The Trappist monk Thomas Merton once said we're required to love each other, but we're not required to like each other. Liking is a matter of taste and sensibility.
Although Merton was speaking about how we are expected to relate to each other on a personal level, I was reminded of his words while reading Ian Johnson's important new book, "A Mosque in Munich." I love the fact that, in the age of Google searches, Johnson cites 10 pages of research sources. I love his ability to comprehend complex and subtle relationships among political, religious and intelligence systems, spanning decades of time and thousands of miles of geographical space. The way he delineates the dozens of personalities involved is impressive.
But it wasalso because of the book's dense complexity that it was difficult for me to keep the many narrative strands clear in my head. It's a book full of fascinating information. But you need to keep flipping back through every few pages to make sure you have the names and situations right.
"A Mosque in Munich" is an essential book for anyone interested in learning how radical Islamists have gained so much influence in our times. In the wake of 9-11, most published reports traced the beginning of the U.S. problems with radical Islamists back to our support of anti-Soviet Muslims in Afghanistan three decades ago.
Johnson convincingly proposes that the real genesis of this problem began in World War II, when the Nazis recruited disaffected Soviet Muslims, using their ethnic and religious identities as rallying cries, to fight against the Russians, literally at first, and ultimately as propagandists.
Post-Armistice, the West Germans, guided by many who had ties with Hitler, found themselves in a recruiting war with the U.S. intelligence services for Muslims. Throughout the Cold War, the U.S. sought an alliance with Islamists to combat the "godless Communism" of the Soviets. Our political and intelligence leaders were willing to ignore that our new allies did not represent the majority of Muslims, but were among the relatively small radical elite who believed the world should be unified in one borderless society ruled by Islamic lawn as they interpreted it. The U.S. obsession with fighting Communism led its leaders to ignore a potentially graver threat.
The central battlefront for Muslim alliances was the process of building a mosque in Munich. While West German and U.S. intelligence factions fought each other for control of who would fund and build the mosque, as well as which Muslim leaders would be appointed to oversee the process, the actual control of the mosque was bestowed into the hands of men who formed the Muslim Brotherhood, radical elites who may not have been terrorists themselves, but whose philosophies influenced many of those the U.S. subsequently labeled terrorists. One worshipper who sought religious counseling at the Munich Mosque was Mohamed Atta, who piloted American Airlines Flight 11 into the World Trade Center.
Johnson, a reporter for The Wall Street Journal, tells a harrowing story about geopolitical blindness and compromise. He details how the intelligence communities in the West, obsessed with looking at things through a narrow lens while trying to create a propaganda campaign against a perceived potential threat, totally ignored, and in fact contributed to the creation of, the greater actual threat the Western democracies face today.
