PARIS - Anti-mosque protests in New York and threats to defile the Quran are playing into the hands of Al Qaeda chief Osama bin Laden who thrives on Islamophobia, experts say.
"This rise of Islamophobia in the West is the oxygen that sustains Al Qaeda," said Mr Fawaz Gerges, professor of Middle Eastern politics and international relations at the London School of Economics and Political Science.
"What is happening currently in the US is playing directly into the hands of Osama bin Laden," he said.
Mr Gerges argued that the West was "being forced against our own will into a confrontation that doesn't exist. It's a trap".
The latest violent protests in the Muslim world, notably in Afghanistan and Indonesia, against plans by an obscure Florida pastor to burn copies of the Quran show how easily the masses can be manipulated, he added.
Mr Gerges and researcher Dominique Thomas of the French EHESS school of social studies agreed that it is extremely important to understand that Al Qaeda uses its radical interpretation of Islam only to better push its own agenda and political objectives.
"Behind this fundamentalist religious rhetoric, we have a revolutionary political discourse, not unlike that of a revolutionary Third World liberation movement, and which is not religious at all," said Mr Thomas.
"They're saying: 'The West is occupying our land; they have been carving up our territories for the last 80 years under the (1916) Sykes-Picot agreement."
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