The Islamic Straw Man: How the United States Conjured Its Own Terror

When Donald Trump was declared president of the United States on November 9, 2016, the nation erupted into a wild fervor of both joy and despair. As some people cried in front of their television screens, white supremacists celebrated, spray painting swastikas and hateful slogans on storefronts, cars, billboards, public transit, schools and parks across the country. Former Ku Klux Klan leader David Duke proclaimed that the election was a great victory for “our people.”

In front of a crowd of 200 mostly young men a few blocks from the White House, Richard Spencer, the founder and leading ideologue of the alt-right, railed against Jews and quoted Nazi propaganda in the original German. America, he said, belonged to white people, whom he called the “children of the sun,” a race of conquerors and creators who had been marginalized but now, in the era of President-elect Donald Trump, were “awakening to their own identity.”

As he finished, several audience members outstretched their arms in a Nazi salute. Mr. Spencer called out: “Hail Trump! Hail our people!” and then, “Hail victory!”

Six thousand miles to the east of Spencer’s congregation, however, something peculiar happened. Across the Middle East, Islamic extremists joined their white supremacist counterparts on social media to celebrate what they believed to be the harbinger of their utopia. "Trump’s win of the American presidency will bring hostility of Muslims against America as a result of his reckless actions, which show the overt and hidden hatred against them,” said the Islamic State-affiliated al-Minbar Jihadi Media network, one of several jihadi forums to post commentaries on the results of the U.S. election.

"Rejoice with support from Allah,” it continued, “and find glad tidings in the imminent demise of America at the hands of Trump.” Al-Minbar capitalized on Trump’s anti-Muslim rhetoric during his election campaign, saying that the alienation of ordinary Muslims is key to its recruitment of foreign fighters.

A pro-al-Qaeda al-Maqalaat Twitter account predicted that Trump would “make the U.S. Enemy No. 1 again” in the Muslim Middle East. “Trump will serve as the perfect straw man for the next four years, like Bush did before him,” it said.

One might glance over the curious use of the term “straw man” to describe Trump’s role for al Qaeda. Merriam Webster defines “straw man” as “a weak or imaginary opposition (such as an argument or adversary) set up only to be easily confuted.” In one sense, Trump is a weak target for Islamic terror. In another sense, he is imaginary, a fiction pretending to represent something real. And in yet another sense, he is both.

Trump does reflect existing racial and religious resentments in the United States. But to the extent that he claims to speak and act on behalf of the entire nation, he is a misrepresentation of the infinitely complex and contradictory diversity of thought, belief and feeling in America. He is an ironic blessing to the Islamic menace he fearmongers about at his rallies. And the favor goes both ways. Muslim terrorists, who comprise a miniscule fraction of the world’s 1.8 billion Muslims, are trotted out to represent all of Islam.

“I think Islam hates us.”

-Donald Trump, March 9, 2016

Right-wing and Islamic extremists, far from being polar opposites, share a faith in the same grand narrative of history: a perennial struggle between Islam and the West, between two world historical currents vying for global supremacy, a clash of civilizations, as Sam Huntington famously put it. Both share even a fondness, to put it lightly, for social conservatism, a need to cling on to tradition, and a streak of xenophobia. The two, however, should not be equated. Their relationship is less like two mutually venerable adversaries duking it out in the ring, each trading blows with the other, and much more like an imperial officer grinding his boot into the neck of a brown person. Edward Said once wrote that “The relationship between Occident and Orient is a relationship of power, of domination, of varying degrees of a complex hegemony…” Power flows from West to East, and there are many millions more bodies lying on one side than the other.

Although the idea of a grand civilizational clash exists now, it is not natural. It was conceived and imposed on otherwise peacefully coexisting people by men with vested interests in promoting such narratives. Its history is tangled with several centuries of colonialism, from the Spanish to the Dutch to the Portuguese to the French to the British and so on. When Europe lay in ruins following the Second World War, the United States rose from the ashes to continue this imperial tradition.

“The conquest of the earth, which mostly means the taking it away from those who have a different complexion or slightly flatter noses than ourselves, is not a pretty thing when you look into it too much,” wrote Joseph Conrad in Heart of Darkness, back in 1899. “What redeems it is the idea only. An idea at the back of it; not a sentimental pretence but an idea; and an unselfish belief in the idea—something you can set up, and bow down before, and offer a sacrifice to.” King Leopold II about whose empire Conrad wrote believed in this idea when he plundered the Congo, as did Winston Churchill when he called the Sudanese Dervishes whom he slaughtered “swarming savages,” as did George W. Bush when he so generously brought “freedom” to the Iraqi people.

The clash-of-civilizations narrative, though literally false, can be made true in the fires of war, for it is on the battlefield that identities are realized. Once the stronger power conquers the weak, it smothers the latter under the categorical blanket of “Muslim” or “Arab,” smooths over any wrinkles or nuances, then justifies its domination with sweeping generalizations about the supposed backwardness of the exploited. The conquered people cannot speak for themselves, so they must be appointed a spokesperson by their conquerors. In the case of Islam, their representatives are the Taliban, Al Qaeda, Islamic State, precisely the straw men who most epitomize Islam in the eyes of American neocons.

One could accurately encapsulate this phenomenon with a bearded straw figure dressed in a turban and suicide vest. The image is made infinitely more absurd, however, when one considers that the three terrorist organizations named above are not merely fringe groups given center stage by American media, but modern phenomena brought about in large part by the United States itself. Far from growing naturally out of the religion of Islam, they are symptoms of the sickness of empire.

Building the Straw Man

As midnight settled over Afghanistan on Christmas Eve, 1979, a fleet of 240 transport aircraft approached Kabul, their bellies full of young Russian men with rifles. Some planes landed at the airport and unloaded thousands of soldiers, while still more landed at airfields in Shindand and Kandahar. Columns of tanks, trucks, and armored personnel carriers rolled in from the north over the Hindu Kush mountains. In just a few days, the Soviets captured Kabul, stormed the Tajbeg Palace and deposed the Afghan government, installing their ally Babrak Karmal as president.

Since a coup in 1978 brought a hardline Marxist Leninist government to power, Afghanistan had been racked with civil unrest. The atheist communist state implemented heavy-handed land reforms, imposed gender equality from the top down, and violently repressed any political opposition. The largely rural, conservative Muslim population found all of this quite disagreeable. Local militias under the command of regional warlords picked up arms and resisted. They called themselves the mujahideen, named after Afghan fighters who opposed aggression from the British Raj during the 19th century.

As conflict flared and political turmoil within the government began to spiral out of control, Moscow eyed the events with unease. If Afghanistan fell to the Muslims, the Soviets’ massive financial investment in the country would go to waste, the new regime could threaten the stability of the other Central Asian communist states to the north, and worst of all, it might slide into bed with the Americans. The Soviets invaded just before Christmas in an effort to minimize the odds of a Western intervention. Unbeknownst to them at the time, the Christians were the least of their concerns.

Not two months after the first Russian boots stepped foot in Kabul, 300,000 indignant Afghans poured into the capital, shouting anti-Soviet slogans and laying siege to government buildings. They looted shops, overturned burning cars, and even set ablaze a hotel. All across the country, the mujahideen launched a full-scale guerilla war against the Soviet occupation. They executed surgical hit-and-run attacks on outposts, convoys and small units, and planted booby traps and mines along frequently traveled supply routes and in abandoned villages.

The Red Army, having no training in counterinsurgency, found itself completely unprepared. The soldiers camouflage uniforms and heavy boots were designed for northern and central Europe, not the rugged mountainous terrain of Afghanistan. Their tanks were useless against the elusive guerillas who blended in with the civilian population and avoided direct confrontation with the Soviet forces, preferring instead to ambush or surprise attack the enemy, then retreat into the brush. Moscow had initially intended to stay in Afghanistan for only a brief time, stabilize the country, then pull out and leave the puppet regime to govern on its own. It soon had to discard those plans, however, as it became bogged down in the quagmire of a protracted occupation. The war was bleeding the USSR dry.

Integral to the story, however, is the mass of international support that flowed in for the resistance. The United States was the primary contributor, with the CIA and ISI, Pakistan’s intelligence agency, working together to funnel guns and cash to the mujahideen. Jimmy Carter sent roughly $200 million before his term ended, and Ronald Reagan poured billions into the country after him. They viewed the conflict in strictly Cold-War terms; the Islamists were anti-communist, so they were allies of America. There was no consideration for the long-term consequences of arming tens of thousands of foreign militants with advanced weaponry.

The mujahideen did not just consist of local Afghans. Abdullah Azzam, an immensely influential Palestinian theologian with past ties to the Muslim Brotherhood, called on Muslims across the world to come fight in a global jihad against the Soviet invaders. And come they did. Muslims from Algeria to Egypt to Chechnya travelled to Pakistan, where they received training and firearms and marched across the border to fight.

Abdullah Anas was one such Muslim. The young Algerian packed up his things and, leaving the Arab world for the first time, boarded a flight to Islamabad. There, Azzam warmly welcomed him into his home for dinner. The place was full of Azzam’s students from the International Islamic University. There was only a dozen of them, all Arabs, all men. Anas was introduced to each of the dinner guests, then met one more volunteer. “I present you Brother Osama bin Ladin,” ‘Azzam said proudly. “He is one of the Saudi youths who love the Afghan jihad.”

“He struck me as very shy, a man of few words,” Anas recollected. “Shaykh Abdullah explained that Osama visited him from time to time in Islamabad.” Azzam and Bin Laden developed a fruitful partnership during their time in Afghanistan. Bin Laden, having been born to a billionaire construction magnate, financed the movement and may have acted as a communications liaison, while Azzam stood out as the ideologue and party leader. In the mid-1980s, as more foreign fighters arrived to volunteer, they created the Maktab al Khadamat (Service Bureau) to organize all of the men under their direction and coordinate their efforts.

The Bureau opened schools and institutes in Afghanistan and in the Afghan refugee camps in Pakistan. It provided aid to orphans and widows from the conflict, while at the same time training militants and producing propaganda to draw in additional volunteers. The United States continued to aid the mujahideen, and it intensified its support later in the war. In 1986, the US started supplying them with shoulder-mounted Stinger missiles, and the Arabs and Afghans, who had previously been fighting with little more than Kalashnikovs and some RPGs, began shooting Soviet aircraft out of the sky like it was Ramadan. Hundreds of planes and helicopter gunships roared to the ground in flames. The tide of the war had turned.

Since Mikhail Gorbachev took power in 1985, the Soviets had always desired to leave Afghanistan. The intense pain from the newly armed Afghans only expedited this process. In 1989, the Red Army began its withdrawal, and by mid-February the next year, it had completely pulled out. With a power vacuum left wide open in Kabul, the country descended into civil war. Ethnic and tribal factions that largely overcame their differences to defeat the common Soviet threat now turned against one another and struggled for regional hegemony.

Most of the Arab mujahideen returned to their home countries following the Soviets’ defeat. Some, however, followed Bin Laden back to Saudi Arabia. Abdullah Azzam died in a car bombing in 1989, and Bin Laden split off from the Service Bureau they created to establish his own transnational organization “the Base,” or as it is more commonly known, al Qaeda.

In the early days of al Qaeda’s inception, Osama Bin Laden needed a fresh enemy to mobilize against. As it turned out, one belligerent actor was causing quite a stir just then; Saddam Hussein’s Iraqhad recently emerged from a dark and bloody war with Ali Khamenei’s Iran, during which it was financed by the United States, and now it was bearing its teeth at Kuwait. Bin Laden declared that the atheist regime in Baghdad must be destroyed.

When Hussein actually invaded Kuwait in 1990, Bin Laden jumped at the opportunity to fan the flames of his movement. Boasting that he could rally 100,000 men (a highly exaggerated figure), he proposed to the Saudi minister of defense that al Qaeda be deployed to repel the Iraqi military. The Saudis dismissed him, and instead allowed a coalition of Western forces led by the United States to station in Saudi Arabia. American boots, like the Russian ones before them, stepped foot on Muslim holy land, in the country of Mecca and Medina, no less. This, in the eyes of Bin Laden, was a defilement of Islam.

But this time, it was different. The Arab states were complicit. The Gulf War radicalized Bin Laden, who now deemed the regional governments corrupt and illegitimate. He began publishing manifestos condemning the Saudi monarchy. In 1994, after having frozen his financial assets, the government stripped him of his Saudi nationality. He fled to Sudan with a group of Afghan veterans and went underground.

Bin Laden was only forced out of Sudan in 1996 after he was found to be connected to a failed assassination attempt on US-backed Egyptian dictator Hasni Mubarak. He sought refuge back in Afghanistan, where civil strife had cooled down. During the chaos following the Soviet’s withdrawal from the country, hundreds of thousands of refugees lived in camps along the border region between Afghanistan and Pakistan. Islamic schools called madrassas that espoused the radical Wahhabi doctrine sprouted throughout the refugee camps, funded by Bin Laden’s and Azzam’s Service Bureau, Saudi Arabia and Pakistan. Thousands of young students left the madrassas and formed the Taliban, plural for talib, which means “student in Pashtun.”

By 1994, the Taliban, led by Mullah Omar, had outcompeted every other warlord and tribe for supremacy over Afghanistan, and just in time to provide safe harbor for al Qaeda. While it controlled 90% of the country, the Taliban’s grip was loose enough to allow Bin Laden the freedom to flourish. On August 24, 1996, the man who had been proclaimed one of the “freedom fighters” by the West declared war on the United States. It only took him five more years to bring the Twin Towers crashing down.

Rise of the Islamic State

When the residents of Mosul were commanded to attend Friday prayers at the Grand al-Nuri Mosque on July 4, 2014, many obeyed out of fear. Islamic State (IS) militants searched them at the door, then directed them where and how to sit inside. Over a thousand congregants filled the 850-year-old building, where a bearded man wearing black robes and a turban stood at the pulpit. He wasn’t their normal imam; this man was unrecognizable. In fact, he had not been seen publicly for many years. With the camera rolling, Abu Bakr al-Baghdadi began to speak.

“I was placed as your caretaker, and I am not better than you,” he said. “So if you found me to be right, then help me, and if you found me to be wrong, then advise me and make me right. I do not promise you, as the kings and rulers promised their followers and congregation, luxury, security and relaxation. Instead, I promise you what Allah promised his worshippers.” Baghdadi spoke calmly and confidently. He exuded an aura of piety, a sharp contrast with the kidnappings, executions and beheadings taking place outside in the city. During his sermon he exhorted Muslims to fast for Ramadan and undergo jihad. The most momentous proclamation came, however, when he declared the establishment of the Caliphate, with Mosul its capital and himself its caliph.

The Islamic State had been gaining groundfor a few years, but Baghdadi’s pronouncement was historic. A Caliphate had not existed since the Ottoman Empire, and its appearance now carried not only symbolic but geopolitical significance. When Mosul fell to the Islamic State the previous month, the group controlled an area roughly the size of Britain, encompassing one-third of Iraq and one-third of Syria. After hundreds of thousands of Christians and Muslims alike fled its advance, it governed over six million people. It only took four days for a meager 800 men to overrun Iraq’s second largest city as government security forces ran with the civilians, and those who remained experienced daily life with armed religious police patrolling the streets. “We were whipped for smoking, beaten for letting our women out of the house without face coverings and using mobile phones” said shopkeeper Dawoud Omar Dawoud. “Baghdadi imprisoned us in our own city.”

The Islamic State did not simply crawl out from between the pages of the Quran, although some Americans believe that to be the case. The organization was born in western Afghanistan as the 20th century came to a close. There, a Jordanian named Abu Musab al-Zarqawi established Jund al Sham (the Army of the Levant) and set up its first training camp. He later expanded into Iraqi Kurdistan, but the opportunity to flourish didn’t arrive until the Americans did.

By the time of the invasion of 2003, Iraq was already traumatized. In little more than a month during the 1991 Gulf War, the United States dropped 90,000 tons of bombs on the country, devastating its civilian infrastructure. 18 of 20 electricity-generating plants were destroyed, water-pumping and sanitation systems were obliterated, and untreated sewage poured into rivers used for drinking water. Infectious disease spread like wildfire. Kids began to starve. The country could not rebuild because the US strangled it with sanctions for years following the war. The death toll resulting from the US’ policies is disputed, but there is no disagreement that several hundreds of thousands of people, most of whom were children, perished throughout the decade.

By 2003, 80% of Iraq’s schools were falling down, the availability of drinking water had dropped by 60%, and unemployment hovered around 50%. The Bush administration, apparently lacking any self-awareness, believed the Iraqi people would emerge from their crumbling homes and rejoice at the sight of their American liberators. The plan was to overthrow Saddam Hussein, bless Iraq with democracy, and be out of there within months. It didn’t take long for the suicide bombings to start.

Abu Musab al-Zarqawi organized attacks on the Jordanian Embassy in Baghdad, the United Nations headquarters and the International Committee of the Red Cross’s headquarters in the same city. The strike that really inflamed tensions took place on August 29, 2003, when a suicide car bomb detonated at the Imam Ali Mosque in Najaf, one of the holiest sites in Shia Islam. Among the over 90 dead was the senior religious leader and politician Ayatollah Muhammad Baqir al-Hakim, who was on his way out of Friday prayers. The bomber was none other than Zarqawi’s own father-in-law.

Over the next several years, Zarqawi orchestrated bombing after bombing in Shia communities, shrines and holy cities. His goal was to draw them into a sectarian bloodbath with the Sunni minority, then erect his Caliphate out of the carnage. It worked. Shia militias roamed the neighborhoods of central Iraq, routing out jihadists and cleansing the country of Sunnis in the process. Abductees were often executed with a power drill to the forehead. Eventually, so many bodies were being pulled out of the Tigris that religious leaders advised people against eating the famous Iraqi smoked carp.

In 2006, Zarqawi died in an American airstrike, but by that time his organization had grown its own legs. It was subsumed under the al Qaeda franchise, renaming itself al Qaeda in Iraq (AQI). The marriage allowed Bin Laden’s organization to gain a foothold in the new front of Iraq and provided a stream of financial, military and logistical assistance for Zarqawi. The relationship between Bin Laden and Zarqawi had always been tense, and it frayed further when the latter’ssuccessor, Abu Hamza al-Muhajir, merged AQI with several other Sunni insurgent groups to form the Islamic State of Iraq (ISI). Afterward, Abu Omar al-Baghdadi quickly took the reins.

In 2010, both Abu Hamza and Abu Omar were dead and ISI was on the brink of extinction. Since late 2006, US-led coalition forces had surged into Iraq alongside local tribes to claw back territory from the extremists. Town by town, city by city, they killed and arrested thousands of ISI militants until they were almost completely wiped out. The last remnants of the group retreated underground, and within four years, it would reemerge to become the largest, most well-funded terrorist organization in the world. And it couldn’t have done it without the Ba’athists.

During the 1960s, a transnational political party rose to power in Syria and Iraq. The Ba’ath Party aimed to create a single pan-Arab Socialist state, and its structure was centralized and authoritarian. Saddam Hussein led in Iraq, and Hafiz al-Asad, later Bashar al-Asad, led in Syria. Political differences between the two branches precluded them from unifying, but nevertheless they built near-totalitarian police states in their respective countries. After the United States invaded Iraq in 2003, L. Paul Bremer, the diplomat in charge of the occupational authority in Baghdad, decided to cleanse the government of all Ba’athist influence.

The de-Ba’athification decree declared that senior party members “are hereby removed from their positions and banned from future employment in the public sector.” In addition, any Ba’ath Party member with a job in the top three management layers of any government ministry and any other government institution or affiliated corporation would be automatically fired. The Army, security and intelligence services were disillusioned, leading to the expulsion of 385,000 armed forces personnel and 300,000 interior security staff.

The ex-Ba’athists were bitter, unemployed, and kicked to the curb in a country about to be torn apart by ethnic violence. They had been stripped of their salaries and their pensions, but not their guns. Some joined Zarqawi’s al Qaeda, others formed Sunni insurgent groups, and still more found their way into US detention camps. Abu Ghraib and Camp Bucca were the most infamous prisons, and the leaked reports of physical and sexual abuse toward the inmates shocked the world. Some of the acts included breaking chemical lights and pouring the phosphoric liquid on inmates, pouring cold water on naked inmates, beating them with a broom handle and a chair, threatening male inmates with rape, and sodomizing a detainee with a chemical light and perhaps a broom stick.

Despite the torturous conditions, the prisons sheltered those inside from the genocide outside. And most conveniently of all, it brought vengeful Ba’athists, radical jihadists, and innocent civilians caught in a random military sweep or highway checkpoint all into one big melting pot. Senior Colonel Peter Mansoor called Camp Bucca a “jihadist university.” It had 24,000 inmates. “We could never have all got together like this in Baghdad, or anywhere else,” said Abu Ahmed, then a detainee and future senior commander in ISIS. “It would have been impossibly dangerous. Here, we were not only safe, but we were only a few hundred metres away from the entire al-Qaeda leadership.”

Around the time the Caliphate was proclaimed in Mosul, the Iraqi government estimated that 17 of the 25 most important Islamic State leaders running the war in Iraq and Syria spent time in US prisons between 2004 and 2011. And of course, one of them was Abu Bakr al-Baghdadi. Abu Ahmed described meeting him in Camp Bucca. “Baghdadi was a quiet person. He has a charisma. You could feel that he was someone important,” he said. “I got a feeling from him that he was hiding something inside, a darkness that he did not want to show other people.”

The prison guards trusted Baghdadi. They turned to him to settle factional disputes between inmates. He soon earned a reputation as a pious leader and conciliator. The whole complex was divided into 24 camps, and the administration let Baghdadi travel between them, a privilege not afforded to other inmates. In December of 2004, he was deemed to pose no further risk, and he was subsequently released.

As former inmates trickled back out into Iraq, they reconnected using telephone numbers and addresses written on the elastic of their boxer shorts. Zarqawi allowed some ex-Ba’athists into AQI, but he always remained skeptical of their secularism and secrecy. Once the organization became desperate in the late 2000s, however, it pulled in more and more ex Ba’athists. By the time Syria began to collapse into civil war in 2011, most of its leadership came from the Ba’ath Party.

Baghdadi himself was picked to be caliph by a small cabal of former Iraqi intelligence officers. Far from being the all-powerful emir of the Islamic world, he was more of a figurehead, a symbol, a straw man. The real power rested with Haji Bakr, a former colonel in the intelligence service of Saddam Hussein’s air defense force who became the architect of the Islamic State. He believed that Baghdadi could be the religious face for ISI, which would attract foreign fighters from across the world to wage jihad on his behalf, just as they did for the Mujahideen in Afghanistan. The group was renamed the Islamic State in Iraq and Sham (ISIS), as it soon spilled into the ungoverned parts of Syria.

The ex-Ba’athists brought military experience, tactical expertise and intelligence proficiency to ISIS. During the 1990s, they had developed smuggling networks to avoid the US’ sanctions regime, and now they used those same networks to facilitate illicit oil trading and secure funds for the group. All the while it maintained a strictly Islamic appearance; local emirs in its Syrian territory were shadowed by Iraqis who secretly pulled the strings. While the foreign fighters volunteered on the front lines for what they believed to be a righteous cause, the ex-Ba’athists sat back and comfortably orchestrated the show.

When one looks closely, the tactics used by ISIS are hardly different from those used by Saddam Hussein’s regime before 2003. They share many of the same torture and intelligence methods, such as, for example, the campaign of beheadings carried out by Hussein during the last couple of years of his rule, primarily against women suspected of prostitution. Both the secular state and the jihadist insurgency even created strikingly similar propaganda videos: shots of Hussein’s elite Fedayeen units marching in black masks, practicing decapitations, and in one instance eating a live dog, are eerily familiar to anyone who has seen ISIS’ work on YouTube.

Once the caliphate was declared in 2014, the group’s name was updated a final time to simply the Islamic State (IS), reflecting its global ambitions. The very next year, it left Europe’s television screens and arrived at the heart of France. At a football stadium, a routine security check halted a man wearing a suicide belt. The resulting explosion could be heard over the cheering of the fans. Elsewhere in Paris, three men stormed through the main entrance of the Bataclan concert hall with Kalashnikovs and unleashed a hail of gunfire into the crowd of 1500; One of the gunmen shouted “Allahu Akbar!” And another blamed President Francois Hollande for intervening in Syria. More gunmen in other parts of the city burst into bars and diners, spraying bullets into innocent people enjoying their meals. That day’s organized massacre took the lives of 130 people, and crippled hundreds more.

Immediately following the bloodshed in Paris, French warplanes soared over Syria and bombed IS positions in Raqqa. While France helped clean up the United States’ mess, the anti-immigrant right began its ascendence in Europe. Footage of the bombings and shootings aired across the Western world. The people were given their straw man. Harassment and assaults on Muslims spiked, even in the US. It didn’t matter that most of the attackers were born in France or Belgium, or that many of them were recently radicalized, or that some of them didn’t even appear to be observant Muslims; they were made to represent the whole of Islam. Once again, both right-wing and Islamic extremists had good reason to celebrate the hateful backlash and the further deepening of the imaginary chasm splitting West from East, orient from oxident, civilization from barbarism.

Books Cited

This is only a list of the books I used in my research. Any other sources are cited with hyperlinks in the essay.

1. Destiny Disrupted by Tamim Ansary
2. Empire of Fear: Inside the Islamic State by Andrew Hosken
3. The Arabs: A History by Eugene Rogan
4. The Soviet Invasion of Afghanistan 1979-89 by Gregory Barnes
5. Al Qaeda in its Own Words edited by Giles kepel and Jean-Pierre Milleli
6. American Islamophobia: Understanding the Roots and Rise of Fear by Khaled A. Beydoun
7. Orientalism by Edward Said
8. Heart of Darkness by Joseph Conrad