We’re Blind to Islamism
With the talk of more talks with Iran, the following may be timely and something worth consideration.
We’re Blind to Islamism
By Abe Greenwald
Part of the backlash against the Iraq War and the War on Terror is that Americans stopped talking about Islamist ideology. There’s a serious problem with our public discourse when people are pontificating about Hamas or Iran without even factoring in their overarching theological motivations.
Much of this began with Barack Obama. He deliberately tried to eradicate Islamism from any conversation about U.S. foreign policy. It’s one of his more enduring successes. Obama prided himself on pragmatism, and he treated Iran as if all it wanted was a little more respect from U.S. Thus began the formation of a great blind spot.
Fast forward to the present, and you’ll see that accepting this blind spot has become a default institutional position in the West. This is from an explainer article titled “What’s behind Iran’s long tussle with the United States?” and published today by Reuters:
When Iranians overthrew the Shah in 1979, the Islamic revolutionaries who took over accused the CIA of having trained the Shah’s secret police and vowed to battle Western imperialism in the region, branding America “the Great Satan.”
Revolutionary students seized the American embassy and took dozens of diplomats and other staff hostage for more than a year, ending a strategic alliance that had shaped the region for decades.
As if Ayatollah Khomeini had been some kind of sociology professor whose chief motivation was anti-imperialism and whose primary complaint against the United States was the alleged actions of the CIA. And his students, I suppose, rose up in an act of anti-colonial solidarity.
The article never touches on religion.
It is true that the Islamic Republic of Iran branded America “the Great Satan” because of imperialism—Iranian imperialism, which is driven by religious doctrine. It’s the same doctrine behind the regime’s establishing sharia in the country—its ban on women showing their hair, its morality police force, its hanging of gay Iranians from cranes, its fatwa on Salman Rushdie—and its vow to wipe Israel off the map.
Iran hates America because Iran is a fanatical theocracy that exists to create a global Islamic revolution. Khomeini was, in fact, a teacher. He was a revered teacher of theology before he became the leader of Shi’ite Islam.
His anti-imperialist rhetoric was part of a very deliberate effort to appeal to non-Islamist enemies of the shah and the West. Here’s Walter Laqueur, in the March 1979 issue of COMMENTARY.
Fundamentalist Islam, like all fundamentalist religion, has always been xenophobic and intolerant toward infidels; thus, by a stretch of the imagination, it could pass as “anti-imperialist.” The fact that Khomeini and his colleagues wanted to replace the Shah’s system by another autocracy, that they envisaged a state dominated by the clergy and run according to the principles of the Shariet, the Islamic law, was of course a little inconvenient for their Western sympathizers. In other countries a movement of this kind would have been branded as “clericofascist,” but in Iran in the 1970’s it became an important, if somewhat unreliable and capricious, ally of the Left.
The regime has kept up that effort ever since. Meanwhile, Iran has become the greatest—almost the only—imperialist power of the present age. It took effective control of, or set up outposts in, a handful of Middle Eastern countries and is contesting for control of others.
One of the many frustrations of the post–October 7 world is that alleged voices of authority have no idea what they’re talking about. This is in part because they’re not talking about Islamism.
Abe Greenwald is the executive editor of COMMENTARY.
