task was to satisfy a peculiar American craving: the US empire always needs a virtual, world-embracing enemy, a single enemy that includes all the opponents of the United States around the world. The Communists delivered the goods: the whole world was divided between Good Guys (the Americans and their supporters) and Bad Guys (the Commies). Everybody who opposed US interests was automatically a Communist-Nelson Mandela in South Africa, Salvador Allende in Chile, Fidel Castro in Cuba-while the masters of apartheid, the death squads of Augusto Pinochet and the secret police of the Shah of Iran belonged, like us, to the Free World.
When the Communist empire collapsed, America was suddenly left without a worldwide enemy. This vacuum has now been filled by the Muslims-terrorists. Not only Osama bin Faden, but also the
Chechnyan freedom fighters, the angry North African youth of the Paris banlieus, the Iranian Revolutionary Guards, the insurgents in the Philippines.
Thus the American world-view rearranged itself: a good world (Western civilization) and a bad world (Islamic civilization). Diplomats still take care to make a distinction between "radical Islamists" and "moderate Muslims," but that is only for appearances' sake. Between ourselves, we know of course that they are all Osama bin Ladens. They are all the same.
This way, a huge part of the world, composed of manifold and very different countries, and a great religion with many different and even opposing tendencies (like Christianity, like Judaism), which has given the world unmatched scientific and cultural treasures, is thrown into one and the same pot.
This world-view is tailored for us. Indeed, the world of the clashing civilizations is, for us, the best of all possible worlds.
The struggle between Israel and the Palestinians is no longer a conflict between the Zionist Movement, which came to settle in this country, and the Palestinian people, which inhabited it. No, it has been from the very beginning a part of a worldwide struggle which does not stem from our aspirations and actions. The assault of terrorist Islam on the Western world did not start because of us. Our conscience can be entirely clean-we are among the good guys of this world.
This is now the line of argument of official Israel: the Palestinians elected Hamas, a murderous Islamic movement. (If it didn't exist, it would have to be invented-and indeed, some people assert it was created from the start by our secret service.) Hamas is terroristic, and so is Hizbullah. Perhaps Mahmoud Abbas is not a terrorist himself, but he is weak and Hamas is about to take sole control over all Palestinian