Ismail Salami: Islamophobia - Washington's "New Colonialism"

Islamophobia: Washington's "New Colonialism"

By Dr. Ismail Salami

Global Research, May 20, 2012

URL of this article: www.globalresearch.ca/index.php?context=va&aid=30952

In an organized act of brutality, a number of US soldiers went on a house-to-house shooting spree in Zangabad village, Kandahar in March and massacred 16 people including nine children while they were sleeping and all Washington had to say were a few words of condolence and apology nonchalantly strung together in order to appease the overwhelming public rage in Afghanistan. Western media however reduced the number of the killers to one.

The bodies were reportedly wrapped in blankets and were set on fire.

US President Barack Obama said he was deeply saddened, "I offer my condolences to the families and loved ones of those who lost their lives, and to the people of Afghanistan, who have endured too much violence and suffering. This incident ... does not represent the exceptional character of our military and the respect that the United States has for the people of Afghanistan."

As contradictory as these words seem, the very 'exceptional character' of the US military had earlier urged them to burn copies of the Holy Quran, an incident which saddened the hearts of Muslims all across the world.

These and earlier incidents are not coincidental and well attest to a prevailing mindset in the US military and a dominant policy in Washington. It is clear that the US government has commenced a large-scale campaign against Islam with the express intention of debilitating the Muslim community.

In fact, the war on Islam started in 2001 when the then US president George Bush made a crass reference to his so-called war on terror as 'crusade'. He warned Americans that "this crusade, this war on terrorism, is going to take awhile." Bush's politically untoward remark rang alarm bells in Europe and the Muslim world although it went barely noticed in the American community who took the word for its sound rather than for its meaning.

Gradually, Washington instilled a sensation of anti-Islamism in America and Europe by attributing the nine-eleven tragedy and ensuing terrorist operations to the Muslims. Soheib Bensheikh, Grand Mufti of the mosque in Marseille, France said Bush's use of the word 'crusade' was most unfortunate and that "It recalled the barbarous and unjust military operations against the Muslim world" by Christian knights.

A delusional man who was overwhelmed with the idea of a messianic mission, George Bush wittingly or unwittingly dragged the world to the margins where a clash of civilizations was imminent.

The legacy of hatred which was started by George Bush was later continued in the form of classes and organized trainings.

In line with this Islamophobic policy funded by Washington and the powerful Zionist groups in the country, the US military has long been involved in fomenting anger and hatred against the Muslims by teaching its future leaders that a "total war" against the Muslims would be necessary to protect America.

According to hundreds of pages of course material and reference documents obtained by Danger Room (wired.com), the US military held a course at the Defense Department's Joint Forces Staff College and taught the students that they had to use a Hiroshima-style in Muslim counties and target the "civilian population wherever necessary."

The officer in charge of the hate lessons was Army Lt. Col. Matthew A. Dooley who still maintains his position at the Norfolk, Virginia College. Sadly, those who sat in his classes are now in the top positions in the US military.

The course 'Perspectives on Islam and Islamic Radicalism' was offered five times a year for groups of 20 at a time, the course may have been taught to as many as 800 mid-level and senior US military officers.

In a July presentation, Dooly said, "We have now come to understand that there is no such thing as 'moderate Islam. It is therefore time for the United States to make our true intentions clear. This barbaric ideology will no longer be tolerated. Islam must change or we will facilitate its self-destruction."

In his ugly lessons, he taught that "International laws protecting civilians in wartime are no longer relevant," and that mainstream Muslims are dangerous, because they're violent by nature. He also called for a Hiroshima-style destruction of the holy cities of Mecca and Medina.

Those who sat in his classes and patiently listened to his mad remarks are the ones who are now serving in Afghanistan and teaching the same hate lessons to their subordinates and even encouraging them to wipe out the Muslim community.

The atrocities perpetrated by the US military in the Muslim countries over the past 11 years or so are closely associated with and inspired by these appalling teachings.

Washington and the Zionist groups have long been making relentless efforts to depict Islam and the Muslims in dark shadows. An in-depth investigation into Islamophobia 'Dubbed as Fear, Inc. The Roots of the Islamophobia Network in America' was carried out by the Center for American Progress in the United States. The report sheds light on the collective efforts of the Zionist groups funded by the United States in pedaling a hatred for and a fear of Islam in the form of books, reports, websites, blogs, and carefully crafted talking points. According to the report, these wealthy donors and foundations also provide direct funding to anti-Islam grassroots groups.

The project of Islamophobia which has cost more than $40 million over the past ten years has been funded by seven foundations in the United States: 1. Richard Mellon Scaife Foundation; 2. Lynde and Harry Bradley Foundation; 3. Newton and Rochelle Becker; 4. Foundation and Newton and Rochelle Becker Charitable Trust; 5. Russell Berrie Foundation, Anchorage Charitable Fund and William Rosenwald; 6. Family Fund; 7. Fairbrook Foundation.

After all, Islamophobia is nothing new. Despite its rising upsurge in recent years, there have been efforts in the past to promote this pernicious trend.

Years ago, prominent Orientalist Edward Said warned of these calculated efforts in the West, arguing that the essentializing nature of the Orientalist enterprise has resulted today in misguided, inaccurate depictions of Islamic cultures: "Most of the pictures represent mass rage and misery, or irrational (hence hopelessly eccentric) gestures. Lurking behind all of these images is the menace of jihad. Consequence: a fear that the Muslims will take over the world."

Islamophobia is a form of political colonialism; an ideological war against Islam and the Muslims. It is a pernicious practice used by Washington and its allies to justify their lust for Muslim blood, give validity to their military expeditions in Muslim countries and seize hold of their numerous resources.

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EXPOSING SECULAR FANATICISM

New York, NY - In a powerful new essay ( Le racisme des intellectuels) for Le Monde [Fr], Alain Badiou, arguably the greatest living French philosopher, pinpoints the principal culprit in the success of the far-right in the recent French presidential election that resulted in the presidency of Francois Hollande.

At issue is the evidently not-so-surprising success of the French far-right, anti-immigration, Islamophobe nationalist politician Marine Le Pen - to whom the French electorate handed a handsome 20 per cent and third place prestige.

As Neni Panourgia has recently warned, "the phenomenon of Golden Dawn (Chrysi Avgi in Greek), the neo-Nazi organisation that received almost seven per cent of the vote in the Greek elections of May 6" is a clear indication that this rise of the right is not limited to France. The gruesome mass murderer Anders Breivik signalled from Northern Europe a common spectre that hovers over the entirety of the continent - most recently marked by the trial of the Bosnian Serb mass murderer General Ratko Mladic - accused of 11 counts of war crimes and crimes against humanity, including orchestrating the week-long massacre of more than 7,000 Muslim boys and men at Srebrenica in 1995 during the Bosnian war.

As Refik Hodzic, a justice activist from Bosnia and Herzegovina puts it, the implications of that murderous incident are not to be missed:

"The statement that will haunt the consciousness of Bosnians, Serbs and the world for decades to come was recorded in the immediate aftermath of the fall of Srebrenica, a UN-protected enclave in eastern Bosnia: 'On this day I give Srebrenica to the Serb people,' he announced into a TV camera. 'The time has finally come for revenge against Turks [Bosnian Muslims] who live in this area.' These chilling words were the prelude to a systematic execution of some 8,000 Bosnian Muslim men and boys who had sought refuge with the Dutch UN battalion or tried to reach safety through the woods surrounding Srebrenica. Years later, the International Criminal Tribunal for the Former Yugoslavia (ICTY) and the International Court of Justice would judge the massacre, directed by Mladic and carried out by his subordinates, to be the first act of genocide committed on European soil after World War II."

Who is responsible?

In this poignant and timely essay, Alain Badiou dismisses the pop sociology of blaming the rise of the right on the poor and the disenfranchised French, supposedly fearful of globalisation. He denounces the blaming of the poor French by the educated elite for all its ills - and instead offers a far more sensible and factual evidence of what seems to be the matter with the French - and, by extension, other Europeans.

Blaming the poor, Alain Badiou retorts, is reminiscent of Berthold Brecht's famous sarcasm that the French government evidently does not have the people it richly deserves. Turning the table against the French politicians and the French intellectuals, Badiou blames them directly for the rise of the right. Badiou turns to a list of the most recent anti-labour and anti-immigrant statements uttered by socialist politicians and charges them with the responsibility for the rise of the right.

"The succession of restrictive laws, attacking, on the pretext of being foreigners, the freedom and equality of millions of people who live and work here, is not the work of unrestricted 'populists'." He accuses Nicolas Sarkozy and his gang of "cultural racism", of "raising high the banner of 'superiority' of Western civilisation" and "an endless succession of discriminatory laws".

But Badiou does not spare the left and, in fact, accuses them of complacency: "We did not see the left rise forcefully to oppose... such reactionary" laws. Quite to the contrary, this segment of the left maintained that it understood this demand for "security", and had no qualms about the public space being cleansed of women who opted to veil themselves.

Badiou accuses the French intellectuals of having fomented Islamophobia, as he accuses successive French governments of having been "unable to build a civil society of peace and justice", and for having Arabs and Muslims abused as the boogymen of French politics.

But this is not just a French thing

The malady that Alain Badiou has diagnosed is not limited to the French, or even to Europeans. It is crucial to keep in mind that there are those among the expatriate Iranian, Arab or South Asian intellectuals in Europe who are identical in their Islamophobic racism against Muslims. A significant segment of these expat intellectuals, clumsily wearing white masks over their brown skin, are integral and definitive to secular fundamentalists' disdain for Islam and Muslims.

The current Islamophobia in Europe is a disease - a slightly updated gestation of old-fashioned European anti-Semitism. The disease is widely spread in North America too. In the US, the selfsame disease is now evident in the fact that US military officers have for years been indoctrinated by a viciously anti-Muslim pedagogy that teaches US military personnel that Muslims "hate everything you stand for and will never coexist with you, unless you submit".

They go further in asserting that the war against Muslims is so vicious that "the Geneva conventions that set standards of armed conflict, are no longer relevant"; which "would leave open the option once again of taking war to a civilian population wherever necessary"; that "Saudi Arabia [ought to be] threatened with starvation... Islam reduced to cult status" and that the US must "wage near total war" against 1.3 billion-plus Muslims.

And what exactly do the white-masked-brown-skinned amongst these expat intellectuals have to say about that? When the Danish cartoon row engulfed Europe, Salman Rushdie and his ilk - the talented Ms Ayaan Hirsi Ali, Ibn Warraq, Taslima Nasreen and a few other comprador intellectuals like them, keeping good company with none other than the one and only Bernard-Henri Levy - were up in arms charging that after "fascism, Nazism and Stalinism" the world now faced "a new global threat" in what they called "Islamism".

Yet they become completely dumb, deaf and blind when a mass murderer such as Breivik goes on a rampage murdering scores of innocent people for his pathological loathing of Muslims and Marxists. They are also blind to the fact that military officers of the most brutal killing machine on planet Earth are being indoctrinated with such criminally insane thoughts as those taught to US military personnel. Neither do they care when Qurans, the holy book of Muslims, are flushed down the toilets in Abu Ghraib, or burned in military bases in Afghanistan.

The new moral imperative

The ailment that Badiou diagnoses is not limited to French or even European intellectuals, or American Christian fundamentalist Quran burning pastors, or what passes for comedians in the United States (does anyone outside the United States care to know who Bill Maher is?). It extends well into fanatical secular fundamentalists among expat Arab, Iranian or South Asian intellectuals whose pathological loathing of Islam and Muslims has led some of them even to form what they call a "Council of Ex-Muslims", while another group that even call itself "Communists" unabashedly hold their anti-Muslim rallies shoulder to shoulder to neo-Nazis.

Still others among "ex-Muslims" are as vicious and brutal in ridiculing, denigrating - and even physically assaulting - a veiled woman who comes from their own country for a short visit to Europe.

The disease that Badiou has judiciously diagnosed is quite contagious and has metastasised far wider than he may care to know. It is now the most recent affliction of the brown-skinned who wear their white masks, wishing themselves white: comprador intellectuals who aid and abet the European and US racists in demonising their own people. There is a very thin line that separates these self-loathing "ex-Muslims" from Anders Breivik - except the Norwegian mass murderer hates their brown skin too, white masks notwithstanding.

What these "ex-Muslims" and their Euro-American counterparts share is a pathological essentialism about "Islam" and "Muslims". They are blind to the fact that there is a factual and existential difference between the "Islam" of a rich Kuwaiti Sheikh negotiating his fat belly around the table and fearfully watching his cholesterol in a fancy restaurant on the Champs-Elysees and the "Islam" of a an illegal Algerian busboy washing the dishes in the basement of the same restaurant.

That existential difference is the moral imperative of a new intuition of transcendence that escapes all these buffooneries and requires a new vision of what must be the highest moral imperative of a fragile world.

(Extracted from article written in Al Jazeera by Hamid Dabashi, Hagop Kevorkian Professor of Iranian Studies and Comparative Literature at Columbia University in the City of New York. Among his most recent books is Brown Skin, White Masks.)

Fwd: What About the 66%?

What About the 66%? By Ian Cooper | Friday, May 25th, 2012 More than 66% of Americans are overweight — and 33.9% of adults in the U.S. are obese. By 2020, more than 75% of us may be fat. I had to put down my Big Mac with extra cheese and push my supersized order of fries aside to type this article today. (My hot fudge sundae will just have to wait until after my editor sees it.) The obesity epidemic has reached a level where it's affecting things like plumbing and public transportation... Hospitals across the United States are replacing wall-mounted toilets with floor models to support the weight of obese patients, according to Reuters. The Federal Transit Administration is requiring buses to be tested for the impact of heavier riders on steering and breaking.  There's been talk about imposing a "fat tax" on the root of the problem: sugar-heavy soft drinks and processed and fast foods. A new British Medical Journal study says a 20% tax would help curb obesity: Economists generally agree that government intervention, including taxation, is justified when the market fails to provide the optimum amount of a good for society's well-being. [This] include[s] a failure to appreciate the true association between diet and disease, time inconsistency (preference for short-term gratification over long-term well-being), and not bearing the full health and social costs of consumption. Let's be honest here: People will not eat any better if you tax their burgers and milkshakes at a higher rate. And we certainly don't need some bureaucrat telling us which foods have been deemed "bad for us." Folks will continue to hit the drive-thru and buy the supersize portion... And as they look to weight loss drugs to regain control, savvy investors should look to this sector to line their pockets.

Anwar Ibrahim: Kita Lawan Penipuan, Rasuah & Kekotoran Dengan Bersih, Sebab Itu Bersih Diadakan

Check out this video on YouTube:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Lv-7A1jgg20&feature=youtube_gdata_player