India and Israel Against Islamic Terror

CHAPTER 19 CIVILIZATIONAL FAULT LINES 313
conquest and campaign of conversion, seeking help from their

Islamic countries for a ’just and noble’ task. The greatest orgy of

slaughter took place in Sudan where approximately 500,000,

non-Muslim blacks in its southern region were put to death in

a glaring genocide, unequalled in the African continent. Moving

further to the east, in Egypt, considered to be a moderate Islamic

Arab State, it’s Coptic Christian population, barely 12 percent of

the whole, almost the same as the black population in the

United States, has been brutalized and kept under constant

fear. The atrocities ranged from burning of churches, arrest

without warrant, house confinement and wanton slaughter of

those suspected as unbelievers. According to a source, the Islamist

expansionism, slaughter and persecution, is not confined to these

areas. There was an attempt on the life of Pope some time back

by an Islamic fanatic, under the misguided conception ”kill the

head and the body dies”, a recipe for destroying non-Islamic

civilizations. Christians and Hindus are not .the Qnly enemies of

the_ Islamic movement, but also Syrian Kurds and the Druse,

who are being robbed of their farm lands, denied access to

schools, access to press and the right to serve in the military or

the government. Between 1920s and 1948, both Iraq and Iran

tried to wipe out the Kurds sacrificing 25 million in this long

conflict. In the near past, Lebanon provided the fighting ground

between Muslims and the rest. The present Christian crisis in

Lebanon originated in 1958, when Nasser declared this country

as a part of the Islamic world, under a veiled threat of a total

take over. This effort was aborted by President Eisenhower’s

intervention. The timely landing of the United States’ forces

prevented the radical take over of the Labanese government,

but a half-hearted follow up action opened the door for the

”Cairo Agreement” which document technically resulted in an

Islamic terrorist state within a state. Taking advantage of the

situation around 1970, a majority of PLO members, fleeing for

safety landed along with those escaping from Jordan, where

they faced execution at the hands of their own people, and

found a safe haven in South Lebanon. These refugees explaining

their status as a nation within a nation attempted to take over

Beirut between 1975 and 1982 resulting in a loss
314 INDIA AND ISRACL CHAPT
ERig
of 25,000 lives. In 1976, the Syrians joined the fray, settled ’

Beirut and never left. The much maligned offensive by General

Arial Sharon under Menachin Begin, the then Prime Minister of

Israel, destroyed the PLO power base in Southern Lebanon

provided a temporary reprieve to the Maronite Christians and

Shiites by forcing the PLO to flee Southern Lebanon. Philippines

is burning as the Islamic group called the Moro National

Liberation Front, plays havoc in the country and the fire has

scorched even Indonesia. The leader of the Moro National

Liberation Front, Sharif Zain-Jali, announced that a separatist

group representing a mere 5% of the population in Philippines

will ”become a nation in the eyes of the Islamic world”. In

Pakistan, Bangladesh, Sudan and in parts of Southern Lebanon,

Islamic law has been proclaimed as the law of the land. In any

country with Muslim majority, the Muslim law prevails, but

wherever the Muslims are a minority they insist on a secular

state and equal rights for the minorities forgetting completely

how they treat their own minorities. The series of terrorist acts

against non-Muslims are legion. From the blowing up of Pan Am

103, the air heist from Kathmandu to Kandhar involving more

than 200 Indian passengers, bombing of the United States

Embassies, destruction of the statues of Buddha in Afghanistan

and the latest bombing of the World Trade Center in New York

on 11th September,2001, the raid on the Legislative Assembly of

Jammu and ”Kashmir Government at Srinagar on 1st October,

2001, an attack on Indian Parliament on 13th December, and

now the recent attack on Swami Narain temple in Gandhi Nagar,

Gujarat, on 24 September, 2002, should leave no one in doubt

about the intention of the Pan-Islamic fundamentalism trying to

overtake other civilizations.
Since, 1500 A.D. there was hardly any period lasting more

than five years when the Muslims did not pick up arms against

Europe, somewhere in the Muslim world and in more than one

country simultaneously. The Muslims see a fundamental chasm

between Islam and the West. The two cannot co-exist, if the

west is to flourish, Islam has to be suppressed and vice versa.For

the Muslim world there is a widespread belief that 200 years of
CHAPTER 19 CIVILIZATIONS FAULT LINES 315
Western colonialism, which oppressed and kept the Muslims

poor and backward with loss of initiative, are going to end and

the future belongs to Islam. The past 150 years, during which

the Muslims were culturally smothered and their institutions and

way of life destroyed, will be a thing of the past. They envy the

prosperity of the West and hate its success and their own

deprivation. In the words of Malise Ruthven, a British Arabist,

”The West like its women has been a simultaneous source of

attraction and repulsion; admiration for its institutions and for

the technical prowess that has enabled so many of its citizens to

enjoy the undreamed of freedoms and opportunities, disgust at

its vulgarity, its seeming callousness and spiritual emptiness

combined with a deep sense of unease that Allah, whose way

has been shown for all mankind in the holy Koran and the

Sunna has been one-upped.”
Recently, recruited by one of the religious organisations

preaching holy war against the US as an Islamic obligation, the

foot soldiers of Mullah Mohammed Omar, meant to be used as

canon fodder in the recent war in Afghanistan, had confessed

the futility of their cause. On pain of death these innocents were

separated from their families and were ordered by the Taliban

to fight in Kandhar to the end or till America is destroyed. They

could meet their families only after this sacred task was completed.

One of these fundamentalists, 23- year old Abu Kalam confessed,

”god was kind to make me realize that it was sheer distortion of

the concept of Jehad”.
The demographic challenge posed by the Muslim emigres to

European countries is real. They account for 10 percent of the

births in Western Europe, while the Arabs alone in Brussels

constitute 50 percent of this figure. Whether they be Turkish in

Germany or Algerian in France, they refuse to be assimilated

into the host culture. Jean Marie Domenach in 1991 remarked

that ”there is a fear growing all across Europe, of a Muslim

community that cuts across European lines, a sort of thirteenth

nation of the European Community.” The French are basically

less racists than culturists. While they can accept black Africans

speaking perfect French as their legislators, they are averse to
316 INDIA AND ISRAEL CHAPT,
ER19
Muslim girls wearing headscarves in their schools. The public

perception about this suffocating by increased presence, when

analyzed reveal the revulsion by 76 percent of the French against

Arabs, 46 percent against blacks, 40 percent against Asians and

24 percent against jews. In Germany in 1994, the picture was

somewhat different, being mainly directed against the Turks. In

1990, Bernard Lewis, a leading scholar of Islam, analyzing ”The

Roots of Muslim Rage” observed that the Muslim ire though

irrational, was definitely a historic reaction of an ancient rivalry

against a Judeo-Christian heritage, its secular content and

worldwide expansion. An Egyptian journalist, Mohammed SidAhmed,

pronounced in 1944 that there was a growing clash

between the Judeo-Christian Western ethics and the Islamic

revivalist movement, starting from Atlantic and ending up at

China in the East. Similar sentiments were expressed in 1 992 by

a prominent Indian Muslim, that the next confrontation from

the Muslim world would be along the fault line, coterminous

with the sweep of Islamic nations from the west to Pakistan. In

a similar vein a Tunisian lawyer observed that ”Colonialism tried

to deform all the cultural traditions of Islam. I am not an Islamist.

I don’t think there is a conflict between religions. There is a

conflict between civilizations.” As far as the USA is concerned,

a sample survey of 3500 respondents revealed that 61 percent

considered ’Islamic Revival’ as the main threat. A similar survey

to identify ’critical threats’ had revealed that 72 percent of the

public and 61 percent foreign experts believe nuclear proliferation

as No. one, while 69 percent and 33 percent of these categories

pointed their fingers at ’international terrorism’, both closely

associated with Islam. Similarly, 33 and 39 percent of the above

categories of the respondents saw a threat in the expansion of

Islamic fundamentalism. The Secretary General of NATO |n 1995

went to the extent of saying~7FiarTslamic fundamentalism was as

dangerous as communism had been to the West. However, in

the America centric west there is an unanimously growing

apprehension against a ’Tehran-Islamabad-Beijing axis’., to

counter, which the west will have to ally with India. Should these

three states form the underpinning of a larger grouping of other
CHAPTER 19 CIVIUZATIONAL FAULT LINES 317
Muslim Asian countries, an informal ’Confucian-Islamist alliance’,

will emerge, on the world scene. A consolidation would occur

not because Mohammed and Confucius are anti-west but because

these cultures perceive the west as the main colonial persecutor.

This sentiment was echoed in 1994 when Mu’ammar al-Qadhafi

declared:
”The New World order means that Jews and Christians control

Muslims and if they can, they will go after Confucianism and

other religions in India, China and Japan... What the

Christians and Jews are now saying ”we were determined to

crush Communism and the West. We must now crush

Islam and Confucianism.”
”Now we hope to see a confrontation between China that

heads the Confucianism camp. We have no justifications but

to be biased against the crusaders. We are standing with

Confucianism, and by allying ourselves with it and fighting

alongside it in one international front, we will eliminate our

mutual opponent”.
”So, we as Muslims, will support China in its struggle against

our mutual enemy...”
”We wish China victory...”
Communal conflicts and fault line wars are the staple of

history, and Islam’s borders have always been drenched with

blood. ln__the thirtytwo ethnic conflicts during the Cold War,

which included fault line wars, between Arabs and Israelis, Indians

and Pakistanis, Sudanese Muslims and Christians, Sri Lankan

Buddhists and Tamils and Lebanese Shi’ites and Maronites,

identity wars constituted half of all such wars. The largest number

involved were Muslims. To quote Huntington again:
”The overwhelming majority of fault line conflicts, however,

have taken place along the boundary looping across Eurasia

and Africa that separates Muslims from non-Muslims. While

at the macro or global level of the world politics the primary

clash of civilizations is between the West and the rest, at the

micro or local level it is between Islam and the others...”
318 INDIA AND ISRAEL CHART:
ER19
Though Muslims constituted only one-fifth of the world

population they, more than any other groups, were involved in

the violence of civilizational clashes. In a study carried out bv

Ted Robert Curr, the Muslims were participants in twenty six out

of fifty ethnopolitical conflicts in 1993-94 alone. Out of twenty

of these conflicts, between different civilizations, those between

Muslims and non-Muslims alone amounted to fifteen. In other

words three times as many inter-civilizational conflicts involved

Muslims, as opposed to non-Muslim civilizations. In terms of

casualties, the conflicts involving Muslims had been most bloody.

In the six wars, analyzed by Ted Robert Gurr, 200,000 or more

people were killed. Three conflicts were between Sudan, Bosnia

and East Timor - Muslims and non-Muslims, two (Somalia, IraqKurds)

were intra-Muslims and only one(Angola) was non-Muslim.
The primal causes of the involvement of Muslims in most

conflicts are history. Intermittent fault lines bred violence between

different civilizational groups causing fears and insecurities on

both sides-Hindus and Muslims in South Asia, Russians and

Caucasians in the North Caucasus, Armenians and Turks in the

Transcaucasus, Jews and Arabs in Palestine, Catholics, Muslims

and Orthodox in the Balkans and many others.
The moot question before the twentyfirst century is,: why

are the Muslims more involved in inter-group conflicts than other

people. Six possible causes can be traced-the main three explain

violence between Muslims and non-Muslims, and the other three

[\ are slowly emerging into focus. Firstly, Islam has been a religion

of the sword, glorifying military valour, born among ”warring

Bedouin nomadic tribes” and this ”violent origin is stamped in

the foundations of Islam. Mohammed himself is remembered as

a hard fighter and a skillful military commander.” Islamic doctrines

ordained a fight against Kafir” non-believers” and when this was

accomplished, the same impulse led to fighting among themselves.

There are few prohibitions in Islam on violence and any thought

on non-violence is absent from Islamic doctrine and practice.
Secondly, the rapid spread of Islam from Arabia to West in

Africa and even in south Spain and north and eastward to
CHAPTER 19 CIVILIZATIONS. FAULT LINES