By Scott Thompson and Jeffrey
Steinberg
This article appears in the November 30, 2001 issue of Executive
Intelligence Review.
On Nov. 19, octogenarian British
Orientalist spook Bernard Lewis wrote an elaborate apologia for Osama bin
Laden, a fervent pitch for the inevitability of the "Clash of
Civilizations," in the pages of New Yorker magazine. Under the
headline "The Revolt of Islam”, Lewis lied that the emergence of
"Islamic terrorism" in the recent decades, is completely consistent
with mainstream Islam, which is committed to the subjugation of the infidels to
Islamic law. He went through 14 pages of a fractured fairy-tale history of
Islam, quoting bin Laden's Oct. 7, 2001 videotape, where the Saudi expatriate
spoke of Islam's "humiliation and disgrace ... for more than 80
years"—a reference to the crushing of the Ottoman Empire by Britain and
France in 1918. Lewis invented a tradition of jihad, "bequeathed to
Muslims by the Prophet":
"In principle," Lewis
explained, "the world was divided into two houses: the House of Islam,
in which a Muslim government ruled and Muslim law prevailed, and the House of
War, the rest of the world, still inhabited and, more important, ruled by
infidels. Between the two, there was to be a perpetual state of war until the
entire world either embraced Islam or submitted to the rule of the Muslim
state."
Among all the different
"infidels" ruling the House of War, Lewis asserted, Christianity was
singled out as "their primary rival in the struggle for world
domination." Lewis cited slogans painted on the walls of Jerusalem's Dome
of the Rock from the Seventh Century, assailing Christianity.
Lewis then claimed that the
evolution of modern Islamic terrorism, specifically the al-Qaeda terrorism, had
a long proud history within Islam, dating to the Assassins cult of the
11th-13th Centuries (Lewis wrote a 1967 book, The Assassins,
extolling the virtues of this secret society). He also identified Saudi Arabia
and Egypt as two regimes legitimately singled out by the Islamic jihadists, for
their corruption by "modernism."
He concluded, ominously: "For
Osama bin Laden, 2001 marks the resumption of the war for the religious
dominance of the world that began in the Seventh Century.... If bin Laden can
persuade the world of Islam to accept his views and his leadership, then a long
and bitter struggle lies ahead, and not only for America. Sooner or later,
al-Qaeda and related groups will clash with the other neighbors of Islam—Russia,
China, India—who may prove less squeamish than the Americans in using their
power against Muslims and their sanctities. If bin Laden is correct in his
calculations and succeeds in his war, then a dark future awaits the world,
especially the part of it that embraces Islam."
Bernard
Lewis Plan, Take II
Since the attacks on the World Trade
Center and the Pentagon, Lewis has, not surprisingly, resurfaced in numerous
locations. After all, the 85-year old British Arab Bureau mandarin has been
London's point-man in the United States since 1974, when he was posted to H.G.
Wells' outpost at Princeton University's Center for Advanced Studies, to secure
American compliance with British geopolitical manipulations in the Middle East,
the Caucasus, the Caspian Basin, and Central Asia.
To put it bluntly: British
intelligence senior operator Lewis is the guiding hand behind the ongoing U.S.
neo-conservative drive for a new "Thirty Years War" in Eurasia. This
drive is at the heart of the ongoing coup d'état attempt against the George W.
Bush Administration, which began with the Sept. 11 irregular warfare attacks on
New York City and Washington.
Lewis' arrival at Princeton, after
serving on the faculty of the University of London's Middle East and Africa
faculty (the repository of the original India House files, long officially
referred to as the Colonial Department), coincided with then-Secretary of State
Henry A. Kissinger's fomenting of the civil war in Lebanon. That persists to
the present day, and served as a laboratory for the later "Islamic
revolution" in Iran.
Lewis is no mere British
quackademic. After obtaining his doctorate in the history of Islam from the
University of London School of Oriental and African Studies, he joined the
university faculty in 1938. From 1940-45, Lewis was, in his own understated
words, "otherwise engaged," as a wartime British Military
Intelligence officer, later seconded to the British Foreign Office. To this
day, Lewis remains mum about his wartime "engagements."
Since arriving at Princeton, Lewis
has been demonstrably responsible for every piece of strategic folly and
insanity into which the United States has been suckered in Asia Minor. The
Wellsian "method to his madness" has been the persistent push to
eliminate the nation-state system, and launch murderous wars stretching across
the Eurasian region.
* During the Carter
Administration, Lewis was the architect of madman Zbigniew Brzezinski's
"Arc of Crisis" policy of fomenting Muslim Brotherhood fundamentalist
insurrections all along the southern tier of the Soviet Union. The planned
fostering of radical Islamist war provocations was known, at the time, as
"the Bernard Lewis Plan." Among the fruits of this Lewis-Brzezinski
collusion: the February 1979 Ayatollah Khomeini "Islamic Revolution"
in Iran, which overthrew the Shah, and sent the once-proud center of the
Islamic Renaissance back into a 20-year dark age; and the 1979-1988 Afghanistan
War, provoked by Brzezinski's July 1979 launching of covert support for Afghan
mujahideen "Contras" inside Afghanistan—six months prior to
the Soviet Red Army's Christmas Eve invasion.
As early as 1960, in a book-length
study he prepared for the Royal Institute for International Affairs, under the
title The Emergence of Modern Turkey, Lewis polemicized against the
modernizing, nation-building legacy of Turkey's Mustafa Kemal Ataturk. He
argued instead for the revival of an Ottoman Empire that could be used as a
British geopolitical battering ram against Russia and against the Arab states
of the Persian Gulf—in alliance with Israel.
* It was Bernard Lewis who
launched the hoax of the "Clash of Civilizations"—in a September
1990 Atlantic Monthly article on "The Roots of Muslim
Rage," which appeared three years before Brzezinski clone
Samuel Huntington's publication of his Foreign Affairs diatribe,
"The Clash Of Civilizations." Huntington's article, and his
subsequent book-length treatment of the same subject, were caricatures of
Lewis' more sophisticated British Orientalist historical fraud, which painted
Islam as engaged in a 14-century-long war against Christianity. Huntington
acknowledged that Lewis' 1990 piece coined the term "Clash of
Civilizations."
* In 1992, in the aftermath of
the Persian Gulf War, Lewis celebrated in the pages of the New York Council on
Foreign Relations' Foreign Affairs that the era of the
nation-state in the Middle East had come to an inglorious end, and the entire
region should expect to go through a prolonged period of
"Lebanonization"—i.e., degeneration into fratricidal, parochialist
violence and chaos.
"The eclipse of
pan-Arabism," he wrote, "has left Islamic fundamentalism as the most
attractive alternative to all those who feel that there has to be something
better, truer, and more hopeful than the inept tyrannies of their rulers and
the bankrupt ideologies foisted on them from outside." The Islamists
represent "a network outside the control of the state.... The more
oppressive the regime, the greater the help it gives to fundamentalists by
eliminating competing oppositionists."
He concluded the Foreign
Affairs piece by forecasting the "Lebanonization" of the
entire region, save Israel: "Most of the states of the Middle East ... are
of recent and artificial construction and are vulnerable to such a process. If
the central power is sufficiently weakened, there is no real civil society to
hold the polity together, no real sense of common national identity or
overriding allegiance to the nation-state. The state then disintegrates—as
happened in Lebanon—into a chaos of squabbling, feuding, fighting sects,
tribes, regions and parties."
* In 1998, it was Lewis who
catapulted Osama bin Laden into prominence with a November/December Foreign
Affairs article, legitimizing the Saudi black sheep as a serious
proponent of mainstream, militant Islam. Lewis' piece, "License To Kill:
Osama bin Laden's Declaration Of Jihad," showered praise on bin Laden,
pronouncing his "Declaration of Jihad Versus Jews and Crusaders"
"a magnificent piece of eloquent, at times even poetic Arabic prose ...
which reveals a version of history that most Westerners will find
unfamiliar."
Caught
In The Act
Osama bin Laden released his 1998
jihad call on Feb. 23, 1998, six months before the truck bombing attacks
against the U.S. embassies in Tanzania and Kenya. The very next day, Bernard
Lewis' signature appeared on a widely circulated Open Letter To President Bill
Clinton, released by a previously unheard-of entity called the Committee for
Peace and Security in the Gulf, demanding that the U.S. government throw its
full support behind a military campaign to overthrow Saddam Hussein. The Open
Letter called for carpet bombing Iraq, and for the United States to
aggressively give financial and military support for the Iraqi National
Congress, yet another corrupt and inept "Contra" pseudo-gang, created
by U.S. and British intelligence elements, and based in London.
In addition to Bernard Lewis, the
Open Letter was endorsed by former U.S. Rep. Steven Solarz (D-N.Y.), notorious
Anglo-Israeli propagandist and spy Richard Perle, convicted Iran-Contra
criminal Elliott Abrams, Jonathan Pollard fellow-traveller Steven Bryen, Frank
Gaffney, New Republic publisher and Al Gore mentor Martin
Peretz, Paul Wolfowitz, Washington Institute for Near East Policy (WINEP)
research director David Wurmser, and Dov Zakheim.
Lewis' public alliance at that time
with the leading lights of the "Mega" apparatus—now waging all-out
war against the Bush Administration's efforts to box in Israeli madman Ariel
Sharon—is noteworthy, but not surprising. Lewis is lionized inside Israel, and
by the Israeli Lobby in America as a geopolitical giant. On Feb. 19, 1996,
Lewis was feted in Jerusalem, where he delivered the ninth annual B'nai B'rith
World Center "Jerusalem Address" on "The Middle East Towards the
Year 2000." His son, Michael Lewis, is the director of the
American-Israeli Public Affairs Committee's super-secret "opposition
research section." This is one of the most important wellsprings of
propaganda and disinformation, presently saturating the U.S. Congress and
American media with war-cries for precisely the Clash of Civilizations Bernard
Lewis has been promoting for decades.
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