Madam, - I almost choked on my breakfast when reading the paranoid rubbish purveyed by Susan Philips (Rite and Reason, April 19th). Ms Philips, a "former Wicklow county councillor", believes that something called "Islam" is on the march to a third attempt to achieve "world domination". Ms Philips reminds us of conquests by Muslims in the 8th and 9th centuries, and then again in the 16th and 17th centuries. Her argument is that al-Qaeda is at the forefront of the third wave.
Ms Philips's argument is simplistic in the extreme. It is unhistorical, in that it fails utterly to take account of any of the other factors - political, economic, social - that affected the societies involved, and fails to account for any variation among them. It is crudely reductive, in that it fails to take account of the variety of interpretations of Islam - the difference between the Sunni and the Shia being only the most obvious.
It projects a monolithic and homogeneous "Islam" as the great bogey. It is utterly bereft of any sense of the astonishing degree to which the West - initially the British Empire, and more recently the United States - has penetrated, manipulated, exploited and damaged various regions of the Middle East in the 20th century, since the discovery of oil in the Arabian Peninsula and the Balfour Declaration. It is completely ignorant of al-Qaeda's origins in the sponsorship by the US, Pakistan and Saudi Arabia of the mujahedeen fighting against the Soviet Union in Afghanistan.
Ms Philips's argument is such arrant nonsense - unhistorical, politically ignorant, culturally prejudiced - that it is utterly astonishing that a supposedly responsible and liberal newspaper would publish it, especially at a time when the Middle East is degenerating into ever-worse chaos, in great measure thanks to the cynical policies of the United States and Israel. - Yours, etc.,
CONOR McCARTHY,
De Vesci Court,
Dun Laoghaire,
Co Dublin.