I remember back in the 1980s, the diplomat then in charge of United Sates counterterrorism program, Robert Oakley, insisted that the US will never be targeted by homegrown Islamist terrorists because it was “their final destination, their last best hope.”

That was the time when groups controlled by Ayatollah Khomeini kidnapped or killed Americans in the Middle East.

So what happened to make that “final destination” a stopover to paradise for martyrs?

Why do so many Muslims hate Americans to the point of wanting to massacre them in their offices as in 9/11 or at a Christmas Party at San Bernardino — despite the fact that the United States is the only major power in modern times to offer Muslims a helping hand when they needed it?

Wasn’t it President Woodrow Wilson who insisted at the end of the First World War that the main European imperial powers of the day, Great Britain and France, publicly commit to respecting the right of self-determination for nations freed from the Ottoman yoke? The Americans invented the idea of “mandates” to prevent the European imperialist world-grabbers from turning their Muslim conquests in the Middle East into a new colonial galaxy.

And wasn’t it President Harry Truman who in 1946 used eyeball-to-eyeball diplomacy against the Soviet despot Josef Stalin to force him to take Russian occupation troops out of Iran’s northwestern provinces and forget about his plan of creating a Soviet Iranistan?



More prevalent than Islamophia is Islamophilia, where liberals treat Muslims as children or teenagers whose feathers should not be ruffled.

Then we had the 1956 crisis, when Britain and France invaded Egypt to prevent the nationalization of the Suez Canal. Wasn’t it President Dwight Eisenhower who went against American’s oldest allies to let the Egyptians assert their national sovereignty?

The US was the only major power to have no state-owned oil company, and thus never used its military clout to obtain a share of the Middle East’s energy resources.

Should Muslims hate Americans because they refused to disband their military bases on Islamic lands? Again, history shows that the US was the only major power prepared to pack up and leave as soon as its hosts showed it the door.

In 1969, an astonished Col. Moammar Khadafy watched as the Americans closed one of their most important aeronaval abases in the Mediterranean, located on Libyan territory, as soon as his newly installed military government asked Washington to leave. A couple of years earlier, it had taken months of bloody battles and tens of thousands of lives before South Yemen was able to force Britain to close its base in Aden.

In 1979, the US had 27,000 military personnel in Iran, operating “ listening posts” set up as part of the strategic arms limitation accords to monitor Soviet missile tests. But when the new Islamic regime led by Khomeini asked the US to close the listening posts, which had been approved by the Soviets as well, the Americans did no foot dragging. The only Americans left behind were diplomats soon to be seized as hostages by Khomeinist militants.

We witnessed a repeat of that in the 1990s on a grander scale when the Americans simply packed up and left when the Saudis asked them to close their bases after driving Saddam Hussein out of Kuwait, tangentially also saving Saudi Arabia from Iraqi occupation.

That the US was a friend of Muslims and of Islam was against illustrated when Americans power helped drive the Soviets out of Afghanistan and, later, to liberate Afghans and Iraqis, a total of 50 million Muslims, from the vicious domination of Taliban and Ba’ath Party.



In 2005, the Iraqi Oil Minister Hussein Sharestani was publicly wondering why the Americans were not coming to “steal our oil” which anti-US propaganda claimed had been Washington’s key objective in toppling Saddam Hussein. We left there, too.

During the past six decades, the US has been by far the largest donor of aid to more than 40 of the 57 Muslim-majority nations. In the 1940s and ’50s, tens of millions of Muslims were saved from starvation and famine thanks to US food-aid. And the Point IV program, launched by President Truman, helped eradicate a number of endemic diseases, including smallpox and malaria, that killed large numbers of Muslims each year.

Many Muslims nations have been annually receiving large checks from the US for decades, among them Egypt, which gets $2 billion and Pakistan, the homeland of Syed Farook, the San Bernardino, Calif., killer, which gets $1 billion.

Since the 1970s, the US has been host to more than 5 million Muslims from all over the world, many of them fleeing brutal Islamist regimes in their homeland. In a conversation in 2002, Princeton Professor Bernard Lewis expressed the hope that Muslims in the United States and other Western democracies could become “ beacons of enlightenment” projecting light back to their old counties. Many of us shared that hope.

Now, however, we see that the opposite is happening. Instead of exporting “ light” back to the Muslim world, a growing number of Muslims in Western democracies have become importers of darkness in their new abodes.

Worse still, the politically correct crowd has turned Islam into a new taboo. They brand any criticism of Islam as racist, ethnocentrist or simply vile, all crammed together in the new category of “Islamophobia.”

Is it Islamophobia to question why a religion whose Middle East leaders often preach against us?

More prevalent than Islamophia is Islamophilia, where liberals treat Muslims as children or teenagers whose feathers should not be ruffled.

The Islampophilia crowd do a great disservice to both Western democracies and to Islam itself. They invite Americans and Europeans to sacrifice part of their own freedom in atonement of largely imaginary sins against Muslims in the colonial and imperialist era. They also invite Muslims in the West to learn how to pose as victims and demand the rewards of victimhood as is the fashion in Europe and America. To the Muslims world at large, the message of Islamophilia is that Muslims need no criticism although their faith is being transformed into a number of conflicting ideologies dedicated to violence and terror.

Never mind if Islamic theology is all but dead. To say so would be a sign of Islamophobia.

Never mind that God makes only a cameo appearance in mosque sermons almost entirely obsessed with political issues.

All that Western intellectuals or leaders need to do is stop flattering Islam, as President Obama has been doing for the past seven years, claiming that virtually anything worthwhile under the sun has its origin in Islam.

Many Muslims resent that kind of flattery, which takes them for idiots at a time that Islam and Muslims badly need to be criticized. The world needs to wake from its slumber and ask: What is going on?