foucault-and-the-iranian-revolution-janet-afary

Epilogue 169
These attitudes formed the backdrop to the discussions after September
11 by leftists and progressives in the United States and Western Europe. As
had occurred briefly in March 1979 during the debate over Iranian women,
but now on a far larger scale, the question of how to respond to the challenge
of radical Islamism became a core political issue of the day. Now everyone,
or nearly everyone, took a position. The anti-imperialist U.S. writer
Noam Chomsky quickly became the most prominent critic on the Left of
official responses to September 11, especially the Bush administration's war
on Al Qaeda and Afghanistan. Within days of September 11, Chomsky had
"contextualized" the Islamist attacks by connecting them to the broader antiimperialist
struggles of the twentieth century. The uniqueness of the September
11 attacks, which he duly denounced as "horrifying atrocities, " lay not
in the reactionary and misogynist political ideology of the terrorists, but in
the fact that this time the victims of imperialism had struck back at the heart
of global power: "European powers conquered much of the world with extreme
brutality. With the rarest of exceptions, they were not under attack by
their foreign victims. England was not attacked by India, nor Belgium by the
Congo, nor Italy by Ethiopia, nor France by Algeria" (Chomsky 2001, 11,
1 2). The leftist historian Howard Zinn took a similar position, putting perhaps
a bit more emphasis on the "murderous fanatical feeling" that in his
view "motivated" the September 11 attacks, but again tying the terrorists to
a broader, anti-imperialist sentiment: "You might say there is a reservoir of
possible terrorists among all those people of the world who have suffered as
a result of U.S. foreign policy" (2002, 17).
What such arguments failed to answer was why movements similar to
Al Qaeda had not developed in Latin America or Central Africa, areas of the
world that had suffered very deeply from Western imperialism and particu­
larly U.S. intervention. Thus, they ignored the specific social and political context
in which Al Qaeda arose, that of two decades of various forms of radical
Islamist politics, beginning with the Iranian Revolution. In terms of its social
vision, Islamism was far closer to fascism than to the socially progressive politics
of a Sandino, a Fanon, a Lumumba, a Mandela, or even a Gandhi. Bracketing
out these uncomfortable facts, including especially the gender politics
of Al Qaeda and the Taliban, allowed Chomsky and Zinn to employ a type of
anti-imperialist discourse that had arisen in a quite different context, the wars
in Vietnam, Nicaragua, and EI Salvador. Chomsky and Zinn refrained from
expressions of admiration or support for the attacks themselves, seeming to
regard them as understandable, but nonetheless criminal. This did not prevent
crude attacks by right-wing groups like Campus Watch, which accused
these critics, and university faculty generally, of supporting terrorism. Such