I've become accustomed to the ubiquitous manufactured controversies of our media, but my sense is that the current anti-Muslim media blitz is of a different order. To say the least, it makes me uncomfortable.
When a media hate campaign is playing out, it is always hard to know how much it is really being felt by people, and how much is just sock-puppeting. In the case of the current bout of anti-Muslim hysteria, I can say that I personally know some of the folks posting home grown Muslim-bashing comments and/or reposting some of the pre-fab hate. Clearly, the summer of hate was instigated on purpose by the usual suspects, but it is tapping into and enflaming a deep and potent stream of emotion.
The comments of a couple retired military officers I know are particularly nasty. This should be expected, considering that the US has been, for nearly 9 consecutive years with no end in sight, occupying Islamic nations and making war against Muslim people. You can’t expect to keep soldiers in a situation where they feel they must kill Muslims or be killed by them and not expect a culture of anti-Muslim bigotry to fester.
Hopefully you are aware that in the US military, the term ‘haji’ is used to describe Iraqis or Afghans in the same manner that ‘gook’ was used in Korea and Viet Nam. Rag-head is also popular, and I understand some of our best politicians have adopted this term.
And so to the topic of the current Muslim-bashing, which appears to have been kicked off when some of our favorite demagogues discovered that an Islamic group, operating wholly within US law, had sought to build a cultural center in Manhattan, within visual proximity to Ground Zero.
If you want to test for yourself how pervasive the hate is, go to any board or social networking site on the net and just ever so meekly imply that it is constitutionally dubious to try to restrict one specific religious group from legally building a religious center in an area where zoning permits such a use. I guarantee that you will get some interesting replies, and perhaps even manage to commit social suicide.
And this is where we are, nearly 9 years into the War on Terror, at least 110,000 Iraqi civilians dead, at least 20,000 Afghan civilians dead, a trillion dollars and counting of war debt, thousands of dead and injured US personnel. We are afraid of a single Islamic community center.
Of course, the phrase War on Terror was quietly retired some time ago. Just as our politicians stopped saying that we were in Afghanistan to chase Osama, in Iraq to stop the WMD’s. And for a while, there was a prominent meme that we must fight terrorists over there so as to prevent from coming here but that too has been abandoned. Because some of us knew then and all of us know now: those were just pretexts.
In retrospect, it is amazing how easily Americans, having been the victims of 19 Saudi Arabs with boxcutters, could be convinced that the answer to their fear and anger was to invade and occupy Afghanistan, a country dissimilar to Saudi Arabia excepting the fact that Islam was the dominant religion. Equally amazing that Americans could likewise be convinced to support and occupy Iraq for the same reason.
President Obama, to his credit, has spoken out against the mindless bigotry and hate now being played out. But he is finding out that his uncharacteristically brave stance has reinvigorated the myth that he himself is a stealth Muslim. I bear him no ill will, but this is perhaps a case of the chickens coming home to roost. Obama has, after all, maintained his support of the doomed, brutal, expensive and strategically impossible US War against the Afghan people, despite the fact that he should damn well know better.
If our president had shown the courage 2 years ago to call ‘bullshit’ on the whole fiasco, as a man of his intelligence and education must surely know that it is, our country might not be captive to such high a degree of Islamophobia.
No, the real reasons we are making war against the Afghan and Iraqi, and why we intend to occupy their countries for the foreseeable future, are manifold and complex. Probably something to do with a global strategic game some people would like to play, and a lot to do with the vastness and power of the corporate and military interests which profit from the war.
But it has become inescapable that our wars against these peoples have nothing to do with our safety or with the well-being of anyone but a tiny minority of plutocrats.
And so the need for a full-on, chest-thumping, self-righteous campaign to vilify Muslims, everywhere. Never mind, of course, the historical atrocities committed by other sects, and never mind home grown Christian terrorists like Eric Rudolf, David Koresh, Randy Weaver, and Timothy McVeigh.
Never mind that if other countries used human rights abuses as a pretext for imperial war, South Africa could have launched attacks ostensibly to liberate US gays from the sexual apartheid we practice.
Never mind that if harboring armed groups of paramilitary extremist militias were really a justifiable reason to attack another nation, several US states would have been occupied since the mid 1990’s by a coalition of the willing.
And never mind that Muslim nations might have a legitimate beef against the US, considering that for every person slain on 9/11, we have exterminated at least 50-and-counting Muslim civilians, and terrorized, tortured, and imprisoned countless more.
No, we are beyond such things now. By our conformity, cowardice, and cupidity, we allowed our leaders to launch war contrary to Constitutional Law, and time and again, we ignored incontrovertible evidence that our military actions were illegitimate and aggressive.
We have become acclimatized to brutality, death and torture committed in our name. We have forsaken the delusion that we can bring peace and human rights to the world. It’s too late; we have seen too much in the last 9 years, we know that there is no truth or justice in the American Way.
Yet still the wars must continue, so the rationale has been changed. We are fighting ‘Islamic Extremism,’ or sometimes, ‘Islamofascism.’ And since ‘extremism’ and ‘fascism’ are such wonderfully fungible terms, they are of course meaningless, so we mentally subtract them from the equation. This leaves just the Islam.
Thirty years of anti-Islam propaganda, with a spectacular blitz this summer, have sown a multitude of anecdotes, factoids, myths, half-truths and items-out-of-context so as fortify any American whose righteous hate of Islam might be in danger of wavering.
For although we have finally eschewed all ideals and dreams, yet we are sustained by our hate. Orgiastic hate had for years been lying quietly in wait, repressed by years of political correctness, seething at the outrage that gays, women, and people of color might be allowed equal exercise of basic human rights. Now finally, the season of hate.
We need this hate, if we are to maintain our empire. For all other justifications of our permanent wars and occupation against the Afghans and Iraqis, however artful, are mere sophistry and will eventually fall apart.
Apparently, we must have these wars.
So, then, we must hate.