Ex-CIA spy Graham Fuller: The West is wrong about Islam, and insider's view

Graham Fuller is an ex-CIA spy, and a Rand Corp. researcher who lived and worked in Turkey, Lebanon, Saudi Arabia, North Yemen and Afghanistan. He now lives in Squamish north of Vancouver.He is the author of six books and many articles on Islam. His writing focused on Asian Islamic politics, religion and ethnicity. His articles have appeared in scholarly journals and everything from The New York Times to the Christian Science Monitor.

He is also appalled at the way the George W. Bush administration is waging an assault on the Muslim world.He believes the U.S.-led war in Iraq and on other Muslim-dominated soil is the wrong approach, making Muslims feel "under siege" and it's the main reason he believes there has been a rise in Islamic terrorism.He is also concerned that "U.S. culture as a whole is sliding into a new undesirable direction that is bigger than Bush".Fuller believes the West's approach to terrorism is creating a "self-fulfilling prophecy" by deepening suspicions about U.S. imperialism among the world's one billion Muslims and forging more extremists in a culture that did not until recently have many."Muslim anxieties, fears, frustrations and anti-American anger are now at all-time highs. The policies of the West, and particularly the U.S., only serve to exacerbate these convictions," Fuller writes in a short, penetrating article in the Harvard International Review."In Muslim eyes, the western imperial tradition is now spearheaded by the United States in its explicit drive for global hegemony and its determination to weaken the political power of Islam -- the last major bastion of resistance to the global American agenda."Fuller is aghast at Americans' misunderstandings about Islam. There is a well-developed cottage industry in the U.S., he says, in which pundits "cherry pick" Muslim texts to argue there is an implacable "clash of civilizations" occurring between Islam and Christianity."Such 'methodology' is tantamount to a selective reading of the Old Testament, identifying the more intolerant passages about what punishment God will visit upon the enemies of the Jews, and from there commenting on the essence of Jewish character and how Jews will behave in the future .... All these approaches are shallow and ultimately offensive."

What does the West need to do?

Nothing short, Fuller says, of withdrawing virtually all U.S. military forces from Muslim soil, where they present a provocation. The U.S. has lost its cachet as an "honest broker" on global affairs.The U.S. must drop its crude military reaction to terrorism, which simply creates more enemies, and return counter-terrorism to the arena of intelligence and police work, he says.The West, working with other powers, also has to find ways to authentically support the mostly peaceful, moderate and pro-democracy Islamist movements that already exist.Furthermore, Fuller says North Americans desperately need access to broader media coverage of global events. Americans, he says, "live in an isolated and self-censoring society that cuts us off from reality -- a deadly luxury for a superpower."He recommends North Americans get much more ready access to CNN International (instead of the parochial national channel), BBC and al-Jazeera networks, as well as English-language versions of Chinese, Russian and Indian news coverage."I'm interested in the welfare of countries other than just my own. I still care about what happens to the Afghans, the Indians, the Palestinians. I think that vision has been lost in the U.S.," he says as lunch winds down. He believes most Canadians share the values he laments are being forgotten in the U.S.His only regret in sharing his dream of a better approach to the Islamic world with Vancouver Sun readers is that it means his past will become much more public in his much-loved chosen home, far from the world's power centres.

No wonder a majority of Muslims polled in Egypt, Pakistan, Indonesia and Morocco believe that the goal of the USA is to weaken and divide Islam.Read the full article on the Vancouver Sun.