Radical (15 page)

CHAPTER SIXTEEN

The Polemic

You drop bombs on my people while knowing full well that the level of “collateral” damage—we call them innocent Muslims—will far exceed the damage to any “legitimate target.” For you, killing our children en masse—and you still call it collateral damage—is an unavoidable consequence of pursuing your policies in our lands. To us, they are simply children. Don't you think we've been crying too, like you are now, for years? Do you think we felt no pain as you raped and plundered our lands and bombed our cities? What lands, what cities, you ask? Your arrogance is only compounded by your ignorance. Look to Iraq. In order to remove Saddam Hussein, after the Kuwait war, you killed over half a million children because you could. Because you could! And because my people were too lost, too defeated, to be able to stop you. These are our children. We cry for them even as you feel absolutely nothing. What of Lesley Stahl's question on
60 Minutes
posed to Secretary of State Madeleine Albright:

“We have heard that half a million children have died—I mean that is more children than died at Hiroshima and, you know, is the price worth it?”

Albright's callous response is etched in our memories, staining our innocence with her venom:

“I think it is a very hard choice, but we think the price is worth it.”

And you wonder why we are so angry? You wonder even now why, after all these years, as we speak these words, we are consumed with rage? The price of killing half a million children with your depleted uranium bombs is worth pursuing, but woe to us if we ever strike back! In your world, Albright's interview was barely mentioned: a Dow Jones search of mainstream news sources after the attack turned up only one reference to the interview in an Orange County newspaper. But in our world, in the hell we live in, this was major news. We will not forget our dead just because you have no feelings.

Is killing civilians justified only for your own foreign policy interests? You claim that, unlike us, you don't target civilians, that your intentions are noble, that you seek only humane concerns. How many deaths of “untargeted” civilians by your hands entitle us to respond? Five, ten, a hundred, half a million? Are three thousand deaths enough to make you feel the pain of each and every mother you “untargeted” with depleted uranium? If not, then know that our intentions in bringing you death can also be noble, we too shroud destruction in humane concerns. You do not have a monopoly on reaping devastation off the back of good intentions, and don't you dare claim such a thing, you arrogant monsters. You can support, fund, and train dictators in our lands who have been torturing our brothers and raping our sisters in their prisons for decades, and yet you invade our countries, claiming to bring democracy? And you cite international law at us, while you willfully ignore Israel's occupation of Palestine, as defined by the UN? We will never forget your friendship with Mubarak and Assad, your unconditional support for an occupying Israel, the way you used us as Mujahideen in Afghanistan only to turn on us once you'd got what you wanted. You chose your side and we have chosen ours.

We have come to know that no amount of civilized pleading, no amount of appealing to your humanity, for your mercy, no amount of playing by your rules in your game, will move you. You are stupefied in ignorant bliss while we bleed and secrete pus from every orifice. There is only one thing you people value and cherish, and that is your own lives, your own happiness, and your own selfish oblivion. If inflicting upon you even an atom's weight of the pain we suffer at your hands wakes you from your stupor and forces you to listen to our cries as we drown, then I'm afraid we have finally decided that though it is “a very hard choice, we think the price is worth it.”

This was powerful stuff, and it worked, but my polemic—a reflection of my instinctive response immediately after 9/11—was only half the truth. How easy it is for a victim to construct a narrative out of half-truths and inspire thousands in the name of righteous indignation.

But the other side only saw half the truth too, and that was the problem.

Understanding how I reached such a detached position is the key to grasping the mind-set of an Islamist, living his life on the verge of violence. I was an ideologue—that was the prism through which I saw the world. It was difficult for non-Muslim audiences to really understand where Muslim indignation had come from, but it was a tangible, palpable thing. The American-led invasions of Afghanistan and Iraq after 9/11 only served to cement these attitudes further.
If America could bomb and invade in response to being bombed, why couldn't jihadists do the same? And if the deciding factor was that one party was a state while the other was a loose grouping, surely the state should be the more responsible one?

And while we in Hizb al-Tahrir disagreed with the tactics that al-Qaeda employed, most of us shared their sense of vengeance. Curiously, my position wasn't entirely detached from humane concerns. Rather, it was too attached to, indeed motivated by, humane concerns—but for Muslims alone, and at the expense of “the other.”

My above polemic may have been uncomfortable reading, especially for my friends who survived the 9/11 attacks, and for that I am sorry. The reality is, and it will help us not to pretend otherwise, there are still many people out there who think this way, whether we like it or not. These days I work to build an understanding of the mind-set that can make people so angry that they lose all empathy for others. I work to humanize even those who dehumanize others, so that the process of healing may begin.
*

Stalin once infamously said that a single death is a tragedy; a million deaths are a statistic. That's what my initial response to 9/11 was. It wasn't about individual people; it was about the overall picture, and by this time I was so consumed by the suffering of “my own people” that I had no empathy left for the suffering of those I accused of causing it. There is a lesson there for the more hawkish elements among Western societies too.

In Egypt, as I digested the events of 9/11, my overriding concern was very narrow and cold: this was going to play badly for HT and for Islamism. I wasn't convinced of the necessity of the attacks, though my objections had little to do with the human cost involved. Back when I was at Newham College, the global HT leadership had been critical of Omar Bakri's aggressive policies, which were bringing heat on the group. That was the fallout of one murder—this was the killing of several thousand in the heart of New York and Washington, not to mention the destruction of iconic American landmarks. The heat on Islamism was going to be turned up for years to come, not just on bin Laden and al-Qaeda, but on all of us.

We had specific concerns too about how the Western response would affect long-cherished HT projects. As it became clear that Afghanistan was going to bear the brunt of the US reaction, HT was about to lose what was considered a key link in the chain to developing “the
Khilafah.
” When I had started a few years earlier, HT had begun to put down serious roots in Pakistan. The same was true in Uzbekistan, where our organization formed the country's largest opposition group, with hundreds of thousands of followers. HT was considered such a threat that the Uzbek president, Islam Karimov, had resorted to extreme torture to halt its spread.

HT's vision was to rise to power on either side of Afghanistan, in Pakistan and Uzbekistan, after which the Taliban would act as the bridge in building the first modern, nuclear-armed Islamist superstate. In 1999 HT even sent a delegation of senior Arab members from Palestine in order to offer the Taliban just such a partnership for our future “nuclear
Khilafah.
” In those days, the Taliban had not yet come to believe that Pakistan was a
kufr,
un-Islamic state, but they politely refused to cooperate with HT.

It didn't take long for our
da'wah
to change the Taliban's view on Pakistan, and by 2009 they had usurped large parts of the country in the north as well. What 9/11 did, by precipitating the NATO occupation of Afghanistan, was destroy this dream of a Central Asian “
Khilafah
” in one stroke. We had always been critical of Jihadism for being the wrong way to go about bringing about an “Islamic state,” and now we had been proven right.