Islam as a manufactured crisis

The writer argues that racism in the West runs deep, citing the early 20th century work of colonial administrator Harry Johnston, ‘The Backward Peoples and Our Relations With Them’. Israel’s Benjamin Netanyahu and the US president, Donald Trump, by their actions and utterances, cement that belief. (Photos: Wikimedia Commons)

DR ISMAIL LAGARDIEN argues that the portrayal of Islam as a threat to Western civilisation is a manufactured narrative rooted in racial and geopolitical interests.

The unflinching support that the state of Israel receives from the Europeans is intrinsically part of beliefs about Muslims, about ‘dark-skinned’ people around the world, and a belief that Christian and Jewish people are the flag-bearers of Western civilisation.

Pecuniary interests and notions of racial or ethnic exceptionalism feed into this belief in the superiority, inevitability and eternal necessity of Western civilisation; there is money to be made from siding with the West…

There are two things that require clarity. When we look for ‘the West’, we need to cast our gaze beyond continental Europe. One point of clarity is that there may be leaders of countries outside continental Europe that see pecuniary gain from siding with the West. A second point of clarity is that there are countries or societies that believe themselves to be exceptional in the same way that, say, the United States deems itself as exceptional, and that they are more at home among countries of the West.

Let’s take a step back and lay out some of the claims and statements that shape the main contentions made here. Israel’s first prime minister, David Ben Gurion, insisted from the outset that Israel was Western. More recently, the US Secretary of War, Pete Hegseth, made it clear that Israel and the USA represent ‘the frontlines of Western civilisation’. As previously mentioned, German Chancellor Friedrich Merz has stated that Israel defended Western interests, and that the Jewish state was doing ‘the dirty work’ for Europe. It is those ‘Western’ interests and references to ‘civilisational’ conflict that feed support for Israel, and which allows the Jewish state to get away with what is effectively the first holocaust of the 21st century.

The racism runs deep. European colonists have almost always held the belief that dark-skinned people in Asia and Africa were savages that needed to be civilised. Writing in the early 20th century, the colonial administrator Harry Johnston (I am not given to referring to people as ‘Sir’ – which, anyway, has meaning and significance only to the British), referred to people who were not Christian or Jewish as ‘backward’. In his book, The Backward Peoples and Our Relations With Them, Johnston drew a specific distinction between ‘white-skinned’ people as forward-thinking and progressive, and ‘coloured’-skinned people as ‘retrograde and ineffective as compared with the dominating white race’ who belonged to ‘the Christian and Jewish religions’. On the sliding scale of European racism, he made some patronising exceptions; Johnston said the Japanese and ‘northern Chinese’ were ‘nearly white’.

And so, racial exceptionalism and supremacy (the superiority of the Christian and Jewish people) have always been definitive of the way the Europeans, and their closest allies in places like Singapore, have viewed ‘non-white’ people or people who were not Christian or Jewish. This is part of what constitutes the predominance of the Judeo-Christian civilisation, such as it is, and what Donald Trump’s former advisor, Steve Bannon, expressly said (in 2017) had to be preserved. The overriding mission of the West was to stop China and the Muslim world – those ‘non-white’ people who were not part of the ‘Judeo-Christian’ world. Bannon told The Economist that the West should maintain its dominance at all costs.

‘I want the world to look back in a hundred years and say that their mercantilist Confucian system lost, and that the Judeo-Christian-liberal West won,’ he said.

We get, then, to Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu’s framing of the wanton slaughter of Palestinians and erasure of Palestinian people and of their cultural landscape and heritage, as part of Europe’s civilisational struggle. The Palestinian presence is presented as a crisis landscape on the frontline of the West’s civilisational wars against dark-skinned people. This is a manufactured crisis. The Palestinian people have not attempted to settle anywhere other than in their homeland. The Palestinians only fought back after the European settler-colonial project was established in 1948. The Europeans are famous for manufacturing crises and consent around their geo-political ambitions.

The European world has to present Muslims and ‘non-white’ people as a threat to Western civilisation, and to Europeans (and their kinfolk in North America and the antipodes), as they have since Portuguese mariners first sought a route around the Cape to bypass the Muslim world’s waters of Western Asia during the 15th century. And so, when the Europeans placed the Jewish state at the ‘frontline’ of the battle to preserve Western civilisation in 1948, they had to create demons to fight. In this way, the Israeli holocaust, bought and paid for by the Europeans, is simply an extension – the most brutal – of clearing a passage and continued presence for Western dominance and control, with Islam presented as a threat for the West, as Hegseth, Bannon, Merz and Netanyahu have said.

Dr Ismail Lagardien is an internationally recognised political economist and writer. His main interests are in global political economy, global finance and historical capitalism. He has designed and taught a course in Islam and the Muslim world in international relations.