Insight Turkey
Insight Turkey
Challenging ideas
On Turkish politics and International affairs

Author

Gema Martín Muñoz

Gema Martín Muñoz
U.S. Foreign Policy and Islamist Politics
April 1, 2010
“I argue that the vast majority of Islamist movements do not pose a real threat to the West and its interests,” Ahmad S. Moussalli asserts in his latest book, U.S. Foreign Policy and Islamist Politics. Taking this idea as his starting point, the author confronts one of the key questions for the future of the Middle East region: whether to include– or exclude – Islamist parties as protagonists and interlocutors in regional and international policy. This question has been raised in American and western debates in general since the 1990s. But the pressing need to give a coherent response to this dilemma has become more urgent in the last few years. The experiences of Hezbollah in Lebanon and Hamas in Gaza have revealed the need for resolution, as well as the contradictions that result from any endeavour to find solutions to the conflicts and crises affecting this important part of the world. Therein lies the broad interest of this book, which seeks to demonstrate that the construction of Islamism as a threat to the West has been created above all “by the media, academia, policy makers, and strategists, as well as Muslim regimes and Israel.” Further, Moussalli argues that this media construction deliberately leaves aside any real, onthe-ground analysis of the many different Islamist parties, whose evolution and trajectories tend to show their diversity, their social integration and their progressive adaptation to democratic dynamics.

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