2. In view of the warmongering of the West, it is really not surprising that support for Muslim extremists continues to grow.

To understand Muslim extremism, one also has to try to see the world from the point of view of a Muslim. Our horizon is not the end of the world. A young Muslim who follows the news on television sees day after day how Muslim women, children and men are killed by Western weapons, Western allies and Western soldiers in Iraq, Afghanistan, Palestine, Lebanon, Somalia, and elsewhere.

It is cynical of great Western thinkers to furrow their brows and ponder the decline and fall of Arab civilization, which once was "militarily, economically and culturally far superior" (Hans Magnus Enzensberger). The West played a major part in making that happen. It plundered and ravaged the colonies and then withdrew.

In 1830, when the colonization of Algeria began, it had a literacy rate of 40 percent, higher than that of France or England. In 1962, when the French occupying forces pulled out, it was under 20 percent. Colonialism stole from the Arab world more than a century of development. Seventeen years after the French conquest of Algeria, Tocqueville noted with resignation: "The lights have been extinguished… We have made Muslim society much more miserable, disorganized, ignorant and barbaric."

Western colonialism raged in almost all parts of the world. But in the oil-rich countries of the Mideast it never stopped. That sets the region apart and makes it a breeding ground for terrorism.

Terrorism is not a Muslim problem but a global one. It has always existed and has been used by all kinds of movements. Alongside Arab terrorists who murdered Jewish settlers, there were also "Zionist terrorist organizations" such as Irgun, led by Menachem Begin, and the Fighters for the Freedom of Israel, led by Itzhak Shamir, who described themselves as terrorists. They used terrorist tactics - also against civilians - to fight the British and the Arabs for a free Israel.

In the current debate on terrorism it is often said: "Not all Muslims are terrorists, but all terrorists are Muslims." That is simply wrong. Until September 11, 2001, the Hindu Tamil Tigers in Sri Lanka were considered the world's deadliest terrorist organization. In their fight for freedom and independence, they professionalized and perfected suicide terrorism; and they were copied down to the last detail by others around the world, especially in the Mideast. They continue to bomb and to be bombed even today. But they do not kill Westerners. That is why their attacks are not reported in depth.

Of the 48 organizations classified as terrorist by the European Union in 2006, 36 have nothing to do with Islam. These "anti-imperialist" or "anti-capitalist" terrorist groups are responsible for the deaths of countless civilians in Latin America, Asia and sub-Saharan Africa. In the West, they do not figure in public awareness because they do not kill people like us.

After the official end of colonial rule in the Mideast, the colonial powers were often replaced by financially and militarily dependent puppet regimes, pawns in the geopolitical game of Western great powers.

Whoever did not play along was advised that a people only has a right to self-determination as long as it does not infringe Western interests. Freedom never meant freedom from us. One might call this "lex Mossadeq" in memory of the Iranian prime minister Mohammad Mossadeq, who was democratically elected in 1951 and deposed two years later by the CIA and the British.

Whoever fails to act in accordance with this law is ousted in a putsch or subjected to a concerted media campaign and branded a "rogue". Using the media to create "villains" is a specialty of Western foreign policy. As the example of Gaddafi shows, the title of 'rogue' can be revoked at any moment.

Even Saddam Hussein, a "partner" who was renamed a "rogue," might still be doing as he pleases even today, had he remained a partner of the United States. The massacre of Dujail, in which 148 people died and for which he was executed, occurred in 1982. At the time Saddam was, for the United States, an important player in the Mideast and waged war with Western support against Khomeini's Iran. Donald Rumsfeld visited Saddam in 1983 as special envoy of the U.S. president, even though he had been thoroughly informed about Dujail.

Saddam was, after all, our anti-Islamist comrade-in-arms; he was supplied by Germany with components for chemical weapons, by France with fighter jets, and by the United States with satellite data on Iranian positions. In the Mideast, the West never showed real interest in human rights or democracy; it was and is fighting for oil.

Cynical dehumanization in the name of human rights, which the bloody images from Iraq, Afghanistan and other Muslim countries document daily, has left a deep and painful mark on the Muslims' cultural memory. Samuel Huntington was right on at least one point: "The West won the world not by the superiority of its ideas or values or religion, but rather by its superiority in applying organized violence. Westerners often forget this fact, non-Westerners never do."

How can the Muslim world believe in our values of human dignity, the rule of law and democracy if all it sees is the way we oppress, humiliate and exploit it? Is it really surprising that extremists gain more and more support? Or that some people eventually hit back when their families are again and again mowed down by our machinery of destruction? Nobody is born a terrorist.

Despite all this, the kindness and hospitality still shown to Western visitors in oriental countries are overwhelming. One can visit religious sites with no problem, not only in secular Syria, but also in theocratic Iran - churches, synagogues and mosques. Most Muslims feel more respect towards Judaism and Christianity than we do. Despite their rejection of American foreign policy, they admire the West in many respects. Young Muslims like to wear (fake) Western trainers, jeans and T-shirts. While retaining their faith, they would like to be like us in many ways - free, modern and, on their terms, democratic. They would like to like America, once the great beacon of hope for oppressed people around the world, were it not for its blood-drenched foreign policy.

The Muslim world is nothing like the way it is depicted in the Western media. Western television broadcasters show a manufactured, distorted image of mobs raging against the West. In September 2001, after the attacks on the World Trade Center, many television stations showed Palestinian children rejoicing. But the footage had been staged. According to reports in the Israeli newspaper Haaretz, the children had been given sweets so that they would rejoice in front of the cameras. "Spontaneous" anti-Western demonstrations in the Muslim world usually take place only when they are carefully organized and staged in cooperation with Western broadcasters. As soon as the cameras are turned off, the "TV demonstrators" are given a little baksheesh and are taken back home in the same trucks that brought them.

In contrast to the West, xenophobia is unknown in the Muslim world. We may be economically and technologically more advanced than these countries - but not in human terms. When it comes to kindness and love of one's neighbor, a sense of family, and hospitality, we could learn a lot from the Muslims.

This cordiality can, as in the case of Iraq, turn into raging anger when the West yet again scornfully tramples upon the rights of the Muslims. Jean-Paul Sartre described this self-destructive despair during the Algerian war of liberation in 1961: "The repressed rage, never managing to explode, goes round in circles and wreaks havoc on the oppressed themselves. In order to rid themselves of it, they end up massacring each other, tribes battle one against the other since they cannot confront he real enemy – and you can count on colonial policy to fuel rivalries;…the torrent of violence to sweep away all barriers. … It is the age of the boomerang; the third stage of violence: it flies right back at us, it strikes us and, once again, we have no idea what hits us.”

Does that not sound rather like a description of the situation in Iraq in 2008? The "coalition of the willing" has taken from the Iraqis everything that might have given them the opportunity to be as "noble, helpful and good" as we like to perceive ourselves. It has destroyed all their state structures; it has trampled upon their dignity and pride. It has systematically incited the Iraqis to turn on each other.

It is so hypocritical of the West to then be "amazed" that the strategy really works and that the despair of the Iraqis sometimes even turns into self-destruction. It is absurd to claim that "something like that could never happen here" - a claim often uttered with an undertone of racist disgust.

Just consider how a power outage in New York in 1977 and a hurricane in New Orleans in 2005 were enough to trigger widespread looting, murder and mayhem. Homo homini lupus - "Man to Man is an arrant Wolfe" (Thomas Hobbes). This is true, not only of Muslims, but of Jews and Christians as well.

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