 Media Credit: Elissa Quinn Dr. Walid Phares, a scholar of Middle Eastern politics, gave insight into Islamic culture and the U.S.´s war on terror.
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Last night, before a full Gasson lecture hall of varying demographics, Dr. Walid Phares, a scholar and professor of Middle Eastern politics from Lebanon, offered retrospective and prescient insight into Islamic culture and America's war on terror.
Having studied and taught on both sides of the Atlantic, Phares offered several cultural discernments.
Washington's "elite," ivory-tower-induced focus on foreign concepts like jihad and infidels clouded policy making until recently, according to Phares.
The American importance of the Arab-Israeli conflict, he said, "overshadowed and marginalized other issues" that asserted themselves on Sept. 11, 2001.
"After a country is attacked, the normal first question is, 'how?' Not, 'why do they hate us? Who are they? What do they want? When did this start? Why didn't we catch signs in '90s?'" said Phares.
Crediting Washington's desire throughout the past few decades to placate tensions with countries ranging from Morocco to Afghanistan to ensure oil availability, Phares said, "We missed the Baathist movement, Al Qaeda, Taliban, and rise of the women's movement in Iran."
The "academic, influential elite," he said, "filtered all the signs" - the 1993 bombing of the World Trade Center, the growth of the Taliban in Afghanistan, the 1998 bombings of U.S. embassies in Kenya & Tanzania, and the 2000 bombing of the USS Cole."
Sept. 11, however, grabbed America's attention, and the 9/11 commission ultimately said, "America had had a failure of imagination." That is, people could not imagine this had happened.
The American psyche, he reasoned, consequently underwent dramatic changes, not because of new information, but because of the scarring images of the attacks, which prompted the latent War on Terror.
"We do not have a definition of what the war or its strategy is, though," said Phares.
"Terrorism is an instrument used by ideologies" that, Phares said, formed before the founding of oil, the formation of the United States, and the Arab-Israeli conflict.
These ancient ideologies, he said, "have a world view, systematic and objective, to weaken and defeat the U.S. in a first stage in reestablishing the caliphate [the historically misplaced leader of the Islamic polity and successor of Muhammad whose legitimacy split the Sunni and Shiite Muslims]."
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