By William Pfaff
PARIS — An important change is evident in what since Samuel Huntington’s time has been mistakenly identified and manipulated as a war between Muslim and Western civilizations.
I say mistakenly for several reasons, one of them being that Professor Huntington himself actually foresaw a war in which an alliance of Muslim and Chinese civilizations attacked the West, in an exaggerated cold war scenario. (The Chinese are now on the American side, where much of their fortune is tied up).
I say manipulatively because the Huntington thesis served the purpose of those Americans who believed in the inevitability of conflict with Islam as a whole — not just with individual states.
This was because 9/11 was not taken in the U.S. as an attack by a state, but as the action of a whole society "that hates Americans for their freedoms." Islamic radicalism was not understood as a politico-nationalist reaction to foreign intrusion, composed of collective Arab enmity toward Israel because of its creation on Arab territory, and fear of a Western strategic threat to the region’s strategic resources.
