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jeanne kirkpatrick
![A Violent Cesspool of Our Own Making: The Dark [K]night of Donald Trump](https://www.commondreams.org/media-library/like-batman-writes-astore-trump-is-a-product-of-gotham-city-and-if-this-country-is-increasingly-gotham-city-writ-large-s.jpg?id=32271980&width=1245&height=700&quality=90&coordinates=24%2C0%2C24%2C0)
A Violent Cesspool of Our Own Making: The Dark [K]night of Donald Trump
Weapons, Warriors, and Fear as the New Order in America
Jan 26, 2017
I came of age during America's Cold War with the Soviet Union, witnessing its denouement while serving in the U.S. military. In those days, the USSR led the world's weapons trade, providing arms to the Warsaw Pact (the military alliance it dominated) as well as to client states like Cuba, Egypt, and Syria. The United States usually came in second in arms dealing, a dubious silver medal that could, at least, be rationalized as a justifiable response to Soviet aggression, part of the necessary price for a longstanding policy of "containment." In 1983, President Ronald Reagan had dubbed the Soviet Union an "evil empire" in part because of its militarism and aggressive push to sell weaponry around the globe, often accompanied by Soviet troops, ostensibly as trainers and advisers.
After the USSR imploded in 1991, dominating the world's arms trade somehow came to seem so much less evil. In fact, faced with large trade deficits, a powerful military-industrial complex looking for markets, and ever more global military commitments, Washington actively sought to promote and sell American-made weaponry on a remarkable scale. And in that it succeeded admirably.
Today, when it comes to building and exporting murderous weaponry, no other country, not even that evil-empire-substitute, Vladimir Putin's Russia, comes faintly close. The U.S. doth bestride the world of arms production and dealing like a colossus. According to the Stockholm International Peace Research Institute, U.S. arms contractors sold $209.7 billion in weaponry in 2015, representing 56% of the world's production. Of that, $40 billion was exported to an array of countries, representing "half of all agreements in the worldwide arms bazaar," as the New York Times put it. France ($15 billion) was a distant second, with Putin's Russia ($11 billion) earning a weak third. Judged by the sheer amount of weapons it produces for itself, as well as for others, the U.S., notes Forbes, is "still comfortably the world's superpower -- or warmonger, depending on how you look at it." Indeed, under President Obama, in the five-year period beginning in 2010, American arms exports outpaced the figures for the previous Bush-Cheney years by 23%.
Not only has the U.S. come to dominate the arms trade in an almost monopolistic fashion over the last two decades, but it has also become the top exporter of troops globally. Leaving aside the ongoing, seemingly endless wars in Iraq and Afghanistan, the U.S. continues to garrison the globe with approximately 800 military bases, while deploying its Special Operations forces to a significant majority of the planet's countries annually. As TomDispatch's Nick Turse reported recently, "From Albania to Uruguay, Algeria to Uzbekistan, America's most elite forces -- Navy SEALs and Army Green Berets among them -- were deployed to 138 countries in 2016." Think about that: last year, U.S. Special Operations troops were sent to more than two-thirds of the approximately 190 countries on the planet. While some of these deployments were small, others were more impressive -- and invasive -- and often enough dovetailed with efforts to sell weaponry (which even has its own military acronym: FMS, or foreign military sales).
"Increasingly Americans are submerged in a violent cesspool of our own making."Recall those Red Army trainers and advisers who often accompanied Soviet weaponry into the field a generation ago. These days, travel the planet and the trainers and advisers you'll see are overwhelmingly likely to be wearing U.S. uniforms or at least to be contractors working for Pentagon-allied, U.S.-based warrior-corporations. Testing, touting, and toting American-made arms in far-flung realms is the common mission of the U.S. military these days, and business is booming.
If all of this were to be summarized under one rubric, it might be Weapons & Warriors "R" Us, and it's not just an international phenomenon. Consider the surge in the production and sale of guns in the good old US of A. It's now estimated that there are more than 300 million weapons in American hands, nearly enough to arm every citizen, the tall and the small (even tots). That old chestnut associated with early advertising for Colt Manufacturing has truly come into its own in twenty-first-century America: God created men; Sam Colt made them equal.
These days, arms are everywhere, even prospectively in public schools, which, as Betsy DeVos pointed out recently in her confirmation hearings for secretary of education, should certainly be armed against "lone wolf" grizzly bears (if not Islamic terrorists). Even liberals are now reportedly getting into the act, scarfing up guns in the aftermath of November's election, apparently gripped by the rising fear of a coming Trumpocalypse. This national mania for guns (and for carrying them everywhere) is mirrored by an abundance of domestic prisons and security firms, offering jobs that, unlike those in steel mills and manufacturing plants, can't easily be outsourced to foreign lands.
Since the end of the Cold War, America has been exporting a mirror image of its domestic self: not the classic combo of democracy and freedom, but guns, prisons, and security forces. Globally, the label "Made in the USA" has increasingly come to be associated with violence and war (as well, of course, as Hollywood action flicks sporting things that go boom in the night). Such exports are now so commonplace that, in some cases, Washington has even ended up arming our enemies. Just consider the hundreds of thousands of small arms sent to Iraq and Afghanistan that were simply lost track of. (Many of them evidently ended up on sale at local black markets.) Or consider the weapons and equipment Washington provided to Iraq's security forces, only to see them abandoned on the battlefield and captured by ISIS. Look as well at prisons like Gitmo (which Donald Trump has no intention of ever closing), Abu Ghraib, and an unknown number of black sites that were in some of these years used for rendition, detention, and torture, and gave the U.S. a reputation in the world that may prove indelible. And, of course, American-made weaponry like tear gas canisters and bombs (including cluster munitions) that regularly finds its way onto foreign soil in places like Yemen and, in the case of the tear gas, Egypt, proudly sporting those "Made in the USA" labels.
Strangely, most Americans remain either willfully ignorant of, or indifferent to, what their country is becoming. That American-made weaponry is everywhere, that America's warriors are all over the globe, that America's domestic prisons are bursting with more than two million captives, is even taken by some as a point of pride.
The New World Order
This is not the "new world order" I envisioned in 1991, when the Soviet Union was collapsing. Back then, I was a young captain in the U.S. Air Force, and my fellow Americans were talking boldly not of arms and war, but of a "peace dividend." Hawks like Jeanne Kirkpatrick, who served as U.N. ambassador under Ronald Reagan, were waxing philosophical about the possibility of the U.S. shedding its worldwide military commitments to become a normal country in normal times. There was even a fair amount of elevated discussion about whether we hadn't reached the "end of history" and the inevitable, eternal triumph of liberal democracy. None of it, of course, was to be.
America's leaders made a fateful choice on a planet that seemed, after so many centuries of imperial rivalries, to have no foes worthy of the name. No longer contained by the Soviet threat, they embraced with awed enthusiasm their self-perceived destiny as the planet's global hegemon. It didn't matter whether the president was Bill Clinton, George W. Bush, or Barack Obama: all of them embraced the myth of American exceptionalism, which in this context meant the unique role the United States naturally was to play as the dominant power on an otherwise rudderless, waiting planet. That kind of exceptionalism and the resistance it engendered led such leaders to embrace and fund in staggering ways our much-lauded "warriors" and the machinery of war that went with them. And with that, in the twenty-first century, came an ethos of never-ending conflict aggravated by a steady drip-drip-drip of fear.
Year by year, in the aftermath of September 11, 2001, a mind-killing blanket of fear only spread further and deeper in American society. Al-Qaeda, anthrax, shoe bombers, underwear bombers, ISIS, lone wolves, vehicles as weapons, and more fed public fear and lent support to the rise of the national security state, whose growing power was eternally justified in the name of keeping us safe from a single confounding phenomenon: "radical Islamic terrorism."
Threat inflation was, in these years, the name of the game, as fear of the Other (particularly the Islamic Other) continued to rise precipitously, including, of course, fear of an allegedly un-American president. It's no accident that U.S. gun purchases surged after Obama's election in 2008 and reelection in 2012.
In this febrile and fetid climate of fear, is it any wonder that a "birther" bully like Donald Trump rose to prominence? Triumph of the Will, indeed.
Bullyboy Trump and the Loss of American Idealism
It's no secret that Donald J. Trump takes pleasure in bullying people he sees as weak and vulnerable. It's all out in the open. He's mocked the disabled. Boasted of grabbing pussy whenever he desires. Called for torture. Suggested that terrorists' families should be murdered. All this, and much more, seems to have won him admiration in certain quarters in this country.
Why? Because increasingly Americans are submerged in a violent cesspool of our own making. As a man who knows how to stoke fear as well as exploit it, President Trump fits into such an atmosphere amazingly well. With a sense of how to belittle, insult, and threaten, he has a knack for inflaming and exploiting America's collective dark side.
But think of Trump as more symptom than cause, the outward manifestation of an inner spiritual disease that continues to eat away at the country's societal matrix. A sign of this unease is America's most popular superhero of the moment. He even has a new Lego movie coming. Yes, it's Batman, the vigilante alter-ego of Bruce Wayne, ultra-rich philanthropist and CEO of Wayne Enterprises.
"America now has a darker knight ... in Donald J. Trump, a man who mocks and assaults those he sees as beneath him, a man whose utterances sound more like a Batman villain, a man who doesn't believe in heroes -- only in himself."
The popularity of Batman, Gotham City's Dark Knight, reflects America's fractured ethos of anger, pain, and violence. Americans find common cause in his tortured psyche, his need for vengeance, his extreme version of justice. But at least billionaire Bruce Wayne had some regard for the vulnerable and unfortunate. America now has a darker knight than that in Donald J. Trump, a man who mocks and assaults those he sees as beneath him, a man whose utterances sound more like a Batman villain, a man who doesn't believe in heroes -- only in himself.
The Dark Knight may yet become, under Trump, a genuine dark night for America's collective soul. Like Batman, Trump is a product of Gotham City. And if this country is increasingly Gotham City writ large, shining the Batman symbol worldwide and having billionaire Trump and his sidekick (General Michael Flynn?) answer the beacon is a prospect that should be more than a little unnerving.
It wasn't that long ago that another superhero represented America: Superman. Chivalrous, noble, compassionate, he fought without irony for truth, justice, and the American way. And his alter ego, of course, was mild-mannered Clark Kent, a reporter no less. (In Trump's America, imagine the likelihood of reporters being celebrated as freedom fighters as they struggle to hold the powerful accountable.) Perhaps it's more telling than its makers knew that in last year's dreary slugfest of a movie, Batman v Superman, the bat rode high while the son of Krypton ended up six feet under.
Let me, in this context, return to that moment when the Cold War ended. Twenty-five years ago, I served as escort officer to General Robinson Risner as he spoke to cadets at the U.S. Air Force Academy. Risner's long and resolute endurance as a prisoner of war during the Vietnam War (captured in his memoir, The Passing of the Night) had made him something of a real-life superhero to us then. He talked to the cadets about public service, love of country, and faith in God -- noble virtues, based on humility, grace, and inner strength. As I look back to that night, as I remember how General Risner spoke with quiet dignity of the virtues of service and sacrifice, I ask myself how America today could have become such a land of weapons and warriors, guns and gun exports, prisons and fear, led by a boastful and boorish bullyboy.
How did America's ideals become so twisted? And how do we regain our nobility of purpose? One thing is certain: the current path, the one of ever greater military spending, of border walls and extreme vetting, of vilification of the Other, justified in terms of toughness and "winning," will lead only to further violence -- and darker (k)nights.
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On Hillary Clinton, Sexism, and U.S. Foreign Policy
Feminists who oppose Hillary Clinton's imperialism can't just challenge her foreign policy. We have to challenge the sexist attacks against her, too.
Feb 13, 2016
After the strong early primary showings by Senator Bernie Sanders, a few high-profile supporters of his Democratic rival Hillary Clinton have seized upon an explanation: sexism -- and not only by men. Sanders' high level of support from young women in particular, they say, reflects the naivete of younger self-identified feminists.
Feminist icon Gloria Steinem, for example, claimed that younger women backing Sanders simply wanted the attention of young men on the Sanders campaign: "When you're young, you're thinking, where are the boys?" Steinem said. "The boys are with Bernie."
Huffington Post blogger Kathleen Reardon, for her part, claims that young women prefer Sanders because they're at a phase in their careers where "when mentors aren't hard to find, colleagues (including men) are often helpful, and the world seems like a place where hard work will surely enable them to grasp the brass ring." They won't recognize the severity of institutionalized sexism, Reardon suggests, until they're no longer "cute and little."
Amy Chozik and Yamiche Alcindor piled on in the New York Times, insisting that younger women just don't "get" sexism like older women. They only support Sanders, the authors seem to say, because they're not engaged enough.
At worst, these critics accuse their younger counterparts of betrayal. There's a "special place in hell," former secretary of state Madeline Albright warned, for women who don't back the leading female presidential contender.
While Hillary Clinton has overcome a great deal of sexism in her professional life, disingenuous charges like these ignore the many ways in which her positions on key issues -- particularly regarding foreign policy -- have been deleterious for women.
Dana Bolger, an editor for Feministing, counters that for many young women who support Sanders, "their rejection of Clinton is informed and deeply political. Many of them have suffered violence, discrimination, and rampant unemployment. They have drawn upon their feminist commitments, alongside their lived experience, to evaluate and reject Clinton's hawkish foreign policy, her expansion of drone warfare, gutting of welfare, (continuing) defense of a burgeoning surveillance state, and more -- all of which have hurt women in the U.S. and abroad."
There's growing pushback from young feminist supporters of Bernie Sanders against the condescending criticism of older Clinton supporters, noting that they're indeed quite aware of institutionalized sexism, but prefer to choose candidates based on the issues. They've seen friends and family members killed, maimed, and psychologically damaged by being sent to fight in an illegal and unnecessary war in Iraq, which Hillary Clinton enthusiastically supported. They see how the enormous financial costs of that war and its aftermath have taken money away from education, jobs, and other programs that impact women. And they're attracted to Sanders' desire to help build a more just and equitable economic system.
The generational divide is borne out in the early voting results. Sanders won a solid majority of women who voted in the New Hampshire Democratic primary. Exit polls showed 69 percent of women under 45 backed Sanders -- a figure that rose to 82 percent of those under 30 -- while Clinton won the votes of 56 percent of women 45 and older.
All of which raises two important questions: Why do older women prefer Clinton? And what's the appropriate response for feminist critics of her foreign policy?
Why Support Hillary?
It may be disappointing to see some politically left-leaning women offering their support to Clinton, despite her militaristic foreign policy positions and pro-corporate economic agenda. But many of us who share that view -- perhaps especially those of us who are men -- underestimate the powerful allure of electing a female president in a pervasively sexist society.
Clinton has personally endured an endless slew of gendered attacks -- from demeaning depictions in political cartoons to questions regarding her temperament to commentaries about her hair, clothes, voice, marriage, and whatever else -- along with pseudo-scandals over Benghazi and her emails. These sexist attacks have put millions of women on the defensive, even those who would otherwise not be prone to support her based upon her policy positions. There's an understandable fear that if Clinton is again denied the nomination, in part as a result of sexism, it would discourage other women from running for president any time in the near future.
That would be a major setback in the struggle for women's rights indeed. But that doesn't change the fact that several things about Clinton's record would make her an unusual standard bearer for that cause.
Historically, it's uncommon for women voters -- who statistically tend to be more dovish on foreign policy matters than men -- to support the most hawkish candidate in the Democratic primaries. Indeed, Clinton is the only one of the six original and two remaining Democratic candidates for the 2016 presidential nomination to have supported the invasion of Iraq.
Still, some female Clinton supporters may hold on to the belief that she's more progressive than she's letting on -- and that she simply has to appear tough on foreign policy to overcome sexist attitudes about having a female commander-in-chief in a time of war. This belief may be naive, but anecdotal evidence suggests it's widely held among liberal and progressive Democrats of all demographics -- and particularly among women middle-aged and older.
All that's to say, a major reason for the strong support Clinton enjoys among older progressive women may simply be a reaction to the omnipresent sexism in American society. Indeed, older women have likely experienced more institutionalized sexism in the workplace and elsewhere than their younger counterparts. To the extent that their support for Clinton is based on identity politics, that's no big surprise in a nation that's had nothing but male leaders at the helm for its entire 240-year history.
Women and War
But the subject is murkier when it comes to examining the actual impacts Clinton's policies have had on women -- an impact that's arguably felt more deeply abroad than in the United States.
Feminists with an interest in foreign policy are divided on the prospects of a Hillary Clinton presidency. Many rightly applaud her advocacy for global feminist concerns, like education and reproductive health, as secretary of state. The question is: Do these issues make up for her more problematic foreign policy positions -- particularly as compared to the more progressive foreign policy agenda of Senator Bernie Sanders?
For example, the Iraq War, made possible in part through Clinton's vote to authorize the invasion, has been a disaster for Iraqi women. The secular regime overthrown by U.S. forces was replaced by Islamist fundamentalists, and the ensuing sectarian civil war has produced horrific cases of sexual violence -- including not least the enslavement of women by extremist groups like the Islamic State. Clinton also backed Israel's massive 2006 assault on Lebanon, as well as the 2009 and 2014 wars on the Gaza Strip, which killed many hundreds of female non-combatants.
Given that modern warfare results in far more civilian than military casualties, women are often its primary victims. Despite Clinton's strong record of supporting women's rights in the United States and in certain overseas programs, her militaristic disposition has arguably made life worse for millions of women outside of her constituency.
Bad Company
It's not even just the wars: As secretary of state, Clinton spearheaded the U.S. embrace of a number of deeply problematic regimes abroad.
For example, she supported the 2009 coup in Honduras, which resulted in a dramatic upsurge in violence against women, with prominent female peasant leaders, union organizers, and indigenous rights advocates among the victims. She's called for closer strategic ties with Saudi Arabia, the most misogynist government on the planet. She supported Bahrain's brutal crackdown on its pro-democracy movement, including prominent women leaders. And Yemeni human rights activist Tawakkol Karman, who was awarded the 2011 Nobel Peace Prize for her leadership in the country's pro-democracy movement, has spoken out against then-Secretary Clinton's lack of support in the struggle against the U.S.-backed autocratic regime of Ali Abdullah Saleh.
A particularly egregious case of Hillary Clinton's selective support for the rights of women is her strong support for the autocratic monarchy in Morocco.
For example, in 2012 -- during the height of a local campaign to repeal an article of the Moroccan penal code that absolves a male rapist if he consents to marry his victim -- Clinton praised the Moroccan government for having "protected and expanded" women's rights. Just weeks after Clinton commended the regime, Amina Filali -- a 16-year old Moroccan girl who'd been raped at the age of 15 and forced to marry her rapist, who subsequently battered and abused her -- burned herself to death.
Similarly, it was not long after a previous visit to Morocco, where she also praised the autocratic monarchy's human rights record, that the regime illegally expelled Aminatou Haidar -- known to some as the "Saharan Gandhi" -- for her leadership in the nonviolent resistance struggle against the illegal Moroccan occupation of Western Sahara.
Haidar -- a winner of the Robert F. Kennedy Human Rights Award who'd previously spent years being tortured in Moroccan prisons -- went on a month-long hunger strike, which almost killed her, before Morocco relented to international pressure and allowed her to return. Amnesty International has accused the Moroccan government of systematically engaging in sexual torture and other abuse against female Saharawi political prisoners in the occupied territory.
Global Feminism in an Imperialist Context
It's no secret that patriarchal men have inflicted enormous damage on the world. But a quick look at a few of the more prominent women who've taken leadership roles in U.S. foreign affairs -- Jeanne Kirkpatrick, Madeleine Albright, and Condoleezza Rice, for instance -- suggests that women can also be forceful advocates for U.S. imperialism. And, as Margaret Thatcher in Great Britain demonstrated, electing a female head of government doesn't guarantee a more compassionate foreign policy either.
Clinton supporters counter that Thatcher -- unlike Clinton -- never had much support from feminists in her country, and didn't have a history of supporting women's rights in general. Since Clinton has such a stronger base among women and a more robust record in support of women's rights domestically, they say, there's reason for hope. But it's hard to imagine how Clinton would find a way to pay for many programs to help women at home or abroad, given how much she wants to increase military spending and expand U.S. hegemony.
In fact, given Clinton's history of backing neoliberal economic policies and war-making by the United States and its allies, her advocacy of women's rights overseas -- within what is widely seen outside this country as an imperialist context -- could actually set back indigenous feminist movements, just as U.S. support for dictatorial regimes in the Middle East gave little credibility to President George W. Bush's pro-democracy rhetoric.
For instance, would a President Hillary Clinton's call for greater respect for women's rights in the Arab world have much credibility while U.S.-manufactured ordnance is blowing up women in Lebanon, Gaza, Syria, Yemen, Libya, and Iraq? The question is especially salient given Clinton's refusal to accept moral responsibility for the humanitarian, fiscal, and strategic disaster that resulted from her support for the Bush administration's 2003 invasion of Iraq -- an ongoing stumbling block I examined in a recent column, "The Five Lamest Excuses for Hillary Clinton's Vote to Invade Iraq."
Challenging Sexism and Imperialism
I've long considered myself a feminist: One of my earliest presidential campaigns was in 1972 on behalf of New York Congresswoman Shirley Chisholm, who was -- quite unlike Clinton -- the most progressive Democrat in the race for the nomination that year.
But I also understand that it's difficult for me, as someone who identifies as both feminist and male, to criticize the feminist credentials of a candidate who could very well become the first woman to lead our country. Indeed, as a result of my personal opposition to Clinton's candidacy -- particularly her militaristic foreign policy agenda -- I've been repeatedly accused of being sexist.
I want to emphasize that my disagreements with Clinton are purely over policy. And I condemn outright the sexist attacks lobbed at her from the left as well as the right. But it's important to understand where this critique comes from.
As a result of the vehemence of the anger and distrust many of us direct at Hillary Clinton -- for her support for the Iraq war, her support for Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu and numerous Arab dictators, her poor record on human rights, and her indifference to international humanitarian law, among other issues -- it can be easy for male critics especially to forget just how serious the misogynist attacks against Clinton have been. For millions of women, it must look all too familiar to the sexist mistreatment they've experienced personally. Like the fear of walking alone at night and the constant harassment of catcalls, there are certain fears and experiences about being a woman in a sexist society that I'll never be able to appreciate fully.
Indeed, I've begun to recognize that I sometimes "forget" that Hillary Clinton is a woman as well as a policymaker. That's not a sign of a lack of sexism on my part: It's a lack of awareness that contributes to the climate of sexism that's permeated the campaign.
This doesn't mean that antiwar voters shouldn't criticize Clinton. It means we need to recognize that not all Clinton supporters -- particularly those motivated by a reaction to right-wing sexism -- embrace her militaristic foreign policy agenda.
These supporters don't need to hear lectures on Clinton's feminist credentials, especially not from men. But if we want to dispel the denial of just how far to the right Clinton's international agenda is, those of us on the left need to acknowledge how serious a problem sexism remains in American society -- and how it's manifesting itself in the personal attacks against Hillary Clinton. We must listen, listen, and listen some more to women who raise these concerns, and challenge such sexism whenever and wherever we come across it.
And we must remember that the issues that face us today -- from sexism to imperialism -- are much greater than anything that can be resolved by electing a new president alone.
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The Lies of Islamophobia
The Three Unfinished Wars of the West against the Rest
Nov 08, 2010
The Muslims were bloodthirsty and treacherous. They
conducted a sneak attack against the French army and slaughtered every
single soldier, 20,000 in all. More than 1,000 years ago, in the
mountain passes of Spain, the Muslim horde cut down the finest soldiers
in Charlemagne's command, including his brave nephew Roland. Then,
according to the famous poem that immortalized the tragedy, Charlemagne
exacted his revenge by routing the entire Muslim army.
The Song of Roland, an eleventh century rendering in verse
of an eighth century battle, is a staple of Western Civilization classes
at colleges around the country. A "masterpiece of epic drama," in the
words of its renowned translator Dorothy Sayers, it provides a handy
preface for students before they delve into readings on the Crusades
that began in 1095. More ominously, the poem has schooled generations of
Judeo-Christians to view Muslims as perfidious enemies who once
threatened the very foundations of Western civilization.
The problem, however, is that the whole epic is built on a curious
falsehood. The army that fell upon Roland and his Frankish soldiers was
not Muslim at all. In the real battle of 778, the slayers of the Franks
were Christian Basques furious at Charlemagne for pillaging their city
of Pamplona. Not epic at all, the battle emerged from a parochial
dispute in the complex wars of medieval Spain. Only later, as kings and
popes and knights prepared to do battle in the First Crusade, did an
anonymous bard repurpose the text to serve the needs of an emerging
cross-against-crescent holy war.
Similarly, we think of the Crusades as the archetypal "clash of
civilizations" between the followers of Jesus and the followers of
Mohammed. In the popular version of those Crusades, the Muslim adversary
has, in fact, replaced a remarkable range of peoples the Crusaders
dealt with as enemies, including Jews killed in pogroms on the way to
the Holy Land, rival Catholics slaughtered in the Balkans and in
Constantinople, and Christian heretics hunted down in southern France.
Much later, during the Cold War, mythmakers in Washington performed a
similar act, substituting a monolithic crew labeled "godless
communists" for a disparate group of anti-imperial nationalists in an
attempt to transform conflicts in remote locations like Vietnam,
Guatemala, and Iran into epic struggles between the forces of the Free
World and the forces of evil. In recent years, the Bush administration
did it all over again by portraying Arab nationalists as fiendish
Islamic fundamentalists when we invaded Iraq and prepared to topple the regime in Syria.
Similar mythmaking continues today. The recent surge of Islamophobia
in the United States has drawn strength from several extraordinary
substitutions. A clearly Christian president has become Muslim
in the minds of a significant number of Americans. The thoughtful
Islamic scholar Tariq Ramadan has become a closet fundamentalist in the
writings of Paul Berman and others. And an Islamic center in lower
Manhattan, organized by proponents of interfaith dialogue, has become
an extremist "mosque at Ground Zero" in the TV appearances, political
speeches, and Internet sputterings of a determined clique of right-wing
activists.
This transformation of Islam into a violent caricature of itself --
as if Ann Coulter had suddenly morphed into the face of Christianity --
comes at a somewhat strange juncture in the United States. Anti-Islamic
rhetoric and hate crimes, which spiked immediately after September 11,
2001, had been on the wane. No major terrorist attack had taken place in
the U.S. or Europe since the London bombings in 2005. The current
American president had reached out to the Muslim world and retired the
controversial acronym GWOT, or "Global War on Terror."
All the elements seemed in place, in other words, for us to turn the
page on an ugly chapter in our history. Yet it's as if we remain fixed
in the eleventh century in a perpetual battle of "us" against "them."
Like the undead rising from their coffins, our previous "crusades" never
go away. Indeed, we still seem to be fighting the three great wars of
the millennium, even though two of these conflicts have long been over
and the third has been rhetorically reduced to "overseas contingency
operations." The Crusades, which finally petered out in the seventeenth
century, continue to shape our global imagination today. The Cold War
ended in 1991, but key elements of the anti-communism credo have been
awkwardly grafted onto the new Islamist adversary. And the Global War on
Terror, which President Obama quietly renamed shortly after taking
office, has in fact metastasized into the wars that his administration
continues to prosecute in Afghanistan, Pakistan, Iraq, Yemen, and
elsewhere.
Those in Europe and the United States who cheer on these wars claim
that they are issuing a wake-up call about the continued threat of
al-Qaeda, the Taliban, and other militants who claim the banner of
Islam. However, what really keeps Islamophobes up at night is not the
marginal and backwards-looking Islamic fundamentalists but rather the
growing economic, political, and global influence of modern, mainstream
Islam. Examples of Islam successfully grappling with modernity abound,
from Turkey's new foreign policy
and Indonesia's economic muscle to the Islamic political parties
participating in elections in Lebanon, Morocco, and Jordan. Instead of
providing reassurance, however, these trends only incite Islamophobes to
intensify their battles to "save" Western civilization.
As long as our unfinished wars still burn in the collective
consciousness -- and still rage in Kabul, Baghdad, Sana'a, and the
Tribal Areas of Pakistan -- Islamophobia will make its impact felt in
our media, politics, and daily life. Only if we decisively end the
millennial Crusades, the half-century Cold War, and the decade-long War
on Terror (under whatever name) will we overcome the dangerous divide
that has consumed so many lives, wasted so much wealth, and distorted
our very understanding of our Western selves.
The Crusades Continue
With their irrational fear of spiders, arachnophobes are scared of
both harmless daddy longlegs and poisonous brown recluse spiders. In
extreme cases, an arachnophobe can break out in a sweat while merely
looking at photos of spiders. It is, of course, reasonable to steer
clear of black widows. What makes a legitimate fear into an irrational
phobia, however, is the tendency to lump all of any group, spiders or
humans, into one lethal category and then to exaggerate how threatening
they are. Spider bites, after all, are responsible for at most a handful
of deaths a year in the United States.
Islamophobia is, similarly, an irrational fear of Islam. Yes, certain
Muslim fundamentalists have been responsible for terrorist attacks,
certain fantasists about a "global caliphate" continue to plot attacks
on perceived enemies, and certain groups like Afghanistan's Taliban and
Somalia's al-Shabaab practice medieval versions of the religion. But
Islamophobes confuse these small parts with the whole and then see
terrorist jihad under every Islamic pillow. They break out in a sweat at the mere picture of an imam.
Irrational fears are often rooted in our dimly remembered childhoods.
Our irrational fear of Islam similarly seems to stem from events that
happened in the early days of Christendom. Three myths inherited from
the era of the Crusades constitute the core of Islamophobia today:
Muslims are inherently violent, Muslims want to take over the world, and
Muslims can't be trusted.
The myth of Islam as a "religion of the sword" was a staple of
Crusader literature and art. In fact, the atrocities committed by Muslim
leaders and armies -- and there were some -- rarely rivaled the
slaughters of the Crusaders, who retook Jerusalem in 1099 in a veritable
bloodbath. "The heaps of the dead presented an immediate problem for
the conquerors," writes Christopher Tyerman in God's War.
"Many of the surviving Muslim population were forced to clear the
streets and carry the bodies outside the walls to be burnt in great
pyres, whereat they themselves were massacred." Jerusalem's Jews
suffered a similar fate when the Crusaders burned many of them alive in
their main synagogue. Four hundred years earlier, by contrast, Caliph
'Umar put no one to the sword when he took over Jerusalem, signing a
pact with the Christian patriarch Sophronius that pledged "no compulsion
in religion."
This myth of the inherently violent Muslim endures. Islam "teaches violence," televangelist Pat Robertson proclaimed
in 2005. "The Koran teaches violence and most Muslims, including
so-called moderate Muslims, openly believe in violence," was the way
Major General Jerry Curry (U.S. Army, ret.), who served in the Carter,
Reagan, and Bush Sr. administrations, put it.
The Crusaders justified their violence by arguing that Muslims were
bent on taking over the world. In its early days, the expanding Islamic
empire did indeed imagine an ever-growing dar-es-Islam (House
of Islam). By the time of the Crusades, however, this initial burst of
enthusiasm for holy war had long been spent. Moreover, the Christian
West harbored its own set of desires when it came to extending the
Pope's authority to every corner of the globe. Even that early believer
in soft power, Francis of Assisi, sat down with Sultan al-Kamil during
the Fifth Crusade with the aim of eliminating Islam through conversion.
Today, Islamophobes portray the building of Cordoba House in lower
Manhattan as just another gambit in this millennial power grab: "This is
Islamic domination and expansionism," writes
right-wing blogger Pamela Geller, who made the "Ground Zero Mosque"
into a media obsession. "Islam is a religion with a very political
agenda," warns ex-Muslim Ali Sina. "The ultimate goal of Islam is to rule the world."
These
two myths -- of inherent violence and global ambitions -- led to the
firm conviction that Muslims were by nature untrustworthy. Robert of
Ketton, a twelfth century translator of the Koran, was typical in
badmouthing the prophet Mohammad this way: "Like the liar you are, you
everywhere contradict yourself." The suspicion of untrustworthiness fell
as well on any Christian who took up the possibility of coexistence
with Islam. Pope Gregory, for instance, believed that the thirteenth
century Crusader Frederick II was the Anti-Christ himself because he
developed close relationships with Muslims.
For Islamophobes today, Muslims abroad are similarly
terrorists-in-waiting. As for Muslims at home, "American Muslims must
face their either/or," writes
the novelist Edward Cline, "to repudiate Islam or remain a quiet,
sanctioning fifth column." Even American Muslims in high places, like
Congressman Keith Ellison (D-MN), are not above suspicion. In a 2006 CNN interview, Glenn Beck said,
"I have been nervous about this interview with you, because what I feel
like saying is, 'Sir, prove to me that you are not working with our
enemies.'"
These three myths of Islamophobia flourish in our era, just as they
did almost a millennium ago, because of a cunning conflation of a
certain type of Islamic fundamentalism with Islam itself. Bill O'Reilly
was neatly channeling this Crusader mindset when he asserted
recently that "the Muslim threat to the world is not isolated. It's
huge!" When Deputy Undersecretary of Defense for Intelligence William
Boykin, in an infamous 2003 sermon, thundered "What I'm here to do today is to recruit you to be warriors of God's kingdom," he was issuing the Crusader call to arms.
But O'Reilly and Boykin, who represent the violence, duplicity, and
expansionist mind-set of today's Western crusaders, were also invoking a
more recent tradition, closer in time and far more familiar.
The Totalitarian Myth
In 1951, the CIA and the emerging anti-communist elite, including
soon-to-be-president Dwight Eisenhower, created the Crusade for Freedom
as a key component of a growing psychological warfare campaign against
the Soviet Union and the satellite countries it controlled in Eastern
Europe. The language of this "crusade" was intentionally religious. It reached out
to "peoples deeply rooted in the heritage of western civilization,"
living under the "crushing weight of a godless dictatorship." In its
call for the liberation of the communist world, it echoed the nearly
thousand-year-old crusader rhetoric of "recovering" Jerusalem and other
outposts of Christianity.
In the theology of the Cold War, the Soviet Union replaced the
Islamic world as the untrustworthy infidel. However unconsciously, the
old crusader myths about Islam translated remarkably easily into
governing assumptions about the communist enemy: the Soviets and their
allies were bent on taking over the world, could not be trusted with
their rhetoric of peaceful coexistence, imperiled Western civilization,
and fought with unique savagery as well as a willingness to martyr
themselves for the greater ideological good.
Ironically, Western governments were so obsessed with fighting this
new scourge that, in the Cold War years, on the theory that my enemy's
enemy is my friend, they nurtured radical Islam as a weapon. As
journalist Robert Dreyfuss ably details in his book The Devil's Game, the U.S. funding of the mujahideen
in Afghanistan was only one part of the anti-communist crusade in the
Islamic world. To undermine Arab nationalists and leftists who might
align themselves with the Soviet Union, the United States (and Israel)
worked with Iranian mullahs, helped create Hamas, and facilitated the
spread of the Muslim Brotherhood.
Though the Cold War ended with the sudden disappearance of the Soviet
Union in 1991, that era's mind-set -- and so many of the Cold Warriors
sporting it -- never went with it. The prevailing mythology was simply
transferred back to the Islamic world. In anti-communist theology, for
example, the worst curse word was "totalitarianism," said to describe
the essence of the all-encompassing Soviet state and system. According
to the gloss that early neoconservative Jeanne Kirkpatrick provided in
her book Dictatorships and Double Standards, the West had every
reason to support right-wing authoritarian dictatorships because they
would steadfastly oppose left-wing totalitarian dictatorships, which,
unlike the autocracies we allied with, were supposedly incapable of
internal reform.
According to the new "Islamo-fascism" school -- and its acolytes like
Norman Podhoretz, David Horowitz, Bill O'Reilly, Pamela Geller -- the
fundamentalists are simply the "new totalitarians," as hidebound,
fanatical, and incapable of change as communists. For a more
sophisticated treatment of the Islamo-fascist argument, check out Paul
Berman, a rightward-leaning liberal intellectual who has tried to
demonstrate that "moderate Muslims" are fundamentalists in reformist
clothing.
These Cold Warriors all treat the Islamic world as an
undifferentiated mass -- in spirit, a modern Soviet Union -- where Arab
governments and radical Islamists work hand in glove. They simply fail
to grasp that the Syrian, Egyptian, and Saudi Arabian governments have
launched their own attacks on radical Islam. The sharp divides between
the Iranian regime and the Taliban, between the Jordanian government and
the Palestinians, between Shi'ites and Sunni in Iraq, and even among
Kurds all disappear in the totalitarian blender, just as anti-communists
generally failed to distinguish between the Communist hardliner Leonid
Brezhnev and the Communist reformer Mikhail Gorbachev.
At the root of terrorism, according to Berman, are "immense failures
of political courage and imagination within the Muslim world," rather
than the violent fantasies of a group of religious outliers or the
Crusader-ish military operations of the West. In other words, something
flawed at the very core of Islam itself is responsible for the violence
done in its name -- a line of argument remarkably similar to one Cold
Warriors made about communism.
All of this, of course, represents a mirror image of al-Qaeda's
arguments about the inherent perversities of the infidel West. As during
the Cold War, hardliners reinforce one another.
The persistence of Crusader myths and their transposition into a Cold
War framework help explain why the West is saddled with so many
misconceptions about Islam. They don't, however, explain the recent
spike in Islamophobia in the U.S. after several years of relative
tolerance. To understand this, we must turn to the third unfinished war:
the Global War on Terror or GWOT, launched by George W. Bush.
Fanning the Flames
President Obama was careful to groom his Christian image during his
campaign. He was repeatedly seen praying in churches, and he studiously
avoided mosques. He did everything possible to efface the traces of
Muslim identity in his past.
His opponents, of course, did just the opposite. They emphasized his middle name, Hussein, challenged
his birth records, and asserted that he was too close to the
Palestinian cause. They also tried to turn liberal constituencies --
particularly Jewish-American ones -- against the presumptive president.
Like Frederick II for an earlier generation of Christian
fundamentalists, since entering the Oval Office Obama has become the
Anti-Christ of the Islamophobes.
Once in power, he broke with Bush administration policies toward the
Islamic world on a few points. He did indeed push ahead with his plan to
remove combat troops from Iraq (with some important exceptions). He has
attempted to pressure Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu's government to
stop expanding settlements in occupied Palestinian lands and to
negotiate in good faith (though he has done so without resorting to the kind of pressure that might be meaningful, like a cutback of or even cessation of U.S. arms exports to Israel). In a highly publicized speech in Cairo
in June 2009, he also reached out rhetorically to the Islamic world at a
time when he was also eliminating the name "Global War on Terror" from
the government's vocabulary.
For Muslims worldwide, however, GWOT itself continues. The United States has orchestrated a surge in Afghanistan. The CIA's drone war in the Pakistani borderlands has escalated rapidly. U.S. Special Forces now operate in 75 countries,
at least 15 more than during the Bush years. Meanwhile, Guantanamo
remains open, the United States still practices extraordinary rendition,
and assassination remains an active part of Washington's toolbox.
The civilians killed in these overseas contingency operations are
predominantly Muslim. The people seized and interrogated are mostly
Muslim. The buildings destroyed are largely Muslim-owned. As a result,
the rhetoric of "crusaders and imperialists" used by al-Qaeda falls on
receptive ears. Despite his Cairo speech, the favorability rating of the
United States in the Muslim world, already grim enough, has slid even further
since Obama took office -- in Egypt, from 41% in 2009 to 31% percent
now; in Turkey, from 33% to 23%; and in Pakistan, from 13% to 8%.
The U.S. wars, occupations, raids, and repeated air strikes have
produced much of this disaffection and, as political scientist Robert
Pape has consistently argued,
most of the suicide bombings and other attacks against Western troops
and targets as well. This is revenge, not religion, talking -- just as
it was for Americans after September 11, 2001. As commentator M. Junaid
Levesque-Alam astutely pointed out,
"When three planes hurtled into national icons, did anger and hatred
rise in American hearts only after consultation of Biblical verses?"
And yet those dismal polling figures do not actually reflect a
rejection of Western values (despite Islamophobe assurances that they
mean exactly that). "Numerous polls that we have conducted," writes
pollster Stephen Kull, "as well as others by the World Values Survey
and Arab Barometer, show strong support in the Muslim world for
democracy, for human rights, and for an international order based on
international law and a strong United Nations."
In other words, nine years after September 11th a second spike in Islamophobia and
in home-grown terrorist attacks like that of the would-be Times Square
bomber has been born of two intersecting pressures: American critics of
Obama's foreign policy believe that he has backed away from the major
civilizational struggle of our time, even as many in the Muslim world
see Obama-era foreign policy as a continuation, even an escalation, of
Bush-era policies of war and occupation.
Here is the irony: alongside the indisputable rise of fundamentalism
over the last two decades, only some of it oriented towards violence,
the Islamic world has undergone a shift which deep-sixes the cliche that
Islam has held countries back from political and economic development.
"Since the early 1990s, 23 Muslim countries have developed more
democratic institutions, with fairly run elections, energized and
competitive political parties, greater civil liberties, or better legal
protections for journalists," writes Philip Howard in The Digital Origins of Dictatorship and Democracy. Turkey has emerged
as a vibrant democracy and a major foreign policy player. Indonesia,
the world's most populous Muslim country, is now the largest economy in
Southeast Asia and the eighteenth largest economy in the world.
Are Islamophobes missing this story of mainstream Islam's
accommodation with democracy and economic growth? Or is it this story
(not Islamo-fascism starring al-Qaeda) that is their real concern?
The recent preoccupations of Islamophobes are telling in this regard.
Pamela Geller, after all, was typical in the way she went after not a
radical mosque, but an Islamic center about two blocks from Ground Zero
proposed by a proponent of interfaith dialogue. As journalist Stephen
Salisbury writes,
"The mosque controversy is not really about a mosque at all; it's about
the presence of Muslims in America, and the free-floating anxiety and
fear that now dominate the nation's psyche." For her latest venture,
Geller is pushing a boycott of Campbell's Soup because it accepts halal
certification -- the Islamic version of kosher certification by a rabbi
-- from the Islamic Society of North America, a group which, by the
way, has gone out of its way to denounce religious extremism.
Paul Berman, meanwhile, has devoted his latest book, The Flight of the Intellectuals,
to deconstructing the arguments not of Osama bin-Laden or his ilk, but
of Tariq Ramadan, the foremost mainstream Islamic theologian. Ramadan is
a man firmly committed to breaking down the old distinctions between
"us" and "them." Critical of the West for colonialism, racism, and other
ills, he also challenges the injustices of the Islamic world. He is far
from a fundamentalist.
And what country, by the way, has exercised European Islamophobes
more than any other? Pakistan? Saudi Arabia? Taliban Afghanistan? No,
the answer is: Turkey. "The Turks are conquering Germany in the same way
the Kosovars conquered Kosovo: by using higher birth-rates," argues Germany's Islamophobe du jour,
Thilo Sarrazin, a member of Germany's Social Democratic Party. The far
right has even united around a Europe-wide referendum to keep Turkey out
of the European Union.
Despite his many defects, George W. Bush at least knew enough to
distinguish Islam from Islamism. By targeting a perfectly normal Islamic
center, a perfectly normal Islamic scholar, and a perfectly normal
Islamic country -- all firmly in the mainstream of that religion -- the
Islamophobes have actually declared war on normalcy, not extremism.
The victories of the tea party movement and the increased power of
Republican militants in Congress, not to mention the renaissance of the
far right in Europe, suggest that we will be living with this
Islamophobia and the three unfinished wars of the West against the Rest
for some time. The Crusades lasted hundreds of years. Let's hope that
Crusade 2.0, and the dark age that we find ourselves in, has a far
shorter lifespan.
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