Clash This!

The Clash of Civilizations Doesn't Exist... Yet

"Not all Muslims are terrorists, but all terrorists are Muslims" is a common refrain on the many "war-blogs" that have proliferated since 9/11. That's wrong, and purely racist -- like saying all crack-heads are African-American. Last year, excluding the mess in Iraq (it's awfully tough to distinguish between terrorism, insurgency, sectarian violence, etc.), U.S. government statistics (PDF) show that the country with the most terror fatalities was India. Some were inflicted by Muslims, but more were perpetrated by secessionist groups from the Northern provinces, the Communist Party of India and various Hindu extremists. Next up was Colombia, a country with a population that's over 90 percent Roman Catholic. Following in fifth place -- after the mess in Afghanistan -- were the victims of secular Maoist terror groups in Nepal.

Writing in Foreign Affairs, Lex Rieffel noted that while Indonesia -- the most heavily populated Muslim country in the world -- is considered by Western analysts to be a hot-bed of Islamic terror, "violence against innocent civilians has been ... committed by secessionist movements in Sumatra and elsewhere, by Christian and Muslim fanatics [and] by indigenous people threatened by migrants ..." The University of Chicago's Robert Pape, who has studied terrorists exhaustively (and seriously), found that the group that led the world in suicide attacks between 1980 and 2004 was the Tamil Tigers, a secular group that draws its adherents from Sri Lanka's predominantly Hindu population. Saying that terrorism is a result of some deep flaw in Islam just isn't serious at all.

Even a serious analysis of Islamic extremism makes clear that these groups are not fighting one ill-defined and melodramatic conflict with the "West," but a host of conflicts with national or regional origins. For the most part, their primary targets are not liberal democracies or Western decadence, but some of the most brutal, authoritarian regimes in the world, many of which are considered "moderate" by our own extremists. The fact is that virtually all terrorist attacks outside of the disputed Kashmir region are perpetrated by extremists in their own country or in the homelands of states that are occupying their country. The only exceptions are stateless peoples whose desire for self-rule are violently suppressed -- Palestinians and Kurds the most prominent among them.

To the extent that some terrorist groups have recently turned their eyes to us, it's not a matter of hating our freedoms or our women's bare shoulders. It's because we've supported many of those repressive regimes -- often with troops on the ground -- from Indonesia to Iran.