The Crisis of Islam: Holy War and Unholy Terror by Bernard Lewis Page A

lands, was a sensitive one, and Khomeini played on it skillfully. “They have reduced the Iranian people to a level lower than that of an American dog. If someone runs over a dog belonging to an American, he will be prosecuted. Even if the Shah himself were to run over a dog belonging to an American, he would be prosecuted. But if an American cook runs over the Shah, the head of state, no one will have the right to interfere with him.” 1 Already in trouble with the authorities, as a result of this speech Khomeini was exiled from Iran on November 4. He returned to this theme in a number of later speeches and writings, taunting the Americans in particular with their alleged commitment to human rights and their disregard of these rights in Iran and in other places, including Latin America, “in their own hemisphere.” Other accusations include the looting of Iran’s wealth and support of Iran’s monarchy.
    In speeches after his return to Iran, the list of grievances and the list of enemies both grew longer, but America now headed the list. And not only in Iran. In a speech delivered in September 1979 in Qum, he complained that the whole Islamic world was caught in America’s clutches and called on the Muslims of the world to unite against their enemy. It was about this time that he began to speak of America as “the Great Satan.” About this time too he denounced both Anwar Sadat of Egypt and Saddam Hussein of Iraq as servants and agents of America. Sadat served America by making peace with Israel; Saddam Hussein did America’s work by making war on Iran. The confrontation with America in the hostage crisis, in the Iraqi invasion, and on many diplomatic and economic battlefields confirmed Khomeini’s judgment of America’s central position in the struggle between Islam and the West. From now on America was “the Great Satan,” Israel, seen as America’s agent, was “the Little Satan,” and “death to America” the order of the day. This was the slogan brandished and shouted in the anti-American demonstrations of 1979. Later it was given a ceremonial, almost ritualized quality that drained it of most of its real meaning.
    American observers, awakened by the rhetoric of the Iranian Revolution to their new status as the Great Satan, tried to find reasons for the anti-American sentiment that had been intensifying in the Islamic world for some time. One explanation, which was for a while widely accepted, particularly in American foreign policy circles, was that America’s image had been tarnished by its wartime and continuing alliance with the former colonial powers of Europe. In their country’s defense, some American commentators pointed out that, unlike the Western European imperialists, America had itself been a victim of colonialism; the United States was the first country to win freedom from British rule. But the hope that the Middle Eastern subjects of the former British and French Empires would accept the American Revolution as a model for their own anti-imperialist struggle rested on a basic fallacy that Arab writers were quick to point out. The American Revolution, as they frequently remark, was fought not by Native American nationalists but by British settlers, and far from being a victory against colonialism, it represented colonialism’s ultimate triumph; the English in North America succeeded in colonizing the land so thoroughly that they no longer needed the support of the mother country against the original inhabitants.
    It is hardly surprising that former colonial subjects in the Middle East would see America as being tainted by the same kind of imperialism as Western Europe. But Middle Eastern resentment of imperial powers has not always been consistent. The Soviet Union, which retained and extended the imperial conquests of the czars of Russia, ruled with no light hand over tens of millions of Muslim subjects in Central Asia and in the Caucasus. And yet the Soviet Union suffered no similar