The Muslims are coming! The Muslims are coming! - growth of Muslimphobia

National Review, Nov 19, 1990 by Daniel Pipes

Muslimphobia is growing in the West, fueled more by an influx of brown-skinned taxidrivers and factory workers than by Saddam Hussein. How frightened should we be?

RICHARD CONDON, author of The Manchurian Candidate, recently declared: "Now that the Communists have been put to sleep, we are going to have to invent another terrible threat." This is, of course, complete nonsense. The Communists have hardly been "put to sleep"; they have plenty of punch left in them, especially in the Third World. Further, Americans did not invent the Soviet threat-tanks, ICBMs, and a global ideology made it real enough. And far from needing "another terrible threat" to replace the Soviet Union, we should look to perfecting liberty and free markets here at home. If that's too heady, we ought to be quite happy to go back to watching baseball or saving money for the next vacation.

Condon's strain of thought, which is by now widely held, may stem in large part from the disappointment Americans experienced after World War II. The victory over fascism was supposed to inaugurate a new era, courtesy of the United Nations and modern science. Then Stalin and Mao dashed this euphoria. Reluctant to be fooled a second time, Americans are now preparing themselves for yet another adversary.

And so it is that Americans, and Europeans as well, are turning in increasing numbers to a very traditional bogeyman-the Muslim. Some focus on a single country (in April, four months before the invasion of Kuwait, Newsweek dubbed Saddam Hussein "Public Enemy No. 1"), but most look at the Middle East as a whole, if not the entire Muslim world.

In 1984, Leon Uris explained that his purpose in writing The Haj, a novel, was to warn the West "that we have an enraged bull of a billion people on our planet, and tilted the wrong way they could open the second road to Armageddon." But Muslimphobia took off in 1989, a by-product of the orgy of speculation that accompanied the liberation of Central Europe.

Concerns about a Muslim threat divide into two distinct varieties. One concentrates on Iran, Libya, and the other hostile states, and sees a military force bent on jihad (Islamic righteous war). The other, focusing on migration to the West, fears that Muslim immigrants will subvert Western civilization from within.

The last time Muslims physically threatened Christendom (a term increasingly coming back into vogue) was in 1683, when Ottoman soldiers camped outside the walls of Vienna. The memory of this event has been revived. Thus, William S. Lind (who once served as an advisor to Gary Hart) worries that "the implication of a Soviet collapse . . . might be that Muslim armies would again be besieging the gates of Vienna."

Peter Jenkins, a leading British commentator, concurs, seeing today's problem in the light of a conflict going back six and a half centuries: "Keeping Islam at bay was Europe's preoccupation from 1354, when Gallipoli fell, until the last occasion on which the Turks stood at the gates of Vienna, in 1683. It is once more a preoccupation in the face of the Islamic Revolution."

Editorial writers at London's Sunday Times found that the concept of containment still holds:

Far from representing the eccentric thoughts of a few commentators, such fears appear to touch a nerve deep in the Western psyche. To cite one piece of survey research, a poll conducted in mid 1989 asked French citizens, "Which of the following countries appear to you today to be the most threatening to France?" In response, 25 per cent said Iran, 21 per cent the USSR, and 14 per cent the Arab countries in general. More than half the respondents-57 per cent to be exact-believed that one or more of the Muslim states are most threatening to France. Similar opinions can be found in the other countries of Western Europe.

Some Muslims, the fundamentalists, encourage these fears. For one, they declare that the great conflict of this age is not between capitalism and Communism, but between the West and Islam. The fundamentalists boast that they will win this battle. Editorialists at Jomhuri-ye Islami, a Teheran daily, put it baldly earlier this year: "Westerners have correctly understood that the world movement of Islam is the biggest threat to the 'corrupt Western empire."' Ali Akbar Mohtashemi, the leading ideologue in the Iranian leadership, frequently makes this point: "The world in the future will have several powerful blocs.... Ultimately Islam will become the supreme power." From Morocco to Indonesia, Muslims of a fundamentalist disposition share this outlook.

Responding to Jihad

HOW SHOULD the West respond? Some say the key is building cooperation among Western states. On the mundane level, industrial democracies should band together and preserve the liberal traditions of freedom of speech, freedom of religion, and the like; and they should cooperate against terrorism and other acts of violence. NATO should be extended outside of the European theater. SDI should be developed for use against Iraqi or Libyan missiles.