Peter Wilby, tidligere redaktør av New Statesman, forklarer og forstår hvorfor unge muslimer gjør seg selv til våpen i våre byer. Han er et kroneksempel på de som er overbevist om at vi angripes for det vi gjør, ikke hvem vi er.
Vi lever i et demokrati, derfor der vi ansvarlig for våre ledere. Hvis Irak-krigen er forklaringen, er det vårt ansvar å avslutte den, skriver Wilby.
Men først må han forstå og akseptere forestillingen om at Vesten fører krig mot islam og muslimene og har gjort det de siste 100 år!
A section of the Islamic world believes the west is waging war on it, that this war has intensified with the invasion and occupation of Afghanistan and Iraq, and that it could intensify further with an invasion of Iran. It’s no use saying the 2001 attack preceded those invasions. As far as many Muslims are concerned, it went on for most of the 20th century. Arabs were expelled from Israel in the 1940s; Israel occupied the West Bank from 1967; the first Gulf war took place in 1991 and, to Bin Laden’s rage, led to US troops polluting sacred Saudi soil. The US has propped up corrupt, secular, pro-western tyrannies throughout the Islamic world - and then blamed and even bombed Muslims for their failure to embrace democracy.
Nor is it any use saying that neither Bin Laden nor the bombers are poor and oppressed and that they don’t care about Palestinians. The leaders of the Russian revolution weren’t poor and they despised the peasants. But their ideas would have had no traction without the miseries inflicted on Russians under the tsars, and nor would Bin Laden’s without the humiliations visited on Islamic countries, and the poverty that re2_kommentars endemic. A climate has been created in which a minority of Muslims, some living in the west but feeling detached from western society, believe there’s a war going on.
How do you prosecute a war against the US and Britain? Muslims fight us on their own soil, but why should they not carry the fight to our homelands as we carry it to theirs?
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Most importantly, Muslim warriors may think, bombing western civilians gets results: the things that make it horrible to us make it more effective in their eyes (shock and awe, perhaps) and if there are enough such outrages, we will demand a retreat from Iraq. They may be wrong on this. But it is the price we pay for living in a democracy: theoretically, we are in charge so we are frontline targets.
Wilby er eks-redaktør. Etter 911 skrev han at Bush hadde seg selv å takke. Mange reagerte. Siden har mye vann rent i havet. Man skulle tro at en lignende argumentasjon ville vekke avsky blant briter av idag. Men denne tankegangen er utbredt blant de dannede lag. Det er den totale mangel på motforestillinger som gjør artikkelen logisk og destruktiv på samme tid. Det er destruksjonens logikk han gjør seg til talsmann for.
The responsibility we share for Islamist shock and awe
PS: Men hvorfor gå over bekken etter vann? Norske aviser er fulle av denne tankegangen, i sterkere eller mildere grad. Fra Aftenposten til Dagbladet. Første impuls er å tie dem ihjel. Mye er hjelpeløst skrevet. Men det er kanskje feil, når det sprøytes ut i alle kanaler.
