Thanks to 9/11 and the merchants of war, the myth of "clash of civilization" between the technologically superior West and the technology-starved House of Islam (Ar. Dar al-Islam) has been getting much notoriety. So pervasive is this propaganda that we often forget that these two powers, while sometimes colliding in the last 14 centauries, did also have comparable periods of peace, compatibility and cooperation.

The lowest point in this encounter between these two world powers in the last two centuries has to be the collapse of the Ottoman Empire, the last vestige of an Islamic Caliphate. This I say, because while the office of the Caliphate by the late 19th and early 20th century had become rather feeble and ineffectual, it nonetheless exerted a sense of belonging and rallying ground for hundreds of millions of Muslims living in the Dar-al-Islam from Indonesia to Senegal. Naturally, this united front of Dar-al-Islam against an already fractured Europe, divided along nation states, was perceived to be too dangerous and defiant by the expansionist powers of the West -- the precursors to today's Globalists. Thus came the Freemasons and their paid agents, aided by European powers, to destroy the Caliphate. They pondered while religion has been in decline in the West and in most of the East, and spirituality has been traded for materialism as living standards have increased, and popular culture has become almost completely secular to the level of becoming almost agnostic, why has the situation been different within the Islamic Middle East?

So, as part of a long-term strategy, the British were to promote racism and nationalism, alcohol, gambling, fornication and tempt Muslim women to uncover themselves – all in the name of emancipation of Muslims. But most important was the strategy to "insert heresies into Muslims' creedal tenets and then criticize Islam for being a religion of terror." It was like cutting religion with the scissor of religion!

The rest is history. The Ottoman Empire was broken and sliced into pieces, and heretical beliefs, including extreme brands of Islam, were promoted and patronized by the European colonial powers – the latter process to be continued later by certain Muslim governments in the post-colonial era. Conspiracies against Islam are nothing new to Muslims and, thus, have often been fought by their uncompromising 'ulama. Truly, clerical Islam was a necessary response to the imperial Europe that degraded Islamic religion, plundered Islamic resources, and cast the Islamic way of being and living as inferior to theirs. While weakened considerably from the post-colonial (minus-Caliphate) experience in Muslim nation states, they still refused to remain silent. Speaking thus of the imperial (Globalist) plan in the post-colonial era, one such Muslim scholar once said, their aim "is to keep us backward, to keep us in our present miserable state so they can exploit our riches, our underground wealth, our lands and our human resources. They want us to remain afflicted and wretched, and our poor to be trapped in their misery … they and their agents wish to go on living in huge palaces and enjoying lives of abominable luxury."

It's, therefore, not difficult to understand the frustration of the Globalists in the post-colonial, secular era. They pondered: how come when the Judeo-Christian ethos has eroded the Islamic ethos continued to experience an apparent resurgence? They sought to remove this obstacle from their path by disparaging Islam and besmirching its noble messenger. They resorted to malicious propaganda so that today, we imagine that Islam simply consists of a handful of legal topics and has nothing to offer for peaceful coexistence in a modern world. They have also tried to destroy the reputation of the genuine fuqaha and the 'ulama that stood uncompromising at the head of Islamic society.

And yet against all odds, the Islamic revolution took place overthrowing America's trusted friend – the Shah of Iran. This change was like an earth shattering event that showed Muslim refusal to settle for a system that was dictated by the West and. culminated in the further worsening of uneasy relations with the USA that had taken over the mantle of leadership in the West from her allies – the former European colonial powers. In recent years, since President Bush's declaration of Iran to belong to the so-called 'Axis of Evil', the American-Iran relationship is one of the worst it has ever been.

There is no escaping from the hard, bitter truth that most of the crises that have plagued our world in the last hundred years grew out of western world's two world wars. For its selfish sense of security and unfathomed greed, the West seeded poisonous plants of permanent insecurity in all the territories it once controlled, devastating our world with war and carnage that would become a recurring theme. And the same goes for the Dar al-Islam where artificial frontiers were created: the people that were together were separated and the people that were separated were forced to live together. The most glaring examples of this injustice can be seen in Africa and how the Kurdish people were divided.

In this age, a major task facing the USA towards global security will be the pacification of a volatile region that stretches from the Middle East to the Central Asia. This region, part of Dar al-Islam, contains two-thirds of world's proven oil reserves and vast quantities of natural gas – energy supplies that are absolutely essential for very survival of the western civilization.  A stable and uninterrupted flow of oil and gas from the region is thus very critical to the USA and her allies.
However, as we have noticed, American relation with the world of Islam has been a very precarious one for several years. Over the last three decades, outside America's intervention in the Balkan territories of former Yugoslavia to stop the massacre of Bosnian and Kosovar Albanian Muslims, there is hardly a single major event that could be cited towards a gelling of the relationship.

In more recent years since 2001, this relationship between the Dar al-Islam and America is mediated by horrible images of 9/11, Guantanamo Bay and Abu Ghraib. A March 2008 Zogby International poll of 4,000 people in Egypt, Morocco, Saudi Arabia, the United Arab Emirates, Lebanon and Jordan found that Arab opinion of the U.S. was at its lowest since 2002, with unfavorable ratings ranging from 80 percent in Egypt and Jordan to 71 percent in the UAE and Morocco. Coming as it does from the most reliable polling group, these are worrisome signs for America to pay attention to. Her public diplomacy is simply not working.

Reciprocal prejudice is at an all time high, and Islam is now equated as a terrorist faith in the West. Interestingly, as outlined in an article by Peter Goodgame - "The Globalists and the Islamists" - the Globalists have had a hand in shaping and financing all the "terrorist" organizations of the 20th century, including the mastermind of 9/11. Following the dictates of Hegelian dialectic to force us into the acceptance of their final alternative - a New World Order - the Globalists, according to David Livingstone, have created two antagonizing forces - the "Liberal-Democratic" West and Terrorism or "political Islam". It is essentially the philosophy of "us" against "them". That is, these two cannot occupy the same space together; one has to leave for the continuation of the other. Thus, the GWOT becomes a necessary tactic at the disposal of the Globalists to fulfill their strategic objective of eradicating untamed Islam – the Islam that resisted foreign occupation and hegemony. Obviously, in their "new" world order, the pristine Islam that was preached by the Prophet Muhammad (S) has no place even among the Muslims. Their prescribed role is one of subservience and unquestioned loyalty to the Globalists, as so dutifully now parroted by cultural coolies like Hirsi Ali and Irshad Manji. Not surprisingly, to the Globalists of our time, the Caliphate - once the unifying, emotive force amongst Muslims - is proscribed as an evil political system, an utterly dirty word in their dictionary!

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From the standpoint of America's national security (and those of other western countries) vis-à-vis the Islamic world, the key question is: how the world of Islam will define itself politically and economically? Will the Dar al-Islam allow easy access to western goods in trade and commerce while it mostly exports raw materials, e.g., oil and gas, to sustain the modern, prosperous life-style in the West? The answer to these questions will vary depending on the bumpy nature of unrest and stability in the Muslim world; after all, Dar al-Islam is disunited and there is no one-shoe-fits-all answer. It is politically unstable and militarily weak, and in all likelihood, will remain as such for quite some time.

In general, the Muslim world is not against modernity or technology (although there is no escaping that there are some risks or unintended consequences of that juxtaposition). Nor is the Muslim world hostile to democracy. It is not against capitalism either (with some checks and balances, of course). Hence, it would be impudent and foolish of anyone to assume that the Muslim world is so culturally distinct that it is incapable of making the necessary transition to become a more progressive society.

On the economic front, global strategists like Dr. Brzezinski argue rather strongly in favor of a massive undertaking in the Muslim world (shouldered by the USA and her European allies) that is much more daunting than what the Marshall Plan had been for Europe in the post-WW II era. They opine that economic prosperity -- translated into job opportunities and capacity to buy goods within one's means -- would have a calming, soothing effect on millions of people that live in the region. The rationale in favor of this undertaking should come from the mere realization that while the cost of this undertaking may run into billions of dollars, it is still a "peanut" investment compared to the trillion dollar cost of the war that is now borne by the U.S. economy.

On the political front, there is no denying that of all the grievances in Dar al-Islam, the most important one is Arab resentment of American support for Israel. That has to change from a blind support to a cautious one, when warranted. A one-sided history, scripted by Christian-Zionists and rehearsed, promoted and recast by pro-Israeli zealots in the media, has forced millions of gullible Americans into believing that Palestinians don't belong to the Holy Land. It does not teach them that it was the Palestinians who were the original inhabitants of the land, and that the European influx of Jews to the territory was rather a more recent incident dating less than a hundred years ago. It is immoral and criminal to steal someone's land and give it to someone else. And that is what the British Mandate did to the Palestinian people. Finding a peaceful and equitable solution to their sixty-year old plight is the most urgent need of our time. This is at the heart of the Middle East crisis and Muslim resentment towards the USA.

On the military front, America is perceived, and not so inappropriately, as fighting Israel's dirty war in the region – from her invasion in Iraq in 2003 to any future war against Iran (under the pretext of denying latter's inalienable right to the nuclear energy). American one-sided favoritism is interpreted as nothing short of being immoral, sadistic, criminal and cruel. Such favoritism only exhibits American deep-seated hypocrisy on a matter of vital importance to the security of our globe and is not sustainable.

While the internationally sponsored adoption of a viable formula for the Palestinian people would not resolve the wider region's manifold conflicts, but it would surely bring in triple benefits: reduce terrorism against America, reduce tension in the region and permit a more concerted effort to address the region's security problems without seeming to embark on an anti-Islamic crusade. The resolution of the Arab-Israeli conflict would also allow for progressive democratization of the adjoining Arab states without appearing, as it does today in Muslim eyes, to exploit the democratization issue as yet another pretext for Pax Americana. A peaceful resolution of the Iranian nuclear crisis would also go a long way towards bridge building between the West and the Muslim world.

PART ONE

PART TWO