The Enemy At Home (15 page)

In his “Letter to America,” released in November 2002, bin Laden enumerates his grievances against the United States. Contrary to “the deceptive lie that you are a great nation,” bin Laden informs the American people that theirs is a country based on “oppression, lies, immorality, and debauchery.” He calls on Americans to “reject the immoral acts of fornication, homosexuality, intoxicants, gambling, and trading with interest” and instead to embrace “manners, principles, honor, and purity.” American culture, he says, had become a kind of “abyss.” Specifically, “You are a nation that permits acts of immorality and you consider them to be pillars of personal freedom.” Bin Laden cites, as an example of this, “President Clinton’s immoral acts committed in the Oval Office.” Moreover, “You are a nation that permits gambling in all its forms…the sex trade in all its forms.” According to bin Laden, the United States is the world’s largest consumer of alcohol and drugs. He accuses America of generating, through its sexual immorality and drug use, “diseases such as AIDS that were unknown to man in the past” but now are being spread throughout the world. In addition, “You are a nation that exploits women like consumer products” after which “you then rant that you support the liberation of women.” Finally, bin Laden calls America a civilization in rebellion against God because “you separate religion from your policies” and thus “contradict the absolute authority of the Lord and Creator.”
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Does the radical Islamic case against America, then, not have a foreign policy component? Of course it does. But as bin Laden and his associates see it, U.S. foreign policy is the vehicle for the coercive transmission of corrupt American values to the Muslim world. Abu Musab al-Zarqawi, Al Qaeda’s former head of operations in Iraq, charged that “America came to spread obscenity and vice and establish its decadence and obscene culture in the name of freedom.”
¹²

Other stated objections to U.S. foreign policy by bin Laden and his lieutenants have a similar moral thrust. Thus in his “Letter to America” bin Laden faults the United States with being “a nation without principles” because it tries to prohibit other countries from possessing weapons of mass destruction while America and Israel possess untold numbers of such weapons. Moreover, America calls those who oppose its policies “terrorist,” while its own war crimes and those of Israel against Muslim populations are ignored and excused. America’s casualties, as at 9/11, provoke worldwide grief and mourning—“The entire world,” bin Laden writes, “rose and has not yet sat down”—while the deaths of Muslims, although far greater in number, do not inspire any American sympathy. Through force, bin Laden alleges, the United States supports corrupt infidel governments in Muslim countries, and they introduce the immoral ways of the West, “preventing our people from establishing the Islamic
sharia
.” America—a nation without faith, honor, decency, and respect—has declared war on Islam, which bin Laden describes as “the nation of monotheism…the nation of honor and respect…the nation of martyrdom.”
¹³

From the point of view of the Islamic radicals, the issue of “terrorism” is a smokescreen. Bin Laden calls this “accusing others with your own affliction in order to fool the masses.”
¹⁴
It is illuminating for us to try and see why. For us in the West, a terrorist is a member of an outlaw group or community that is willing to kill civilians, even women and children, in pursuit of its political goals. This is regarded, across the political spectrum in the West, as utterly reprehensible. The Islamic radicals complain that the West has cleverly defined terrorism so that the resistance of Muslims to occupation and oppression is automatically considered evil while the state-sponsored massacres of a far greater number of Muslims by the American and Israeli war machines is never understood as “terrorism”—only a justified reaction to Muslim atrocities.

No matter how many women and children Israel kills, bin Laden says, “the United States stops any efforts to condemn Israel.” He reminds Muslims that America firebombed numerous German and Japanese cities during World War II, killing hundreds of thousands of civilians. In his 1997 interview with Peter Arnett, bin Laden spoke of the civilian horror produced when America dropped atomic bombs on Hiroshima and Nagasaki: “The United States does not consider it a terrorist act to drop atomic bombs…which killed so many women and children that up to this day the traces of those bombs remain in Japan.”
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Bin Laden’s point is not that America is failing to live up to its moral standards, or that terrorism is bad no matter who engages in it. Rather, his point is that terrorism can be good or bad depending on
who is being terrorized
. As bin Laden said in one of his interviews, “Terrifying and terrorizing innocent people is clearly not right” whereas “terrorizing oppressors, criminals and thieves is necessary…to abolish tyranny and corruption.” It is in light of this distinction that we can better understand bin Laden’s otherwise cryptic assertion that “the terrorism we practice is of the commendable kind.”
¹⁶

To those in the West, and in the Muslim world, who ask how supposedly religious Muslims can justify killing innocent civilians, bin Laden answers that the civilians who are targeted are not innocent. In bin Laden’s view, attacks on Iraqi civilians or foreign workers in Iraq are warranted because these are the people who support the governing infrastructure established by the infidel occupying power. Even attacks on civilians in America are justified, bin Laden argues, because in a democracy the citizens are not detached from the actions of their government. The basic idea of democracy is that the people
are
the government. As bin Laden puts it, “It is a fundamental principle of democracy that the people choose their leaders, and as such approve and are party to the action of their leaders.” The American people are ultimately accountable, he contends, because “they chose their government, and voted for it despite their knowledge of its crimes.”
¹⁷

To Americans who feel outraged that they have become the target of terrorist attacks, bin Laden asks: Who is funding the Israeli government’s war machine against Muslims? Who is backing and paying for the marauding actions of the U.S. military? Whose debauched values of promiscuity, pornography, family breakdown, and separation of church and state are being thrust—via military rule and corrupt local dictators—on the Muslim people? In each case bin Laden’s answer is: You, the American people, are responsible. These are your morals, your government, your policies, that are threatening the future of Islam.

The indignation that bin Laden frequently expresses toward the United States surprises the Western observer. “Even ravenous animals,” bin Laden writes, “do not do the deeds” routinely performed by Americans.
¹⁸
Such rhetoric is incomprehensible without recognizing that bin Laden is using a different compass to assess America than Americans use to assess him. American outrage toward bin Laden’s actions usually focuses on the issue of killing noncombatants. Drawing on a long tradition of Western warfare, most Americans consider this inexcusably barbaric. Few Americans are likely to be persuaded by bin Laden’s rationalizations for the murder of civilians. Bin Laden’s outrage, however, is focused on the issue of proportionality. An old concept, respected in many cultures, proportionality simply means “measure for measure.” As a well-known verse in the Koran has it, “Whoever transgresses against you, respond in kind.” The moral doctrine here is that aggression should be punished according to the scale of the original crime: if I raid your tribe and kill ten people, you have the right to raid my tribe and kill ten people. But you do not, in this view, have the right to raid my tribe and kill ten thousand people. This would be utterly disproportionate to the original offense.

Proportionality is not an unfamiliar notion in the West, but it is often set aside because of another common belief in America, pointed out by military historian Victor Davis Hanson.
¹⁹
This principle says, in effect, “If you start it, we have the right to wipe you out completely.” So if the Japanese attack Pearl Harbor and kill a few thousand Americans, America will not retaliate and kill an equivalent number of Japanese; rather, America will engage in a “fight to the finish,” even to the point of killing hundreds of thousands of Japanese, both combat soldiers and civilians, until Japan unconditionally surrenders or is completely obliterated. As Hanson points out, Americans see this sort of unmitigated carnage as a fair and reasonable way to fight. According to bin Laden, however, it is an abomination.

Here is his way of reasoning. How many Americans did Muslims kill on 9/11? Around three thousand, every victim counted, every death mourned, every victim’s family generously compensated. How many Muslims has the United States killed in response? Many thousands in Afghanistan, and tens of thousands in Iraq so far. It’s possible that the death toll in those two countries has already topped fifty thousand. No one knows for sure, and few Americans seem distressed over these numbers. From bin Laden’s point of view, these levels of carnage show that the United States is barbaric in its rules of war, a nation “without principles or manners.” As he sees it, the immorality of America expresses itself in the way that America fights. Consistent with a country that has no God and no ethics, America refuses even to respect the norms of savage tribes: it kills without any measure of justice or restraint. The U.S. and Israel, bin Laden says, are like crocodiles ferociously devouring the children of Islam. In bin Laden’s view, no amount of persuasion or pleas can be expected to dissuade the crocodile. “For does a crocodile understand any language other than arms?”
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Bin Laden concludes, “Just as you lay waste our nation, so shall we lay waste yours.” The goal, he says, is a “balance of terror.” And in this campaign the 9/11 attacks are just the beginning. Without revealing the basis for his calculations, an Al Qaeda spokesman asserts that Muslims would have to kill 4 million Americans, about half of them children, in order to achieve proportionality for all the Muslims who have died at the hands of America and its sidekick Israel.
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Presumably the only way to do this would be for radical Muslims to detonate a nuclear bomb.

IN ORDER TO
more fully understand bin Laden, it is necessary to examine the general outlook of radical Islam, which has formulated a comprehensive philosophy and strategy that is now the blueprint for Muslim activism, insurgency, and suicide bombings throughout the world. In discussing radical Islam, I will cite several thinkers but I intend to focus on the work of the Egyptian thinker Sayyid Qutb. Originally a traveler in literary and pro-Western circles, Qutb became fiercely anti-American after living in the United States. He returned to Egypt, joined the Muslim Brotherhood, and advocated Islamic radicalism as an antidote to what he perceived as American decadence. Although he died in 1966, martyred for his opposition to Nasser’s secular socialist regime, Qutb’s work has continued to grow in influence; indeed, no single person has done more to shape the minds of Islamic radicals.

The Muslim fundamentalists who planned and carried out the assassination of Anwar Sadat were inspired by Qutb. The blind sheikh Omar Abd al-Rahman, now incarcerated for terrorism in the United States, routinely cited Qutb in his sermons. Bin Laden’s mentor Abdullah Azzam was a fiery advocate of Qutb’s ideas, and one of bin Laden’s professors at King Abdul Aziz University in Jedda was Qutb’s brother, Muhammad Qutb. Bin Laden’s deputy, Ayman al-Zawahiri, is an acknowledged disciple of Qutb. In his essay “Knights Under the Prophet’s Banner” Zawahiri writes, “Sayyid Qutb was the spark that ignited the Islamic revolution against the enemies of Islam at home and abroad.”
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Here, then, with an emphasis on Qutb, are the two key elements of radical Muslim thought.

“Islam is the solution.”
This is now the most popular slogan in the Muslim world, and has become a sort of rallying cry for radicals. At first glance the notion that Islam is the solution may seem absurd to Western observers—especially Western liberals—for whom Islam and Islamic “fundamentalism” are viewed as part of the problem. But let’s try and see things from the point of view of the Islamic radicals. The Islamic world, they concede, is in miserable shape. It is weak. Israel has shown that it can defeat the combined force of all the Arab countries. It is disunited. Despite a common religion the Muslim world has been rent by internecine conflict, such as the Iran-Iraq war, and by opportunistic alliances that set one Islamic country against another. It is poor. According to the Unified Arab Economic Report, published by a consortium of Muslim organizations, per capita income in the Arab world is around $2,000 a year. Unemployment is high and there are no jobs for young people coming out of the schools and colleges. Moreover, the Arab world has seen a declining standard of living at a time when everyone else—not only the West but also India and China—has gotten richer.
²³
If you don’t consider oil income, which after all is the product of luck and which will not last forever, the Arab world would join sub-Saharan Africa as the least developed, most insignificant part of the globe.

The Islamic radicals know all this. Their question is, how have we reached this low point? To answer this question, they look at history. Unlike sub-Saharan Africa, the Muslim world once had a rich, sophisticated, and powerful civilization. By the time of the Prophet Muhammad’s death all of Arabia was united under the Islamic banner. The early converts to Islam conquered the rest of the Middle East, defeating the Sassanid dynasty in Persia and pushing back the Byzantine Empire. The Islamic armies then drove into Asia, Europe, and Africa. Within a few centuries after Muhammad’s death the Muslims had established an empire from the Himalayas to the Pyrenees that rivaled in size the Roman Empire.

Muslim fundamentalists ask, how did the Muslims do this? What accounts for the “miracle in the desert” that gave rise to a new faith and a new form of monotheism that surpassed the reach of Judaism and Christianity and established a new kind of human community throughout the known world? Their answer: Islam. It was their religious conviction that inspired the armies of Muhammad to create the great Islamic empire. It was religious conviction and not just force that won over tens of millions of converts to Islam. It was religious conviction that built the resplendent civilization stretching across three continents. Western historians in general agree with this.