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The South Atlantic Quarterly 101.2 (2002) 325-336



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A Muslim to Muslims:
Reflections after September 11

Vincent J. Cornell


Oddly, my first thought is of what a Moroccan scholar of Fez once said about a Berber tribe that used to raid the city's fields and orchards: "They are not the Beni Mtir; they are the Flying Catastrophe!" 1 Despite all of our arguments to the contrary, Samuel Huntington appears to be right. His "Clash of Civilizations" has become the first war of the twenty-first century. 2 And the name of the Flying Catastrophe is Islam.

Seven months later, events in Palestine and Israel remind us that this is supposed to be where it all began. CNN, Fox, and Al-Jazeera remind us of the Fifty-Four-Year Catastrophe that never ends. Broken hopes and shattered dreams of friendship between Muslims and Jews lie dead in the rubble of Palestine. Israeli tanks crush cars and houses in Nablus, Bethlehem, and Jenin. Thousands are homeless in Jenin alone. The heavy hand of collective punishment follows the brutal but ultimately impotent logic of revenge. Palestinian despair and anger confront Israeli guilt and fear. The only winners are the extremists. Hamas activists and Jewish Settlers dance dabkas and horas of self-righteous bigotry, believing that God is on their [End Page 325] side. The Palestinian population bomb is made flesh through murderous acts of self-immolation. If we go down in flames, we'll take the whole world with us. Is this the beginning of the end? Said the Prophet Muhammad, "Islam came as a stranger, and it will be a stranger once again." The same can be said of the religions of Moses and Jesus.

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Two important fallacies of September 11, 2001, are directly related to April 11, 2002. Arab and Muslim political activists tell us that American support for Israel created the hatred that led to the attack on the Twin Towers. Talking heads from the Israeli government tell us that America has finally tasted the terrorism that Israelis have long experienced. Accepting these arguments means accepting counterfeit coin for legal tender. The Sufi poet Jalal al-Din Rumi said that counterfeit coin could never be taken for real coin if there weren't real gold in it. There is indeed great and well-founded frustration and anger throughout the Muslim world because of America's unequivocal support for Israel's policies. This is especially true today, as the Israeli army invades the Palestinian territories and destroys the Palestinian Authority, conveniently cloaking their assault in Bush's "war on terrorism" rhetoric. It is also true that Israelis have lived in a constant state of war since the founding of their nation in 1948. This has engendered a fortress mentality that influences much of Israeli policy. The false coin can be found in the theories of causality and definitional equations bandied about by each side. Support for Israel, we are told, leads to Islamic hatred. All forms of terrorism are supposed to be alike. What the public really needs to know is what is not said in the media. PLO apologists do not tell us that Palestinian extremists have no intention of accepting the legitimacy of either Israel or the Palestinian Authority. Israeli apologists do not tell us that Israeli extremists want every Arab out of Palestine. Neither do they tell us that some of these extremists are in the present Israeli government. For the past eighteen months, every step that has been taken for peace has been countered by an atrocity on the Palestinian side or a provocation—and now an atrocity—on the Israeli side. Extremists on both sides want to disrupt the peace process. In 1993, I spoke with Ramadan Abdallah, just before he became the head of Islamic Jihad for the Liberation of Palestine. He made no pretense at hiding his contempt for Yásir Arafat, both personally and politically. It doesn't take a Middle East expert to understand that the only way to power for Islamic Jihad is over [End Page 326] the...

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