Alessandro Orsini is an Italian sociologist and scholar of terrorism. He is currently an associate professor at LUISS University. He teaches general sociology and sociology of terrorism. In the following article, Orsini discusses the perception of Islam in the West, arguing that it is often misunderstood and misrepresented. He refutes the idea that Islam hates the West and wants to destroy it, stating that this belief is a distortion of historical reality. The West’s actions, such as the wars in Iraq and Libya, have led to a Westernization of Islam, rather than an Islamization of the West. Terrorist attacks by groups like al Qaeda and ISIS are defensive reactions to Western aggression, not attempts to impose Islamic values on the West. He criticizes the West for its role in causing suffering in Muslim countries, citing the death of Iraqi children due to American sanctions as an example. The author concludes by stating that the real issue is not Islam’s hatred of the West, but the West’s hatred of Islam.
No people can grow morally without becoming aware of their own prejudices. The thesis I present before the court of reason this week is championed by Corriere della Sera and its “younger siblings”: Libero, Repubblica, il Giornale, and il Foglio.
I’m referring to the thesis that Islam hates the West and wants to destroy it to introduce Sharia into our democracies. The Hamas attack on October 7th would be a case of hatred against the West. An overwhelming historical documentation shows that the thesis of hatred against the West is the result of a paranoid reversal of historical reality.
Historical studies demonstrate that the project to replace Islamic values with Western values is an idea originating from Europe and the United States. The illegal NATO wars in Iraq in 2003 and Libya in 2011 were conducted with the declared purpose of eliminating Islamic culture in those countries and replacing it with Western culture and the European political system. The slogan was: “We must transform Iraq and Libya into Western democracies.”
Contrary to this, historical studies do not show that Islamic countries waged war against European countries to replace their secular regimes with Islamic ones. Iran did not invade France to kill Macron or Italy to replace Giorgia Meloni with an Ayatollah. The phenomenon recorded in recent centuries by historians is not the Islamization of the West but the Westernization of Islam. It is Islam adopting Western lifestyles under the pressure of Western wars and its political-economic dominance.
The attacks suffered by the West at the hands of Al Qaeda and ISIS were never an attempt to impose Islamic values on the West but rather an attempt to defend Islam from Western wars.
In 1996, Albright said:
“The death of 500,000
Iraqi children was worth it.”
Al Qaeda and ISIS in Iraq did not exist under Saddam; they were born as a nationalist reaction to the American invasion. ISIS militants carried out attacks in Europe to induce European governments to cease bombings against ISIS positions in Syria. All documentation on terrorism shows that it is false that the Bataclan massacre was carried out to end Western freedoms. The attacks by ISIS and Al Qaeda were conceived as a defensive function, to stop the Westernization of Islam, not to promote the Islamization of Europe.
Muslims do not hate the West; they hate the bombs that the West drops on them. Hamas did not plan the massacre on October 7th to allow Palestine to prevail over the West but to end the West’s dominance over Palestine, where a Western minority dominates a Muslim majority reduced to inhumane conditions. We live in lies and the sleep of reason. The thesis of Islam’s hatred against the West has been formulated to hide the West’s hatred against Islam and justify the massacre of Muslim children in Iraq and Gaza.
In 1996, Lesley Stahl asked Madeleine Albright: “American sanctions have caused the death of 500,000 Iraqi children, more than the atomic bomb. Was it worth it?” Albright, the U.S. Secretary of State in 1997, responded: “Yes, it was worth it.” If the White House deems it permissible to cause the death of half a million Iraqi children, why should it find it illicit to contribute to the killing of a million Palestinian children?
Il Fatto Quotidiano, November 28, 2023
