On the nature and origins of Islamism

Two items in my inbox caught my eye this morning. One, by Caitlin Johnstone, refers to a piece two days ago in Israel’s liberal Haaretz, under the self explanatory title, Israeli Settlers Filmed Torturing Lambs in a Palestinian-owned Pen in the West Bank.

Says Caitlin:

Israeli settlers were filmed torturing lambs which belonged to Palestinians in the West Bank. Gouged their eyes out. Smashed them with cinder blocks. Beat them to death in front of their mothers.

Lambs.

It’s not the most evil thing the Israelis have done. Not by a long shot. Hell, all of human civilization subjects animals to cruel abuses every minute of every day through the horrors of factory farming. But this particular incident shines a special sort of light into exactly what’s going on behind Israeli eyes over there in that sadistic society.

Think about the hatred and savagery you’d need to summon up within yourself to gouge the eyes out of a living baby sheep. Think about the kind of person you’d have to become to do something like that to an innocent creature.

Those lambs didn’t know they were Palestinian. They didn’t know anything about Hamas or October 7 or the Nazi Holocaust, or any of the other reasons Israelis generally cite for their abuses of human beings …

Nuff said when I already used up, yesterday, my weekly Caitlin quota. But I will pick up on the reference to October 7, and by implication to Hamas, Islamism and – in the unforgettably self-indicting words of Israeli Defence Minister Yoav Gallant two days later ¹ – human animals.

In a footnote yesterday I quoted from my current long read, Aaron Good’s American Exception: Empire and the Deep State. Following Peter Dale Scott, who came to my attention in the wake of my belated recognition, with attendant eating of humble pie, ² of 9/11 as almost certainly one of a long line of false flag operations conducted or greenlit by a lawless US deep state, Mr Good writes:

The Islamist terror phenomenon derives from over a century of Western imperial meddling, most notably by Britain and the US … the British supported the Wahabist Saudi royal family and created (through the Suez Canal Company) the Muslim Brotherhood specifically to combat nationalism and socialism in Egypt. After World War II, the most popular statesmen across the Middle East were secular nationalists—Mossadegh and Nasser. Not coincidentally, both governments also suffered paramilitary violence from Western-backed Islamist terror organizations. Additionally, both Iran and Egypt were ultimately undone by Anglo-US imperialism—the CIA’s Operation Ajax and Israel’s Six Day War, respectively.

Other Middle Eastern states targeted by the US include secular governments in Iraq, Syria, and Libya. Additionally, the US Operation Cyclone backed the Islamist Mujahideen against the Soviets in Afghanistan. The massive campaign utilized a Saudi network for logistical assistance which eventually evolved into al Qaeda. Led by Osama bin Laden and Ayman al-Zawahiri, the paramilitary terror organization was deployed by the West in Bosnia, Kosovo, Azerbaijan, and Libya before 2001. During the Obama administration, al Qaeda was used to affect regime change successfully in Libya, unsuccessfully in Syria. [Good writes mid 2022, some thirty months before Assad’s Ba’athist government fell to US armed jihadists.] The key point is that the Western use—and subsequent demonization—of Sunni Islamist terror can lend itself to Clash-of-Civilizations-style cultural explanations for international political phenomena. However, this can only occur in the context of widespread historical obscurantism and disinformation that could collectively be described as state gaslighting.

Which brings me to the second of today’s eye-catching inbox items. I have it as a twenty minute read, so you may wish to set aside a slot later but, please, don’t miss its fusion of erudition with the unfailingly lucid prose of author Jonathan Cook. His implicit start point is occupied Palestine but he goes wider than October 7 and wider than Israel. Wider too, without neglecting this, than the West’s weaponising of jihad.

Do find that twenty minutes – I base this on average read speed, the authors limpid prose, and a length of 3500 words – for Jonathan’s interrogation of “four common misconceptions about Muslims, Islam and Islamism – and about the West. Each is a small essay in itself”.

The misconceptions in question – and here too I once had to eat humble pie – being that:

• Islam is an intrinsically violent religion, one that naturally leads its adherents to become Islamists.

• Islam, unlike Christianity, never went through an Enlightenment. That tells us there is something fundamentally wrong with Islam. ^{3 4}

• The Middle East is full of people – Muslims – who want to chop off the heads of “infidels”. You can’t tell me a religion that teaches people to hate like that is normal.

• What is happening in Gaza is awful, but Hamas are just like Islamic State. If we cannot allow Islamic State to take over the Middle East, we cannot expect Israel to let Hamas do so in Gaza.

Here’s the link. Have a great day.

* * *

1. Rarely have genocide and the crime of collective punishment been so nakedly advertised in advance – both before and after October 7 – as in the utterances of senior Israeli politicians. For his part Gallant, the man Netanyahu subsequently sacked as insufficiently hawkish, declared on October 9 2023 that:

   I have ordered a complete siege on the Gaza Strip. There will be no electricity, no food, no fuel, everything is closed. We are fighting human animals and we act accordingly.

2. My worldview was and is broadly Marxist. It understands history’s primary drivers to be material and, in the sense of opposites interacting in ways gross and subtle at every level of experience, dialectical. As such it tends to be scathing of conspiracy-led analyses. Too scathing? It’s one thing to say imperialism’s laws of motion do not rely in any pivotal way on conspiracy. It’s another entirely to make the logical non sequitur that, ergo, conspiracy could not have played out on September 11, 2001. I now view my disdain for 9/11 ‘truthers’ as a textbook case of theory triumphing over fact.

   Additionally, while I still balk at according it a pivotal role in making and servicing the planet’s most powerful ruling class, I’m coming increasingly to a view of conspiracy as catalytic. As I put it in a post three weeks ago:

   We who do contemplate the implications of class rule in the post-truth world of a dying empire are poor at conveying them in ways that are simple without being simplistic, concrete without losing the generalisability of abstraction, and concise without omitting what is crucial. None of these being easy – since the ruling ideas of any age are those of its ruling class – we too often retreat into the comfort of echo chambers for the likeminded.

   Marxism need not but often does engender understandings of class rule that emphasise (and rightly so) impersonal processes but neglect the actuality, large as life and twice as ugly, of human agency within the ruling class. The reason is painfully simple. The fiercest critics of class rule include first rate thinkers, yes, but vanishingly few of them may access the elite clubs and watering holes where power is quietly exercised.

   

3. The charge – of there being “something wrong with Islam” – is rooted in those idealist understandings of the world, in which Western societies are saturated, which see ideas rather than material forces as history’s primary engine. In this case the ideas in question are found in Q’uran and Hadith and lead otherwise fine minds like Richard Dawkins to conclude, as once I concluded, that violent Islamism is rooted in those texts rather than in over a century of Western interference following the fall of the Ottoman Empire.
4. On the realpolitik of Christianity’s Reformation in the 16th century, and by implication the European Enlightenment of the late 18th, see my 2017 Reading the Reformation.