Walid Phares Interviewed on Lebanon & Jihadists' Aims

By Andrew Cochran

In an excellent article titled, "East and West must beware new Barbarians at the gates," British journalist Allister Heath interviews Walid Phares about the implications of the current situation in Lebanon for the jihadist movement. Some excerpts follow, and you can read the entire article here (also linked on the "CT Blog Experts in the Media" page):

Walid Phares, the brilliant scholar of terrorism, lived through the worst of times in Lebanon, the country where he was born. At the height of the civil war, he would make the perilous journey out of Lebanon in flimsy vessels that were easy targets for Syria’s long-range missiles. “In the 1980s, we used commercial ships, with no Navy escort, sometimes under direct artillery action,” he recalls....

The emergence of current strands of Islamic extremism long predates the creation of Israel or the Cold War, Phares explains. He peppers the conversation with Arabic to make his case, which is that today’s jihadist movements see themselves as a continuation of the Islamic state and strive for its reestablishment within in its old borders.

The abolition of the Caliphate by Ataturk in 1924 freed jihadists from an ultimate Islamic authority for the first time since the seventh century. This unleashed the Saudi Wahhabis, and triggered the creation of Egypt’s Muslim Brotherhood. The Afghan battlefield produced a convergence into al-Qaeda, which soon became a rival school of its own. All these groups compete over the best way to re-establish the Sunni Caliphate, held up as the solution to the Muslim world’s problems. Meanwhile, the Iranian revolution saw the rise of a Shia jihadism; it too seeks leadership of Islam and to wage war against the infidels...

“Hezbollah’s plan for the Lebanese army is to drag it into a fight with Israel, to destroy it,” says Phares. “The options are very limited: either Hezbollah will dominate Lebanon, or the latter will disarm Hezbollah. Anything in between would be a waste of time. The international community must form a multinational force to assist the Lebanese army”.

As to the wider war on terror, Phares is angry that the West has ignored moderate Muslims and reformers, in the West as well as in the Islamic world, instead treating those who support the jihad as truly representative. “For decades, the only ‘issue’ debated was the Arab- Israeli conflict”, he says. There was little study of jihadism, human rights abuses, women’s liberation movements or the treatment of minorities; worst of all, terrorists were routinely presented as reformers.

“The vast majority of intellectuals still live on a pre 9/11 planet. They refuse, even after the rise of democratic movements and dissidents in the region, to acknowledge that the jihadists are a fascist movement.” This must change, Phares pleads; the only hope is to support young Muslims who advocate democracy and social change.

Across the centuries, the jihadists often agreed temporary tactical alliances with one enemy, better to defeat another, a lesson which France, China and even Russia appear not yet to have learnt. But Phares’ crucial lesson is that we should never forget that all jihadist strands, regardless of how much they hate one another, are ultimately committed to the same aim, which is to wage war against those with whom they disagree. “The barbarians killed each other more than they killed Romans,” Phares warned me. “Yet they eventually destroyed the empire.”

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