“Terrorism is the weapon of the militarily weak. Nuclear weapons are the symbols of the militarily strong. Those who are outgunned in terms of conventional war are sometimes forced to resort to guerilla war and terrorist tactics. But until 1998, nuclear weapons were a declared monopoly of the five permanent members of the security council, the United States, the United Kingdom, France, Russia and China. Terrorism, as an instrument of the militarily weak has, at least by the Western press, been disproportionately been associated with Muslims. Nuclear weapons are symbols of military prestige, have been denied the Muslim world more ruthlessly than they have been denied any other part of the world. In other words, no other part of the world has paid a bigger price for presuming to attempt to go nuclear than parts of the Muslim world. The Iraqis had to put up with the destruction of an Iraqi reactor by the Israelis in 1981. Since the Gulf War more recently, Iraq has been hounded about its capabilities, nuclear, chemical and biological. Long after the Gulf War, the punishments have been inflicted. Pakistan was subjected to economic sanction by the United States, concerning its nuclear programs long before it detonated its nuclear devices in May 1998.
Until this year, any time anybody else attempted to go nuclear, more specifically a country like North Korea, as often as not the United States used a carrot and not just a stick to influence its behavior. In the case of the Muslim world, the resort to the stick was much more often then the resort to the carrot, and Libya and Iran have been served with all sorts of notices if they attempted to go nuclear. Libya, I am told by some sources might even have been subsidizing the nuclear program of Pakistan.
Two partitions of the twentieth century profoundly affected the Muslim world. One gave us a new Muslim country, and that is Pakistan, and the other created a new adversary to the Muslim world, and that is Israel. The creation of Pakistan occurred in 1947. The creation of the state of Israel occurred primarily in 1948. But, both as it turned out, were affected by the nuclear dimension. Israel was created barely three years after the emergence of the nuclear detonation on Hiroshima and Nagasaki. And before long, Israel virtually asserted a monopoly of nuclear power in the Middle East.”
“I don’t disagree that for most Muslim countries the priority is human rights and democracy in our societies. I’m not absolutely sure by what extent democratization in the Arab world is affected by the military superiority in Israel and the consequences of that superiority for the domestic systems in the country. I have no idea. In other words, I have no idea to what degree our aspiration that the Arabs should have democratic systems is affected by the military superiority of Israel. If it is affected by the military superiority of Israel, then our distinction between whether the Arabs should pursue military parity with Israel, that distinction between military parity and domestic democratization may be less valid than you think. So it may well be the military humiliation of the Arabs in the Middle East is part of their domestic incapacity for democracy. If it is, then nuclear weapons cannot be divorced from that condition.”
[Transcribed by Jon Edington and edited by Imad-ad-Dean Ahmad]
Source: http://www.minaret.org/Mazrui.htm