Orientalist BLewisBehind ClashOfCivilization


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Posted by andreas from p3EE3C6E2.dip.t-dialin.net (62.227.198.226) on Thursday, November 28, 2002 at 7:11AM :

Short expanatory note:

"SVENGALI" = an deviously influential person with (post-) hypnotic powers
breaking and commanding another person's will by deep persuasive &
emotional & intellectual intrusion in to his/her soul. Thus called
after a main character in the horror movie.

"SVENGALI (1931/Warner/Vitaphone)
From the novel "Trilby" by George Du Maurier.

"All Paris desired her, but Svengali owned her! Weirdest romance ever
pictured! With the screen's genius and his new find!"

--------------------------

Source: EIR - Executive Intelligence Review


This article appears in the November 30, 2001 issue of Executive
Intelligence Review.

PROFILE: BERNARD LEWIS

British Svengali Behind Clash Of Civilizations
by Scott Thompson and Jeffrey Steinberg

On Nov. 19, octogenarian British Orientalist spook Bernard Lewis wrote an
elaborate apologia for Osama bin Laden, a fervent pitch for the
inevitability of the "Clash of Civilizations," in the pages of New Yorker
magazine. Under the headline "The Revolt of Islam," Lewis lied that the
emergence of "Islamic terrorism" in the recent decades, is completely
consistent with mainstream Islam, which is committed to the subjugation of
the infidels to Islamic law. He went through 14 pages of a fractured
fairy-tale history of Islam, quoting bin Laden's Oct. 7, 2001 videotape,
where the Saudi expatriate spoke of Islam's "humiliation and disgrace ...
for more than 80 years"-a reference to the crushing of the Ottoman Empire
by Britain and France in 1918. Lewis invented a tradition of jihad,
"bequeathed to Muslims by the Prophet":

"In principle," Lewis explained, "the world was divided into two houses:
the House of Islam, in which a Muslim government ruled and Muslim law
prevailed, and the House of War, the rest of the world, still inhabited
and, more important, ruled by infidels. Between the two, there was to be a
perpetual state of war until the entire world either embraced Islam or
submitted to the rule of the Muslim state." Among all the different
"infidels" ruling the House of War, Lewis asserted, Christianity was
singled out as "their primary rival in the struggle for world domination."
Lewis cited slogans painted on the walls of Jerusalem's Dome of the Rock
>from the Seventh Century, assailing Christianity.

Lewis then claimed that the evolution of modern Islamic terrorism,
specifically the al-Qaeda terrorism, had a long proud history within Islam,
dating to the Assassins cult of the 11th-13th Centuries. (Lewis wrote a
1967 book, The Assassins, extolling the virtues of this secret society.) He
also identified Saudi Arabia and Egypt as two regimes legitimately singled
out by the Islamic jihadists, for their corruption by "modernism."

He concluded, ominously: "For Osama bin Laden, 2001 marks the resumption of
the war for the religious dominance of the world, that began in the Seventh
Century.... If bin Laden can persuade the world of Islam to accept his
views and his leadership, then a long and bitter struggle lies ahead, and
not only for America. Sooner or later, al-Qaeda and related groups will
clash with the other neighbors of Islam-Russia, China, India-who may prove
less squeamish than the Americans in using their power against Muslims and
their sanctities. If bin Laden is correct in his calculations and succeeds
in his war, then a dark future awaits the world, especially the part of it
that embraces Islam."

Bernard Lewis Plan, Take II
Since the attacks on the World Trade Center and the Pentagon, Lewis has,
not surprisingly, resurfaced in numerous locations. After all, the 85-year
old British Arab Bureau mandarin has been London's point-man in the United
States since 1974, when he was posted to H.G. Wells' outpost at Princeton
University's Center for Advanced Studies, to secure American compliance
with British geopolitical manipulations in the Middle East, the Caucasus,
the Caspian Basin, and Central Asia.

To put it bluntly: British intelligence senior operator Lewis is the
guiding hand behind the ongoing U.S. neo-conservative drive for a new
"Thirty Years War" in Eurasia. This drive is at the heart of the ongoing
coup d'état attempt against the George W. Bush Administration, which began
with the Sept. 11 irregular warfare attacks on New York City and
Washington.

Lewis' arrival at Princeton, after serving on the faculty of the University
of London's Middle East and Africa faculty (the repository of the original
India House files, long officially referred to as the Colonial Department),
coincided with then-Secretary of State Henry A. Kissinger's fomenting of
the civil war in Lebanon. That persists to the present day, and served as a
laboratory for the later "Islamic revolution" in Iran.

Lewis is no mere British quackademic. After obtaining his doctorate in the
history of Islam from the University of London School of Oriental and
African Studies, he joined the university faculty in 1938. From 1940-45,
Lewis was, in his own understated words, "otherwise engaged," as a wartime
British Military Intelligence officer, later seconded to the British
Foreign Office. To this day, Lewis remains mum about his wartime
"engagements."

Since arriving at Princeton, Lewis has been demonstrably responsible for
every piece of strategic folly and insanity into which the United States
has been suckered in Asia Minor. The Wellsian "method to his madness" has
been the persistent push to eliminate the nation-state system, and launch
murderous wars stretching across the Eurasian region.

* During the Carter Administration, Lewis was the architect of madman
Zbigniew Brzezinski's "Arc of Crisis" policy of fomenting Muslim
Brotherhood fundamentalist insurrections all along the southern tier of the
Soviet Union. The planned fostering of radical Islamist war provocations
was known, at the time, as "the Bernard Lewis Plan." Among the fruits of
this Lewis-Brzezinski collusion: the February 1979 Ayatollah Khomeini
"Islamic Revolution" in Iran, which overthrew the Shah, and sent the
once-proud center of the Islamic Renaissance back into a 20-year dark age;
and the 1979-1988 Afghanistan War, provoked by Brzezinski's July 1979
launching of covert support for Afghan mujahideen "Contras" inside
Afghanistan-six months prior to the Soviet Red Army's Christmas Eve
invasion.

As early as 1960, in a book-length study he prepared for the Royal
Institute for International Affairs, under the title The Emergence of
Modern Turkey, Lewis polemicized against the modernizing, nation-building
legacy of Turkey's Mustafa Kemal Ataturk. He argued instead for the revival
of an Ottoman Empire that could be used as a British geopolitical battering
ram against Russia and against the Arab states of the Persian Gulf-in
alliance with Israel.

* It was Bernard Lewis who launched the hoax of the "Clash of
Civilizations"-in a September 1990 Atlantic Monthly article on "The Roots
of Muslim Rage," which appeared three years before Brzezinski clone Samuel
Huntington's publication of his Foreign Affairs diatribe, "The Clash Of
Civilizations." Huntington's article, and his subsequent book-length
treatment of the same subject, were caricatures of Lewis' more
sophisticated British Orientalist historical fraud, which painted Islam as
engaged in a 14-century-long war against Christianity. Huntington
acknowledged that Lewis' 1990 piece coined the term "Clash of
Civilizations."

* In 1992, in the aftermath of the Persian Gulf War, Lewis celebrated in
the pages of the New York Council on Foreign Relations' Foreign Affairs
that the era of the nation-state in the Middle East had come to an
inglorious end, and the entire region should expect to go through a
prolonged period of "Lebanonization"-i.e., degeneration into fratricidal,
parochialist violence and chaos.

"The eclipse of pan-Arabism," he wrote, "has left Islamic fundamentalism as
the most attractive alternative to all those who feel that there has to be
something better, truer, and more hopeful than the inept tyrannies of their
rulers and the bankrupt ideologies foisted on them from outside." The
Islamists represent "a network outside the control of the state.... The
more oppressive the regime, the greater the help it gives to
fundamentalists by eliminating competing oppositionists."

He concluded the Foreign Affairs piece by forecasting the "Lebanonization"
of the entire region, save Israel: "Most of the states of the Middle East
... are of recent and artificial construction and are vulnerable to such a
process. If the central power is sufficiently weakened, there is no real
civil society to hold the polity together, no real sense of common national
identity or overriding allegiance to the nation-state. The state then
disintegrates-as happened in Lebanon-into a chaos of squabbling, feuding,
fighting sects, tribes, regions and parties."

* In 1998, it was Lewis who catapulted Osama bin Laden into prominence with
a November/December Foreign Affairs article, legitimizing the Saudi black
sheep as a serious proponent of mainstream, militant Islam. Lewis' piece,
"License To Kill: Osama bin Laden's Declaration Of Jihad," showered praise
on bin Laden, pronouncing his "Declaration of Jihad Versus Jews and
Crusaders" "a magnificent piece of eloquent, at times even poetic Arabic
prose ... which reveals a version of history that most Westerners will find
unfamiliar."

Caught In The Act
Osama bin Laden released his 1998 jihad call on Feb. 23, 1998, six months
before the truck bombing attacks against the U.S. embassies in Tanzania and
Kenya. The very next day, Bernard Lewis' signature appeared on a widely
circulated Open Letter To President Bill Clinton, released by a previously
unheard-of entity called the Committee for Peace and Security in the Gulf,
demanding that the U.S. government throw its full support behind a military
campaign to overthrow Saddam Hussein. The Open Letter called for carpet
bombing Iraq, and for the United States to aggressively give financial and
military support for the Iraqi National Congress, yet another corrupt and
inept "Contra" pseudo-gang, created by U.S. and British intelligence
elements, and based in London.

In addition to Bernard Lewis, the Open Letter was endorsed by former U.S.
Rep. Steven Solarz (D-N.Y.), notorious Anglo-Israeli propagandist and spy
Richard Perle, convicted Iran-Contra criminal Elliott Abrams, Jonathan
Pollard fellow-traveller Steven Bryen, Frank Gaffney, New Republic
publisher and Al Gore mentor Martin Peretz, Paul Wolfowitz, Washington
Institute for Near East Policy (WINEP) research director David Wurmser, and
Dov Zakheim.

Lewis' public alliance at that time with the leading lights of the "Mega"
apparatus-now waging all-out war against the Bush Administration's efforts
to box in Israeli madman Ariel Sharon-is noteworthy, but not surprising.
Lewis is lionized inside Israel, and by the Israeli Lobby in America as a
geopolitical giant. On Feb. 19, 1996, Lewis was feted in Jerusalem, where
he delivered the ninth annual B'nai B'rith World Center "Jerusalem Address"
on "The Middle East Towards the Year 2000." His son, Michael Lewis, is the
director of the American-Israeli Public Affairs Committee's super-secret
"opposition research section." This is one of the most important
wellsprings of propaganda and disinformation, presently saturating the U.S.
Congress and American media with war-cries for precisely the Clash of
Civilizations Bernard Lewis has been promoting for decades.




-- andreas
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