Why
Do We Hate Them?
By Jason Miller
18 August, 2006
Countercurrents.org
Islamophobia
is a mental and spiritual affliction. And our Western ruling elites
bear the responsibility for inflicting it upon the psyches of the masses.
Now that the Stalinist/Maoist
regimes have collapsed or evolved toward capitalism and no fascist states
with imperial ambitions exist (besides the United States and its few
allies), the American Empire needed to find a new "enemy”
to replace Stalinists and Nazis. Much of the soft power employed by
the leaders of America’s “top down democracy” stems
from psychological manipulation of “the mob”. Mobilization
of the masses against a common enemy “threatening the very existence
of the American Way” has long been a staple in the United States’
ruling elites’ ongoing push to monopolize the world’s wealth,
power, and prestige.
And who better to vilify
than Islamic people? Many are dark-skinned and live in developing nations,
meaning their lives are inconsequential in the prevailing moral calculus
of the West. The Middle East is predominately Islamic, its sands are
oozing with crude oil, and it is home to Israel. From the perspective
of the Empire, what better region to target than the Middle East?
And whether one believes
that 9/11 was a false flag operation perpetrated by the US government
or the work of radical Islamic Fundamentalists, the members of the Bush
Regime obviously shed their crocodile tears publicly while privately
celebrating the event as their Pearl Harbor. 3,000 civilian deaths and
the demolition of a powerful symbol of the Western “value”
of avaricious Capitalism whipped the American public into a furor against
the “evil Muslims” who “hate our freedoms”.
Never mind the fact that
the United States and Israel have undertaken a nearly unparalleled program
of military aggression and ethnic cleansing throughout the Middle East
since the formation of the illegitimate colonial nation in Palestine.
Given the premises for founding Israel, someone needs to remind Great
Britain and the United States that it is incumbent upon them to create
a homeland for homosexuals and Romani people. After all, they were also
Holocaust victims and are people without a nation. And like the Palestinians,
the other inhabitants of the Middle East are more akin to animals than
human beings. So why not establish two more colonies on their land?
On August 13, Sixty Minutes
aired a segment that revealed a great deal about Islamophobia and the
role the corporate media plays in its proliferation.
In his recent open
letter to Mike Wallace, Michael K. Smith declared:
Your interview with Iranian
Prime Minister Ahmadinejad was a disgrace to the journalistic profession.
You began with the condescending manner of a school principal lecturing
the class clown for immature behavior and squandered the entire interview
on hypocritically accusatory questions. If gall were an Olympic sport,
you'd take the Gold Medal.
Michael made some fine points
throughout his letter. However, I opine that he was too generous when
he called Wallace’s vituperative verbal assault an interview.
What I witnessed was Mike Wallace, the Ugly American. Brimming with
contempt, impatience, hubris, and belligerence, he more closely resembled
the Grand Inquisitor than a journalist.
Did Wallace truly fail to
grasp that he was acting as an apologist and cheerleader for bellicose,
heartless, and ruthless perpetrators of war crimes on behalf of Israel,
and thus is a Zionist (as Ahmadinejad suggested)? Through its grossly
biased coverage of the “War on Terrorism” and mindless perpetuation
of the inane myth that Israel has the right to annihilate an unlimited
number of civilians to protect its “right to exist”, CBS
News has joined the squad of corporate media cheerleaders which has
been shamelessly complicit in the Empire’s egregious crimes against
humanity. I submit that one can be a Zionist and a journalist. Mike
Wallace is living proof.
Yet in spite of Wallace’s
tenacious efforts, the “devil incarnate”, Ahmadinejad, remained
composed. At times Ahmadinejad seemed to thoroughly enjoy Wallace’s
obvious “flustration” in attacking him from what has become
an absurdly untenable position, both morally and logically. For those
of us who don’t believe the Western media fairy tale that the
United States is a force for good engaged in a noble struggle in its
bid to rid the world of the evil of Islam and defend Israel’s
“right to exist”, Wallace’s ill-fated attempt to expose
the malevolence of the “enemy” was quite entertaining.
Just as Wallace scrambled
madly in a hopeless attempt to prevail intellectually in his interrogation
of Ahmadinejad, the debt-ridden, aging American Empire and its allies
are flailing wildly in a desperate attempt to claim military victory
in the Middle East. And like Ahmadinejad, those who comprise the resistance
to occupation and exploitation in the Middle East are facing down their
occupiers with a deft persistence, filled with a confidence born from
the knowledge that recent history has not been kind to imperial invaders
facing a people determined to expel them (i.e. Vietnam, Lebanon, and
Iraq).
In the perverse worldview
of the Neocons, Israel, and AIPAC, Iran is considered to be a part of
the “Axis of Evil”. Since Wallace championed the cause of
the “benevolent” United States in his Sixty Minutes interrogation
of the leader of one of the members of the “Axis”, it is
instructive to consider the “evils” Iran and resistance
groups like Hamas and Hezbollah have perpetrated.
While various resistance
groups in the Middle East have certainly committed war crimes by killing
civilians, the “leader of the free world” and its counterpart
in Palestine have annihilated hundreds of thousands more civilians than
have the so-called “terrorists”.
Yes, militant Fundamentalist
Islamic individuals wield much of the power in Iran. But let’s
put on our thinking caps to discern how that situation evolved. In 1979
hard-line anti-American Islamic clerics assumed control of the Iranian
government when they ousted the Shah (the corrupt US puppet who tortured
and killed tens of thousands of Iranian “dissidents” during
his reign of terror). Ironically, the Iranian government the United
States loves to hate exists because the CIA and MI6 facilitated the
Shah taking power from Mohammed Mossadegh in 1953. The significance?
Mossadegh was a democratically-elected secular prime minister who had
had the audacity to nationalize the oil industry because the British
oil companies were grossly exploiting the Iranian people. By acting
in typical fashion (by taking out a populist leader and replacing him
with a vicious tyrant), the United States provided an incubator for
powerful anti-American sentiment. Thus the United States and Great Britain
are responsible for the theocracy in Iran which they fear and despise.
Corporate media pundits like
Michelle Malkin and Anne Coulter are the vanguards in spreading pernicious
distortions which fan the rapidly spreading emotional flames of fear,
prejudice, and hatred comprising Islamophobia. Two of the most disturbing
and inflammatory perversions of the truth the Western media entities
disseminate are that all adherents of the Islamic faith are radical
fundamentalists and that Sharia Law is universally harsh and grossly
inferior to the Empire’s system (which provides “liberty
and justice for all”).
Just as Christianity encompasses
a broad spectrum of people with varying ways of practicing and expressing
their faith, the Islamic world is filled with human beings who have
diverse ways of expressing their religious beliefs. There are liberal,
moderate, and Fundamentalist Muslims. And surprising as it may seem,
most practitioners of Fundamentalist Islam, like most Fundamentalist
Christians, are essentially peaceful individuals. In fact, a Muslim
truly following the tenets of Islam practices moderation and tolerance.
Many Muslims are no more willing to strap plastic explosives to their
belts for a suicide mission than most Christians would be to bomb an
abortion clinic. There are radicals from both religions, but they are
very much in the minority.
Another lie deeply embedded
in the barrage of communications we receive from the Western corporate
media is that the United States and its allies are morally superior
to the “evil Muslims”. One aspect of Islam they offer as
“proof” of this faulty conclusion is that many Islamic nations
incorporate Sharia into their legal systems. While Sharia can involve
harsh and rigid forms of justice, it exists to varying degrees in the
many Muslim nations around the globe. Judiciaries in Islamic nations
manifest the influence of Sharia in ways that span the spectrum from
extremely dogmatic to highly secular and liberal.
While the Western media’s
blistering criticism of the more draconian actions of some Islamic nations
(i.e. Iran’s execution of teenagers) is definitely warranted,
the Empire has a great deal of house-cleaning to do before it is in
a position to preach to other nations on human rights issues.
Here are but a few recent
examples of the United States’ own flagrant human rights abuses:
1. carrying out quite a number
of its own executions in a manner recently discovered to inflict a great
deal of suffering on the victim
2. routinely torturing and
suspending justice for suspected “enemy combatants”
3. funding the Israeli Apartheid
and ethnic cleansing of the Palestinians
4. occupying a nation where
it has killed over a million Iraqi civilians since the Gulf War invasion
(through brutal economic sanctions and military actions).
5. funding the Israeli devastation
of Lebanon
6. supporting numerous ruthless
and murderous regimes (as long as they are friendly to US corporations)
7. having cynically embraced
Saddam Hussein as an ally (knowing of his crimes against humanity) when
it furthered US interests and invading Iraq preemptively to topple him
when he ceased to be useful.
8. having kept the House
of Saud in power for years despite its harsh practice of Sharia (i.e.
thieves’ hands are severed and adulterers are stoned).
9. maintaining the largest
prison population in the world through a legal system so unjust that
50% of those incarcerated are Black when Blacks comprise 14% of the
general population.
10. engaging in numerous
outright massacres of civilians (i.e. Haditha, Fallujah)
In light of the above, how
long will it be before a significant portion of the Muslim population
falls prey to an extreme prejudice against all Westerners called Anglo-Christophobia?
Let’s hope it does not happen any time soon.
Speaking of Christians (at
least the Fundamentalist ones), their demonization of Islam is actually
rather amusing. Christian Fundamentalists share more common ground with
the extreme members of the Islamic faith than they perhaps realize.
Some Muslim nations treat homosexuality as a crime. Abortion is illegal
in virtually every circumstance throughout much of the Middle East.
Separation of church and state does not exist in nations like Iran.
Implementation of the death penalty is common in the Middle East. How
can men like John Hagee reconcile their cognitive dissonance in advocating
war against Iran, a model of the theocracy they strive to implement
in the United States?
CBS, Mike Wallace and the
rest of the United States’ corporate media can continue to do
the Empire’s bidding from now until the world comes to an end
(which may not be as far away as I make it sound if sanity and humanity
do not prevail over greed, ignorance, and hatred). However, their nearly
endless bombardment of intelligently crafted lies readily distributed
to nearly every corner of the globe are powerless to alter the truth.
In truth, Israeli and American
lives are no more precious than those of the Arab and Persian human
beings populating the Middle East. And neither the United States/Israel/Great
Britain nor the nations and groups comprising the resistance in the
Middle East are innocent of the deep transgression of murdering innocents.
Each nation or group also commits human rights abuses against its own
people in some fashion. However, Western exploiters and invaders are
culpable of far more frequent and grievous war crimes than the Middle
Easterners who are defending themselves, their resources, and their
people.
If the majority of the human
beings controlling the corporate media had a shred of moral decency
they would focus their efforts on informing their viewers, listeners,
and readers of the vast number of war crimes committed by Israel and
the United States. They would start portraying the “terrorists”
as the resistors of oppression they truly are. They would make a distinction
between the various Middle Eastern resistance groups’ legitimate
attacks on their occupiers’ militaries and the war crimes they
commit against civilians. And they would devote most of their remaining
substantial resources to the inundation of news consumers with stories,
photos and video footage depicting the tragic and gruesome civilian
suffering and death.
As it is, the Western corporate
media shamelessly serve the Neocons by perpetuating a virtually endless
cycle of hatred and violence. They incite and feed Islamophobia and
they fabricate a plethora of false justifications for the malevolent
actions of Israel and the United States. But then in a fascist nation,
corporations are wedded with the state, militarism is the state’s
primary focus, scapegoats and enemies are essential, and the function
of the Fourth Estate is to provide the propaganda to control the masses.
Just imagine if the mainstream
media in the United States actually began fulfilling its role (in what
is ostensibly a free society) and acted as a check on our government
rather than its accomplice. If more Americans knew more truth, instead
of hating Islamic people and pushing to intensify the war in the Middle
East, the masses would be demanding that reason, justice, and peace
prevail. They would demand that the United States completely withdraw
its military from the Middle East and leave Israel to stand on its own,
which would force the Israelis to finally settle the Palestinian issue
in a just manner and to cooperate with their neighbors as equals.
If the major media entities
of the West were living up to their responsibilities as members of the
Fourth Estate, perhaps 3 year old Ali Ahmad Hashim of Qana would not
have been bombed to death, the members of the Ghalia family would not
have been obliterated on a Gaza beach, 76 year old wheel-chair bound
amputee Abdul Hamid Hassan Ali would not have been massacred at Haditha,
Cindy Sheehan would not be grieving for a son lost to a war of imperial
aggression, and Reuven Levy of Haifa would not have been annihilated
by a rocket attack as he was doing his job for Israel Railways.
I am not holding my breath
waiting for money-driven enablers of war like Rupert Murdoch to start
heeding the advice of Jiminy Cricket. However, I will not succumb to
their assault of malicious distortions. I refuse to fear, hate, or consider
myself at war with 20% of the world’s population simply because
they choose to follow the teachings of the Qur’an.
Islamophobia is an intellectual
and spiritual malignancy. Reason and humanity are the cures.
Jason Miller
is a 39 year old sociopolitical essayist with a degree in liberal arts
and an extensive self-education (derived from an insatiable appetite
for reading). He welcomes responses at [email protected]
or comments on his blog, Thomas Paine's Corner, at http://civillibertarian.blogspot.com/.