Bush
And Islam: Words Versus Deeds
By Nicola Nasser
29 September, 2006
Countercurrents.org
The wide gap between U.S. President
George W. Bush’s words and deeds vis-à-vis Islam and Muslims
doomed to failure his speech at the United nations on September 19,
which could neither appease Muslims nor pacify the ever growing Islamophobia.
Hardly a week had passed since his speech than Winston Churchill - author,
journalist, former Member of Parliament and grandson of the former British
prime minister - was speaking at an American university to condemn “Radical
Islam” as posing to Western civilization a threat similar to that
of the Nazis and the Soviets. (1)
President Bush has denied that the West is engaged in a war against
Islam as a “false propaganda,” but confirmed his country’s
determination to carry on with its “war on terror” and its
“great ideological struggle” at the start of the 21st century
exclusively against Muslims and Muslim countries.
“My country desires peace,” Bush told world leaders at the
opening of the 61st session of the UN General Assembly, adding: “Extremists
in your midst spread propaganda claiming that the West is engaged in
a war against Islam. This propaganda is false... We respect Islam.”
(2)
Bush is also on record as saying that “Islam is a religion of
peace” and praising Islam's “commitment to religious freedom,”
statements that were criticized by the popular U.S. televangelist Pat
Robertson.
These rare expressions of respect to Islam would have been welcomed
by Muslims were they not swept to utter oblivion in the collective memory
of the American public by his incessantly flowing anti-Muslim terminology:
Islamic radicalism, Islamic fascism, Islamic extremism and extremists,
Islamic or Islamist terrorism and terrorists, radical Islamists or Islamist
and Islamic radicals, etc.
His September 19 speech was almost exclusively confined to the Middle
East, an overwhelmingly Muslim region. The absence of even a reference
to the North Korean pillar of his so-called “axis of evil”
was revealing enough that his WWIII (3) “on terror” has
shrunk to focus exclusively on the Muslim Middle East.
“At the start of the 21st century, it is clear that the world
is engaged in a great ideological struggle, between extremists who use
terror as a weapon to create fear, and moderate people who work for
peace,” he said, defining the battle lines of his WWIII.
Four days earlier he identified those extremists as being “Islamic,”
who “want to impose” their “ideology throughout the
broader Middle East.” Earlier, on August 10, CNN quoted Bush as
saying that, “this nation is at war with Islamic fascists.”
He also defined a modern Anglo-Saxon white man’s mission in the
21st century as “our obligation to defend civilization and liberty,
to support the forces of freedom and moderation throughout the Middle
East.” (4)
How can mainstream Muslims perceive Bush or the United States as respecting
Islam when their overwhelming propaganda machine is producing this torrential
flow of anti-Muslim terminology and their overpowering war machine is
disintegrating Muslim societies to pre-state age, allegedly to defend
the freedom of American people. How could a leader secure his people’s
freedom when he deprives other peoples of their freedoms!
Jim Lobe is a respected reporter of the Asia Times; in a recent article
I misquoted him as attributing to Bush’s co-ideologist, Nweit
Gingrich, the term “WWIII on Islam.” Lobe rightly felt highly
indignant that his credibility was compromised by my misquotation. Gingrich
did not literary say it by the word, but he and Bush said it in each
and every other word.
Bush's “strategies are not wrong, but they are failing,”
in part because “they do not define the scale of the emerging
World War III, between the West and the forces of Islam,” Gingrich
said. (5)
Bush’s attempt to verbally separate between Islam and Muslims
in his propaganda to justify his pre-emptive American militaristic and
hegemonic foreign policy is hopeless and doomed to failure.
Five years after U.S. President George W. Bush launched his global war
on terrorism, this war has boiled down to a war on Islam: One cannot
target all those Muslims, their countries and their Islamic syllabus
without targeting their religion.
His global war on terrorism targets “Islamic terrorism”
almost exclusively. “Till recently, of the 36 organisations on
the U.S. State Department's banned list, 24 were Muslim. The rest were
Basque and Irish separatists and leftist groups. There were no Christian,
Buddhist or Hindu groups. The State Department also lists 26 countries
whose nationals represent an ‘elevated security risk’ to
the U.S. Barring North Korea, all are Muslim-majority countries.”
(6)
Bush’s religious terminology is shooting his unreligious war in
the legs, antagonizing not only the mainstream Muslims but also the
non-Muslim large Christian minority in the midst of their ethnic compatriots
because this minority feels threatened by his inciting anti-Muslim propaganda,
which creates an explosive antagonistic environment that plays in the
hands of the same extremists whom he uses as a scapegoat for his unjust
pre-emptive wars.
“Ignorance” of the Middle East and its people is a false
thesis that sometimes is cited as a justification for Bush’s militarist
polices and verbal anti-Muslim blunders. But Bush, whose country has
been bleeding the region’s oil wealth for a century, could not
be credited even with the benefit of ignorance.
All the anti-Islamist terminology cannot blur the fact that the issue
is oil. There's no question that controlling the oil and the profits
from oil is a U.S. top priority in the Middle East, particularly as
Washington is not only bracing for a future competition with China and
India for that resource, but also is already in fierce race with Europe
and Japan to take hold of the strategic asset, which is getting more
precious and more expensive by the day, because whoever sets hands on
it will decide who is the future leader of the globalized world economy;
hence the U.S. war on Afghanistan in the vicinity of the central Asian
oil reservoir and on Iraq in the heart of the Middle East oil reserves
huge depot.
In his most blatant self-contradiction Bush declared: “Freedom,
by its nature, cannot be imposed, it must be chosen.”
However he did not hesitate to arrogantly dictate to world leaders and
whipping Muslims into line in his U.N. speech: The world “must,”
the United Nations “must,” the nations gathered “in
this chamber (U.N. General Assembly) must”, the Muslim world “must,”
the “leaders” of Iraqis “must,” the Syrian government
“must;” and to the Hamas-led Palestinian government he had
an outright order: “Serve the interests of the Palestinian people.
Abandon terror, recognize Israel's right to exist, honor agreements,
and work for peace.”
Bush accuses Islamists of forcing their version of things on others
while he unsheathes his sword out and high to dictate a 21st century
white man mission to convert Muslims to a version of Islam that serves
U.S. interests.
No wonder the National Intelligence Estimate concluded that the “pervasive
anti-U.S. sentiment among most Muslims,” is a “movement
that is likely to grow more quickly than the West's ability to counter
it over the next five years.” (7)
And Bush still can't come to grips with the question of “Why they
hate us.” Bush's line: “They hate us because of our freedoms.”
No Mr. President, they hate you because your administration and its
predecessors have been for decades depriving them of their liberty,
freedoms, resources and elected governments, in a historic trend that
extends from removing an elected leader in Iran in the 1950s because
of his nationalizing the oil and replacing him by the Shah, a brutal
dictator, to suffocating the Palestinian people to squeeze out the elected
Hamas-led government from power in 2006.
Bush’s scare tactics aimed at American public should not blur
the divide in Bush’s WWIII. The battle lines should be redrawn
to be between U.S. and Israeli militarism and military occupation and
expansion and the liberation movements that were led by nationalists
or Pan-Arabists in the 20th century and now are led by Islamists.
Bush absurdly, unconvincingly and arrogantly postured as the liberator
of the Muslim and Arab masses, promoting the U.S. Democracy as a campaign
of changing Muslim and Arab regimes, by military force if needed.
However, Muslims and especially Arabs are very well aware that the end
of the Cold War and the collapse of the former USSR have made Islam
a useful scapegoat for tightening the US grip on the unipolar world.
Books by the Orientalist Bernard Lewis and Samuel Huntington's The Clash
of Civilizations became popular in the west because they promoted the
idea that Islam was the main threat to Western “civilization.”
They are also aware that this war to establish total and lasting U.S.
global hegemony, a sort of modern-day Roman Empire, is spearheaded in
the heartland of Muslims and Islam, the Arab world, where all the regimes
are targeted sooner or later; it makes no difference whether they are
Islamic, Islamist, secular, liberal, or Pan-Arab regimes, monarchies
or republics.
*Nicola Nasser is a veteran Arab journalist in Kuwait, Jordan, UAE and
Palestine. He is based in Ramallah, West Bank of the Israeli-occupied
Palestinian territories.
Notes
(1) Winston Churchill at the Union University on September 26. Reported
by the Baptist Press BP on Sept. 27, 2006.
(2) President Bush’s speech at the 61st session of the UN General
Assembly on September 19, 2006.
(3)“WWIII” is a term used by the former Republican Speaker
of the House of Representatives Newt Gingrich in a recent speech at
the neo-conservative American Enterprise Institute (AEI); he was quoted
by Jim Lobe, Asia Times on September 14, 2006.
(4) Bush's news conference at the White House on Friday, September 15,
2006.
(5) Jim Lobe, Asia Times on September 14, 2006.
(6) Praful Bidwai, Inter Press Service, September 7, 2006. Reported
by http://www.snpx.com
(7) The Washington Post on September 27, 2006.
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