This new article by Jihad Watch director Robert Spencer considers the recent remarks by Pakistan’s President in light of the latest studies about the background of terrorists. It can be found today at FrontPage. A few highlights:
Call the roller of big cigars: Pakistan’s Pervez Musharraf is hard at work auditioning for the role of today’s Winston Churchill. Last Monday he declared: “A new iron curtain seems to be falling. This iron curtain somehow is dividing the Muslim world on one side and the West on the other side. This is very dangerous.”
How dangerous? Well, the Islamic world is on the brink of falling into new “depths of chaos and despair.” It seems that “Muslim states are seen as the source of terrorism,” which evidently our new Churchill finds disturbing; I suppose he would prefer that we search for terrorists among the Ohio Amish. Musharraf warns of more “terrorism and an impending clash of civilizations” — unless, that is, the United States goes to what he identifies as the root of the problem: “If you manage to finish off one organization like al Qaeda … you’ve chopped off a branch of that tree, but the tree will still grow. You must identify the root, and the root happens to be political disputes … the root happens also to be illiteracy and poverty.” Many Muslims, he explained, “feel deprived, hopeless, powerless.” This leaves them vulnerable to being “indoctrinated by distorted views of Islam.” …
Will Great Society programs aimed at stamping out Musharraf’s twin bogeymen, illiteracy and poverty, really put an end to all this? When the Ottoman Empire was the richest, most powerful nation in the world, it still pursued jihad against Christian Europe. None of Osama bin Laden’s millions have ever persuaded him that he’d rather haunt the nightclubs of Beirut than the caves of Afghanistan. But Musharraf isn’t alone: few in the West want to face the implications of studies like Sageman’s. It is far easier to imagine that a few dollars and a voucher or two to MIT will put everything right again in the Middle East, than to try to digest the implications of a religion in need of massive reform on a global scale.
But all this obfuscation is ultimately self-defeating: with the root causes of terror left unaddressed, the terrorists are still free to recruit and proliferate. Let Musharraf speak about the real roots of Islamic terror, and he’ll actually deserve that Churchillian mantle.