In effect, Dr. Brzezinski is theorizing the essential link between ideology and control. A century earlier, German philosopher Karl Marx had noted that no ruling class could endure for long unless the ideas of the ruling class also become the "ruling ideas". These ruling ideas can be oppressive or liberating. 

Today, many American Muslims feel oppressed. According to a Zogby poll commissioned by the Georgetown University and released on October 19, 2004, every fourth Muslim has been profiled, at least one in three has experienced discrimination, and one in two knows someone who has been either harassed by the law enforcement agencies or has been discriminated against. 

This oppression has five faces: social, legal, economic, political and ideological. I will focus only on ideological. 

"We are faced with two types of prejudice: prejudice of the ignorant and the prejudice of the learned", says Dr. Agha Saeed who teaches at the University of California in Berkeley. "The prejudice of the learned is usually expressed through carefully crafted systems of ideas and values." 

Though at present American Muslims are facing many threats, a particularly serious threat emanates from the opinion and ideas, among some of major American intellectuals -- including Samuel Huntington, Henry Kissinger, Bernard Lewis -- that Islam itself is somehow to blame for the terrorist attacks. 

This Islamophobic ideology has been under-construction for the last 15 years. 

The first piece that came to public attention was Francis Fukuyama's famous article called "The End of History?" At that time he was the Deputy Director of the U.S. State Department's Policy Planning staff. In his article "The End of History?" he said, using German philosopher Hegel's model that history evolves to a competition of ideas. He argued that there were three main idea systems in the 20th century - Fascism, Communism and Capitalism. With Communism and Fascism fallen by the wayside, he argued that the history had come to an end in Hegelian sense because there was no competition of idea and no further evolution of thought. Things had come to a standstill in that sense and he said did not mean there would be no more wars, conflicts or disputes but they would be of the same conceptual flavor. So by what he meant by end of history where all events will come to be located in a single paradigm or a single conceptual flavor need not have concerned us too much.

From this argument he derived other arguments, which were very relevant. He said with the end of the Cold War we changed from a geo-political phase to a geo-economic phase. He said in the name of geo political what counts is your military, and in the name of geo economics what counts is your economy. We entered a different phase in which countries would be seen, measured and judged in relation to each other on a totally different basis. In another very important point he said we had no global enemies - the last global enemy was Soviet Union. We had entered a relative age of peace; therefore, the whole world, principally, the United States, should reap the benefits and dividends of peace. Finally, he said Islam is not the enemy. Iran and Iraq, he said, may be local irritants but they lack the capacity to be global enemies for two reasons; one, they don't have an ideology that appeals to people outside of their own world; and, second, they don't have the military means to project their power beyond their borders.

No sooner had Fukuyama published his article that Henry Kissinger attacked him by saying that Fukuyama does not understand complex international issues. He asserted that Fukuyama is dead wrong because we continue to have global enemies; Kissinger did not say it in so many words but hinted at the Muslims as the new enemies. 

Then in his book "Islam in the West", Bernard Lewis, put forward the argument that we do have the making of a global enemy within the Muslim world. Muslims are a civilization that has been left behind. They are suffering from the "rage of impotence" and, therefore, they are going to be our new enemy and we have to be prepared to deal with them. 

Next came the major attack. In his famous article "Clash of Civilization", the internationally renowned scholar Samuel Huntington argued that Fukuyama had misunderstood the flow of history. History actually had gone through four phases and each age had its unit of conflicts. He claimed the unit of conflict was civilization - and ultimately the conflict of two sets of civilization; first, Islam and the west; second, between Confucian state (China) and Islam on one side and the west on other. 

In the concluding section of his essay, Huntington recommended several concrete steps including the following six: 1) unite the west, 2) neutralize Russia and Japan by befriending them, 3) divide the Muslim world, 4) "exploit difference and conflicts among Confucians [China] and Islamic states", 5) "strengthen international institutions that reflect and legitimate Western interests and values", and 6) incorporate non-Western states into pro-Western international institutions. 

Huntington's vendetta was not against violent groups or outlaw states but against the Muslim world. Whatever was left unstated by Huntington; the neo-cons later supplied by way of an ideology of global domination. Now they are recruiting and promoting Muslim neo-cons.