Newspaper Watch: The war against thought

The announcement by the British government on 10 August that it had foiled an alleged terrorist plot against transatlantic aircraft provided the perfect occasion for a counter-attack by the supporters of the so-called "war on terror". The genuinely terrifying prospect of a small group of fanatical terrorists committing mass murder in the skies provided more comfortable terrain for the US cheerleaders than had the pulverisation of Lebanon and the murder of hundreds of civilians by the high-tech weaponry of the Israeli army, supplied and tacitly endorsed by the US.

In particular, the supporters of "the West" mounted a concerted effort to deny any causal links between the foreign policy of the West and the threat of terrorism at home.

In the Sunday Independent, Brendan O'Connor plumbed the depths of Islamophobia and anti-semitic slurs in declaring that Islam's "fundamental principles will only be satisfied when its followers have wiped out Western civilisation" and sarcastically thanked "the media" and "the artistic community" for claiming that "the problem is, in fact, the Jews".

Ruth Dudley Edwards attacked "liberal opinion formers" for "railing against Israel and blaming the West for Muslim alienation".

Eoghan Harris pondered "the massive gap between what most Irish people believe – that Islamism is the real problem – and what the Irish political class, led by Bertie Ahern, seems to believe – that Israel is the major problem."

Alan Ruddock attacked Robert Fisk and those who think that "Israel is the cause and only by sacrificing it do we ensure our own safety."

Meanwhile, much of the reputedly liberal media echoed these arguments. The Observer carried an editorial entitled 'These ludicrous lies about the West and Islam', which argued that Islamic terrorism could not be connected to western foreign policy since the first plot against the World Trade Center took place in 1993, during a period when the West had launched military interventions "aimed at protecting Muslim populations" in Bosnia and Kosovo and was attempting "to negotiate lasting peace between Israel and the Palestinians". Their potted history of the period omitted the US backing for Saddam Hussein's murderous invasion of Iran; the first Gulf war and the establishment of US military bases in Saudi Arabia; the consistent US support for despotic regimes across the region; Clinton's bombing of Sudan and Afghanistan; and the US support for Israel's illegal occupation of Palestine.

The Irish Times, on Monday 14 August, covered the British government's criticism of "Muslim leaders for drawing a causal link between Britain's foreign policy and the rise of Islamist extremism". The problem with this argument is that almost nobody really believes them. The British and US governments don't. Their own intelligence agencies predicted – accurately – that their invasion of Iraq would increase the risks of terrorism at home. This prediction was made by the highest US intelligence analysts, in their National Intelligence Estimate in January 2003, just a few weeks before the invasion, and it was borne out by events. Before the invasion, Iraq had not seen a suicide attack since the 13th century. Just six months later, Jessica Stern, Harvard University's pre-eminent terrorism expert, described how the US had "taken a country that was not a terrorist threat" and turned it into a "terrorist haven". Similarly, few could believe that recent events have harmed Hezbollah's recruitment prospects.p