ABSTRACT
Often, even though wrongly, the rise of radical political Islam is viewed as an
outcome of unbalanced US policies by some not so well-informed Europeans
who are aiming at washing their hands of the matter in taking this attitude.
Since the emergence of political Islam, however, Europe has been the tradi-
tional foe. The prophet of the ideology of third-worldism, Frantz Fanon, did
not deal with this issue, but he wrote in his classic The Wretched of the Earth
that Europe and the third world had long known each other equally as enemies
and as friends. This very dichotomy of Europe and the third world is used at present by Islamists in their approach of historically rooted self-victimization;
they translate this tiers mondisme into the new relationship between Europe and
Islam and only then extend it to the West at large to include the USA. In fact,
the USA is a latecomer on the fringes of this conflict. The Muslim outrage over
the insensitive and offensive Mohammed cartoons published by the Danish
newspaper Jyllands Posten extended to the entire European community and
brought the conflict back to Europe. An editorialist of the German Tagesspiegel
(Berlin), Bernd Ulrich, wrote in his column of 4 February 2006 that ‘‘the conflict comes back home, to Europe.’’ Another editorialist of International Herald
Tribune, John Vinocur, engaged in pondering how one is ‘‘Trying to Put Islam
on Europe’s Agenda’’ (21 September 2004, p. 2.)
