Western audiences misread religious-political murderers as targeting outsiders when Israelis were incidental

Evidence

Take for example the murder of President Sadat of Egypt in 1981. In Israel and in most of the Western world, it was assumed that Sadat was murdered because he made peace with Israel and opened good relations with the United States. That is not the impression that one gets from reading, for example, the transcript of the interrogation of his murderers. From this, and from some of the statements of the accused in court, one sees that they did not approve the peace with Israel and the opening to the United States; on the contrary, they objected to them very strongly. But for them, these were symptoms, not causes— the kind of thing that they would expect from what they saw as a neo-pagan government, headed by a ruler who had renounced Islam, disestablished the Islamic holy law, and introduced pagan, foreign, i.e. western notions and prac­ tices. The charges against the Shah in Iran, against Sadat in Egypt, against the military rulers of Algeria and others elsewhere are primarily internal. They come from movements directed against their own rulers, seeking to take power and, as they see it, regenerate, that is to say, re-Islamize, society. Except of course for those most immediately affected by their presence, the Israelis, like the Crusaders in the same place some centuries ago, are so to speak, incidental; their arrival is seen as a consequence, rather than the true cause, of a deeper, more pervasive evil. — Bernard Lewis, From Babel to Dragomans, 574

Categorization

• XREF: Directly corroboates and sharpens the Said-adjacent cluster: Western legibility of Mideast violence misattributes motive, projecting the Israel/US conflict as cause when perpetrators read it as symptom.
• SHARE: The Sadat murderers saw peace with Israel as a symptom of neo-pagan rule, not a cause — a precise decoupling of Western causal narrative from the actors’ own.