Date: August 18, 2006 6:21:43 AM PDT
To: undisclosed-recipients:;
Subject: [IPCUSA] Fear and Loathing in the Occident
Why Do We Hate Them?
Fear and Loathing in the Occident
By Jason Miller
8/17/06
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
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