Global Intifada

Perhaps the greatest obstacle to the full fledged Islamization of the Muslim world is foreign intervention and interference by the U.S. government through an intricate system of control and checks. Some of this control is exhibited through “hard power” and at other times, through “soft power.”

“Hard power” involves the use of military force (usually in violation of international law such as the war on Iraq), covert funding of organizations to oppose Islamist regimes (some of these organizations are actually classified as “terrorist” organizations by the State Department, such as Mujahideen e Khalq) such as CIA support for the Ethiopian invasion of Somalia to oust the ICU (also in violation of international law), and to giving the opponents of Islamism greater media coverage and portraying them as victims (many of them being apostates).

Unfortunately, many Muslims are under the naive and mistaken assumption that Western hegemony (now being led by America) has to do with a superior epistemological framework (the scientific method), moral-legal construction (human rights and democracy), or economic system (capitalism). All of these assumptions are incorrect. Western historians and academians themselves are beginning to concede that the rise of Western civilization had less to do with its intellectual, scientific, and technological powers and more to do with the use of warfare to pursue its objectives. Thus, it should come to no surprise that America is using such tactics throughout the world to pursue its agenda of world domination, in stark contradiction to all of the universal humanistic values it hypocritically propagates. A careful scrutiny of American and Western history will make these conclusions virtually self-evident and, if necessary, I can provide the documentation to back up these assertions.

The second manner in which America maintains global domination is through “soft power”, the use of various social, economic, and intellectual institutions and processes. This is nothing new, after all, since colonialism itself has always required such aspects. Frantz Fanon has written extensively of how the only way that colonizers are able to subjugate the colonized is by first relegating them to the status of ‘inhuman’ by over-exaggerating the “humaneness” and therefore, the superiority, of the colonizer. The colonizer is “rational” whereas the colonized is “irrational”, the colonizer is “civilized” while the colonized is “barbaric”, the colonizer is “scientific” while the colonized is “medieval, superstitious, or religious.” The colonizer constructs a distorted image of himself and the colonized in order to justify their subjugation.

Today, the market has created the physical hardware necessary to propagate a distorted, essentially Eurocentric or Americo-centric view. In order to understand how America uses its soft power to influence world opinion and coerce foreign populations to cooperate with its power scheme, one must understand how soft power operates.

The following excerpts are from, “The Choice” by Zbigniew Brzezinski (the mastermind of the American strategy to fight the Soviet Union in Afghanistan

• • “The sheer scale of American cultural predominance has neither a peer nor any historical precedent. Nor is there any rival on the horizon. If anything, America’s cultural domination is intensifying as the world increasingly urbanizes, as mankind becomes more interwoven and interactive, and as the more traditional and largely rural segments of the world shrink and become more permeable. That is as true of Lagos as of Shanghai.” (p 182)
  • “US movies account for nearly 80% of the film industry’s worldwide income. (p 183)
  • “70% of all websites originate in the US and English is the most widely used language of communication for both play and work (96% of all e-commerce web sites are in English (p 183)
  • “The growth of foreign student enrollment in the United States has been enormous. In the 1954-55 academic year, the total number of foreign students in American colleges was 34,232 (or 1.4 percent of total U.S. enrollment). IN 1964-65, it was 82,045 (1.5 percent); in 1974-75, 154,580 (1.5 percent); in 1984-85, 343,113 (2.7 percent); in 1994-95, 452,653 (3.3 percent); and by 2001-02 it had climbed to 582,996 (4.3 percent). The largest numbers came from India and China, with over 60,000 originating from each in the year 2001-02. With Europe and Japan collectively accounting for under 130,000 of the grand total, it is evident that America is a major training ground for the future leaders of Asia, the Middle East, Africa, and Latin America.” (p 185-186)

These cultural and economic institutions and processes supplement America’s physical and military domination of world affairs. The colonized, whether he realizes it or not, is indoctrinated through a variety of means (some of them lifted above) into accepting many of the fundamental assumptions that justify hegemony. By studying in American institutions, using the American-dominated corporate media, or simply going on the internet, the colonized is embedded in an environment that by its very nature imposes a conceptual model that alters reality and fundamentally distorts the image of the colonizer and the colonized. Many of those leaders who become incorporated into this global system of hegemony as elected or unelected leaders were first educated in Western institutions. Instead of challenging the relationship between American media and the political-military establishment, the colonized simply accepts the presentation of cultural narratives as fact or, alternatively, develops bizarre conspiracy theories with no empirical evidence to substantiate them.

Muslims, and the colonized in general, must engage in a thorough deconstruction of this entire system of control and create a conceptual framework of how such hegemony functions. It is only by understanding how the colonizer controls and subdues the colonized, whether through hard or soft power, that the colonized can develop the intellectual tools that are required for political, economic, and military independence.

Lastly, on an optimistic note, once American hegemony collapses, there will simply be no other state powerful enough to stop the full-fledged Islamization of the Muslim world.

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