By: Roger Cohen –
Feb. 16, 2015
After a Danish movie director at a seminar on “Art,
Blasphemy and Freedom of Expression” and a Danish Jew guarding a synagogue were
shot dead in Copenhagen, Helle Thorning-Schmidt, the prime minister of Denmark,
uttered a familiar trope:
“We are not in the middle of a battle between Islam and the West. It’s not a battle between Muslims and non-Muslims. It’s a battle between values based on the freedom of the individual and a dark ideology.”
This statement — with its echoes of President Obama’s vague
references to “violent extremists” uncoupled from the fundamentalist Islam to
which said throat-cutting extremists pledge allegiance — scarcely stands up to
scrutiny. It is empty talk.
Across a wide swath of territory, in Iraq, in Syria, in
Afghanistan, in Pakistan, in Yemen, the West has been or is at war, or
near-war, with the Muslim world, in a failed bid to eradicate a metastasizing
Islamist movement of murderous hatred toward Western civilization.
To call this movement, whose most potent recent
manifestation is the Islamic State, a “dark ideology” is like calling Nazism a
reaction to German humiliation in World War I: true but wholly inadequate.
There is little point in Western politicians rehearsing lines about there being
no battle between Islam and the West, when in all the above-mentioned countries
tens of millions of Muslims, with much carnage as evidence, believe the
contrary.
The Danish filmmaker Finn Norgaard was killed a little over
a decade after another movie director, Theo van Gogh, was slain in Amsterdam
for making a film critical of Islam’s treatment of women. The Islamists’ war is
against freedom of expression, freedom of conscience, freedom of the press,
freedom of blasphemy, sexual freedom — in short, core characteristics of
democracies seen by the would-be rebuilders of the Caliphate as signs of
Western debasement.
Do not provoke them with cartoons of the Prophet Muhammad,
some say, show respect for Islam, the peaceful faith of some 1.6 billion
people. But what, pray, was the “provocation” of Dan Uzan, the Jewish security
guard outside the Copenhagen synagogue?
Islam is a religion that has spawned multifaceted political
movements whose goal is power. Islam, as such, is fair game for commentators,
caricaturists and cartoonists, whose inclination to mock the depredations of
theocracy and political Islam’s cynical uses of the Prophet cannot be cowed by
fear.
Over the more than 13 years since Al Qaeda attacked America
on 9/11, we have seen trains blown up in Madrid, the Tube and a bus bombed in
London, Western journalists beheaded, the staff of Charlie Hebdo slaughtered,
Jews killed in France and Belgium and now Denmark. This is not the work of a
“dark ideology” but of jihadi terror.
On the right of Europe’s political spectrum, anger is rising
against Islam, against marginalized Muslim communities, who in turn feel
discriminated against and misrepresented, with cause. Several thousand young
European Muslims troop off to join ISIS. Europe’s Jews are on edge, with cause.
Israel calls them home. In the United States, three Muslim students were killed
this month by a gunman in a possible hate crime denounced by Obama as “brutal
and outrageous.” A tide of retaliatory menace rises.
Who or what is to blame? There are two schools. For the
first, it is the West that is to blame through its support for Israel (seen as
the latest iteration of Western imperialism in the Levant); its wars (Iraq);
its brutality, (Guantánamo, Abu Ghraib); its killing of civilians (drones); its
oil-driven hypocrisy (a jihadi-funding Saudi ally).
For the second, it is rather the abject failure of the Arab
world, its blocked societies where dictators face off against political Islam,
its repression, its feeble institutions, its sectarianism precluding the
practice of participatory citizenship, its wild conspiracy theories, its
inability to provide jobs or hope for its youth, that gives the Islamic State
its appeal.
I find the second view more persuasive. The rise of the
Islamic State, and Obama’s new war, are a direct result of the failure of the
Arab Spring, which had seemed to offer a path out of the deadlocked,
jihadi-spawning societies of the Arab world.
Only Arabs can find the answer to this crisis. But history,
I suspect, will not judge Obama kindly for having failed to foster the great
liberation movement that rose up in Tunisia, Libya, Egypt, Syria and elsewhere.
Inaction is also a policy: Nonintervention produced Syria today.
I hear the words of Chokri Belaid, the brave Tunisian
lawyer, shortly before he was gunned down by Islamist fanatics on Feb. 6, 2013:
“We can disagree in our diversity but within a civilian, peaceful and
democratic framework. Disagree in our diversity, yes!”
To speak of a nonspecific “dark ideology,” to dismiss the
reality of conflict between the West and Islam, is also to undermine the
anti-Islamist struggle of brave Muslims like Belaid — and these Muslims are the
only people, ultimately, who can defeat the black-flagged jihadi death
merchants.
