The short answer is that Americans have always been frightened of
someone. We are taught to mistrust those who are "different" than us.
Whether it was the Indians, the Slaves, the Chinese, the Japanese, or
Salem Witches, we have been raise for generations on Fear of Others.
Too bad we can't seem to turn some of our Fear toward those who keep
fanning the Fire.
Carl Jarvis
On 2/19/17, Miriam Vieni <miriamvieni@xxxxxxxxxxxxx> wrote:
Schwarz writes: "There's been lots of attention-grabbing opposition to
Trump's 'Muslim ban' executive order, from demonstrations to court orders.
But polls make it clear public opinion is much more mixed."
A Muslim woman walks down a crowded street. (photo: Dmitry Kostyukov/NYT)
<https://theintercept.com/2017/02/18/why-do-so-many-americans-fear-muslims-d
ecades-of-denial-about-americas-role-in-the-world/>
Why Do So Many Americans Fear Muslims? Decades of Denial About America's
Role in the World.
By Jon Schwarz, The Intercept
18 February 17
There's been lots of attention-grabbing opposition to Trump's "Muslim ban"
executive order, from demonstrations to court orders. But polls make it
clear public opinion is much more mixed
<https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/the-fix/wp/2017/02/13/americans-arent-r
ejecting-trumps-immigration-ban-outright-but-it-has-a-tough-road-ahead/?utm_
term=.9b13a70417dc> . Standard phone polls show small majorities opposed,
while web and automated polls find small majorities continue to support it.
What surprises me about the poll results isn't that lots of Americans like
the ban - but that so many Americans don't. Regular people have lives to
lead and can't investigate complicated issues in detail. Instead they
usually take their cues
<https://books.google.com/books?id=71NYEEaMb4oC&lpg=PP1&dq=%22the%20politica
l%20brain%22&pg=PA22#v=onepage&q=%22public%20opinion%20follows%20the%20lead%
20of%20party%20leaders%20and%20pundits%22&f=false> from leaders they
trust.
And given what politicians across the U.S. political spectrum say about
terrorism, Trump's executive order makes perfect sense. There are literally
no national-level American politicians telling a story that would help
ordinary people understand why Trump's goals are both horrendously
counterproductive and morally vile.
Think of it this way:
On February 13, 1991 during the first Gulf War, the U.S. dropped two
laser-guided bombs on the Amiriyah public air raid shelter in Baghdad. More
than 400 Iraqi civilians were incinerated or boiled alive. For years
afterward visitors to a memorial there would meet a woman with eight
children who had died during the bombing
<http://riverbendblog.blogspot.com/2004_02_01_riverbendblog_archive.html> ;
she was living in the ruined shelter because she could not bear to be
anywhere else.
Now, imagine that immediately after the bombing Saddam Hussein had
delivered
a speech on Iraqi TV in which he plaintively asked "Why do they hate us?" -
without ever mentioning the fact that Iraq was occupying Kuwait. And even
Saddam's political opponents would only mumble that "this is a complicated
issue." And most Iraqis had no idea that their country had invaded Kuwait,
and that there were extensive United Nation resolutions and speeches by
George H.W. Bush explaining the U.S.-led coalition's rationale for
attacking
Iraq in response. And that the few Iraqis who suggested there might be some
kind of relationship between Hussein's invasion of Kuwait and the Amiriyah
bombing were shouted down by politicians saying these Iraq-hating radicals
obviously believed that America's slaughter of 400 people was justified.
If that had happened, we'd immediately recognize that Iraqi political
culture was completely insane, and that it would cause them to behave in
dangerously nutty ways. But that's exactly what U.S. political culture is
like.
In an interview last March
<http://www.cnn.com/2016/03/09/politics/donald-trump-islam-hates-us/> with
Anderson Cooper, Donald Trump tried to puzzle out what's behind the
terrorism directed at the U.S. "I think Islam hates us," Trump learnedly
opined. "There's a tremendous hatred there, we've got to get to the bottom
of it."
"In Islam itself?" asked Cooper. Trump responded, "You're going to have to
figure that out. You'll get another Pulitzer."
During Trump's speech at the CIA right after his inauguration, he expressed
the same bewilderment. "Radical Islamic terrorism," pondered Trump
<http://www.cbsnews.com/news/trump-cia-speech-transcript/> . "This is
something nobody can even understand."
John F. Kelly, now Trump's head of the Department of Homeland Security, is
similarly perplexed, saying in a 2013 speech
<https://www.washingtonpost.com/world/national-security/retired-marine-gen-j
ohn-f-kelly-picked-to-head-department-of-homeland-security/2016/12/07/165472
f2-bbe6-11e6-94ac-3d324840106c_story.html?utm_term=.72d9d5811c66> that "I
don't know why they hate us, and I frankly don't care, but they do hate us
and are driven irrationally to our destruction."
Say what you want about the tenets of this worldview, but at least it's an
internally consistent ethos: We're surrounded by lunatics who want to
murder
us for reasons that are totally inscrutable to rational people like us but
.
obviously have something to do with them being Muslims.
Meanwhile, in private, the non-crazy members of the U.S. foreign policy
establishment aren't confused at all. They understand quite well that
Islamist terrorism is almost wholly blowback from the foreign policy
they've
designed.
Richard Shultz, a professor at Tufts whose career has long been intertwined
with the national security state, has written
<http://www.weeklystandard.com/confab-sprint-or-slog/article/2006795> that
"A very senior [Special Operations Forces] officer who had served on the
Joint Staff in the 1990s told me that more than once he heard terrorist
strikes characterized as 'a small price to pay for being a superpower.'"
That small price, of course, is the deaths of regular Americans, and is
apparently well worth it.
The 9/11 Commission report quietly acknowledged
<http://avalon.law.yale.edu/sept11/911Report.pdf> , hundreds of pages in,
that "America's policy choices have consequences. Right or wrong, it is
simply a fact that American policy regarding the Israeli-Palestinian
conflict and American actions in Iraq are dominant staples of popular
commentary across the Arab and Muslim world." A senior official in the
George W. Bush administration later put it more bluntly to Esquire
<http://web.archive.org/web/20041124122100/http:/www.ocnus.net/cgi-bin/exec/
view.cgi?archive=56&num=14737> : That without the post-Gulf War sanctions
that killed hundreds of thousands of Iraqis and the stationing of U.S.
troops in Saudi Arabia, "bin Laden might still be redecorating mosques and
boring friends with stories of his mujahideen days in the Khyber Pass."
Intelligence professionals were quite aware that an invasion of Iraq would
take the conditions that led to 9/11 and make them far worse. The British
Chilcot Inquiry into the Iraq war published a February, 2003 assessment
<http://www.iraqinquiry.org.uk/media/230918/2003-02-10-jic-assessment-intern
ational-terrorism-war-with-iraq.pdf> by British intelligence of the
consequences of an invasion of Iraq, which would occur one month later.
"The
threat from Al Qaida will increase at the onset of any military action
against Iraq," the UK's Joint Intelligence Committee told Tony Blair, and
"the worldwide threat from other Islamist terrorist groups and individuals
will increase significantly."
The CIA had the same perspective. Michael Scheuer, who for several years
ran
the section of the Agency that tracked bin Laden, wrote in 2004
<http://www.npr.org/templates/story/story.php?storyId=1977111> that "U.S.
forces and policies are completing the radicalization of the Islamic world,
something Osama bin Laden has been trying to do with substantial but
incomplete success since the early 1990s. As a result, I think it fair to
conclude that the United States of America remains bin Laden's only
indispensable ally."
For its part, the Defense Department's Science Board concluded in a 2004
report <http://www.acq.osd.mil/dsb/reports/ADA428770.pdf> that "Muslims do
not 'hate our freedom,' but rather, they hate our policies. The
overwhelming
majority voice their objections to what they see as one-sided support in
favor of Israel and against Palestinian rights, and the longstanding, even
increasing support for what Muslims collectively see as tyrannies, most
notably Egypt, Saudi Arabia, Jordan, Pakistan, and the Gulf states."
When Barack Obama took office, he had two choices.
First, he could tell the truth: That the U.S. has acted with extraordinary
brutality in the Middle East, that this had been the main motivation for
most Islamist terrorism against us, and if we continued the same foreign
policy Americans would be killed indefinitely in intermittent attacks. Then
we could have had an open, informed debate about whether we like our
foreign
policy enough to die for it.
Second, Obama could continue trying to run the Middle East without public
input, but in a more rational way than the Bush administration.
Obviously he went with the second choice, which demanded several different
forms of political correctness.
Most importantly, Obama pretended that the U.S. has never done anything
truly wrong to others, and can enjoy the benefits of power without any
costs. This is the most pernicious and common form of political
correctness,
but is never called that because the most powerful people in America love
it.
But Obama also engaged in something more akin to what's generally called
political correctness, by contending that Islam has nothing to do with
terrorism. But it does - just not in the way that Frank Gaffney and Pamela
Geller would tell you.
Religion and nationalism have always been similar phenomena, and Islam
sometimes functions as a form of nationalism. And like all nationalisms, it
has a crazy, vicious right wing that's empowered by outside attacks on
members of the nation. The right loves to jeer at Obama for calling Islam
<https://obamawhitehouse.archives.gov/the-press-office/remarks-president-new
-economic-school-graduation> "a religion of peace," and they should - not
because Islam specifically isn't a religion of peace but because there is
really no such thing, just as there is no "nationalism of peace." It's true
religions and nationalism can bring out the best in people, but they also
bring out the worst (sometimes in the same person for the same reasons).
But Obama could never say anything like that, because he knew the U.S.
needs
the governments of Muslim-majority countries like Saudi Arabia and Egypt to
keep the rest of the Middle East in line.
This amalgam of political correctness made it impossible for the Obama
administration ever to tell a story about terrorism that made any sense.
For
instance, in his 2009 speech in Cairo
<http://www.nytimes.com/2009/06/04/us/politics/04obama.text.html> , he
declared, "It is easier to blame others than to look inward" - and then
went
on to demonstrate that truism.
His description of wrongs done by the U.S. was vague to the point of
meaninglessness: "tension has been fed by colonialism that denied rights
and
opportunities to many Muslims." Also, "Iraq was a war of choice that
provoked strong differences in my country and around the world."
Obama then explained that "Violent extremists have exploited these
tensions." So . 19 people were motivated to fly jetliners into buildings by
"tensions"? If that's the only story that non-Muslim Americans hear,
they'll
rationally be terrified of Islam.
In 2010, Obama's counterterrorism advisor, John Brennan, emitted a similar
bland puree of words at a press conference when questioned by Helen Thomas
<http://crooksandliars.com/heather/helen-thomas-presses-brennan-and-napolita
n> about Umar Farouk Abdulmutallab, the failed underwear bomber. Their
exchange went like this:
THOMAS: And what is the motivation? We never hear what you find out on why.
BRENNAN: Al Qaeda is an organization that is dedicated to murder and wanton
slaughter of innocents. [They] attract individuals like Mr. Abdulmutallab
and use them for these types of attacks. He was motivated by a sense of
religious sort of drive. Unfortunately, al Qaeda has perverted Islam, and
has corrupted the concept of Islam, so that [they're] able to attract these
individuals. But al Qaeda has the agenda of destruction and death.
THOMAS: And you're saying it's because of religion?
BRENNAN: I'm saying it's because of an al Qaeda organization that uses the
banner of religion in a very perverse and corrupt way.
THOMAS: Why?
BRENNAN: I think this is a, uh, long issue, but al Qaeda is just determined
to carry out attacks here against the homeland.
At his sentencing, Abdulmutallab explained his motivation
<https://books.google.com/books?id=ndNjAwAAQBAJ&lpg=PA241&ots=BJeofNLxmj&dq=
%22and%20in%20retaliation%20of%20the%20killing%20of%20innocent%20and%20civil
ian%20Muslim%20populations%20in%20Palestine%22&pg=PA241#v=onepage&q=%22to%20
attack%20the%20unite> in less time than it took Brennan to say there
wasn't
enough time to explain:
[I pledged] to attack the United States in retaliation for U.S. support of
Israel and in retaliation of the killing of innocent and civilian Muslim
populations in Palestine, especially in the blockade of Gaza, and in
retaliation for the killing of innocent and civilian Muslim populations in
Yemen, Iraq, Somalia, Afghanistan and beyond, most of them women, children,
and noncombatants.
To be fair, there is one situation in which American officials have lost
the
mushmouth and drawn a direct connection between a country killing
Mideastern
civilians and terrorist retaliation: when that country is Russia. William
Burns, formerly Obama's Deputy Secretary of State, recently and accurately
proclaimed
<https://www.nytimes.com/2017/01/07/opinion/sunday/how-we-fool-ourselves-on-
russia.html> that "Russia's bloody role in Syria makes the terrorist
threat
far worse." John Kirby, an Obama State Department spokesman, warned that
Russia's brutalization of Syria would lead to "attacks against Russian
interests, perhaps even Russian cities."
Russia's response
<https://www.rt.com/news/361032-zakharova-kirby-syria-body-bags-attacks/>
to our friendly observation was about the same as ours when Russia told us
<https://sputniknews.com/politics/201609091045123892-iraq-us-war-terrorism/>
before the invasion of Iraq that it would cause a "wave of terror."
That brings us back to President Trump and his executive order on
immigration.
Trump's story about why it's necessary is, factually speaking, garbage. But
a normal human being can at least understand it and its moral: These
incomprehensible foreigners are all potential psychotics, we've got to keep
them out. Under these circumstances, who cares that no one from any of
these
seven countries has killed any Americans yet? They're all part of a huge
morass of ticking time bombs.
By contrast, the Democratic, liberal perspective laid out by Obama makes no
sense at all. We've never done anything particularly bad in the Middle
East,
yet . some people over there want to come here and kill us because .
they've
been exploited by violent extremists who've perverted Islam and . gotta
run,
there's no time to explain.
Regular people could sense that anyone mouthing this kind of gibberish was
hiding something, even if they didn't realize that Obama was trying to keep
the U.S. empire running rather than concealing his secret faith in Islam.
And because a coherent narrative always beats the complete absence of a
story, no one should be surprised that many Americans find Trump's fantasy
of inexplicable Muslim hatred persuasive. The only way to conclusively beat
it will be with a coherent, complicated, true story like this:
America has done hideous things to countries across the Middle East for
decades, such as bomb a civilian air raid shelter, burning the silhouette
of
a mother trying to protect her baby
<http://www.frbiu.com/video-updates/a-day-of-love-and-loss-loss-al-amiriyya-
massacre-iraq-13021991> onto its walls. It was inevitable that some people
would seek revenge. This doesn't mean that their brutality is justified,
any
more than the slaughter at Amiriyah was justified by Saddam Hussein's
invasion of Kuwait. It just means that humans are humans, violence begets
violence, and Americans will always be in danger unless we change our
foreign policy.
We must welcome immigrants from the Middle East both for moral and
pragmatic
reasons. Morally, the U.S. invasion of Iraq is what sent the region
spiraling into catastrophe; only psychopaths set someone's home on fire and
then lock them inside. There are already three million Muslim American
citizens. If the government keeps bombing the Middle East while making it
clear that it genuinely hates Muslims, that will only spur to action more
troubled weirdos like Omar Mateen - who was born in Queens, a few miles
away
from Donald Trump's childhood home.
And we'd better get started with this story soon, because it may not be
true
forever. Israel has done an exemplary job turning a solvable,
straightforward fight over land into a religious war that may no longer
have
any solution. We're making similar strides in transforming a conflict that
was 90 percent political, where there can be compromise, into a religious
conflict where there can't.
This can be seen, on the one hand, in ISIS propaganda. Bin Laden generally
just talked about kicking the U.S. out of the Middle East and said things
<http://www.nytimes.com/2004/10/29/international/transcript-of-al-jazeera-ta
pe.html> like, "Your security is in your own hands and each state which
does not harm our security will remain safe." The ISIS magazine Dabiq
cheerfully tells us
<http://www.clarionproject.org/factsheets-files/islamic-state-magazine-dabiq
-fifteen-breaking-the-cross.pdf> that "We hate you, first and foremost,
because you are disbelievers; you reject the oneness of Allah . even if you
were to stop bombing us, imprisoning us, torturing us, vilifying us, and
usurping our lands, we would continue to hate you because our primary
reason
for hating you will not cease to exist until you embrace Islam."
On the other hand, Donald Trump is president of the United States and Steve
Bannon is his chief strategist. Bannon straightforwardly believes
<https://www.buzzfeed.com/lesterfeder/this-is-how-steve-bannon-sees-the-enti
re-world?utm_term=.llMMbn55rp#.jeva1qxx0W> , as he told a conference at the
Vatican in 2014, that "we're in a war of immense proportions" that's part
of
the "long history of the Judeo-Christian West struggle against Islam." To
win, Bannon says, we must form the "church militant" - an archaic term
<https://www.merriam-webster.com/dictionary/church%20militant> for the
"Christian church on earth regarded as engaged in a constant warfare
against
its enemies, the powers of evil."
So it's quite possible ISIS and the Trump administration can successfully
collaborate on getting what they both want
<https://theintercept.com/2017/02/11/as-tensions-rise-steve-bannon-and-isis-
get-closer-to-their-common-goal-civilizational-war/> : a totally
unnecessary, civilizational war. To stop them we have to end our truckling
equivocation about terrorism, and start telling the truth while there's
still time.
<http://e-max.it/posizionamento-siti-web/socialize>
Error! Hyperlink reference not valid.Error! Hyperlink reference not valid.
A Muslim woman walks down a crowded street. (photo: Dmitry Kostyukov/NYT)
https://theintercept.com/2017/02/18/why-do-so-many-americans-fear-muslims-de
cades-of-denial-about-americas-role-in-the-world/https://theintercept.com/20
17/02/18/why-do-so-many-americans-fear-muslims-decades-of-denial-about-ameri
cas-role-in-the-world/
Why Do So Many Americans Fear Muslims? Decades of Denial About America's
Role in the World.
By Jon Schwarz, The Intercept
18 February 17
here's been lots of attention-grabbing opposition to Trump's "Muslim ban"
executive order, from demonstrations to court orders. But polls make it
clear public opinion is much more mixed
<https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/the-fix/wp/2017/02/13/americans-arent-r
ejecting-trumps-immigration-ban-outright-but-it-has-a-tough-road-ahead/?utm_
term=.9b13a70417dc> . Standard phone polls show small majorities opposed,
while web and automated polls find small majorities continue to support it.
What surprises me about the poll results isn't that lots of Americans like
the ban - but that so many Americans don't. Regular people have lives to
lead and can't investigate complicated issues in detail. Instead they
usually take their cues
<https://books.google.com/books?id=71NYEEaMb4oC&lpg=PP1&dq=%22the%20politica
l%20brain%22&pg=PA22#v=onepage&q=%22public%20opinion%20follows%20the%20lead%
20of%20party%20leaders%20and%20pundits%22&f=false> from leaders they
trust.
And given what politicians across the U.S. political spectrum say about
terrorism, Trump's executive order makes perfect sense. There are literally
no national-level American politicians telling a story that would help
ordinary people understand why Trump's goals are both horrendously
counterproductive and morally vile.
Think of it this way:
On February 13, 1991 during the first Gulf War, the U.S. dropped two
laser-guided bombs on the Amiriyah public air raid shelter in Baghdad. More
than 400 Iraqi civilians were incinerated or boiled alive. For years
afterward visitors to a memorial there would meet a woman with eight
children who had died during the bombing
<http://riverbendblog.blogspot.com/2004_02_01_riverbendblog_archive.html> ;
she was living in the ruined shelter because she could not bear to be
anywhere else.
Now, imagine that immediately after the bombing Saddam Hussein had
delivered
a speech on Iraqi TV in which he plaintively asked "Why do they hate us?" -
without ever mentioning the fact that Iraq was occupying Kuwait. And even
Saddam's political opponents would only mumble that "this is a complicated
issue." And most Iraqis had no idea that their country had invaded Kuwait,
and that there were extensive United Nation resolutions and speeches by
George H.W. Bush explaining the U.S.-led coalition's rationale for
attacking
Iraq in response. And that the few Iraqis who suggested there might be some
kind of relationship between Hussein's invasion of Kuwait and the Amiriyah
bombing were shouted down by politicians saying these Iraq-hating radicals
obviously believed that America's slaughter of 400 people was justified.
If that had happened, we'd immediately recognize that Iraqi political
culture was completely insane, and that it would cause them to behave in
dangerously nutty ways. But that's exactly what U.S. political culture is
like.
In an interview last March
<http://www.cnn.com/2016/03/09/politics/donald-trump-islam-hates-us/> with
Anderson Cooper, Donald Trump tried to puzzle out what's behind the
terrorism directed at the U.S. "I think Islam hates us," Trump learnedly
opined. "There's a tremendous hatred there, we've got to get to the bottom
of it."
"In Islam itself?" asked Cooper. Trump responded, "You're going to have to
figure that out. You'll get another Pulitzer."
During Trump's speech at the CIA right after his inauguration, he expressed
the same bewilderment. "Radical Islamic terrorism," pondered Trump
<http://www.cbsnews.com/news/trump-cia-speech-transcript/> . "This is
something nobody can even understand."
John F. Kelly, now Trump's head of the Department of Homeland Security, is
similarly perplexed, saying in a 2013 speech
<https://www.washingtonpost.com/world/national-security/retired-marine-gen-j
ohn-f-kelly-picked-to-head-department-of-homeland-security/2016/12/07/165472
f2-bbe6-11e6-94ac-3d324840106c_story.html?utm_term=.72d9d5811c66> that "I
don't know why they hate us, and I frankly don't care, but they do hate us
and are driven irrationally to our destruction."
Say what you want about the tenets of this worldview, but at least it's an
internally consistent ethos: We're surrounded by lunatics who want to
murder
us for reasons that are totally inscrutable to rational people like us but
.
obviously have something to do with them being Muslims.
Meanwhile, in private, the non-crazy members of the U.S. foreign policy
establishment aren't confused at all. They understand quite well that
Islamist terrorism is almost wholly blowback from the foreign policy
they've
designed.
Richard Shultz, a professor at Tufts whose career has long been intertwined
with the national security state, has written
<http://www.weeklystandard.com/confab-sprint-or-slog/article/2006795> that
"A very senior [Special Operations Forces] officer who had served on the
Joint Staff in the 1990s told me that more than once he heard terrorist
strikes characterized as 'a small price to pay for being a superpower.'"
That small price, of course, is the deaths of regular Americans, and is
apparently well worth it.
The 9/11 Commission report quietly acknowledged
<http://avalon.law.yale.edu/sept11/911Report.pdf> , hundreds of pages in,
that "America's policy choices have consequences. Right or wrong, it is
simply a fact that American policy regarding the Israeli-Palestinian
conflict and American actions in Iraq are dominant staples of popular
commentary across the Arab and Muslim world." A senior official in the
George W. Bush administration later put it more bluntly to Esquire
<http://web.archive.org/web/20041124122100/http:/www.ocnus.net/cgi-bin/exec/
view.cgi?archive=56&num=14737> : That without the post-Gulf War sanctions
that killed hundreds of thousands of Iraqis and the stationing of U.S.
troops in Saudi Arabia, "bin Laden might still be redecorating mosques and
boring friends with stories of his mujahideen days in the Khyber Pass."
Intelligence professionals were quite aware that an invasion of Iraq would
take the conditions that led to 9/11 and make them far worse. The British
Chilcot Inquiry into the Iraq war published a February, 2003 assessment
<http://www.iraqinquiry.org.uk/media/230918/2003-02-10-jic-assessment-intern
ational-terrorism-war-with-iraq.pdf> by British intelligence of the
consequences of an invasion of Iraq, which would occur one month later.
"The
threat from Al Qaida will increase at the onset of any military action
against Iraq," the UK's Joint Intelligence Committee told Tony Blair, and
"the worldwide threat from other Islamist terrorist groups and individuals
will increase significantly."
The CIA had the same perspective. Michael Scheuer, who for several years
ran
the section of the Agency that tracked bin Laden, wrote in 2004
<http://www.npr.org/templates/story/story.php?storyId=1977111> that "U.S.
forces and policies are completing the radicalization of the Islamic world,
something Osama bin Laden has been trying to do with substantial but
incomplete success since the early 1990s. As a result, I think it fair to
conclude that the United States of America remains bin Laden's only
indispensable ally."
For its part, the Defense Department's Science Board concluded in a 2004
report <http://www.acq.osd.mil/dsb/reports/ADA428770.pdf> that "Muslims do
not 'hate our freedom,' but rather, they hate our policies. The
overwhelming
majority voice their objections to what they see as one-sided support in
favor of Israel and against Palestinian rights, and the longstanding, even
increasing support for what Muslims collectively see as tyrannies, most
notably Egypt, Saudi Arabia, Jordan, Pakistan, and the Gulf states."
When Barack Obama took office, he had two choices.
First, he could tell the truth: That the U.S. has acted with extraordinary
brutality in the Middle East, that this had been the main motivation for
most Islamist terrorism against us, and if we continued the same foreign
policy Americans would be killed indefinitely in intermittent attacks. Then
we could have had an open, informed debate about whether we like our
foreign
policy enough to die for it.
Second, Obama could continue trying to run the Middle East without public
input, but in a more rational way than the Bush administration.
Obviously he went with the second choice, which demanded several different
forms of political correctness.
Most importantly, Obama pretended that the U.S. has never done anything
truly wrong to others, and can enjoy the benefits of power without any
costs. This is the most pernicious and common form of political
correctness,
but is never called that because the most powerful people in America love
it.
But Obama also engaged in something more akin to what's generally called
political correctness, by contending that Islam has nothing to do with
terrorism. But it does - just not in the way that Frank Gaffney and Pamela
Geller would tell you.
Religion and nationalism have always been similar phenomena, and Islam
sometimes functions as a form of nationalism. And like all nationalisms, it
has a crazy, vicious right wing that's empowered by outside attacks on
members of the nation. The right loves to jeer at Obama for calling Islam
<https://obamawhitehouse.archives.gov/the-press-office/remarks-president-new
-economic-school-graduation> "a religion of peace," and they should - not
because Islam specifically isn't a religion of peace but because there is
really no such thing, just as there is no "nationalism of peace." It's true
religions and nationalism can bring out the best in people, but they also
bring out the worst (sometimes in the same person for the same reasons).
But Obama could never say anything like that, because he knew the U.S.
needs
the governments of Muslim-majority countries like Saudi Arabia and Egypt to
keep the rest of the Middle East in line.
This amalgam of political correctness made it impossible for the Obama
administration ever to tell a story about terrorism that made any sense.
For
instance, in his 2009 speech in Cairo
<http://www.nytimes.com/2009/06/04/us/politics/04obama.text.html> , he
declared, "It is easier to blame others than to look inward" - and then
went
on to demonstrate that truism.
His description of wrongs done by the U.S. was vague to the point of
meaninglessness: "tension has been fed by colonialism that denied rights
and
opportunities to many Muslims." Also, "Iraq was a war of choice that
provoked strong differences in my country and around the world."
Obama then explained that "Violent extremists have exploited these
tensions." So . 19 people were motivated to fly jetliners into buildings by
"tensions"? If that's the only story that non-Muslim Americans hear,
they'll
rationally be terrified of Islam.
In 2010, Obama's counterterrorism advisor, John Brennan, emitted a similar
bland puree of words at a press conference when questioned by Helen Thomas
<http://crooksandliars.com/heather/helen-thomas-presses-brennan-and-napolita
n> about Umar Farouk Abdulmutallab, the failed underwear bomber. Their
exchange went like this:
THOMAS: And what is the motivation? We never hear what you find out on why.
BRENNAN: Al Qaeda is an organization that is dedicated to murder and wanton
slaughter of innocents. [They] attract individuals like Mr. Abdulmutallab
and use them for these types of attacks. He was motivated by a sense of
religious sort of drive. Unfortunately, al Qaeda has perverted Islam, and
has corrupted the concept of Islam, so that [they're] able to attract these
individuals. But al Qaeda has the agenda of destruction and death.
THOMAS: And you're saying it's because of religion?
BRENNAN: I'm saying it's because of an al Qaeda organization that uses the
banner of religion in a very perverse and corrupt way.
THOMAS: Why?
BRENNAN: I think this is a, uh, long issue, but al Qaeda is just determined
to carry out attacks here against the homeland.
At his sentencing, Abdulmutallab explained his motivation
<https://books.google.com/books?id=ndNjAwAAQBAJ&lpg=PA241&ots=BJeofNLxmj&dq=
%22and%20in%20retaliation%20of%20the%20killing%20of%20innocent%20and%20civil
ian%20Muslim%20populations%20in%20Palestine%22&pg=PA241#v=onepage&q=%22to%20
attack%20the%20unite> in less time than it took Brennan to say there
wasn't
enough time to explain:
[I pledged] to attack the United States in retaliation for U.S. support of
Israel and in retaliation of the killing of innocent and civilian Muslim
populations in Palestine, especially in the blockade of Gaza, and in
retaliation for the killing of innocent and civilian Muslim populations in
Yemen, Iraq, Somalia, Afghanistan and beyond, most of them women, children,
and noncombatants.
To be fair, there is one situation in which American officials have lost
the
mushmouth and drawn a direct connection between a country killing
Mideastern
civilians and terrorist retaliation: when that country is Russia. William
Burns, formerly Obama's Deputy Secretary of State, recently and accurately
proclaimed
<https://www.nytimes.com/2017/01/07/opinion/sunday/how-we-fool-ourselves-on-
russia.html> that "Russia's bloody role in Syria makes the terrorist
threat
far worse." John Kirby, an Obama State Department spokesman, warned that
Russia's brutalization of Syria would lead to "attacks against Russian
interests, perhaps even Russian cities."
Russia's response
<https://www.rt.com/news/361032-zakharova-kirby-syria-body-bags-attacks/>
to our friendly observation was about the same as ours when Russia told us
<https://sputniknews.com/politics/201609091045123892-iraq-us-war-terrorism/>
before the invasion of Iraq that it would cause a "wave of terror."
That brings us back to President Trump and his executive order on
immigration.
Trump's story about why it's necessary is, factually speaking, garbage. But
a normal human being can at least understand it and its moral: These
incomprehensible foreigners are all potential psychotics, we've got to keep
them out. Under these circumstances, who cares that no one from any of
these
seven countries has killed any Americans yet? They're all part of a huge
morass of ticking time bombs.
By contrast, the Democratic, liberal perspective laid out by Obama makes no
sense at all. We've never done anything particularly bad in the Middle
East,
yet . some people over there want to come here and kill us because .
they've
been exploited by violent extremists who've perverted Islam and . gotta
run,
there's no time to explain.
Regular people could sense that anyone mouthing this kind of gibberish was
hiding something, even if they didn't realize that Obama was trying to keep
the U.S. empire running rather than concealing his secret faith in Islam.
And because a coherent narrative always beats the complete absence of a
story, no one should be surprised that many Americans find Trump's fantasy
of inexplicable Muslim hatred persuasive. The only way to conclusively beat
it will be with a coherent, complicated, true story like this:
America has done hideous things to countries across the Middle East for
decades, such as bomb a civilian air raid shelter, burning the silhouette
of
a mother trying to protect her baby
<http://www.frbiu.com/video-updates/a-day-of-love-and-loss-loss-al-amiriyya-
massacre-iraq-13021991> onto its walls. It was inevitable that some people
would seek revenge. This doesn't mean that their brutality is justified,
any
more than the slaughter at Amiriyah was justified by Saddam Hussein's
invasion of Kuwait. It just means that humans are humans, violence begets
violence, and Americans will always be in danger unless we change our
foreign policy.
We must welcome immigrants from the Middle East both for moral and
pragmatic
reasons. Morally, the U.S. invasion of Iraq is what sent the region
spiraling into catastrophe; only psychopaths set someone's home on fire and
then lock them inside. There are already three million Muslim American
citizens. If the government keeps bombing the Middle East while making it
clear that it genuinely hates Muslims, that will only spur to action more
troubled weirdos like Omar Mateen - who was born in Queens, a few miles
away
from Donald Trump's childhood home.
And we'd better get started with this story soon, because it may not be
true
forever. Israel has done an exemplary job turning a solvable,
straightforward fight over land into a religious war that may no longer
have
any solution. We're making similar strides in transforming a conflict that
was 90 percent political, where there can be compromise, into a religious
conflict where there can't.
This can be seen, on the one hand, in ISIS propaganda. Bin Laden generally
just talked about kicking the U.S. out of the Middle East and said things
<http://www.nytimes.com/2004/10/29/international/transcript-of-al-jazeera-ta
pe.html> like, "Your security is in your own hands and each state which
does not harm our security will remain safe." The ISIS magazine Dabiq
cheerfully tells us
<http://www.clarionproject.org/factsheets-files/islamic-state-magazine-dabiq
-fifteen-breaking-the-cross.pdf> that "We hate you, first and foremost,
because you are disbelievers; you reject the oneness of Allah . even if you
were to stop bombing us, imprisoning us, torturing us, vilifying us, and
usurping our lands, we would continue to hate you because our primary
reason
for hating you will not cease to exist until you embrace Islam."
On the other hand, Donald Trump is president of the United States and Steve
Bannon is his chief strategist. Bannon straightforwardly believes
<https://www.buzzfeed.com/lesterfeder/this-is-how-steve-bannon-sees-the-enti
re-world?utm_term=.llMMbn55rp#.jeva1qxx0W> , as he told a conference at the
Vatican in 2014, that "we're in a war of immense proportions" that's part
of
the "long history of the Judeo-Christian West struggle against Islam." To
win, Bannon says, we must form the "church militant" - an archaic term
<https://www.merriam-webster.com/dictionary/church%20militant> for the
"Christian church on earth regarded as engaged in a constant warfare
against
its enemies, the powers of evil."
So it's quite possible ISIS and the Trump administration can successfully
collaborate on getting what they both want
<https://theintercept.com/2017/02/11/as-tensions-rise-steve-bannon-and-isis-
get-closer-to-their-common-goal-civilizational-war/> : a totally
unnecessary, civilizational war. To stop them we have to end our truckling
equivocation about terrorism, and start telling the truth while there's
still time.
http://e-max.it/posizionamento-siti-web/socializehttp://e-max.it/posizioname
nto-siti-web/socialize
