Infidels_ A History of the Conflict Between Christendom and Islam - Andrew Wheatcroft [201]
Then he specified the enemies:
There is a feeling of hopelessness among the Muslim countries and their people. They feel that they can do nothing right. They believe that things can only get worse. The Muslims will forever be oppressed and dominated by the Europeans and the Jews. They will forever be poor, backward and weak. Some believe, as I have said, this is the Will of Allah, that the proper state of the Muslims is to be poor and oppressed in this world.
But is it true that we should do and can do nothing for ourselves? Is it true that 1.3 billion people can exert no power to save themselves from the humiliation and oppression inflicted upon them by a much smaller enemy? Can they only lash back blindly in anger? Is there no other way than to ask our young people to blow themselves up and kill people and invite the massacre of more of our own people? …
It cannot be that there is no other way. 1.3 billion Muslims cannot be defeated by a few million Jews. There must be a way. And we can only find a way if we stop to think, to assess our weaknesses and our strength, to plan, to strategise and then to counterattack.
For Mahathir, the enemies of all Muslims were the West and a “Jewish plot.”23 Blind force was useless against these powerful foes, and he called for a united effort to defeat them.24 His long speech was applauded politely.
In the same week, the story broke in Los Angeles that General William “Jerry” Boykin, a much-decorated fighting soldier recently promoted to a senior high-profile post in the Pentagon, had been unmasked as a zealous neo-Crusader. More and more details were uncovered. In January 2003, speaking of a captured Muslim warlord he had met in Somalia in the 1990s, he had said, “Well, you know what I knew, that my God was bigger than his. I knew that my God was a real God, and his was an idol.” Regarding a later speech by General Boykin at a church in Boring, Oregon, one eyewitness wrote:
On June 21, 2003 we were invited by a friend and neighbor to attend a celebration “… to honor those who have served in our country’s armed services” at the Good Shepherd Community Church … The pastor stood up and introduced a Major General William G. Boykin … Boykin has a slight southern drawl and an obvious sense of humor, both of which makes him an effective speaker …
Boykin showed us a few slides from the recent war in Afghanistan, made a joke about sending some of the prisoners on a “Caribbean vacation,” a reference to the U.S. prison in Guantanamo Bay, Cuba. A bit crude and possibly offensive to some, but still nothing out of the ordinary.
General Boykin then showed a picture of Osama bin Laden and commented “This is not our enemy.” Another slide of Saddam and again “This is not our enemy.” Kim Jung Il was also described as “not our enemy.”… General Boykin explained that “our real enemy is Satan.”25
It was one of many such events. At one, a videotape was made. General Boykin later apologized, and claimed his views had been taken out of context. They had: what was appropriate for a gathering of like-minded evangelical believers sounded like the words of a bigot to the wider world.26 But Boykin can have had no illusions that his meetings would remain secret. He became a star speaker on the evangelical circuit, often in full uniform, speaking at church after church. Each time he added a little to his presentation. Standing in the pulpit of the First Baptist Church at Broken Arrow, Oklahoma, he showed a slide of a strange black mark over the Somali capital, Mogadishu, in 1993. “This is your enemy,” he told his audience. “It is the principalities of darkness. It is a demonic presence in that city that God revealed to me as the enemy.” As