Islam As A Vehicle For Arab Imperialism: The Case Of The Berbers

by Hugh Fitzgerald

If the American government wished to fight a war of self-defense against those who wage Jihad, not only against America, but against all non-Muslim states and peoples, sometimes across national borders, sometimes within Infidel states, it would surely take the time to identify the possible points of purchase that would help to divide and demoralize the Camp of Islam.

Since 80% of the world's Muslims are non-Arabs, and since in Islam the Arabs are the best of peoples, and the Sunnah merely reflects the customs of seventh (or eighth or even ninth) century Arabs, and since, furthermore, Muslims are supposed to read the Qur'an in Arabic (the only version that truly counts), and take Arabic names, and face Mecca, in Arabia, five times a day, and in many other ways become sedulous apes of the Arabs, it would surely be useful to make those non-Arabs Muslims aware, by speaking and writing openly about, the linguistic and cultural, and other forms of imperialism by the Arabs, for which Islam is, and always has been, the vehicle.

Take the Berbers, for example, and their campaign, especially in the Kabyle region of Algeria, to be able to speak and be taught in their own language, Tamazight. The riots in Tizi-Ouzou and elsewhere for such linguistic rights (now finally, and reluctantly, granted by the Algerian Arabs), the Berber websites that rightly denounce the Arabs and their "invasion" of North Africa, the way in which Christianity is spreading among some Berbers, because resentment of the Arabs nautrally weakens the hold of Islam, all of this causes the Arabs to worry. And in France itself, it is among the Berbers that the French intelligence services, have found the recruits necessary to monitor the larger Muslim, chiefly Arab, population.

Here, from http://www.memri.org/bin/latestnews.cgi?ID=SD226209a piece that reflects the worry of the Arabs over

Berber loyalty lies. Does it lie, blindly, in reflexive hatred of the Jews? Is the Arab war on Israel really the war of the Berbers? Even as early as the 1960s a Berber writer was expressing sympathy for Israel. Should not this kind of thing be noted, and in every way encouraged? Do the Infidels not have a stake in spreading the word, everywhere, that Islam is a handmaiden of Arab imperialism, and then in spelling out -- it's not hard to do -- exactly how it performs that function? For no Berber, no Kurd, no black African Muslim in Darfur can deny that the Arabs have treated them badly, even at times engaged in murder or mass murder. Let the reasons for this Arab supremacist attitude, rooted in the texts and history of Islam, be more widely understood.

Go to it, Pentagon, go to it, State Department. You have nothing to lose, and a world to win.


Posted on 12:32 PM by Hugh Fitzgerald

http://www.newenglishreview.org/The_Iconoclast/