The Enemy At Home Read Online Free PDF Page B

killed a handful of marines in Mogadishu in 1993, the Clinton administration withdrew American troops from Somalia. When Al Qaeda orchestrated the bombings of the American embassies in East Africa in 1998 and the attack on the USS
Cole
in 2000, President Clinton responded with desultory counterstrikes that did little harm to Al Qaeda. These American actions, bin Laden has confessed, emboldened him to strike directly at America on September 11, 2001.
    Now that America is fighting back, seeking to uproot the terrorists and transform the political landscape in the Middle East, the left is fighting hard to prevent that campaign from succeeding. It does so not simply by resisting at every stage whatever actions are proposed and implemented to win the war, but, just as important, by unceasingly fueling the hatred of American foreign policy among Muslims. It is a common belief among Muslims, for example, that the main reason America consistently sides with Israel is that Americans hate Muslims. A Muslim lawyer I interviewed in Tunis puts the matter this way: “I keep hearing,” he says, “that countries base their foreign policy on self-interest. The self-interest of America is in obtaining access to oil, and we are the ones who have all the oil. The Israelis don’t have any oil. So why is America always on the side of Israel and against the Muslims? Please don’t tell me it’s because Israel is America’s only friend in the Middle East. After all, Israel is one of the main reasons why so many Muslims are America’s enemy. So I am forced to conclude that there is only one reason why America acts against its self-interest and backs Israel. The reason is that Americans hate Muslims. America is violently opposed to Islam. So the Christians are making allies with the Jews to get rid of Islam.”
    This is a relatively articulate expression of one of the central themes of fundamentalist propaganda. The argument is that America is a bigoted nation that wants to take over Muslim countries and steal their oil. In reality this claim is absurd. Americans do not hate Muslims, and America does not want to occupy the Muslim world or seize its natural resources. America supports Israel for complex reasons of history, common ideology, and the domestic political influence of Jewish Americans. So this Islamic perception of American foreign policy is utterly wrong. But it is routinely confirmed by the American left. The writings of leading leftists affirm that, yes, America is a racist power that wants to conquer and plunder non-Western peoples. Political scientist Anne Norton writes that anti-Muslim bigotry is now “the unacknowledged cornerstone of American foreign policy.” Legal scholar Mari Matsuda insists that “the history of hating Arabs as a race runs strong in the United States,” where Arabs are “reviled even more than blacks.” Rashid Khalidi contends that America’s actions are based on “wildly inaccurate and often racist stereotypes about Arabs, Islam, and the Middle East.” Writing in the Egyptian newspaper
Al-Ahram,
Edward Said claims that “for decades in America there has been a cultural war against the Arabs and Islam” and that America’s Middle East policy is based on blind hatred for stereotypical “sheikhs and camel jockeys.” 19 By confirming Muslims in their worst prejudices, the American left has strengthened their conviction that America is evil and deserves to be destroyed.
    To repeat—because this is a point on which I do not wish to be misunderstood—I am in no sense suggesting that the left is disloyal to America. To say this is to confuse the success of the Bush administration, or even of American foreign policy, with the interest of the country as a whole. As we saw earlier with Senator Byrd, the left has its own view of what’s good for America, and it is fiercely loyal to that ideal. So disloyalty is not the issue. The issue is why the left is so passive, reluctant, and even oppositional in