Western thinkers must begin to recognize the difference between Islamism and Islam, or we are headed toward an ideologically defined battle with one quarter of humanity.

That’s the entire point of Newsweek’s Is It Islamic or Islamist?

I’ll add “jihad” and “Jihadism” to the mix. The political or social philosophies of Islamism and Jihadism (note my use of -ism and capitalization) are different from the religion of Islam and the concept of jihad. It’s comparable to equating Judaism and Zionism, with the added disadvantage that we are essentially using the same word for two different concepts.

So stop it.

In a very rare moment of candor for this rank war-loving propagandist, he announced very clearly the real purpose of the war, only for him to now turn around and accuse Muslims of being blind and hateful because they heard his message loud and clear, and because they don’t express enough gratitude for all the gracious Freedom Bombs we’ve dropped — and continue to drop — on their homes, their villages, their families, their children and their society.

Friedman’s column America vs. The Narrative left me with a sense of incredulity. In it, he writes:

Yes, after two decades in which U.S. foreign policy has been largely dedicated to rescuing Muslims or trying to help free them from tyranny — in Bosnia, Darfur, Kuwait, Somalia, Lebanon, Kurdistan, post-earthquake Pakistan, post-tsunami Indonesia, Iraq and Afghanistan — a narrative that says America is dedicated to keeping Muslims down is thriving.

This is a gross simplification when it’s not an outright lie. Let’s review.

Clinton’s stated rationale for NATO action in Bosnia was to keep southern Europe from exploding into a regional war, not “rescuing Muslims.”

Sure we rescued Muslims in Kuwait. But the United States and Europe got much of its oil from Kuwait at the time. An Iraqi-controlled Kuwait would have been disastrous for the global oil supply, and put too much oil in Saddam Hussein’s hands.

Darfur? Really? Our government has done little more than send supplies to Darfur. Our efforts have been fairly half-assed.

Lebanon? Well the United States vetoed UN Security Council motions that censured Israel for its 1982 invasion of Lebanon (which was an effort to stamp out the Palestinian Liberation Organization). At the time, Lebanon’s 40% Christian minority held the bulk of the country’s power. Yes, our involvement in Lebanon was totally about “rescuing Muslims.”

We also did not invade Afghanistan to “rescue Muslims” from the Taliban. We toppled the Taliban because they had <sarcasm>total control</sarcasm> of an impoverished, rural, mountainous, hard-to-navigate country with almost no infrastructure and were sheltering al-Qaeda.

According to the Bush administration, we invaded Iraq because of an imminent, existential threat to the United States posed by Weapons of Mass Destruction. Again, it was not about “rescuing Muslims.”

And while Somalia was arguably a humanitarian intervention, the conflict itself had roots in U.S. and Soviet Union Cold War power grabs.

Yet even with a well-documented, easily-Googled history of reasons that have nothing to do with our big ol’ American hearts, Friedman insists that not only did we do awesome things, but that we did these things for Muslims’ own good. I will call Friedman’s assertion the Benevolent Bomb Dropper Narrative.

Don’t misunderstand, I agree with Friedman that there is no ‘American-Crusader-Zionist conspiracy’ to keep Muslims down. U.S. foreign policy is pro-control-of-money-land-and-resources, not anti-Muslim. But there is a degree of truth contained within it.

The Narrative is not merely a “cocktail of half-truths, propaganda and outright lies” that were “concocted” by jihadists to obscure “our million acts of kindness.” It’s a very real, understandable, and arguably justifiable response to about a century’s worth of European and American colonialism, capitalism, and military occupation. I’ll point you to “Think Again: God” by Karen Armstrong in the November/December 2009 issue of Foreign Policy and this quote:

Even the actions of so-called jihadists have been inspired by politics, not God. In a study of suicide attacks between 1980 and 2004, American scholar Robert Pape concluded that 95 percent were motivated by a clear strategic objective: to force modern democracies to withdraw from territory the assailants regard as their national homeland.

In other words, The Narrative isn’t as crazy as Mr. Friedman thinks it is, Maj. Nidal Malik Hasan not withstanding.

I will close with this quote from Stephen M. Walt‘s blog post Why They Hate Us (I): Lessons from Civil War Reconstruction:

Military occupation generates resistance because it is humiliating, disruptive, arbitrary and sometimes terrifying to its objects, even when the occupying power is acting from more-or-less benevolent motives. If you’ve ever been caught in a speed trap by a rude or abusive policeman (I have), or selected out for special attention crossing a border (ditto), you have a mild sense of what this is like. You are at the mercy of the person in charge, who is inevitably well-armed and can do pretty much whatever he (or she) wants. Any sign of protest will only make things go badly — and in some situations will get you arrested, beaten, or worse — so you choke down your anger and just put up with it. Now imagine that this is occurring after you’ve waited for hours at some internal checkpoint, that none of the occupiers speak your language, and that it is like this every single day. And occasionally the occupying power kills innocent people by mistake, engages in other forms of indiscriminate force, and does so with scant regard for local customs and sensibilities. Maintain this situation long enough, and some members of the local population will start looking for ways to strike back. Some of them may even decide to strap on explosive vests or get behind the wheel of a explosives-laden truck, and sacrifice themselves.

Is it really that hard of a concept to grasp?

Also see:

• The al-Qaeda-Taliban Nexus from the Council on Foreign Relations
• The Tajik Solution: A Model for Fixing Afghanistan from Foreign Affaris

It was the most successful form of colonialism: the colonized mind identified completely with the colonizer. The Javanese had held out for centuries, but finally they had lost. Their idea of there being many paths to God, none better than the other, had broken under the weight of the orthodox Arab injunction about the one true faith. The Javanese now skulked like criminals where their president had meditated just twenty years earlier.

Indonesian native Sadanand Dhume on the rise of an Arab-looking — rather than a localized, Indonesian-looking form of Islam — that has taken root in the country in the last 30 or so years. From this month’s Guernica piece, The Colonized Mind.

On a slightly related note: is it useful to think about jihadism and Islamism and the rhetoric from them as a form of global, anti-neo-colonialist liberation theology rather than a literal call to arms?

Also: Check out Irshad Manji’s book The Trouble with Islam Today: A Muslim’s Call for Reform in Her Faith. Read a bit about the Islamic tradition of ijtihad, and check out Marc Lynch’s Foreign Policy blog post Ft. Hood and the Clash of Civilizations: Security vs political correctness revisited.