The Fallacy of Grievance Based Terrorism

The myth of Islamist Imperialism being the result of Muslim communities reacting to “unfair” American foreign policy is sited by both far left Anti-American pundits as well those on the far right whose anti-semitism is served by such nonsense.

History debunks this madness but truthfully history has become a subject unpopular among Americans, especially those of a leftward bent, who instead prefer a more “progressive” understanding of reality that demands the willful ignorance of historical fact and the radical re-imagining of our present reality. From The Fallacy of Grievance Based Terrorism by Melvin E. Lee:

The fundamental premise of much scholarly examination and public discourse is that grievances with U.S. policies in the Middle East motivate Islamist terrorism. Such assumptions, though, misunderstand the enemy and its nature. In reality, the conflict is sparked not by grievance but rather by incompatibility between Islamist ideology and the natural rights articulated during the European Enlightenment and incorporated into U.S. political culture. Acquiescing to political grievances will not alter the fundamental incompatibility between Lockean precepts of tolerance and current interpretations of Islam: Only Islam’s fundamental reform will resolve the conflict.

Many scholars mark the post-World War I partition of the Ottoman Empire as the origin of Islamist opposition to the West.[1] The idea that the Middle East would be a tolerant, prosperous contributor to the global environment today if World War I victors had left intact the Ottoman Empire is a premise in the literature accompanying the rise of twentieth-century jihadism. Historian David Fromkin argued in his influential A Peace to End All Peace that present day Muslim unrest is the direct result of Winston Churchill’s early twentieth-century decisions.[2] British journalist Robert Fisk also holds British officials responsible although he prefers to blame Arthur Balfour, foreign secretary between 1916 and 1919.[3] Both authors are wrong, though, to base their theories of grievance on such arbitrary demarcation of eras. The roots of jihadism and its opposition to the United States as part of the non-Muslim West were cast long before World War I erupted. The interaction between the United States and Muslim states and societies dates back to American independence.[4] Contemporary jihadism is not the result of accumulated grievance; rather it has for cultural reasons been an integral factor in Islamic societies’ interaction with the United States.

Jihadism has targeted Americans for our entire existence. North African Muslims preyed upon American merchants as soon as we gained our independence. The Ottoman empire used the threat of violence not only against us to gain concessions, but they used our good natures against us by threatening to exterminate the Christians and Jews in their territories:

Almost immediately after independence, the U.S. government found itself in conflict with the Barbary sheikhdoms of Morocco, Tunis, Algiers, and Tripoli. For centuries, these states filled their coffers by piracy, stealing cargoes, enslaving crew, and collecting ransom. European sea-going nations often entered into treaty and tribute arrangements with the Barbary leaders in order to buy immunity and curtail competition.[5] In 1784, Moroccan pirates hijacked the U.S. merchant ship Betsy in the Mediterranean and enslaved her crew. A year later, Algerine pirates seized two more vessels, the Maria from Boston and the Dauphin from Philadelphia. The U.S. ministers to England and France, John Adams and Benjamin Franklin, and Thomas Jefferson oversaw a peace treaty with Morocco, but the Algerine leadership refused any accommodation. In 1796, President George Washington ordered construction of six warships to form a U.S. navy and to protect U.S. shipping from Barbary pirates. In 1801, in the wake of an upsurge in piracy, President Thomas Jefferson entered into war with Tripoli, bombarding the city three years later and winning the release of American hostages.[6] Peace did not last. With the U.S. military embroiled in the War of 1812, Algerine pirates again began terrorizing American crewmen and disrupting U.S. trade. They miscalculated. In 1815, President James Madison dispatched a squadron of U.S. Navy frigates, which defeated the pirate fleet and won reparations from Algiers, Tunis, and Tripoli.[7]

The rationale for the predation of the Barbary corsairs was not based in opposition to American political maneuvering, the so called “blow back” of the Ron Paul crowd, but instead in religious ideology:

What Americans and Europeans saw as piracy, Barbary leaders justified as legitimate jihad. Jefferson related a conversation he had in Paris with Ambassador Abdrahaman of Tripoli who told him that all Christians are sinners in the context of the Qur’an and that it was a Muslim’s “right and duty to make war upon them wherever they could be found, and to enslave as many as they could take as prisoners.”[11] Islam gave great incentive to fighting infidels, Abdrahaman explained, because the Qur’an promised that making war against infidels ensured a Muslim paradise after death.[12] Richard O’Brien, the imprisoned captain of the Philadelphia merchantman Dauphin and later the U.S. consul to Algiers, related similar conversations with ‘Ali Hasan, the ruler of Algiers.[13] Ottoman leaders used the same rationale to justify the enslavement and trading of captives from the Balkans, Caucasus, and Ukraine.[14]

The role that jihadi ideology played in the Barbary wars is documented with explicit references to jihad and holy war in the treaties that U.S. officials entered into with Muslim rulers. Tunis and Algiers, as the western outposts of the Ottoman Empire, even described themselves to American envoys as the “frontier posts of jihad against European Christianity.

The article is a good one and goes on to examine that the theory of American policy angering Muslims is a bizarre one considering America’s pro-Arab, pro-Islamic stances which lasted well into the 21st century. At the heart of the matter isn’t American support for Israel or “exploitation” of the third world, but Islamic countries embrace of Jihadism and rejection of modernism:

The failure of Islamic states to incorporate the Enlightenment’s advances in thought has caused their stagnation, if not decline, over the last several centuries. In contrast, the incorporation of Enlightenment and democratic principles into Western governance has resulted in history’s most rapid improvement in the human condition. Only those Muslim countries that have embraced, in some fashion, Western principles of democracy, free markets, property rights, tolerance, and the rule of law have prospered. Most Arab states refuse. Bernard Lewis, perhaps the doyen of Middle East studies in the Western world, explained, “By all indicators from the United Nations, the World Bank, and other authorities, Muslim countries—in matters such as job creation, education, technology, and productivity—lag ever further behind the West. Even worse, the Arab nations also lag behind the more recent recruits to Western style modernity, such as Korea, Taiwan, and Singapore.”[36] All majority Muslim countries except Qatar, Bahrain, Kuwait, Oman, and Turkey, which have recently adopted significant free market and democratic reforms, rank in the bottom half of world productivity; of the rest, only Morocco, Indonesia, Saudi Arabia, and Bangladesh reach the third quartile.[37] According to the World Bank, the average per capita income of all majority Muslim countries collectively is less than half of the average for the globe. Only Kuwait approaches the global average life expectancy;[38] all other Muslim majority states lag in the bottom half of the world in this important measure of health.

Jihadis thrive in such stagnated conditions. This leads to negative annuity: Jihadism both grows amid stagnation and fuels stagnation. It accelerated coincident with the European Enlightenment and the relative decline of the Muslim Middle East. At its core, jihadism is a violent rejection of many of the fundamental principles of the European Enlightenment. Democracy, free markets, tolerance and freedom of religion, secular government, and separation between the religious, the political, and the individual spark religious fury. It is no coincidence, then, that jihadis, under the banner of cleansing their religion of evil Western influence, have focused their attentions on the United States, the clearest manifestation of the European Enlightenment today. They will continue to threaten Western civilization until they are checked.

Read the whole article, if nothing else it’ll provide you with plenty of ammunition to shoot down the the flighty arguments of those who would tell you Islamists would stop their violence if only America would stop supporting Jews/buying oil/ exporting our culture etc.

h/t American Congress for Truth