Michael Barone is not a stupid, uninformed man. I know. My brother used to work with him at the U.S. News & World Report. So there is no innocent explanation for why he would write something so patently false and so obtusely misleading as the following. It’s pure disinformation. Every single word of it is dishonest.
Why do they hate us? No, I’m not talking about Islamofascist terrorists. We know why they hate us: because we have freedom of speech and freedom of religion, because we refuse to treat women as second-class citizens, because we do not kill homosexuals, because we are a free society.
No, the “they” I’m referring to are the editors of The New York Times. And do they hate us? Well, that may be stretching it. But at the least they have gotten into the habit of acting in reckless disregard of our safety.
In order to determine why the so-called Islamofascists hate us, I am going to go straight to the main source. Usama bin-Laden laid out his reasoning in a 1996 fatwa and a 1998 fatwa. The 1996 fatwa complains mainly of the corruption of the Saudi regime, their disregard for a free press and human rights, their high military spending and their reliance, nonetheless, on America for security. The 1998 fatwa is more specific to America’s perceived faults. [emphasis mine].
The Arabian Peninsula has never–since God made it flat, created its desert, and encircled it with seas–been stormed by any forces like the crusader armies now spreading in it like locusts, consuming its riches and destroying its plantations.
Again, bin-Laden is criticizing what he sees as economic exploitation by the West. He then lays out three main greivances, in order of importance.
First, for over seven years the United States has been occupying the lands of Islam in the holiest of places, the Arabian Peninsula, plundering its riches, dictating to its rulers, humiliating its people, terrorizing its neighbors, and turning its bases in the Peninsula into a spearhead through which to fight the neighboring Muslim peoples.
By 9/11/01 it would be ten years that the United States had been based in Saudi Arabia, plundering their riches (as UBL saw it), dictating to their rulers, and (as we now know about the Bush administration pre-9/11) planning on fighting their neighboring Muslim peoples. Nowhere in this first complaint does bin-Laden mention anything about how we treat women and homosexuals, nor does he discuss freedom of speech or religion. His second complaint also focused on Iraq.
Second, despite the great devastation inflicted on the Iraqi people by the crusader-Zionist alliance, and despite the huge number of those killed, in excess of 1 million… despite all this, the Americans are once against trying to repeat the horrific massacres, as though they are not content with the protracted blockade imposed after the ferocious war or the fragmentation and devastation. So now they come to annihilate what is left of this people and to humiliate their Muslim neighbors.
Remember that this fatwa dates from 1998, not 2002. Bin-Laden is angry that the United States has inflicted great devastation on the Iraq people, and then uses the ‘million’ number that people used to describe the effect of the sanctions. He is clearly angered by the sanctions on Iraq and he suspects that the United States is getting ready to attack Iraq again. In fact, Clinton did launch Operation Desert Fox in late 1998, a four-day sustained bombing campaign.
So, what about his third complaint? Anything in there about hating our freedoms? Let’s see.
Third, if the Americans’ aims behind these wars are religious and economic, the aim is also to serve the Jews’ petty state and divert attention from its occupation of Jerusalem and murder of Muslims there.
The best proof of this is their eagerness to destroy Iraq, the strongest neighboring Arab state, and their endeavor to fragment all the states of the region such as Iraq, Saudi Arabia, Egypt, and Sudan into paper statelets and through their disunion and weakness to guarantee Israel’s survival and the continuation of the brutal crusade occupation of the Peninsula.
Damn!! Nothing in there about hating our freedoms. Rather, he just noted our eagerness to destroy Iraq, and to fragment the other regional powers into ‘paper statelets’, powerless to destroy Israel. And on that basis, and that basis alone, bin-Laden issued the following fatwa:
The ruling to kill the Americans and their allies–civilians and military–is an individual duty for every Muslim who can do it in any country in which it is possible to do it, in order to liberate the al-Aqsa Mosque and the holy mosque from their grip, and in order for their armies to move out of all the lands of Islam, defeated and unable to threaten any Muslim.
Now, let’s think about this for a moment. It’s true that bin-Laden subscribes to a kind of medieval version of Sunni Islam, and that he is not a proponent of religious freedom in Muslim lands. In his 1996 fatwa, he criticized the Saudi regime for:
(1) Suspension of the Islamic Shari’ah law and exchanging it with man made civil law. The regime entered into a bloody confrontation with the truthful Ulamah and the righteous youths
In that sense, he is hostile to modern innovations in Islam, including some of what we rightfully refer to as human rights. He is not calling for a Jeffersonian revolution. But that doesn’t mean that he is indifferent to the people of Saudi Arabia’s basic rights. He also criticizes the Saudi regime for:
(1) The intimidation and harassment suffered by the leaders of the society, the scholars, heads of tribes, merchants, academic teachers and other eminent individuals;…
(3) The state of the press and the media which became a tool of truth-hiding and misinformation; the media carried out the plan of the enemy of idolising cult of certain personalities and spreading scandals among the believers to repel the people away from their religion,…
…(4) Abuse and confiscation of human rights;
In short, his critique of the Saudis was that they were corrupt, that they misallocated funds (especially on defense), that they set the price of oil with more regard to American desires than the benefit of the Saudi people, that they did not respect religious freedom (within the context of Islam), that they cracked down on academics, and that they used the media to spread disinformation.
This doesn’t sound like the critique of a man that has a total disregard for the merits of liberty. It sounds like a man that sees the Saudis as corrupt and the American role in the Middle East as one that is inimical to the liberty of Muslims.
Usama bin-Laden is a propagandist. It’s true that he will use any available argument to make his case. We shouldn’t take his talk of human rights, freedom of the press, academic freedom, etc., to mean that he would grant these things if he somehow gained power. But, at the same time, there is nothing there, nothing even hinted at, to suggest that he hates America because of our freedoms, or the way we treat women and homosexuals. He shows no concern for how our culture might be undermining the faith of Muslims or corrupting their youth. His concerns are economic, political, and geo-political. Michael Barone knows this. He knows it just as well as Dick Cheney knows it. And yet, he chooses to describe the threat of Islamic terrorism as deriving from a hatred of our culture and our freedoms.
When we invaded Iraq we made bid-Laden’s 1998 fatwa look less like the ravings of a lunatic than a modern day Les Propheties. Perhaps nothing could have lent bin-Laden more credibility than to have been proven right about America’s intention to conquer and occupy and (in effect) destroy Iraq. And, it is the refusal of the neo-conservatives to be honest about why Islamists are targetting U.S. civilians that has led, more than anything else, to the total collapse of American credibility on the international stage.
The Islamists are not angry about the freedoms that Americans enjoy. They are perfectly content to let us go on enjoying them. But, they are not content to go on living under oppression in their own countries. Yes, if they gained power they would replace the current oppression with a new and different kind of oppression. But, at least it would not be bought and paid for by the American taxpayer.
Michael Barone knows these facts. He’s a very smart man. But he doesn’t get paid to tell the truth. He gets paid to brainwash right-wingers into thinking the fate of American liberty is on the line. It’s not. Islamists will leave us alone the moment we leave them alone. And if we have good reasons not to leave them alone (and we do), then this fight will go on. It’s a real fight, but it isn’t an existential threat. It ain’t armageddon, and it ain’t a war on the tactic of terrorism. Tell America the truth.
