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I want to get this in here even if it extends the thread unduly, because I feel that the religiously inspired guerrilla movements now known as "Islamist" would have done better to stay with the older ideologies of pan-nationalism and anti-neo-colonialism, and I want to ask, who is really responsible for the reframing of the issues as religious, anyway? Who decided that, in this case, pan-Arab movements should be regarded, not as regional resistances to neocolonialism, but as "wars of civilisations"? Was it "them," or "us"? And if it was "us," was that because "we" were being pushed rightwards anyway, towards a sort of crusader mentality of our own? I don't want to just list individual neocon writers, starting with Bernard Lewis, since examples by themselves don't really answer the question. Neocon ideology grew out of anti-communism, when Trotskyites met Scoop Jackson democrats, but who was really behind the change towards evangelical anti-Islamism? To claim that "Israel" or "the Jews" were behind this change in the US's geopolitical ideological theories is just plain ignorant.
