
failed bombings on July 21, recently told Italian investigators that
they prepared for the attacks by watching "films on the war in Iraq," La
Repubblica reported. "Especially those where women and children were
being killed and exterminated by British and American soldiers...of
widows, mothers and daughters that cry."
It has become an article of faith that Britain was vulnerable to terror
because of its politically correct antiracism. Yet Osman's comments
suggest that what propelled at least some of the bombers was rage at
what they saw as extreme racism. And what else can we call the
belief--so prevalent we barely notice it--that American and European
lives are worth more than the lives of Arabs and Muslims, so much more
that their deaths in Iraq are not even counted?
It's not the first time that this kind of raw inequality has bred
extremism. Sayyid Qutb, the Egyptian writer generally viewed as the
intellectual architect of radical political Islam, had his ideological
epiphany while studying in the United States. The puritanical scholar
was shocked by Colorado's licentious women, it's true, but more
significant was Qutb's encounter with what he later described as
America's "evil and fanatic racial discrimination." By coincidence, Qutb
arrived in the United States in 1948, the year of the creation of the
State of Israel. He witnessed an America blind to the thousands of
Palestinians being made permanent refugees by the Zionist project. For
Qutb, it wasn't politics, it was an assault on his identity: Clearly
Americans believed that Arab lives were worth far less than those of
European Jews. According to Yvonne Haddad, a professor of history at
Georgetown University, this experience "left Qutb with a bitterness he
was never able to shake."
When Qutb returned to Egypt he joined the Muslim Brotherhood, leading to
his next life-changing event: He was arrested, severely tortured and
convicted of antigovernment conspiracy in an absurd show trial. Qutb's
political theory was profoundly shaped by torture. Not only did he
regard his torturers as sub-human, he stretched that categorization to
include the entire state that ordered this brutality, including the
practicing Muslims who passively lent their support to Nasser's regime.
Qutb's vast category of subhumans allowed his disciples to justify the
killing of "infidels"--now practically everyone--in the name of Islam. A
movement for an Islamic state was transformed into a violent ideology
that would lay the intellectual groundwork for Al Qaeda. In other words,
so-called Islamist terrorism was "home grown" in the West long before
the July 7 attacks--from its inception it was the quintessentially
modern progeny of Colorado's casual racism and Cairo's concentration
camps.
Why is it worth digging up this history now? Because the twin sparks
that ignited Qutb's world-changing rage are currently being doused with
gasoline: Arabs and Muslims are being debased in torture chambers around
the world and their deaths are being discounted in simultaneous colonial
wars, at the same time that graphic digital evidence of these losses and
humiliations is available to anyone with a computer. And once again,
this lethal cocktail of racism and torture is burning through the veins
of angry young men. As Qutb's past and Osman's present reveal, it's not
our tolerance for multiculturalism that fuels terrorism; it's our
tolerance for the barbarism committed in our name.
Into this explosive environment has stepped Tony Blair, determined to
sell two of the main causes of terror as its cure. He intends to deport
more Muslims to countries where they will likely face torture. And he
will keep fighting wars in which soldiers don't know the names of the
towns they are leveling. (According to an August 5 Knight Ridder report,
a Marine sergeant in Iraq recently pumped up his squad by telling them
that "these will be the good old days, when you brought...death and
destruction to--what the fuck is this place called?" Someone piped in
helpfully, "Haqlaniyah.")
Meanwhile, in Britain, there is no shortage of the "evil and fanatic
racial discrimination" that Qutb denounced. "Of course too there have
been isolated and unacceptable acts of a racial or religious hatred,"
Blair said before unveiling his terror-fighting plan. "But they have
been isolated." Isolated? The Islamic Human Rights Commission received
320 complaints of racist attacks in the wake of the bombings; the
Monitoring Group has received eighty-three emergency calls; Scotland
Yard says hate crimes are up 600 percent from this time last year. Not
that pre-July 7 was anything to brag about: "One in five of Britain's
ethnic minority voters say that they considered leaving Britain because
of racial intolerance," according to a Guardian poll in March.
This last statistic shows that the brand of multiculturalism practiced
in Britain (and France, Germany, Canada...) has little to do with
genuine equality. It is instead a Faustian bargain, struck between
vote-seeking politicians and self-appointed community leaders, one
that keeps ethnic minorities tucked away in state-funded peripheral
ghettos while the centers of public life remain largely unaffected by
the seismic shifts in the national ethnic makeup. Nothing exposes the
shallowness of this alleged tolerance more than the speed with which
Muslim communities are now being told to "get out" (to quote Tory MP
Gerald Howarth) in the name of core national values.
The real problem is not too much multiculturalism but too little. If the
diversity now ghettoized on the margins of Western
societies--geographically and psychologically--were truly allowed to
migrate to the centers, it might infuse public life in the West with a
powerful new humanism. If we had deeply multi-ethnic societies, rather
than shallow multicultural ones, it would be much more difficult for
politicians to sign deportation orders sending Algerian asylum-seekers
to torture, or to wage wars in which only the invaders' dead are
counted. A society that truly lived its values of equality and human
rights, at home and abroad, would have another benefit too. It would rob
terrorists of what has always been their greatest recruitment tool: our
racism.
© 2005 The Nation
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