A must read: “The Clash of Civilizations Doesn’t Exist… Yet” by Joshua Holland, AlterNet. Posted September 1, 2006.

The neocons who are pushing a Clash of Civilizations are mirror-images of the terrorists that inspire their hyperbolic fear — they are just as irrational and just as great a threat to our security.

To the extent that some terrorist groups have recently turned their eyes to us, it’s not a matter of hating our freedoms or our women’s bare shoulders. It’s because we’ve supported many of those repressive regimes — often with troops on the ground — from Indonesia to Iran.

Consider this: in the epic struggle between East and West, some of our staunchest allies are the undisputed champs in spreading violent Islamic extremism. Saudi Arabia and Pakistan established fundamentalist, anti-Western madrassas all across the world, funneled gobs of cash to extremist groups, and nurtured and supported them in their infancy. It wasn’t just random individuals within those countries; Saudi Arabia made it a foreign policy priority to spread its brand of Wahhabism, mostly to counter the perceived threat of Pan-Arabism and other anti-colonial ideologies. Pakistan’s intelligence service, the ISI — sometimes called a “state within a state” — not only supported the Taliban in Afghanistan but funded, equipped and helped train some of the most notorious terror groups that grew out of that country in the 1990s. Talk all you want about Syria and Iran supporting Hezbollah, these are the great terror-sponsoring states, and they’re on the side of the Western democracies.

What’s more, the West isn’t all that unified in this great existential struggle to save itself from destruction. A recent poll of citizens in the United Kingdom, our most loyal ally and a country that largely believes the Clash of Civilizations meme, found that — “by a margin of more than five to one — the public wants Tony Blair to split from President George W. Bush and either go it alone in the ‘war on terror’, or work more closely with Europe.” Just 14 per cent believed “Britain should continue to align itself with America.” A Pew Global Attitudes survey in June found that in Spain, supposedly a target of “Islamic Imperialism” and the victim of one of the most spectacular terror attacks ever, “four times as many people oppose the war on terror as support it (76 percent to 19 percent).”

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