Seven Events That Made America America (29 page)

Lost in the stream of analysis was the larger issue, which, at the time, all but the Syrians had ignored. The biggest menace was that of a rising Islamic fundamentalism that threatened some of the most oppressive Muslim dictatorships in the region, not to mention Israel and the United States. Jihad was not “business as usual,” not just routine violence in the Middle East. A profound reordering of much of Islamic society had occurred since the Second World War, much of it of course related to the founding of Israel. But that was only an excuse, the rowdy drunk in the bar obscuring a room full of inebriates. At a much deeper level, the stunningly rapid expansion in prosperity in the West and parts of Japan had, literally, left the Muslim states in the dirt. A few nations, such as Saudi Arabia, had vast oil wealth dispersed among a handful of families. Other Islamic countries—Egypt, Yemen, Morocco, Algeria, and Syria, all of which lacked substantial oil reserves—received second-class treatment from their Muslim brothers. Those nations remained pitifully backward. Western prosperity encompassed Israel, which in a matter of years had built resorts and farms on land the Arabs had left barren for centuries.

Israel provided a convenient scapegoat for these states and their virtual dictators. Government schools propagandized against the Jews relentlessly. Nonie Darwish, an Egyptian whose father was killed supervising Gaza, recalled of her education, “The hatred of Israel and our obligation to pursue jihad was somehow worked into every subject we discussed in school. In fact, clearly, the main goal of our education was to instill a commitment to destroy Israel.”
⁴³
Jews were “portrayed as devils, pigs, and an evil, occupying force.”
⁴⁴
The foundation of Israel, however, only focused Muslim anger—it didn’t create it. Instead, a new brand of fundamentalist Islam had arisen since World War II, lodged primarily in the Wahhabi teachings, but also in the Shiite school of thought. Politically, hatred of the West was funneled into the Muslim Brotherhood, the forerunner of al-Qaeda, founded by Sayyid al-Qutb. Ironically, it was not the founding of Israel that kicked al-Qutb over the railings into radicalism, but his visit to the United States in 1948, specifically, his time as a college student at the Colorado State College of Education (now Northern Colorado University) in Greeley. There, this middle-class former Egyptian bureaucrat (again disproving the maxim that terrorists are pushed into their activities because of privation and lack of education) and lover of Hollywood films confronted sexual liberation such as he had never seen in his native country. The “main enemy of salvation,” he later intoned, was sex. Sexual “mixing led inevitably to perversion.”
⁴⁵
By the time he boarded a boat bound for Egypt in 1950, al-Qutb was a full-blown radical and bigot, obsessed with “the white man in Europe or America” who was “our number-one enemy.”
⁴⁶
Nor were Muslims who rejected jihad to be spared. A “Muslim community” did not exist, only an Islamic revival that would sweep the world, beginning with his home country. Promptly, then, he was arrested, tried, and finally executed by the Egyptian government.

Islamic radicalism had already spread, not only through the Muslim Brotherhood, but also through the mosques, where the themes of Jew-hatred and vengeance against the West figured prominently in sermons. Al-Qutb’s mantle passed to another Egyptian, Ayman al-Zawahiri, a Cairo surgeon, radicalized since age fifteen, who opposed Anwar Sadat and called for the defeat of the Jewish and American devils. He was, ironically, innocent of charges that he had participated in the assassination of Sadat (he only learned about the plan a few hours before, and took no direct action), but his time in jail turned him into a “hardened radical whose beliefs had been hammered into brilliant resolve.”
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Relocating to the friendlier confines of Saudi Arabia, he met Mohammed bin Laden, whose construction companies did a great deal of kingdom business, and bin Laden’s son, Osama, who had himself served jail time for his affiliation with the attackers who struck the Grand Mosque in 1979. Despite the fact that the Saudi government had crushed the siege (and subsequently carried out sixty-seven public beheadings in four Saudi cities), the bubbling radicalism inside the kingdom merely simmered while it looked for other, softer targets. It had not been controlled, and certainly had not been stamped out.

Bin Laden fell under the influence of the “warrior priest” Sheikh Abdullah Azzam, whose view of the world typified that of many Islamic radicals—“Jihad and the rifle alone; no negotiations, no conferences, no dialogues.” Seeing the Soviet invasion of Afghanistan as a struggle against infidels, bin Laden offered to purchase an airline ticket, lodging, and expenses for any Arab (including family members) who joined the mujahideen.
⁴⁸
When he joined the holy warriors himself in 1986, he was reunited with Zawahiri, and in 1988 the two formed al-Qaeda (“the Base”). At the time, of course, neither of these malevolent misfits had appeared on the radar screen of any major intelligence service, save perhaps those of Egypt and Saudi Arabia. It’s doubtful that even Israel knew who they were, nor at the time was it apparent they would become such malignant viruses infecting Middle Eastern politics and religion.

Meanwhile, a radicalized strain of Islam that blamed all Muslim problems on Israel, the West, and apostates
was
metastasizing, and it was far more pervasive than all but a handful of Western analysts were willing to admit; the preoccupation (including Reagan’s) with “moderate Muslims” ignored the reality that when it came to Israel, there
were
no moderate Muslims. Bud McFarlane, who at the time supported the Marine mission, later saw clearly how the events in Lebanon tied into radical Islamic views of a “weak” America and noted of the subsequent Iran arms-for-hostages deal that, “there is, in terms of western logic, a very good case that there ought to be moderates in Iran. That is logical. It is not, I think, the reality.”
⁴⁹
Robert B. Oakley, who worked in the State Department’s counterterrorism office during the negotiations with Iran, came to the conclusion even before McFarlane that there were no moderates in Tehran. Nonie Darwish, who grew up in Egypt and who, through her job as an editor and translator for the Middle East News Agency, interacted with Westerners, came to appreciate the hatred and anger into which Muslim children were indoctrinated through their school systems. Yet even some of her friends, including those considered well educated by Western standards, had fully internalized the radical jihadist teachings.

To most Americans, including those in the Reagan administration, radical Islamic fundamentalism still hadn’t registered. In Karen DeYoung’s 640-page biography of Colin Powell, for example, there are only two references to Islamic fundamentalism, and, based on their public comments, it seems that neither Secretary of State George Shultz nor Secretary of Defense Caspar Weinberger thought much about it.
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Navy Secretary John Lehman came the closest of anyone in the administration to identifying Islamic radicalism as a significant threat, but he focused almost entirely on the PLO.
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William Clark was attuned to the issue, but he had just resigned as national security advisor. Congressman Newt Gingrich (R-GA), usually noted as a visionary, impressed White House staffer Ken Duberstein with a speech that warned that neither the American people nor the news media were “intellectually prepared” to deal with the world as it was, and that the media was still “covering Viet Nam and Watergate.”
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Yet even Gingrich failed to mention Islamic fundamentalism. In box after box of correspondence, memos of meetings, and policy debate contained in the Reagan Library, one searches in vain for the words “Islamic,” “Islam,” or “Muslim,” and even when discussions turned to topics such as the
Achille Lauro
or Iranian hostages, they were almost universally defined as “illegal acts,” not “terrorism.”
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One exception occurred in July 1982 when Reagan referred to terrorism in a speech as a “worldwide threat.” But he still did not blame Islamic fundamentalism.
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To reporters at a press luncheon on October 24, 1983, Reagan reaffirmed the Cold War context by tying together Lebanon, KAL 007 (the Korean airliner shot down by the Soviets), and Grenada.
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Why did so many people, including Reagan, misjudge the extent and depth of this Islamic sea change upon them? Why, despite a connect-the-dots history of carnage worthy of a pointillist, did so few of the Western intelligence agencies appreciate its significance? Diplomats downplayed it; traditional Cold Warriors interpreted it as a smaller piece in the global conflict between free and Communist nations; and all but the Israelis treated Islamic terror as a massive case of “Arab boys gone wild.” But there was a track record of blood and horror whose starting point varied depending on whom you asked, and while the creation of Israel was a convenient excuse, the descent into jihad was a long process most visible initially in the rash of airline hijackings.

Probably the first example of a terrorist hijacking occurred in 1968 when an El Al flight was hijacked by militant Palestinians. The same group (Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine) seized other flights, then the group hijacked four airlines simultaneously from different international terminals and landed them at Dawson’s Field in Jordan. Hostages were traded for released prisoners, and the incident prompted President Richard Nixon to introduce the air marshal program in 1970. Two years later, Yasir Arafat’s Fatah organization sent Black September terrorists to take the Israeli Olympic team hostage, killing 11 athletes and coaches before their rampage ended. Another hijacking—one of the most dramatic ever—unfolded in 1976 when Palestinians took Air France Flight 139 and flew it to Entebbe Airport in Uganda, where the terrorists found safe haven under Ugandan thug dictator Idi Amin. Israeli commandos flew to Uganda, assaulted the airport buildings where the hijackers kept the captives, and rescued 105 passengers while killing all the hijackers. But the next year, the Palestinians were at it again, hijacking a German flight that was forced down in Somalia before a similar rescue occurred in which 86 passengers were freed (the pilot died in the rescue), and the hijackers were again eliminated. In the first two years of Reagan’s presidency, more Islamic-related hijackings occurred, including one of a Pakistani jet and another of a Kuwaiti airplane. The severity of this threat was probably obscured by the fact that, between 1970 and 1982, ten other major hijackings took place, each at the hands of a different non-Muslim group and each perpetrated for its own (sometimes incomprehensible) reasons. These included the Aer Lingus hijacker who demanded that the pope release the “third secret of Fatima,” and Garrett Trapnell’s 1972 demand that Richard Nixon release Angela Davis from prison.

Another factor clouding the perceptions of a growing Muslim terrorist threat was the overwhelming early focus on Israel. Bombs went off routinely in crowded markets in Jerusalem and Tel Aviv, but the Western press ignored the incidents. In 1976 alone, five separate bombings and a grenade incident produced a crimson flood in Israel. Palestinians seeking to fire a SAM-7 missile at an El Al plane at Nairobi’s airport were stopped before they could complete their mission. However, many other terrorist incidents worldwide were misreported as non-Islamic-related attacks. These included two hijackings in 1976 alone by the Moro Liberation Front in the Philippines, the “Red Guerilla” bombing near the Iranian consulate in San Francisco, and the assassination of three Rockwell employees in Iran. Nor did the press consider attacks against the Syrian government (which sided with the Lebanese Christians against the PLO) as essentially “Islamic terrorism,” because they happened
to
Muslims.

The murders of Jesuit priests and Dominican nuns in Salisbury, Rhodesia (modern Zimbabwe), by Muslim militia recruiters, and the seizure of the Washington, D.C., city council chambers (a hostage standoff that was finally resolved without bloodshed) raised no red flags among the media. Bombs detonated near the U.S.-owned Parisian Discount Bank in 1978, as well as the announcement by the Palestinian Arab Revolutionary Army that it had spiked exported oranges from Israel with mercury a month later, failed to persuade anyone of a large-scale movement. Even in Latin America, where terrorists who bombed the Bogotá hotel office of Lufthansa Airlines invoked the name of Andreas Baader (a pro-Palestinian leader of the Baader-Meinhof gang), no one seemed to link the Islamic killers to a larger worldwide movement. Bombs went off virtually every sixty days in Turkey at some American office or installation, and gunfire into the U.S. consulates in Turkey occurred routinely. Moderates, such as Ali Yassin of Kuwait, or Youssef el Sebai, the former Egyptian cultural minister and editor of
Al Ahram
, were assassinated in 1978. The following year saw more hijackings, more bombings in Israel, ambushes of U.S. military personnel in Iran, the bombing of the Cairo Sheraton, the kidnapping and murder of U.S. ambassador Adolph Dubs in Kabul, Afghanistan, multiple bombings in Turkey and France, plus a bombing each in Cyprus and Vienna. Still more incidents were prevented: a grenade attack in Belgium on Israeli passengers was thwarted by Belgian police, and Berlin police stopped seven Lebanese Muslims from blowing up the city’s largest fuel depot.

Collectively, this murderous track record—only a tiny sampling of Islamic terrorism in the 1960s and 1970s—was largely dismissed as the work of “a few individuals,” of groups that didn’t represent mainstream Islamic thinking. Academics and terror experts said most Muslims were not radicalized, and were not violent. To say that most did not take up the AK-47, however, was quite different from understanding the underlying religious culture that justified those who did. And the very moderates whom the West reflexively cited found themselves at the end of smoking gun barrels. Even if
jihad
had at one time only meant “self-struggle,” as some Islamic apologists claimed, the definition was juiced between 1960 and 1980 to mean almost exclusively struggle against Israel and her allies. Along with the more militant redefinition of jihad came geopolitical shifts that repeatedly demonstrated the powerlessness of the Muslim states. Israel won war after war; the Saudis, Iranians, Kuwaitis, and Iraqis had their oil, but that seemed to gain them little. If anything, the discovery of oil in the Middle East only confirmed the weakness of the Muslim nations, which relied entirely on the petroleum processing science and technology of the West. Armies of Western workers arrived to do what the Saudis and Iranians could not do, extract the wealth from their own lands. Little had changed from the time the Suez Canal was built—conceived by French engineers, necessitated by Western commerce, funded and protected by British bankers and armies, and driven by the irrepressible Ferdinand de Lesseps.