Who Are The Fanatics?
September 6, 2007
by Paul Craig Roberts
President Jimmy Carter was demonized for pointing out in his book, Palestine: Peace Not Apartheid, that there are actually two sides to the Israeli-Palestinian issue. Distinguished American scholars, such as John Mearsheimer and Stephen Walt have suffered the same fate for documenting the excessive influence the Israel Lobby has on US foreign policy.
Americans would be astonished at the criticisms in the Israeli press of the Israeli government’s policies toward the Palestinians and Arabs generally. In Israel facts are still part of the discussion. If the Israeli newspaper, Haaretz, could replace Fox “News,” CNN, New York Times and Washington Post, Americans would know the truth about US and Israeli policies in the Middle East and their likely consequences.
On September 1, Haaretz reported that Rabbi Eric Yoffie, the president of the Union for Reform Judaism, which represents 900 Congregations and 1.5 million Jews, “accused American media, politicians and religious groups of demonizing Islam” and turning Muslims into “satanic figures.”
Rabbi Yoffie is certainly correct. In America there is only one side to the issue. An entire industry has been created that is devoted to demonizing Islam. Books abound that misrepresent Islam as the greatest possible threat to Western Civilization and seek to instill fear and hatred of Muslims in Americans. For example, Norman Podhoretz proclaims “World War IV: The Long Struggle Against Islamofascism.” Daniel Pipes shrieks that “Militant Islam Reaches America.” Lee Harris warns of “The Suicide of Reason: Radical Islam’s Threat to the West.”
Think tanks have well-funded Middle East programs, the purpose of which is to spread Islamophobia. Fear and loathing pour out of the Middle East Forum and the American Enterprise Institute.
In the US it is acceptable, even obligatory in many circles, to hate Muslims and to support violence against them. Pipes has been described as a “leading anti-Muslim hate propagandist.” He is on record advocating the use of violence alone as the solution to the Muslim problem. This won him the endorsement of the Christian Coalition, AIPAC, and the Zionist Organization of America for appointment to the board of the United States Institute of Peace. President George Bush used a recess appointment to appoint this man of violence to the Institute of Peace.
Pipes advocates that the Muslims be beaten into submission by force, the view that has guided the Bush administration. To brainwashed and propagandized Americans, the Pipes appointment made perfect sense.
Podhoretz believes that Islam has no right to exist, because it is opposed to Israeli territorial expansion, and that America must deracinate Islam, which means to tear Islam up by the roots.
While neoconservatives, Christian Zionists, and the Bush administration embrace unbridled violence against Muslims, Lee Harris warns that America is much too tolerant and reasonable to be able to defend itself against Muslim fanaticism. America’s “governing philosophy based on reason, tolerance, consensus and deliberation cannot defend itself against a [Muslim] strategy of ruthless violence.”
Islamophobia overflows with such absurdities and contradictions. Harris tells us that the Enlightenment overcame fanatical thinking in the West, leaving the West unfamiliar with fanaticism and helpless to confront it. Harris, who fancies himself an authority on fanaticism, is deaf, dumb, and blind to Communism and National Socialism and is completely ignorant of the fact that neoconservative fanatics are the direct heirs of the Jacobins of the French Revolution, itself a fanatical product of the Enlightenment.
If Americans did rely on reason, tolerance and deliberation, they might free their minds of shrill propaganda long enough to consider the “Muslim threat.” Muslims are disunited. Their disunity makes them a threat to one another, not to the West.
In Iraq most of the fighting and violence is between Sunni and Shi’ite Arabs and between Arabs and Kurds. If Iraqis were unified, most of the violence, instead of a small part of it, would be directed against the American troops, and the remnants of a defeated US army would have been withdrawn by now. However much Iraqis might hate the American invader and occupier, they do not hate him enough to unite and to drive him out. They would rather kill one another.
Iran, the current focus of demonization, is not Arab. Iranians are descended from the ancient Persian race. Indeed, Iran would do itself a favor if it changed its name back to Persia. For eight years (1980-1988) the Iranians and Iraqis were locked in catastrophic war with horrendous casualties on both sides. Despite its military exhaustion, Iraq was considered a “threat” by the American Superpower and was bombed and embargoed for the decade of the 1990s, one consequence of which was the deaths of 500,000 Iraqi children.
Not content with the complete crippling of Iraq by the Clinton administration, the Bush administration invaded Iraq in 2003 and has been dealing more death and destruction to Iraq ever since.
Palestine has been under Israeli occupation for decades. Israel has simply stolen most of Palestine, and the remaining Palestinian enclaves are ghettos policed by the Israeli army.
The rulers of Saudi Arabia and the oil emirates are Sunni Arabs. They are more afraid of Shi’ite Arabs than of Israelis. Egypt, Jordan, and Pakistan are ruled by bought-and-paid-for American puppets. The Turkish military is also in the American pocket and suppresses any Islamist influence in the civilian government.
Afghanistan is a disunited country of tribal peoples, each holding sway in their area. The Taliban were attempting to unify Afghanistan, and the Bush administration’s fear that the Taliban might succeed was the reason for the US invasion of Afghanistan. The US allied with the defeated Northern Alliance, in part a remnant of the old Soviet puppet government, and turned Afghanistan back over to warlords.
When the facts are considered – Muslim disunity and the absence of modern technology, navies, and strategic reach – the Bush/Cheney/neoconservative/Zionist propaganda that “we must fight them over there before they come over here” is such a transparent hoax that it is astounding that so many Americans have fallen for it.
To the extent that there is any Muslim threat, it is one created by the US and Israel. Israel has no diplomacy toward Muslims and relies on violence and coercion. The US has interfered in the internal affairs of Muslim countries during the entire post World War II period. The US overthrew an elected government in Iran and installed the Shah. The US backed Saddam Hussein in his aggression against Iran. The US has kept in power rulers it could control and has pandered to the desires of Israeli governments. If America is hated, America created the hate by its arrogant and dismissive treatment of the Muslim Middle East.
There is no such thing as Islamofascism. This is a coined propaganda word used to inflame the ignorant. There is no factual basis for the hatred that neoconservative Islamophobes instill in Americans. God did not tell America to destroy the Muslims for the Israelis.
In America today, blind ignorant hate against Muslims has been brought to a boiling point. The fear and loathing is so great that the American public and its elected representatives in Congress offer scant opposition to the Bush administration’s plan to make Iran the third Middle East victim of American aggression in the 21st century.
Most Americans, who Harris believes to be so reasonable, tolerant, and deliberative that they cannot defend themselves, could not care less that one million Iraqis have lost their lives during the American occupation and that an estimated four million Iraqis have been displaced. The total of dead and displaced comes to 20 percent of the Iraqi population. If this is not fanaticism on the part of the Bush administration, what is it? Certainly it is not reason, tolerance, and deliberation.
Source: http://www.antiwar.com/roberts/?articleid=11560
About Author
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Paul Craig Roberts wrote the Kemp-Roth bill and was assistant secretary of the Treasury in the Reagan administration. He was associate editor of the Wall Street Journal editorial page and contributing editor of National Review. He is author or co-author of eight books, including The Supply-Side Revolution (Harvard University Press). He has held numerous academic appointments, including the William E. Simon chair in political economy, Center for Strategic and International Studies, Georgetown University, and senior research fellow, Hoover Institution, Stanford University. He has contributed to numerous scholarly journals and testified before Congress on 30 occasions. He has been awarded the U.S. Treasury’s Meritorious Service Award and the French Legion of Honor. He was a reviewer for the Journal of Political Economy under editor Robert Mundell.
US Role in Islamist Terrorism
July 3, 2007
by Ivan Eland
When U.S. government officials and foreign policy pundits discuss terrorism, they usually focus on the characteristics, personnel, history, tactics, targets, objectives and effects of terrorist organizations. They rarely talk about motives.
To fully understand Islamic terrorism, one needs to understand what triggers this extraordinary rage. And throughout history one factor stands out above all else: the occupation of Muslim land by non-Muslim forces.
From the time of the Crusades, the pattern has been consistent. The Soviet Union learned this difficult lesson following its invasion and occupation of Afghanistan in the late 1970s. The Russians learned it again when they occupied Chechnya in the 1990s. Israel’s occupation of the West Bank and Gaza after the 1967 Six Day War and its military interventions in Lebanon triggered similar reactions, as did the U.S. military presence in Lebanon in the early 1980s. Indeed, it’s fair to say that Israel’s very existence – a non-Islamic state in land claimed by the Muslims – is part of the same pattern, as is the U.S. occupation of Iraq and Afghanistan.
There is much the United States could do to defuse the problem, and a good place to start would be by removing land-based U.S. forces from the Persian Gulf.
Even Osama bin Laden claims he attacks the United States primarily because of its military presence in the region. Other reasons, he claims, are secondary.
Remember, bin Laden first went to war not against the United States, but against the Soviets in Afghanistan. When he returned to his Saudi Arabia homeland after fighting the Soviets, he found a large – and to him unacceptable – U.S. military presence in the desert kingdom, which remained after evicting Saddam Hussein from Kuwait. It was then that the United States became a target.
During the Cold War, one could make a plausible argument for some U.S. involvement overseas to counter the expansionist Soviet superpower. When the Soviet Union collapsed, that rationale disappeared.
Even if the United States believes the global oil market will fail to deliver Persian Gulf oil to U.S. shores without U.S. military forces protecting it (a dubious proposition), the U.S. military could protect our oil lifeline from offshore, without troops stationed in Muslim countries.
The United States has done so before. In 1991, when the George H.W. Bush administration believed U.S. oil supplies were endangered by Saddam Hussein’s invasion of Kuwait, U.S.-based land and air forces were sent to the Gulf to push Saddam out of Kuwait. After the job was done, those forces should have been brought home. Instead, the United States established a large military footprint in the region, which, in retrospect, was exactly the wrong move.
Now it’s time to get rid of that unneeded land presence, not to increase the ante by talking about permanent U.S. bases in Iraq.
Just look at the troubles the United States has caused in Afghanistan. There, the continued U.S. occupation – which has changed its main focus from killing or capturing bin Laden to nation-building, counterinsurgency, and drug interdiction – is fueling a resurgence of the Taliban movement.
Only by minimizing the permanent U.S. military presence in Arab and Islamic lands can we hope to stem anti-U.S. terrorism. The United States should withdraw its forces from Afghanistan, inform the Afghans that U.S. forces will return if any Afghan government harbors al-Qaeda, and use Special Forces to hunt down al-Qaeda’s leadership. This process needs to be repeated in Iraq and the Persian Gulf.
The lesson learned is that empire does not enhance security – it undermines it. U.S. power on Islamic soil is especially problematic.
Source: http://www.antiwar.com/eland/?articleid=11230
About Author
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Ivan Eland is Senior Fellow and Director of the Center on Peace & Liberty at The Independent Institute in Oakland, Calif. Having received his Ph.D. in national security policy from George Washington University, Dr. Eland has served as Principal Defense Analyst at the Congressional Budget Office, Evaluator-in-Charge for the U.S. General Accounting Office (national security and intelligence), and Investigator for the House Foreign Affairs Committee. He has testified on NATO expansion before the Senate Foreign Relations Committee and CIA oversight before the House Government Reform Committee.
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Imprisoning a Whole Nation
Israel is being allowed to destroy the very notion of a state of Palestine and is imprisoning an entire nation. That is clear from the latest attacks on Gaza, whose suffering has become a metaphor for the tragedy imposed on the peoples of the Middle East and beyond. These attacks, reported on Britain’s Channel 4 News, were “targeting key militants of Hamas” and the “Hamas infrastructure.” The BBC described a “clash” between the same militants and Israeli F-16 aircraft.
Consider one such clash. The militants’ car was blown to pieces by a missile from a fighter-bomber. Who were these militants? In my experience, all the people of Gaza are militant in their resistance to their jailer and tormentor. As for the “Hamas infrastructure,” this was the headquarters of the party that won last year’s democratic elections in Palestine. To report that would give the wrong impression. It would suggest that the people in the car and all the others over the years, the babies and the elderly who have also “clashed” with fighter-bombers, were victims of a monstrous injustice. It would suggest the truth.
“Some say,” said the Channel 4 reporter, that “Hamas has courted this [attack] …” Perhaps he was referring to the rockets fired at Israel from within the prison of Gaza which killed no one. Under international law an occupied people has the right to use arms against the occupier’s forces. This right is never reported. The Channel 4 reporter referred to an “endless war,” suggesting equivalents. There is no war. There is resistance among the poorest, most vulnerable people on earth to an enduring, illegal occupation imposed by the world’s fourth largest military power, whose weapons of mass destruction range from cluster bombs to thermonuclear devices, bankrolled by the superpower. In the past six years alone, wrote the historian Ilan PappĂ©, “Israeli forces have killed more than 4,000 Palestinians, half of them children.”
Consider how this power works. According to documents obtained by United Press International, the Israelis once secretly funded Hamas as “a direct attempt to divide and dilute support for a strong, secular PLO [Palestine Liberation Organization] by using a competing religious alternative,” in the words of a former CIA official.
Today, Israel and the US have reversed this ploy and openly back Hamas’s rival, Fatah, with bribes of millions of dollars. Israel recently secretly allowed 500 Fatah fighters to cross into Gaza from Egypt, where they had been trained by another American client, the Cairo dictatorship. The Israelis’ aim is to undermine the elected Palestinian government and ignite a civil war. They have not quite succeeded. In response, the Palestinians forged a government of national unity, of both Hamas and Fatah. The latest attacks are aimed at destroying this.
With Gaza secured in chaos and the West Bank walled in, the Israeli plan, wrote the Palestinian academic Karma Nabulsi, is “a Hobbesian vision of an anarchic society: truncated, violent, powerless, destroyed, cowed, ruled by disparate militias, gangs, religious ideologues and extremists, broken up into ethnic and religious tribalism and co-opted collaborationists. Look to the Iraq of today …”
On 19 May, the Guardian received this letter from Omar Jabary al-Sarafeh, a Ramallah resident: “Land, water and air are under constant sight of a sophisticated military surveillance system that makes Gaza like The Truman Show,” he wrote. “In this film every Gazan actor has a predefined role and the [Israeli] army behaves as a director … The Gaza strip needs to be shown as what it is … an Israeli laboratory backed by the international community where human beings are used as rabbits to test the most dramatic and perverse practices of economic suffocation and starvation.”
The remarkable Israeli journalist Gideon Levy has described the starvation sweeping Gaza’s more than a million and a quarter inhabitants and the “thousands of wounded, disabled and shell-shocked people unable to receive any treatment … The shadows of human beings roam the ruins … They only know the [Israeli army] will return and they know what this will mean for them: more imprisonment in their homes for weeks, more death and destruction in monstrous proportions.”
Whenever I have been in Gaza, I have been consumed by this melancholia, as if I were a trespasser in a secret place of mourning. Skeins of smoke from wood fires hang over the same Mediterranean Sea that free peoples know, but not here. Along beaches that tourists would regard as picturesque trudge the incarcerated of Gaza; lines of sepia figures become silhouettes, marching at the water’s edge, through lapping sewage. The water and power are cut off, yet again, when the generators are bombed, yet again. Iconic murals on walls pockmarked by bullets commemorate the dead, such as the family of 18 men, women and children who “clashed” with a 500lb American/Israeli bomb, dropped on their block of flats as they slept. Presumably, they were militants.
More than 40 percent of the population of Gaza are children under the age of 15. Reporting on a four-year field study in occupied Palestine for the British Medical Journal, Dr. Derek Summerfield wrote that “two-thirds of the 621 children killed at checkpoints, in the street, on the way to school, in their homes, died from small arms fire, directed in over half of cases to the head, neck and chest – the sniper’s wound.” A friend of mine with the United Nations calls them “children of the dust.” Their wonderful childishness, their rowdiness and giggles and charm, belie their nightmare.
I met Dr. Khalid Dahlan, a psychiatrist who heads one of several children’s community health projects in Gaza. He told me about his latest survey. “The statistic I personally find unbearable,” he said, “is that 99.4 percent of the children we studied suffer trauma. Once you look at the rates of exposure to trauma, you see why: 99.2 percent of the study group’s homes were bombarded; 97.5 percent were exposed to tear gas; 96.6 percent witnessed shootings; 95.8 percent witnessed bombardment and funerals; almost a quarter saw family members injured or killed.”
He said children as young as three faced the dichotomy caused by having to cope with these conditions. They dreamt about becoming doctors and nurses, then this was overtaken by an apocalyptic vision of themselves as the next generation of suicide bombers. They experienced this invariably after an attack by the Israelis. For some boys, their heroes were no longer football players, but a confusion of Palestinian “martyrs” and even the enemy, “because Israeli soldiers are the strongest and have Apache gunships.”
Shortly before he died, Edward Said bitterly reproached foreign journalists for what he called their destructive role in “stripping the context of Palestinian violence, the response of a desperate and horribly oppressed people, and the terrible suffering from which it arises.” Just as the invasion of Iraq was a “war by media,” so the same can be said of the grotesquely one-sided “conflict” in Palestine. As the pioneering work of the Glasgow University Media Group shows, television viewers are rarely told that the Palestinians are victims of an illegal military occupation; the term “occupied territories” is seldom explained. Only 9 percent of young people interviewed in the UK know that the Israelis are the occupying force and the illegal settlers are Jewish; many believe them to be Palestinian. The selective use of language by broadcasters is crucial in maintaining this confusion and ignorance. Words such as “terrorism,” “murder” and “savage, cold-blooded killing” describe the deaths of Israelis, almost never Palestinians.
There are honorable exceptions. The kidnapped BBC reporter Alan Johnston is one of them. Yet, amidst the avalanche of coverage of his abduction, no mention is made of the thousands of Palestinians abducted by Israel, many of whom will not see their families for years. There are no appeals for them. In Jerusalem, the Foreign Press Association documents the shooting and intimidation of its members by Israeli soldiers. In one eight-month period, as many journalists, including the CNN bureau chief in Jerusalem, were wounded by the Israelis, some of them seriously. In each case, the FPA complained. In each case, there was no satisfactory reply.
A censorship by omission runs deep in western journalism on Israel, especially in the US. Hamas is dismissed as a “terrorist group sworn to Israel’s destruction” and one that “refuses to recognize Israel and wants to fight not talk.” This theme suppresses the truth: that Israel is bent on Palestine’s destruction. Moreover, Hamas’s long-standing proposals for a ten-year cease-fire are ignored, along with a recent, hopeful ideological shift within Hamas itself that amounts to a historic acceptance of the sovereignty of Israel. “The [Hamas] charter is not the Quran,” said a senior Hamas official, Mohammed Ghazal. “Historically, we believe all Palestine belongs to Palestinians, but we’re talking now about reality, about political solutions … If Israel reached a stage where it was able to talk to Hamas, I don’t think there would be a problem of negotiating with the Israelis [for a solution].”
When I last saw Gaza, driving towards the Israeli checkpoint and the razor wire, I was rewarded with a spectacle of Palestinian flags fluttering from inside the walled compounds. Children were responsible for this, I was told. They make flagpoles out of sticks tied together and one or two will climb on to a wall and hold the flag between them, silently. They do it when there are foreigners around and they believe they can tell the world.
Source: http://www.antiwar.com/pilger/?articleid=11014
About Author
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John Pilger was born and educated in Sydney, Australia. He has been a war correspondent, film-maker and playwright. Based in London, he has written from many countries and has twice won British journalism’s highest award, that of “Journalist of the Year,” for his work in Vietnam and Cambodia.
