Adam's blogbox: it takes a Christofascist like Bush to call Islam names like Islamofascism

Is Bush really trying to fight the Crusades all over again? His rhetoric certainly says so. “Islamofascism” -- can you think of a worse insult to Islam, conjoining the religion of Islam with the slur of Fascism? Because there may be about 10,000 terrorists of the Muslim persuasion in the entire world, he now feels entitled to slur an entire religion of over a billion adherents?

“They hate our freedoms”? What is that supposed to mean -- when Osama said again and again, he hated American troops being in Saudi-Arabia right by Islam’s holiest site of Mecca, with the desecration of unveiled American female troops in the vicinity? That’s not hating our freedoms. That’s hating something much more specific. That’s why they did 9/11 – because of our troops in Saudi-Arabia. That’s what they said.

These days, this “they” have made it clear they don’t like our troops being in Iraq, or Israel giving the Palestinians a hard time. If you were a Muslim, would you like our troops occupying a Muslim country? Would you like Muslim troops taking over Texas, even if they wanted to do some good, like stopping them from executing black people via capital punishment, a punishment the entire civilized world has given up long ago?

“They hate our freedoms.” What freedoms? Seems to me it’s the Christofascists like Bush who hate our freedoms.

1. They hate the freedom of women to have sex and use abortion to prevent a pregnancy. This is a legally won freedom they want to roll back. They’ve even used terrorism to fight this freedom –- bombing clinics, trying to kill doctors, and succeeding.

2. They hate our Constitution. Bush has tried to override it.

3. They hate our laws. Bush has used 750 signing statements to say that the laws he signed can be ignored by him. He hates the freedom of Congress to make laws he has to observe.

4. Bush hates our basic freedom of the rule of law: habeas corpus. He thinks you can detain people indefinitely without charging them in a court of law -- just use a legal fiction by calling them an enemy combatant, and incarcerate them somewhere outside America, in Guantanamo.

Here are some freedoms the Christofascists like:

5. They like the freedom to torture.

6. They like the freedom to kidnap people and dump them in countries where they know they’ll be tortured.

7. They like the freedom to spy on US citizens.

8. They like the freedom to lie to the American people.

9. They like the freedom to start unnecessary wars on countries that are no threat to us.

Bush hates our freedoms. Christofascist that he is (after all, he thinks he’s an instrument of God), he’s projecting when he says terrorists hate our freedoms.


a. The "new Orientalism" -- by Alastair Crooke (from bitterlemons-international.org)

It's unconscious. It slips out almost inadvertently. It is not deliberate but, rather, a reflex: an Israeli commentator discusses options for clearing Hizballah from the area south of the Litani River in the context of the war in Lebanon. After reviewing the options he adds, in an almost despairing note, that probably whatever Israel does, almost certainly a "Hizballah terrorist will pop up somewhere on the back of a donkey with a rocket."

The imagery is clear, but paradoxical. Clear because his report implies a grudging and bemused respect for a foe that unexpectedly is not being crushed by the Israeli onslaught (as every western and Israeli analyst had assumed), paradoxical, because whatever the force that was frustrating this mighty military machine, it was certainly something more than "a man on a donkey". Why the donkey? Because this foremost proponent of modern asymmetrical guerrilla warfare--Hizballah--must nevertheless somehow be associated with obscurantism, with a reaction against western modernity and a desire for a return to a pre-modern age. It's just how we see things.

Edward Said rightly identified this western unconscious prejudice as "Orientalism". He suggested that the West sees the Orient as that mysterious "Other" that eludes rational analysis. Western academics and observers continue to see the Orient, and to define it, in polar opposites: we in the West are rational, the Orient is violent and inexplicable; we are moderate, they are extreme; we practice good administration, they live under oppression and tyranny.

This flawed western analysis is entirely self-serving: the language of Orientalism, Edward Said noted, was a construct of power. For the previous 300 years, Europeans have regarded the Treaty of Westphalia (an agreement that shattered the Christian "caliphate" in secular nation states) as laying the foundations of modernity. The separation of church and state, the belief in the inevitability of progress through science, a faith in reason as a solution of social problems, everything that we think of as the "Enlightenment" ideal, became our mantra however much European reality differed from this ideal.

The Enlightenment grew from a simple concept to become, irretrievably, a synonym for "modernity" itself; the Orient became its antithesis. The ideals we believe are reflected in the Enlightenment became the device that allowed us to use the language of European modernity not only as a tool to "domesticate" the Orient but also as an interpretative template from which to offer a critique of the Orient's "backwardness". The Enlightenment mindset of European modernity became sedimented in western thinking at the same time that it served western colonial and economic interests.

In the years since Edward Said published his classic, the West has elevated Orientalism into something more serious: an inexorable self-fulfilling reality. The global "war on terror" has allowed western leaders to cast "our" struggle as one for civilization itself--"we" have values, they have none, we want to spread democracy, they hate our freedoms. The West is now defined by its opposition to terrorism and as a defender of civilization. The war on terrorism has transformed orientalism, from a European-based vision of modernity that could be used to "domesticate" non-Europeans, into a program that establishes a frontier between "Civilization" and "the new Barbarism".

The new "Orientalism" offers us new political tools. Since the "new barbarians" live outside of civilization, civilized rules no longer apply to them: if "they" win elections they can still not be part of "us"--office holders and parliamentarians can be abducted and interned without a murmur; members of "barbarian" movements can be arrested and taken away for imprisonment and torture in other countries, and barbarian leaders, whether or not legitimately elected, can be assassinated at the pleasure of western leaders. They "abduct" us, we "arrest" them.

The underpinning of our worldview is based on our idea of what constitutes the legitimate use of power--and, therefore, on the use of violence. It is the bedrock of the Enlightenment. Violence practiced by the nation state is legitimate; violence used by non-state actors is a threat to civilization and the existing world order. The barbarians do not have resistance movements, they are not for liberation, and they are not fighting oppression. To admit so is to admit that we are oppressors, and that cannot be. They are not fighting for their homes: they are "unauthorized armed groups".

Non-state actors who use violence--defined now as "terrorists" in the new lexicon of the Bush-Blair world view--face a double proscription: not only are they outside of civilization and undeserving of having civilized standards applied to them (such as respect toward elected representatives), they are excluded from international law too. Their challenge to "our" Westphalian rules on the use of violence permits us to cast them as barbarians and outlaws. Nor are we constrained by our own rules of war in the military struggle to be waged against them. Why are we bombing them? Because they don't have our values.

As these "Others"--these barbarians--find themselves isolated and excluded from civilization, as well as from the safeguards of international law, they respond by assuming the characteristics we attribute to them. If we do not apply civilized standards to them, and use unrestrained military force against them, is it any wonder that they respond in kind? And so this "new Orientalism" becomes self-fulfilling: since their violence is "terrorism" and our violence is "self-defense," we propound a reasonable solution--we get to keep our guns, but they must disarm. - Published 31/8/2006 © bitterlemons-international.org,

(Alastair Crooke is a director of Conflicts Forum. He was formerly an EU mediator who facilitated a number of ceasefires with Islamist movements He was also a staff member of Senator Mitchell's Fact Finding Committee into the causes of the Second Palestinian Intifada.)


b. Racism and resistance define many West-Middle East encounters -- by Rami G. Khouri (from Beirut's Daily Star)

In the five years since 9/11, a most worrying and widespread political trend in western societies has been the broad identification of Islam with terrorism. The translation of that general perception into specific foreign policies by leading western powers has led to dangerous new confrontations in the predominantly Islamic Arab-Asian region. It has driven military interventions and "regime change" policies spearheaded by the United States, sometimes with Europeans and Israelis on board. These tensions have also dovetailed with the persistent Arab-Israel conflict, aggravating both simultaneously.

In response, a new coalition of forces has emerged in the Middle East, prompted by a growing collective will to defy and sometimes militarily resist western-Israeli policies. Such resistance includes the use of force in Afghanistan, Iraq, Palestine and Lebanon, and pushing back politically against western-Israeli hegemony. Iran, Syria, Hizballah, Hamas, Muslim Brotherhood groups and remnants of leftist and nationalist movements have all found themselves motivated by common fears of American-Israeli-driven policies. The recent fighting in Lebanon highlighted these new battle lines, whose origins can be traced back in part to aggressive post-9/11 American strategies to "drain the swamp" in the Arab-Islamic Middle East.

The problem as seen by many in the Middle East is three-fold. First, since the end of the Cold War, the US and the West in general have seemed to need a new defining global paradigm to regulate relations among states or groups of states. Many in the West seem to have opted for the "clash of civilizations" theory, which was quickly reduced to a West-Islam face-off. Incompatibilities and threats, rather than shared values and ethical-religious legacies, quickly defined the public discussion of Islam and the West in many parts of Europe and North America. 9/11 instantly propelled this dynamic to catastrophic new heights of anger and aggression.

Second, the American and British governments misdiagnosed and then over-reacted to 9/11 and other terror attacks, in London and Madrid particularly. They opted for an aggressive military and diplomatic strategy that seeks to defeat terror groups, but also to change regimes and modify governance systems, along with some basic social values, in Arab-Asian societies. The West is no longer just suggesting gradual policy reforms to Arab-Asian countries--it is sending in the Marines to do the job by force, often dictating the values and systems the target countries should adopt.

Third, George W. Bush and Tony Blair in particular have incessantly spoken of their fear that radical Islamic values and the acts of terror groups threaten the western way of life, and must be beaten with a robust display of western power and determination waged in a great civilizational "battle for hearts and minds". The most recent catch-all phrase to describe the bad guys in the Middle East-Asian region is "Islamo-fascists"--a stunningly simplistic convergence of a noble ancient religion from the Middle East with an evil modern political ideology that was born in Europe. When two leading figures like Bush and Blair repeatedly speak of Islamic values, radical terror groups and ideologies and threats to western lifestyles as one seamless set of ideas, the damage over years is devastating.

It is in the public mind and mass media throughout the West where the criminal terror acts of fringe groups like al-Qaeda or local copy-cats have been conflated with the religion and values of Islam as a whole. Serious social science research indicates that public perceptions of Islam, Arabs and Muslims in western societies are now routinely associated with concepts like religious extremism or fundamentalism, political violence, terrorism, anti-American and anti-Israeli sentiments, incompatibilities with western values, and security threats to western societies.

The confrontational cycle since 9/11 between many in the West and the Middle East has been fuelled by specific policies and incidents that can be widely interpreted as reflecting a new form of political racism in the West against Arabs and Muslims. The main charge is that the American-led West applies a double standard when it comes to Arab-Islamic countries or groups. Four particular recent issues reflect this feeling: the Danish cartoons controversy last winter, reactions to Iran's nuclear technology development, the response to Hamas' victory in the Palestinian elections, and the relaxed Anglo-American attitude to calling for a ceasefire in the Israel-Hizballah war, after initially giving Israel weeks to pursue its widespread devastation throughout Lebanon.

Each of these issues reflects distinct dynamics and concerns. But in the eyes of much of the Arab-Islamic world they also share a common thread: they manifest in practical policy terms a prevalent western sense that the rights of Arabs and Muslims are broadly contingent on their first unconditionally accepting American-Israeli demands. This trend has been aggravated by the trauma of 9/11 and other terror attacks in the West, which prompt the US, UK and Israel to feel they can use any combination of military force and threats of sanctions to change the policies of Middle Eastern governments (Iran, Syria, Lebanon, Palestine, Sudan, etc.) or non-state actors like Hizballah. The same values and strategies behind such threats and attacks are not applied in the same way against others, such as the IRA, North Korea, Israel, or Pakistan and India.

No other national or religious groups are repeatedly singled out by western leaders and associated with terror, violence and imminent threats to western civilization as are Arabs and Muslims. That is widely seen in the Middle East as racism in its latest form, and like all incidents of racism it has generated it own counter-movement to fight back.

(Rami G. Khouri is editor-at-large of Lebanon's Daily Star newspaper and director of the Issam Fares Institute of Public Policy and International Affairs at the American University of Beirut.)