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October 15, 2007
Holy War and Anti War: An Axis against Nature
By Walid Phares
The oddest of all
factional relationships is the open alliance between the Jihadists and the
so-called "antiwar" neo-Left movement in the West. The jumble of causes thrown
together is mind-bending: globalization hobnobs with the caliphate, class
struggle with Wahabism, proletariat with infidels, and North Korea with
Palestine.
While still shedding each
others' blood, the Reds (neo-Left) and the Dark Greens (Islamists) are
conducting a joint offensive against both democracy-pushing America and the
democracy-craving Middle East. They are not letting old or new grudges get in
their way.
- The Wahabis fiercely fought the Soviet Communists in Afghanistan;
- the Muslim Brotherhood and the Marxists have been at each other's throats for decades;
- the Salafists butchered left-wing intellectuals in Algeria and assassinated progressive bureaucrats in central Asia after the Soviet collapse;
- the Taliban killed socialists and shut down art institutions;
- the Khumeinist regime in Iran decimated the Tudeh Communist Party in the 1980's.
Despite all the mutual mayhem
across the Mediterranean and throughout the Middle East, an unnatural alliance
was established by elites of the two camps, even while blood was being shed in
the 1990's. Setting ideologies and history aside, the Islamist tacticians and
neo-Left pragmatists gradually converged on a two-lane path against liberal
democracies and the specter of a free market and pluralist Middle East.
The Jihadi concern with Western
involvement in the region is logical: free societies in the Arab and Muslim
world, joined finally to the international community, would shatter
fundamentalism's control of the region's political cultures. To have Arab and
Iranian youths, in addition to minorities, hooking up directly with the peaceful
and prosperous societies of the West would leave the Islamists without a base to
recruit from.
Jihadism is joined with the
antiwar movement even while promoting "holy war," which is the essence of their
rissala (mission). The ideology of the Salafists and Khumeinists is to
prepare for, mobilize for, incite, and engage in a constant war of jihad against
the infidels, who are supposed to be all those who aren't Islamists, including
moderate Muslims.
Theoretically, the jihadi
connection to the antiwar concept is impossible. But in the realm of reality, it
does occur, mainly because of the mutating "pragmatism" of both of the
antidemocratic movements. The radical Islamists, as I argued in Future Jihad, have undergone a strategic
mutation that has allowed them to coalesce tactically with ideological foes,
among them Baathists, Neo-Marxists, and anarchists.
The last group, under an
international neo-Left umbrella in the West, created the anti-war movement,
which is reminiscent of the old Cold War Communist-controlled "peace movement."
Islamists found it easier to
insert themselves as partners in an "antiwar" movement than a "peace" movement.
Effectively, in the jihadi aqida (doctrine), seeking permanent peace
with others is a non issue, given that jihad is constant, regardless of its
form. Jihadism cannot accommodate a peace movement in
principle.
However jurisprudence based on
al Haja (necessity) would allow the jihadists to accept an interim
cessation of war and work in more sophisticated ways to stop wars that they
cannot win. Thus it is in the interest of the radical Islamists to stop a war
that can't be won by them, at least until the balance of power is restored and a
winnable war becomes possible again. They are against the West's war for
tactical reasons. But they are not at all in favor of peace until they
win.
In the case of the War on Terror,
the "political Islamists" joined the "no war" crowd in order to stop the
military efforts of the United States and its allies against the terrorist
forces of the jihadists. Hence Islamic militants marched in the demonstrations
against the wars in Afghanistan and Iraq as a way to give respite to the Taliban
and al Qaeda. The antiwar movement exposed its broken rationale when it marched
against some but not all wars. It demonstrated against the military efforts to
overthrow the Taliban and Saddam but ignored the wars waged by the Sudanese
regime against the African peoples in the south and Darfur; it marched against
the Israeli occupation of the West Bank, but ignored the Syrian occupation of
Lebanon.
Worse, in the eyes of millions of
Middle Easterners, were the highly publicized "red buses" filled with antiwar
militants who headed to Iraq to "support" dictator Saddam Hussein. They traveled
from London, Berlin, and Rome through Eastern Europe without a word in
remembrance of its struggle against the Soviet occupation, and crossed Syria
without comforting the thousands of political prisoners tortured and
assassinated by the Baathist regime.
And for an apex of irony, the
buses rolled through sinister Halabja, a Kurdish town gassed by Saddam in 1988,
and past the Shiites' mass graves, stopping only to "shield" Saddam's castles,
built from oil revenues that rented the buses and lodged their occupants in
fancy hotels. This antiwar movement was convenient for the jihadists, as it was
a form of war against the rise of democracies in the region. For the movement,
mostly bourgeois in nature, never showed up in Darfur, among Berbers in Algeria
or Lebanese under Syrian occupation, or to shield women under the Taliban.
Hence it wasn't surprising for
viewers around the world to see the Islamist militants in Europe taking to the
streets alongside the "bourgeois Neo-Marxists" to protest the governments that
supported the War on Terror. In Europe, the most revealing action of the
Islamist militants was when -- in the same year as the red buses -- they marched
in support of the French government against U.S. intervention in Iraq, and then
burned shops and cars in 200 French cities and towns during a "French intifada."
The jihadi manipulation of the
bourgeois-Neo-Marxist "struggle" has played a central role in the so-called
"mass demonstrations" in the West since 2002, and the demonstrations themselves
are an important component of the War of Ideas against democracy. On campuses,
both in North America and Western Europe, the jihadi-antiwar axis has planted
deep roots, and thanks to the skills of university-based anarchist groups, the
jihadists have found a cover they can hide under, instead of simply becoming
members of the typical Wahabi-contolled Muslim Student Unions.
But this "marriage of
convenience" with the extreme left has not deterred jihadists from conducting
another, simultaneous, wedding with the extreme right. But that's another
story.
Dr Walid
Phares is a senior fellow at the Foundation for the Defense of Democracies and a
visiting scholar at the European Foundation for Democracy. He is the author of
War of Ideas.
