On May 1, Foreign Policy magazine published a piece by Yair Shamir with the headline “Our Shared Islamist Enemy: From Boston to Israel, radicals are attempting to destroy Western culture.”
Shamir’s piece endeavors to draw baseless parallels between the Boston Marathon bombings and the resistance of Palestinians against the Israeli occupation, what he inaccurately portrays as an “aggressive and offensive jihad, unconnected to any particular conflict or borders, which conjoins Islamist terror groups around the world.” His unabashedly Zionist agenda rears its head through this opportunistic attempt to play into the media circus surrounding the Boston bombings.
His ludicrous argument essentially states that the problem is not Hamas or Al Qaeda, the problem is not Osama Bin Laden or Dzokhar Tsarnaev: the problem is Islam.
Unfortunately, the Boston bombings have given virulent propagandists and Islamophobes a field day. While various pundits and media personalities jumped to the Tsarnaev brothers’ religious identities as the singular motive for their alleged acts of violence, they focused on them as individuals, and how their thought processes could have been perverted by purported religious radicalization. What makes Shamir’s contention particularly disturbing is his sweeping generalization that all groups and individuals affiliated with Islam, from Hamas to the Muslim Brotherhood, to the Tsarnaevs and Sayyid Qutb, all had a particular end in mind—the obliteration of Western culture.
Shamir attempts to disengage all incidents of violence from the influences of time period, geography, culture, national interest and socioeconomic disparities. To Shamir, it doesn’t matter if you’ve been battered, beaten, occupied, oppressed, starved, shot or colonized—your only purpose for resistance or violence, which are the same to Shamir, is Islam. Whether you are acting alone or as part of a group, whether you seek to harm or kill civilians, or occupying soldiers, in Shamir’s world, your goal is the same: to eliminate the West.
Glossing over more than 60 years of military occupation in the case of Palestine, an issue that Shamir convolutedly connects to the Boston bombings only with the tenuous thread of religious commonality, he asserts, “There is little that is reactive about this belief system – it is not aimed at defending its rights, but at conquering the world of the disbelievers.”
When did the Palestinian-Israeli conflict become about conquering disbelievers? Even opponents of Palestinian self-determination would at least agree that Palestinians believe they are defending their rights, whether or not they believe they should be afforded those rights or not.
Shamir’s unfounded argument glaringly displays his belief in the dichotomy between East and West, the incompatibility of Islam with modernity and an apocalyptic foreshadowing of the clash of civilizations, àla Samuel Huntington.
“In the West, we can understand a person who fights with every breath against tyranny and oppression. We were raised on the heroic struggles against Nazi Germany and Soviet Russia. However, we cannot understand someone whose goal is to maim and murder innocents in the name of their religion,” Shamir says.
Apparently, Shamir does not understand that Palestinians, as well as others who have resisted in the name of attaining freedom from an occupying force, fight not to main and murder in the name of religion, but to achieve independence from an occupying force, such as Israel. And individuals who murder and maim independent of any terrorist group act as themselves, and numerous factors contribute to such heinous actions.
Shamir says that we cannot explain away and rationalize acts of violence committed by Muslims because “we in the West” simply cannot comprehend such a mindset. Yet he places Israel, a nation in the East, among the West. He conveniently repositions and aligns Israel with the West, yet he is not able to rationalize the fact that maybe, just maybe, all Muslims who commit acts of violence are not acting because of an inherent hatred of Western culture.
Shamir cannot rationalize, but he sure can generalize.
A repudiation of Western culture is not at the heart of all acts of violence by Muslims. To explain them as such is to ignore the underlying causes, whether they are at the societal or individual levels.
Fortunately, Shamir digs his own grave by the end of the piece. While condemning Muslims and Islam throughout the duration of his article as intrinsically belligerent and fundamentally inclined toward the annihilation of the West, he employs the same rhetoric he denounces Muslims for using.
“If we in the West wish to stand in the way of this malevolent terror, we must first understand its vision, its true nature, and its goals. Only then can it be conquered.”
I think Shamir let us all know who wants to conquer whom.
Who would respect Palestinians if they did not resist their ethnic cleansing by Israel?
Of course Shamir, an israeli politician and son to the terror leader Yitzhak Shamir, will try to frame that americans and israel share the same enemy.
The Islamophobes are also making hay with the numbers here: http://www.fbi.gov/wanted/wanted_terrorists/@-@wanted-group-listing
There’s way too much ‘Israel’ connected to the Boston bombing to feel comfortable, sit back and let it all be.
Israeli Doctors Are Treating Boston Bombing Suspect … , because all those US docs having spent time in the ToO in Iraq and Afghanistan patching up GIs don’t know JS about the horrors of war.
Israel Hi-Tech Firm Helped Capture Boston Bomber Terrorists.
Israeli police head to US to aid in Boston Marathon bombing investigation.
Personal:
A long, long time ago I was involved in a motorcycle accident in which a friend of mine lost his [right] leg [above the knee]. When I saw certain pictures/videos of the aftermath of the Boston bombing, I couldn’t believe my eyes [LINK], because I’ll never forget the amount of blood I was drenched in or the spooky whiteness of my buddy’s face. Later I was told that if I hadn’t done what I did do, my friend would’ve been dead [bled out] in a minute or so.
I’ll never know why I survived that crash without as much as a scratch [but that has nothing to do with the topic at hand]. Nevertheless, blood is this dark-red liquid, no matter where it is spelt.
‘There exist people who would stop at nothing in order to make Islam the sole and universal religion’ – probably a true proposition. ‘There exist people who would like to make Islam part of, rather than a force antagonistic towards, Western culture’ – probably true also, and probably true of a great many more people. How to make fewer enemies and more friends? Step one would be to eliminate any idea that we will never treat people justly if they are Muslims and the basic means to that is to end those activities that make injustice towards Muslims systematic on our side. Step zero would be restrain ourselves when tempted to indulge in hate propaganda.