Prof. Paul Eidelberg

This article was published nine days after 9/11, after I had seen with my own eyes the rubble of the World Trade Center, which I had previously visited on various occasions. I am publishing the article again for two reasons: first, because American scholars and politicians, as well as Israeli scholars and politicians – including Benjamin Netanyahu – persist in denying a clash of civilizations between Islam and the West, second, because my 2001 article, “A War America Can’t Win” explains why Israel can’t win her current war with the Palestinians.

America can’t win the war against international terrorism because the U.S. has failed to identify the enemy. The enemy is nothing less than Islam, and democratic, multicultural America is conceptually incapable of conquering such an enemy.

We have here a clash of civilizations of world-historical significance. The United States, including its most notable intellectuals, obscure this clash by defining the enemy as “Islamic fundamentalism” or “Islamism,” supposedly an extremist aspect of Islam.  But as I shall now show, what is called “Islamic fundamentalism” is authentic, resurgent Islam.

First, consider a booklet entitled Arab Theologians on Jews and Israel (1971) edited by D.F. Green.  The booklet is a 76-page condensation of a 951-page volume containing papers presented at “The Fourth Conference of the Academy of Islamic Research” of Al Azhar University in Cairo (1968).  Al Azhar University, it should be emphasized, is the Harvard of the Islamic world.  Al Azhar is attached to the office of the President of Egypt and unofficially represents the theological-political position of that country, if not most of the Arab-Islamic world.

Delegates from 24 countries attended the conference:  Algeria, India, Indonesia, Iraq, Japan, Jordan, Kenya, Kuwait, Lebanon, Malaysia, Morocco, Nigeria, Philippines, Russia, Senegal, Sierra-Leone, Somalia, Sudan, Syria, Togoland, Turkey, Uganda, Yemen, and Yugoslavia.

Some 22 papers were presented by Islamic theologians and professors:  Egypt 10; Lebanon 3; Jordan 2; Syria 2; Indonesia 2; and one each from Morocco, Iraq, and “Palestine.”

The papers frequently denote Jews as the “Enemies of God” or the “Enemies of humanity.”  One paper refers to Jews as “the dogs of humanity.”  The Bible of Israel is referred to in pejorative terms and as a counterfeit work.  Jews are described as evil, as deserving the hatred and persecution of all the peoples with whom they have come into contact—and this was said in full awareness of the Nazi Holocaust! Also, the State of Israel is described as a culmination of historical and cultural depravity.

Since the Conference portrays the evil of the Jews as immutable and permanent, the attending Muslim theologians and professors were prompting the Arab-Islamic world to annihilate Israel (politicide) and the Jews (genocide).  This was not a conference of “Islamic fundamentalists,” unless Islamic fundamentalism is authentic Islam!

Second, the present writer has shown that the Israel-Egypt peace treaty of March 1979 did not diminish Egyptian hatred of Jews and Israel.  (See my Sadat’s Strategy, 1979.)  Indeed, as the eminent Islamic scholar Bernard Lewis has noted, Egypt’s anti-Jewish and anti-Israel propaganda increased after the signing of that treaty!

Third, consider Professor Y. Harkabi’s Arab Attitudes to Israel (1972).  This 500-page volume documents hundreds of statements made by Arab rulers, scholars, journalists, and writers throughout the Arab-Islamic world vilifying Jews and calling for Israel’s destruction.   Harkabi makes no distinction between Islam and “Islamic fundamentalism” when he describes Islam as a “militant,” “combative,” and “expansionist” creed.

Fourth, recall the Teheran Conference of October 1991 (which, by the way, took place two weeks before the October 30 Madrid “peace” conference sponsored by the U.S. and the USSR and attended by Israel, Jordan, Syria, Lebanon, and PLO surrogates).   Attended by a score of Arab and Islamic states, including Jordan, Syria, Lebanon, and the PLO, the Teheran Conference unanimously signed various resolutions calling for Israel’s destruction.  Egypt, despite its peace treaty with Israel, signed those resolutions!  Again, this was not a conference of “Islamic fundamentalists” or of any single Islamic sect—Sunni, Shi’ite, or Wahhabi.

Now for some basic principles.  In The Political Language of Islam (1988), Professor Lewis notes that Islam divides the world in two:  “the House of Islam (dar al-Islam), where Muslims rule and the law of Islam prevail; and the House of War (dar al-Harb), comprising the rest of the world.  Between the two there is a morally necessary, legally and religiously obligatory state of war, until the inevitable and final triumph of Islam over unbelief.  According to Islamic law books, this state of war could be interrupted, when expedient, by an armistice or truce of limited duration.  It could not be terminated by peace but only by a final victory” (p. 73).

The question arises:  How should Muslims behave in territories previously conquered by Islam—for example Portugal, Spain, and the Balkans—but which were subsequently reconquered by Christians?  According to certain Islamic jurists, it was the duty of Muslims to leave such territories and not remain under non-Muslim rule.  Other jurists held that Muslims might remain under a non-Muslim ruler and were even obliged to obey his orders, provided only that Muslims were allowed to observe their religion.  This ruling, however, was based on practical necessity.  For as Lewis remarks, the territories conquered by Christians would then become part of the House of War, “subject, when circumstances permit, to jihad and reconquest” (p. 106).   (This has obvious implications for Israel and its Muslim citizens.)

Finally, it should be noted that the destruction of the World Trade Center is the manifestation of a war between East and the West.

Prof. Paul Eidelberg

… Unbeknownst to the West, and unacknowledged by Israel’s ruling elites, the 1948 War of Independence was a civilizational war, one that has been going on to this day.  Thus, in a lecture sponsored by the Arab League in Cairo, ‘Abd al-Rahman al-Bazzaz, Professor of Law at the University of Baghdad, who later became Iraq’s Prime Minister, declared in 1962:  “The existence of Israel … is a flagrant challenge to our philosophy of life and the ideals for which we live, and a total barrier against the values and aims to which we aspire in the world.”

Islam perceives Israel both as a Jewish and secular democratic state that threatens the religio-political power structure of the Islamic world. Tyrannies do not like democracies on their borders.  But let us probe a little deeper into the conflict between the East (here limited to Islam) and the West, with which Israel finds itself precariously aligned.

The West exalts the individual, and the state exists to maximize his comfort.  Accordingly, the function of the state is not to cultivate virtue or morality but to promote freedom and material prosperity.  In the West, therefore, religion is a private matter.  Contrast the fatalistic world of Islam.  There personal and political freedom is unknown.  There the state is all-powerful.  Its primary function is to serve Allah by imbuing people with the moral and religious teachings of the Koran.   There poverty is the rule.

The World Trade Center represented the pinnacle wealth.  Like the Tower of Babel, it symbolized the exaltation of man.  The Twin Towers were monuments of scientific technology in stark contrast to pre-industrial, feudal Islam.

The destruction of the Twin Towers by suicide bombers reveals the unbridgeable gap between the West’s preoccupation with this world and Islam’s concern with the afterworld.  While America pursues a life of pleasure here and now, Islam is infatuated with death as the entry to eternal Paradise.  Can mundane life defend itself against death?

The World Trade Center’s destruction was an act of revenge—revenge against centuries of Western domination of the East—intolerable to Muslims.  The West is the home of Christianity, hated by Islam.  Also, the U.S., by supporting Israel, is the Great Satan.  Hence the Mufti of Jerusalem urges Muslims to kill Americans as well as Jews.

Multicultural, relativistic America is incapable of waging war against this totalitarian enemy.  It lacks the concepts, the understanding, required to wage such a war.  President Bush called the destruction of the World Trade Center a “cowardly” act, when, in truth, it was an act of dauntless courage.  He called this act “senseless,” when in fact it was well calculated to humble America, to uplift Islamic pride, to glorify Allah.

Moreover, responsibility for this monstrous act was attributed to “Islamic fundamentalism,” or to a network of terrorists led by Osama bin Laden.  True, Islamic states were held responsible for harboring these terrorists.  But this tacitly indicates that the so-called war against international terrorism involves Islam as a whole: there is hardly an Islamic state that does not provide a haven, to say nothing of financial support, for Arab terrorists.  Yet, to make a mockery of the World Trade Center disaster, the U.S. invited Islamic regimes and even arch-terrorist Yasser Arafat to join the war against international terrorism!  Nor is this all.

President Bush called this a war between good and evil.  And so it is.  But the United States and the West have long been silent about evil, indeed, have honored the personification of evil, again, Yasser Arafat.  Hence the U.S. is far from being simply good.  Besides, American cultural imperialism is vulgarizing much of the world, undermining moral and religious values.   We see this in the Americanization of Israel.  True, Israel is indebted to the United States and is itself to blame for the vices it has imported from America.  Some may also blame Washington for Oslo, which has resulted in thousands of Jewish casualties—an enormous number for a small country like Israel.  But Oslo is primarily the product of Westernized or secularized Jews.  Indeed, the Israeli architects of Oslo were animated by one ultimate objective, and that is to destroy Israel as a Jewish state and to transform it into miniature, multicultural America!