This week was convenient timing indeed to foil an alleged Islamist plot to blow up planes over the Atlantic, writes Gamal Nkrumah The Western world, or to be more precise, the United States and Britain, are still in denial. Five years after 11 September 2001, Washington is still attempting by sheer force to create a "New Middle East" composed in the main of pro- Western states with Western-style multi-party democratic political systems. The sad truth is that Anglo-American foreign policy courts catastrophe. The clash of civilisations is moving into a higher gear. The shift presents few opportunities and many challenges. And Britain is among the countries most immediately vulnerable, not least because of its sizable Muslim population and the wide perception of Blair as "Bush's poodle". Bush's choice of terms such as "crusade" against terrorism hasn't helped. Does the Bush administration expect Muslims, both "moderate" and "militant" to use Blair's dubious categorisation, to squirm with bitterness and regret? There might have been much gnashing of teeth among the world's Muslims, but not all Muslims are prepared to stand idly by as their fellow Muslims in Palestine, Lebanon, Iraq and Afghanistan are being butchered by brutish occupation forces. Israeli aggression on a defenceless Palestinian population and in Lebanon only aggravated the situation and exacerbated Muslim grievances against blind Anglo-American backing for Israel. Precisely for that reason, the issuing of nonsensical statements such as the insistence by Bush and Blair that "Hizbullah was defeated" is likely to cause a ruction among British Muslims and their co-religionists the world over. Bush and Blair are depicting the brutish Israeli onslaught on the innocent civilian population of Lebanon as a fight between the forces of freedom and terrorism, democracy and totalitarianism. Nothing can be further from the truth as far as the vast majority of Muslims around the world are concerned. "This nation is at war with Islamic fascists," declared US President George W Bush in the wake of the supposed plot to blast nine planes over the Atlantic. "Oxymoron terms like 'Islamic terrorists' or 'Islamic extremists' or today's brand new term 'Islamic fascists' are stereotypical, counter- productive and only increase hatred," Fadel Suleiman director of the Cairo-based Bridges Foundation, an inter-faith dialogue groups which specialises in introducing Islam to non-Muslims around the world, told Al-Ahram Weekly. Aggressive military intervention first in Afghanistan and then Iraq has inflamed passions in the region and resulted in the spread of militant political Islam. "Bush's words insulted and offended 1.5 billion Muslims all over the globe, who are already living times of distress and frustration seeing what is happening in Lebanon and Palestine and viewing innocent children and women massacred by the Israeli war machine which is armed to the teeth by the US," Suleiman, the ex-imam of the American University, Washington DC, explained. "We believe this is an ill-advised term and we believe that it is counter-productive to associate Islam or Muslims with fascism," concurred Nihad Awad, director of the Washington-based Council on American Islamic Relations. British Muslims, too, agree. "[British Prime Minister Tony] Blair might be less gullible than Bush, but he too, utters the most infuriating and offensive statements. He has provoked Muslim sensibilities in the past," Anas Al-Tikriti, a former House of Commons MP, told the Weekly. "It is outrageous that Bush uses such terminology that is hardly likely to build bridges between cultures," Al-Tikriti added. The point to grasp is that Bush's brash and abrasive commentary and the Bush administration's indiscriminate support for Israel has offended the sensibilities of many non-Muslims across the globe. The US president's words and actions smack of being judge, jury and executioner. It is Pax-Americana gone wild. British pundit Simon Jenkins writing in The Sunday Times derisively labelled the Bush and Blair attitudes as the "'denial bunkers' of the White House and Downing Street". He warned that such statements would poison relations between Muslims and non-Muslims. Michael Portillo, writing in the same British newspaper, asked a most pertinent question: "Why did Al-Qaeda choose Britain as the country from which to launch an audacious and bloodthirsty assault on the United States whose death toll could have rivalled or exceeded 9/11?" We in the Arab world might not agree with his conclusions, but Portillo -- former British defence secretary turned journalist and broadcaster -- articulates what a sizable section of the population in the West believes. After all, a Gallop poll released that soon after the arrests in Britain of Muslim suspects claimed that two out of five Americans harbour prejudicial feelings towards Muslims. "Labour politicians vie with each other to wear their conscience on their sleeves and distance themselves from Blair. As Israel fights terror the Tories are mealy-mouthed and Gordon Brown is silent," the former conservative politician argued. Portillo's assumption that Israel is fighting terror is precisely the sort of assumption that shows the huge gulf in perceptions that divide the Muslim from the Anglo-American worlds and driving an ever-increasing number of Muslims into the hands of militant Islamist organisations both in the Muslim heartlands and in the West. The West must, therefore, brace itself for more arrests in Britain and the US of impetuous young men bent on defending Islam in the only way they feel they can -- violent resistance. Meanwhile, Israel is not fighting terror, rather the Lebanese resistance, embodied in Hizbullah and their allies, is waging a protracted armed struggle against the most aggressive settler colonial power in the region. And, it is winning hearts and minds -- not only in the Arab world, but also around the globe. The right of the Lebanese to resist Israeli aggression must remain inviolate if true democratic values are to be instituted in the countries of the region. Resisting Israeli oppression is an elementary form of social justice. Hizbullah was ahead of the game, the movement since its inception in 1985 realising that the so-called "invincibility" of the Israeli war machine was a fallacious myth. It long understood that in spite of its seemingly unassailable military prowess, Israel was nothing but a paper tiger. "Might not Al-Qaeda reasonably believe that another massive atrocity could bring Blair's leadership to an end and usher in a series of less hard-nosed administrations? Might they not also reason that Britain is a tempting target because in vast numbers the British refuse to recognise the nature of the extreme Islamist threat that confronts us?" wrote Portillo. As Portillo keenly observes, discontent in Britain with Blair's foreign policy has reached fever pitch -- and that is not just among the country's Muslim community. As for the notion of the "clash of civilisations" or "clash of cultures", without close cooperation with Muslim nations such as Pakistan, the plot to blow up planes over the Atlantic would never have materialised. Indeed, Western intelligence agencies often instigate surveillance of suspicious characters on the grounds of information provided by members of the Muslim communities reporting their suspicions about their co-religionists. Second, Muslim states are often key to uncovering plots by Islamist militants. "Although Pakistani intelligence played a vital role in the arrests, the original tip-offs about the alleged plot is understood to have come from an M15 informant from within the British Muslim community more than a year ago," noted Jamie Doward in The Observer. Both 9/11 and 7/7 have left an indelible mark on the British and American psyches. Still, according to British media reports, the British intelligence agency M15 estimates that up to 400,000 people in Britain are sympathetic to militant streams of political Islam and some 1,200 are actually involved in "terrorist" networks. "There is a lot of scepticism among British Muslims," explained Ibrahim Hewitt, head of London's Al-Aqsa Muslim school. "There is a suspicion that the timing was forced by the Americans upon the British. One senior British police officers hinted at that," Hewitt explained.
