“The United States invading a number of Muslim countries was believed to have created radical behavior in the Muslim world, the speakers said.” — from this news article
“Radical behavior in the Muslim world” — i.e., the conduct of Jihad through violent combat, qitaal, or its (for Muslims) perfectly acceptable variant, terrorism (that is, indiscriminate killing of Infidels, especially of civilians) — was not “created” by the United States. The Jihad through violence predates — as a doctrine, and as a doctrine put immediately into practice by the earliest Muslims — the existence of the United States by more than a millennium. It has been conducted in the Middle East, in North Africa, in the Iberian peninsula, in sub-Saharan Africa, in Sassanian Iran, in Hindustan, in parts of East Asia. For a time, when Muslims were defeated in conventional combat (as near Poitiers by Charles Martel), the Jihad then took the form of raiding parties by sea, the destruction of Christian coastal villages, and killing and looting and the seizing of Christians in Western Europe. One to two million were taken back to be enslaved by their Muslim masters. And in Eastern Europe, millions of Slavs were taken, and women from Circassia and Georgia, for the slave-markets and then the harems.
Jihad does not end. There is no, pace the thrusting young academic entrepreneur Noah Feldman, an “After Jihad.” Jihad never ended as a doctrine; it merely fell, for a while, into desuetude when the non-Muslim powers — the Christian powers — proved too strong, too strong to be fought militarily. But the texts of the Qur’an and Hadith underwent no change. The details of the life of Muhammad, in the Sira, were not changed. No, the only thing that changed was that Muslims could not successfully conduct Jihad against the European powers.
But then, after World War II, things changed for the Camp of Islam. Where, however briefly, European powers had had their writ run, that writ came to an end. Parts of former British-ruled India became Pakistan and Bangladesh. The Dutch East Indies became Indonesia. The French-controlled lands of Morocco and Tunisia (which had French rule for less than a half-century), and finally Algeria (the only Arab country that can be said to have had full-fledged colonial rule for a long period, 130 years), all became independent.
And then came the oil wealth, discovered by Westerners, produced by Westerners, and paid for by Westerners, which since 1973 alone has given the Arab and Muslim states of OPEC ten trillion dollars. They have wasted much of it, in yachts and private 747s and every imaginable vice, and have failed to create — how can they, given inshallah-fatalism? — modern economies, but have managed to build palaces and fantasy-lands (including that grotesque hyper-Las-Vegas known as Dubai, where both Iranian and Arab money compete). And of course they have become by far the biggest arms-buyers on the planet, spending hundreds of billions over the past three decades, and then doing one other little thing: spreading Islam, pushing Islam, paying for mosques, madrasas, campaigns of Da’wa, and armies of Western hirelings: diplomats, journalists, former intelligence agents, lawyers to bring suits or defend Muslim clients, academics to make sure that in colleges and universities the Muslim view of Islam is the only view allowed, throttling all attempts to discuss the texts and tenets and attitudes of Islam soberly, without fear or sentimentality. These are all devoted to protecting and promoting Islam or the image of Saudi Arabia and other countries doing Allah’s work. Saudi Arabia alone has been estimated to have spent $100 billion on these efforts. Then add in the Emirates, Kuwait, Libya, Iran, and Qatar — the home of Al-Jazeera, spreading its anti-American, anti-Infidel venom, as well as to an American base that is there only because Qatar, like Kuwait, wants American protection from local bullies such as Iran, a revived Iraq, and even Saudi Arabia itself.
Islamic terrorism and other forms of “radical behavior” come from Islam itself. They come from the texts and the tenets and the attitudes. They come from the rage against Infidels, who are responsible for everything bad in the world, and above all, everything that is not right with Muslims anywhere. Are the leaders of Egypt and Saudi Arabia corrupt? Yes. Blame the Infidels, who “support them.” Are the Muslims in Western lands not being allowed, quite at the pace they would wish, to have their every demand for Islam-friendly sites, for prayer rooms in schools and footbaths in public places, for changes in the way people are allowed to dress, for an end to mixed-sex public pools or special Muslim-women-only and Muslim-men-only days, for this and for that, and for that and for this? Then they will demand them all the more insistently, in order that the Infidels will by degrees give in, thinking this or that accommodation is of no great significance — when it is the accommodation itself to Muslim demands that is the achievement. That accommodation is what is changing the face of Infidel nation-states, and weakening the resolve of their peoples to remain what they are and not to yield. It is all thought out, not spontaneous.
It has all been planned, all been premeditated. Even these demands that seem so innocuous, such as that Congressional resolution to “commend” Muslims for Ramadan. “Well,” Congressmen thought to themselves, “why not? What’s the harm in that? Why shouldn’t Muslims be “˜commended” for Ramadan?” But why should they? Is any group “commended” for such an observance? This was a deliberate attempt to inveigle Congressmen into a vote that then, minds being what they are, Congressmen would find themselves, if challenged on it, becoming defensive. They would begin to find reasons to convince themselves why the resolution was a good thing, why they were not wrong to vote for it. And so they have then moved just a bit, just a bit toward the Muslim point of view, even if they didn’t give a damn about, and paid no never mind to, that Resolution when it first came up, but merely cast that automatic, timid, and not-quite-innocuous “Yes.”
The Jihad — that “radical behavior” — is back because it can be. Those OPEC trillions, those millions of Muslims allowed to settle deep within Infidel lands, behind what Muslims themselves are taught to regard as enemy lines, those Western technologies that have made possible, as never before, the spread, to both Muslim and non-Muslim populations, of propaganda on behalf of Islam and the Jihad — those are the three elements that explain why “radical attitudes,” as they are demurely called, are back. Though if the West had been paying attention not merely to Israel, but also to Muslim behavior toward non-Muslims in every land dominated by Muslims, they would have realized, long before now, long before 9/11/2001, that Islamic attitudes never were modified, and the limited improvements in the treatment of non-Muslims that obtained under European rule were often reversed, s-l-o-w-l-y or rapidly — it hardly matters which. It was happening.