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AntiColonial Radicalism and Islam
Imperialism invariably engenders anti-imperialist reactions. Anti-imperial
movements have embraced varying ideologies at different times to attain their
ends. After World War II, it was leftist nationalist ideology that dominated the
ideological scene in the Middle East. Nasser’s nationalist message from Egypt
still has a familiar ring: denunciation of Western intervention in the Middle East,
a demand for Muslims to exercise sovereign control over their own energy
resources, the elimination of Western military bases in the Middle East, and a
call for a just solution to the running sore of the dispossessed Palestinians.
We forget that in the 1950s and 1960s, it was Arab nationalism that was
viewed as the predominant threat to Western interests in the Middle East,
stimulating the United States and Britain into covert operations to overthrow
leaders in Iran and Syria and to manipulate the Egyptian political scene. (The
United States disastrously continues to believe, into the twenty-first century, that
it can ignore and override Arab, or other, nationalisms—which is what crises
with Iraq and Syria have been all about.) And in an earlier time, as astonishing
as it may seem today, the US and UK often identified the Islamists as the
weapon with which to weaken Arab nationalist leadership and local Soviet
interests.
The United States, in particular, never shrank from regular overthrow of
unfriendly regimes by covert operations or outright military intervention in
country after country, in order to maintain regimes favorable to it. The list is
stunning: Korea (1950–1953), Iran (1953), Guatemala (1954), Costa Rica
(1955), Syria (1957), Indonesia (1958), Dominican Republic (1960), Peru
(1960), Ecuador (1960), Congo (1960), Vietnam (1961–1973), Cuba (1961),
Brazil (1964), Chile (1972), Angola (1975), Nicaragua (1981), Lebanon (1982–
1984), Grenada (1983), Panama (1989), Iraq/Gulf (1991), Somalia (1993),
Bosnia (1994–1995), Kosovo (1999), Afghanistan (2001–to present), and Iraq
(2003–to present).
Washington funded the Muslim Brotherhood opposition to Nasser in Egypt in
the late 1950s and engaged the Saudis to do the same. It also worked with the
Brotherhood to help overthrow a pro-Nasser regime in Yemen in 1962. Support
may have extended to Indonesian Muslim movements as well. Israel itself
played the same game: in the 1960s Israel released the Hamas leader Shaykh
Ahmad Yassin from prison and funded Islamist Hamas as an instrument to play
against the Arab nationalist Palestine Liberation Organization (PLO) under the
leadership of Yasir Arafat, in the foolish belief that the Islamists would be more

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manageable than the nationalists. Israel then returned in 2004 to assassinate
Shaykh Yassin.
The United States bears some responsibility in artificially skewing the
strength and role of differing ideological movements in the Muslim world, and
has created legacies that have come back to haunt it. If Islam had not been
available, Washington would have found other ideological forces to weaken or
destroy radical nationalist movements of the period.
Arab nationalists were not alone in their resistance. An entire cohort of
nationalist leaders emerged midcentury, creating in 1955 the Non-Aligned
Movement (NAM), which positioned itself as a “third force” between the Soviet
Union and Western camps during the Cold War. Its leaders galvanized the
developing world in a call to stand up for sovereign rights against the neo-
imperial Western forces that still sought strategic domination. Washington
perceived the entire NAM as a threat, since the movement did indeed tilt toward
the USSR against Western imperialism.
The platform of the Non-Aligned Movement, set forth in the Havana
Declaration of 1979, called for preserving “the national independence,
sovereignty, territorial integrity and security of non-aligned countries” in their
“struggle against imperialism, colonialism, neo-colonialism, racism, Zionism,
and all forms of foreign aggression, occupation, domination, interference or
hegemony as well as against great power and bloc politics.” Nearly two-thirds of
the member countries of the United Nations became members of the NAM.
From today’s perspective, the language of this statement still rings true.
(Israelis, of course, had every reason to view the NAM as anti-Israel, and
indeed it was. NAM opposition to Israel, however, was based not on anti-
Semitism, but on opposition to an exclusivist Jewish nationalist ideology that
supported the creation of a Zionist state designed only for Jews at the expense of
three-quarters of a million Palestinian refugees who lost their homes and lands.
For the Muslim world and many other Third World states, the strong backing of
the creation of Israel by the West also raised fears that Israel was meant to be a
creature of the West, deliberately implanted into the heart of the Middle East to
dominate it. Subsequent events did little to overcome these suspicions.)
The Palestinian problem is a key case in demonstrating the irrelevance of
Islam to the roots of the issue. Islam has nothing whatsoever to do with the
creation of the Palestinian problem and the origins of the Arab-Israeli crisis. The
Palestinian problem began with the immigration into Palestinian lands of Jews
from Eastern Europe, slowly at first, later much more rapidly, with huge funding
from Western Jewry, in the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. The new
Zionist movement emerged at a time of other exclusivist ethnonationalist

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movements in Europe such as those among Italians, Germans, Hungarians,
Slavs, Turks, and others; Jews, furthermore, had every reason for seeking an
exclusivist nationalist/religious movement in view of the longstanding
discrimination against them in Europe and especially in Eastern Europe.
Palestinians became increasingly worried about this huge influx of European
settlers in their midst, however, as it became clear that Zionist ideology foresaw
all of Palestine becoming the new Jewish homeland.
The crime of the Holocaust, which lay entirely on European shoulders, was
the final push for Jews to go to Palestine, supported by guilty Europeans. Three-
quarters of a million Palestinians were ultimately displaced in Israeli operations
of ethnic cleansing and intimidation as the foundation of the new Jewish state
was attained. Palestinians bitterly resent being asked to pay the price for
European sins. If there had never been an Islam, Christian Palestinians would
have no more happily lost their lands to Jews, or refrained from guerrilla actions
to get them back. Indeed, Palestinian Christians have been prominent among the
guerrilla movements against Israel. Although this Palestinian-Jewish ethnic clash
has eventually taken on religious overtones on both sides in recent years, Islam
had nothing to do with its origins.
Indeed, Palestinian movements have passed through three distinct phases in
their evolving ideological metamorphosis: an Arab nationalist phase, a Marxist-
Leninist phase, and, finally, an Islamist phase. Yet each of them had as a goal the
same independent Palestinian state. The Palestinian cause remained the same,
but the ideological vehicle kept changing—shifting ideologies for permanent
grievances.
All these events dramatically demonstrate the passions that lie behind the
policies and sensitivities of the developing world’s nations in their search for
genuine sovereignty. The Muslim world is just one more part of that movement.
And Islam functions as just one more vehicle, or banner, with which to oppose
Western interventionism. If there were no Islam, the anti-imperial grievances
would be no less, and the resistance no less; but the resistance movement might
be deprived of the additional emotional and ideological power of Islam now
coupled with nationalism.
As long as the invaders, occupiers, or oppressors are non-Muslim, Islam will
invariably be invoked, along with nationalism, in the struggle against them.

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CHAPTER THIRTEEN