Why do Americans hate Muslims?

[eynon81]

War seems to be the biggest contributor to radicalization; 6 Day War got the Muslim Brotherhood rolling. Soviet Invasion of Afghanistan gave us Al Queda. US invasion of Iraq gave us ISIS. etc.

[Ben Huh]

The Middle East creates a cycle of bad situations for the United States, both a result of our direct actions and others. Many radicals dislike us because we constantly bomb their nations, but unfortunately they live in Syria or Iraq or other places where at times force from western nations may have been necessary. It's a pretty shitty catch 22 when it comes to foreign policy. Do we let despots gain more influence or territory in the region, which hurts our interests, or do we drone the shit out of them to halt their ambitions, leaving everyday Arabs caught in the crossfire? I think introducing more hard line conversations in regards to our relationship with teh Saudis is a good start. As much as am down on Iran in this thread, Saudi Arabia takes the prize for being the most despicable nation in the region. The fact that all of our modern presidents have kissed their asses doesn't help our standing with potential extremists.

[exploited]

[exploited]

To sum it up: we can't make it better, but we have and certainly can make it worse.

[Ben Huh]

[broken robot]

[The Comrade]

why would they have needed anti-colonial movements though? the middle east was colonized for less than 30 years. they weren't under the thumb of europeans long enough to alter the structure of society in a way that would be difficult to undo. and as i've mentioned earlier, the colonialism of the middle east had little to no effect on the majority of people living there given the lack of urbanization in the early 20th century. and how does this explain areas like afghanistan? or turkey for that matter. what's the reason that the most western, democratic, and economically equal muslim state is becoming islamist?

broadening this discussion now to refer to islam outside of just the middle east, how does this explain the rapid radicalization of muslim youth in the west? why are bosnians and albanians beginning to see their youth run to ISIS?

or look at boko haram. or al shabab. or the janjaweed militias of sudan. or any of these groups. they all rose up in africa well after colonialism. then you have the problems in east asia with malaysia and indonesia and the philippines.

if you want to say it's colonialism, a lack of decolonization, cold war proxy wars, poverty, and an ineffective outlet for liberal voices, that's totally reasonable. but there's no connection with all the other countries that have gone through that. ethiopia, for example, is an egregious example of cold-war puppetry, poverty, conservatism, and 20th century colonialism. why is there not rampant orthodox militancy? why does chile and argentina and uruguay not have rampant catholic extremism and terrorism?

the only linking factor to the regions previously mentioned is islam. even in areas like albania and bosnia, which strove to put nationalism above islam and reformed the religion, are beginning to see problems with it. and it's because as a system it endorses violence and extremism. and this isn't new to the religion, it's just not accepted any longer. just look at what happened when islam was first introduced in to west africa. the region became awash in caliphates declaring jihad on each other over who was the most muslim, who had unbelievers, etc etc. the region was a nightmare until sokoto temporarily stabilized it again. the same happened in east africa. everywhere it spread, it spread by violence, because the koran explicitly endorses this behavior. it was founded on violence, spread by violence, survived by violence. why is it surprising that it's systemically violent today?

[broken robot]

Let's break this down a bit because otherwise we're conflating too many different tendencies and organizations:

1) Anti-colonial movements (or lack thereof) in the Middle East--First when I make this distinction, I agree with you M-E wasn't officially under Western colonialism for long. For whatever historical reasons, the Ottoman Empire was predominant in the region, so when the West did in fact intervene, it was paradoxically supporting the incipient indigenous rebellions against the Ottomans. At the same time, while the West subsequently imposed a structure of political economic dependency, there was never any mass movement against Western colonialism as such. The latter formed the basis for democratic legitimacy in many other postcolonial countries.

2) Transnational terrorist networks--Now this one again I'm going to offer a somewhat counterintuitive explanation. I think the reason disaffected Muslim youth in Western countries are receptive to these movements is because they have been racialized and excluded in the West AND they are seeking some other way of making connections between struggles. Islamist terrorism is a good candidate in this regard because it offers a global imaginary of revolution; it's basically the modern equivalent of Western youth wanting to join anticolonial and communist movements during the 1960s.

3) Postcolonial conflicts in Africa--Again, I think this could be articulated more along the lines of intergenerational conflict between traditional authorities and tribal leaders, and youth who have been excluded from jobs and government service opportunities. It's just a guess. Also in Africa there's a large contingent of the "lumpenproletariat" in slums that are attracted to new evangelizing movements, whether Muslim or Christian (Pentecostal). I think again it reflects the frustrations and anxieties of their experiences.

4) Postcolonial conflicts in Southeast Asia--We're really stomping outside what I know, but briefly, based on my theoretical assumptions (as opposed to actual knowledge of what is going on), I'd propose these are probably the product of ethnic and indigenous conflicts. These include battles between the government at the center and the periphery, such as the Islamic rebellion in southern Thailand. They probably are, as with most postcolonial conflicts, based on a sense of exclusion.

Now, you also bring in examples from non-Muslim countries to ask why they aren't committing acts of religious terrorism. 1) they actually might have been doing so (Cristero War in Mexico, for example), 2) conflict might be articulated along different ideological and political lines, but it's still based on extreme violence. In Peru for example, the Left/Right conflict spawned the absolutely vicious Sendero Luminoso. In Ethiopia, you had Mengistu's Red Terror. So it's just wrong to assume that Islam is the cause of violence in unstable postcolonial societies, when there are clearly so many other examples of conflict that is equally brutal, but may be seen as say battle between the Left and Right. "Islam" can't be the independent variable to explain violence across these cases.

Finally, you also bring up the case of past Muslim Empires. Now again, seeing as how neither of us are scholars in these areas, I'd say we're really better off admitting our ignorance and moving on. If you want to continue the conversation in this direction though, I can offer my own theoretical guesses, as opposed to ones based on more direct disciplinary knowledge of an area. First of all, while there may very well have been campaigns of "Islamic conquest" eventually whatever groups of migrants or warriors eventually settled down and started building polities. They recognized they had to work by gaining at least the implicit consent of the local population.

In India for example, the Mughals inter-married with Hindu Rajputs, and in fact relied on the latter as their source of nobles. They patronized temples, and welcomed other religions in the court (Akbar's being the most famous example). So if we're going to talk about "Islamic rule," we can't just focus on the most brutally violent or excessive features. Rather we have to examine the mercantile, administrative, etc. aspects that governed everyday life. Whether any of this can be said to be the product of a universalizing ideology of Islamic conquest, however, is dubious at best, given that these polities were integrated with local power holders in their respective regions and often expressed the state making dynamics of those places.

To try and tie this all together, basically the reason we now see "Islam" as the connecting term in all these conflicts is because in the absence of the Cold War, we need a new way of organizing and understanding the world (again, my original post in this thread). This is combined with the West's latent orientalist belief that politics in other places is driven by religion, ethnicity and culture as opposed to class, urbanization, or any of the other sociological phenomena typically attributed to Western societies. At the same time such explanation is basically the same as vulgar Marxism, which reduces political conflict to economics, in that both schemes rely on a monocausal explanation. At least in the case of Marxism though you know they want "global communist revolution." No clue what anti-Islam advocates actually want, other than to promote scary immigration policies, increase surveillance, or continue subordinating rest of the world to US Empire.

Practically speaking, the only way out of this, based on our perspective coming from the Western societies, is to promote demilitarization and actual democratization in the Middle East in a principled fashion. It won't happen of course, given the fact that when actual democratic revolts happen, as in Bahrain, we selectively ignore some and promote others based on cynical geopolitical calculations. But one can hope. One can also hope that over time there will eventually be another way of dividing up the world that doesn't rely on culturally essentialist notions of competing civilizations. Maybe for example the chaotic protests happening elsewhere, in places such as Brazil and Turkey, will be the precursor to a democratic invigoration in a politically decayed West wracked by financial crisis. It might already be happening in Greece, for example, and the inspiration they draw from the Arab Spring.

[The Comrade]

[broken robot]