In the last 20–30 years America did not just respect Muslims, it bled for Muslims. We Americans engaged in five military campaigns on behalf of Muslims, each one resulting in the liberation of a Muslim people: Bosnia, Kosovo, Kuwait, Afghanistan and Iraq.
—Charles Krauthammer
Why Arab Anti-Americanism?
ACCORDING TO LEFTIST, Arab, and Islamic spokesmen, there are three reasons for anti-Americanism in the Arab world:
The first argument assumes that those Arabs (and other Muslims) who hate America want open and free societies and hate America for aiding non-open regimes. But the least free and most repressive Arab governments were the least supported by America and most anti-American—Islamist Sudan, Assad’s Syria, Saddam Hussein’s Iraq, and Muammar Qaddafi’s Libya. As corrupt and repressive as the Egyptian government under Mubarak was, Egypt was freer than any of those anti-American countries.
The Arabs and other Muslims who most hate America do not want a free and open society; they want a closed secular or closed Islamist one. And the small number of Arabs who are pro-American are the most desirous of a free society.
As for the second reason, American support of Israel has probably increased anti-Americanism in the Muslim world. But those Muslims most preoccupied with destroying Israel are precisely those Muslims who most loathe liberty and other American values, and who are either aligned with Islamist theocrats or secular totalitarians (such as the Baath Party). The obsession with eradicating Israel is a function of the Islamist goal of eradicating a Jewish state in the midst of the Muslim world. It is not as if these people would be lovers of liberty and America were it not for America’s support of Israel.
As for the presence of American troops on Muslim soil—a favorite explanation for Osama bin Laden’s hatred of America—this, too, avoids the greater and obvious question of why such a thing would produce such hatred. There have been American troops on German and Japanese soil since the end of World War II and on Korean soil since the 1950s. While Leftists in Germany, Japan, and South Korea periodically mount anti-American demonstrations against the American troops stationed in their respective countries, the presence of American troops in those countries doesn’t elicit hatred remotely analogous to the anti-American hatred in parts of Arab and Muslim worlds.
America’s and Israel’s haters hate on a magnitude not seen since Nazi hatred. They want Israel gone, and they want a wounded—they hope fatally wounded—America. They say so publicly, and they say so in polls. Yet, the Israel and America haters of the West ignore all this and blame Israel for trying to live and America for enabling it to do so. If America abandoned Israel, Muslim haters of the Jewish state would rejoice, but they would not stop hating America. They would conclude only that terror and intimidation work, and that America will give in when the threats are great enough. One proof? Muslims who hate Israel and who live in European countries that are far less supportive of Israel continue to loathe Europe. Europe’s relative abandonment of Israel has only convinced Muslims who loathe Israel and America that Europe has lost its nerve and is ripe for an Islamic takeover.
Muslims who hate America also do so because America—as well as, in the Middle East, Israel—prevents the expansion of Islamist rule. Expansionist totalitarian movements, whether Soviet Communism or Islamism, hate free societies, and America is the strongest free society. One of the most powerful statements against Muslim anti-Americanism was made by a Muslim writer, Professor Muqtedar Khan of the University of Delaware. Shortly after 9/11, in an open letter to American Muslims, he wrote:
Muslims love to live in the US but also love to hate it. Many openly claim that the US is a terrorist state but they continue to live in it. Their decision to live here is testimony that they would rather live here than anywhere else. As an Indian Muslim, I know for sure that nowhere on earth, including India, will I get the same sense of dignity and respect that I have received in the US. No Muslim country will treat me as well as the US has. If what happened on September 11th had happened in India, the biggest democracy, thousands of Muslims would have been slaughtered in riots on mere suspicion and there would be another slaughter after confirmation. In patience and in tolerance ordinary Americans have demonstrated their extraordinary virtues. It is time that we acknowledge that the freedoms we enjoy in the US are more desirable to us than superficial solidarity with the Muslim World. If you disagree than prove it by packing your bags and going to whichever Muslim country you identify with. If you do not leave and do not acknowledge that you would rather live here than anywhere else, know that you are being hypocritical.1
In the words of international affairs writer Peter Brownfeld, Muslims “have more opportunity in America to practice Islam than anywhere else in the world…. The chances of you being discriminated for your Muslim beliefs in the Muslim world is greater than it is in the United States…”2
Islamists in the West
THE ACTUAL NUMBER IS unknowable, but it is widely acknowledged that a significant percentage of Muslim immigrants to Europe have rejected Western social and moral values. In fact, some Muslims living in the West have actually become more insular, more radical, and more Islamist while living there.
British, not Middle Eastern, Muslims first raised the charge against the Indian Muslim writer Salman Rushdie that he insulted Islam and Muhammad in his novel The Satanic Verses. It was they who pushed the Iranian Islamists to issue the infamous fatwa (religious decree) calling on Muslims throughout the world to murder Rushdie. Ayatollah Khomeini’s fatwa against Rushdie provided an early example of how radicalized many Muslims in the West had become. Few American or European Muslim leaders condemned the Rushdie fatwa; many supported it.
Ahmed Omar Saeed Sheikh, the head of Jaish-e-Mohammed (the Army of Mohammed), the Pakistani terror group that murdered American Jewish journalist Daniel Pearl of the Wall Street Journal, was born in England and educated at the London School of Economics.
The European failure to assimilate most Muslim immigrants has led the heads of some Western European countries to announce that multiculturalism has failed. It is difficult to overstate the significance of this admission on the part of Western Europeans. Multiculturalism has been a major Left-wing, therefore widely held cultural and political, value in Western Europe and the United States. Yet, in 2010–11, the heads of the United Kingdom, France, and Germany made this announcement.
In 2011, the New York Times reported that in Sweden, perhaps the European country most committed to multiculturalism, “Nearly a quarter of Sweden’s population is now foreign born or has a foreign-born parent”—the country had begun to despair of assimilating most of its Muslim citizens.3
Part of the reason is that Muslim schools throughout the world, a large number of them funded by Saudi Arabia, teach millions of young Muslims the most xenophobic and insular expressions of Islam. Typically infidels, that is, non-Muslims, Americans and Jews in particular, are portrayed in a hate-filled way.
This even includes some Muslim schools in America. The Washington Post reported on Muslim elementary and high schools in America that teach religious bigotry: One “11th-grade textbook, for example, says one sign of the Day of Judgment will be that Muslims will fight and kill Jews, who will hide behind trees that say: ‘Oh Muslim, Oh servant of God, here is a Jew hiding behind me. Come here and kill him.’ Several students of different ages, all of whom asked not to be identified, said that in Islamic studies, they are taught that it is better to shun and even to dislike Christians, Jews and Shiite Muslims.” In addition, “maps of the Middle East hang on classroom walls, but Israel is missing.”4