"The Making of the Arab Menace," from Rayan El-Amine in the Dissident Voice, with thanks to Skeetstreet:
Anti-Arabism and Islamophobia are so much a part of the political and cultural discourse on Arabs and Muslims in American society today that most do not even recognize it as racism. The fear mongering of the Bush administration and the right wing media pundits who make a living from demonizing Arabs and Muslims have inundated people with images of the violent Arabs bent on death and destruction. For media outlets like Fox Television, it is a way to sell their sensationalist news programs and for the current administration, a way to sell its wars.
Funny how the Islamic world keeps obliging Fox and Bush by supplying plenty of images of violent Arabs bent on death and destruction. Or maybe all those are concocted by Italian and Greek actors on top secret soundstages adjacent to Camp David.
The article then goes on to repeat some old falsehoods about Daniel Pipes, and then says that we are now fighting, lo and behold, a "New Crusade":
While the neo-cons and Bush embark on a new white man's burden of remaking the Arab and Muslim world, the media has found a niche in being a mouthpiece to this new crusade. Fox Television, MSNBC, CNN and other networks saw their ratings go up after 9-11, as their production of the "war on terror" began. The strategy was to keep the story simple; the US is good and Arabs and Muslims are evil. The cast was already in place: neo-conservatives from the administration, generals, "terrorist experts" and retired military media advisors were all ready to be directed by right wing news show hosts, like Bill O'Reilly from Fox and the like...
This is insanely ludicrous in light of the fact that Fox behaved like a good dhimmi when CAIR complained about Islamic terrorists on 24.
The potency and resilience of anti-Arab racism and Islamophobia today lies in the combination of three factors. First, its historical foundations are rooted in the imperialist view of the Arab/Muslim world as violent, backward and uncivilized. This was generated by early colonial Orientalist scholars who wrote about the Arab world's inferiority as a way to justify colonization by the West.
In fact, the Orientalists wrote honestly about Islam, and weren't interested in justifying anything. The Saidists who smear and vilify them, like Mark LeVine, Omid Safi, and others we have encountered here, are the ones who have politicized academia.
Second, racism against Arabs in films and popular culture has gone on for years. Even before 9-11, Arabs were portrayed almost exclusively as terrorists, rich greedy sheikhs, belly dancers or backwards desert dwellers.
Yeah, look at the movie Kingdom of Heaven for more of those bad screen Arabs.
Last and probably most important, anti-Arabism and Islamophobia have been perpetuated by American foreign policy that has waged wars directly or indirectly on the Arab and Muslim world for decades for geopolitical reasons without any regard for its inhabitants. It is easier to justify control of a region when you demonize and dehumanize its people and culture.
Oh, brother. If you attempt read the rest, keep that bottle of Pepto handy.
It is easier to justify control of a region when you demonize and dehumanize its people and culture.
And if ANYONE knows this, it's the Islamists. They're the experts at demonizing and dehumanizing everyone else.
What kind of visa is he on? Check with immigration and make sure he is exported!
"American foreign policy that has waged wars directly or indirectly on the Arab and Muslim world for decades for geopolitical reasons without any regard for its inhabitants."
In 1956 Eisenhower and Dulles forced Britain and France to end the Suez Campaign, thus saving Nasser from defeat and humiliation. The United States government not only did nothing to shore up the French in Algeria, but supported, under Kennedy, Algerian independence. For the past 60 years, the American government has allowed itself to believe that Saudi Arabia is a "staunch ally" and has consistently relied on a chimera -- the idea that the Saudis somehow will "do us favors" -- as a substitute for a relentless policy of raising, through self-taxing, the price of oil so as to diminish revenues to malevolent Muslim states.
In recent decades the American government has consistently pressured Israel to give up territory it had evern legal, historic, and moral right to retain, beginning with the Sinai, legitimate spoils of war (see the boundaries that are customarily withdrawn after every war; see, especially, what happened all over Europe after World War I, and after World War II), which Carter and Brzezinski insisted Begin yield for a handful of promises about Egypt ending hostile activities and propoaganda, not one of those promises -- on the Egyptian side-- kept.
The assorted plans, the Oslo Accords, and now the American encouragement -- assisted suicide --of the vacuous and dangerous destruction, by the Israeli state, of Jewish villages that bestride the chief invasion route, and in some cases were founded before the state of Israel was declared, is the kind of mad policy that a real ally that understood the geopolitical significance of allowing a "Palestinian" and hence an Islamic triumph, boded ill -- and not only for Israel, but for other Infidel peoples and polities, not least in Europe (where the understanding of the connection between staving off Muslim control of the Holy Land, through whittling away at an all too-compliant Israel, and the moral collapse of the Western world, is not understood).
The American government for decades was the main diplomatic and military support for Turkey, a country which in the last few years has begun to show (and then to try to hide) the Islamist colors that, during those same decades, hidden by Kemalist camouflage -- but those colors are now running.
The American government rescued Muslims, not all of them entirely guiltless or quite as wonderful (nor the Serbs quite so horrid, and their fears, given five hundred years of history, quite so implausible), in Bosnia, and in Kosovo.
The American government has supplied one of the most anti-American countries in the world, and a promoter and exporter of anti-Americanism, Egypt, with $2 billion a year. It started as a way to bribe Egypt into behaving itself (though Egypt never felt it had to obey the Camp David Accords, once it had safely pocketed the entire Sinai, in three tranches). The American government is the main source of aid to Jordan. The American government has sent hundreds of millions of dollars to the "Palestinian" Authority.
The American government has now spent $300 billion to do two things: to remove a monstrous regime that had ruled Iraq for 35 years, and was prepared to rule for another 35 years, and to "reconstruct" Iraq, which has already resulted in 4.5 million Iraqis now having potable water, thousnads of schoolrooms built, a hundred hospitals rebuilt and completely re-equipped, power plants rebuilt and enlarged. And none of this, nor the lives of soldiers disrupted, or marred, or ended, will earn any lasting gratitude from more than an infinitesimal number of Iraqis. As for the "war for oil" -- there is not, and never was, such a war -- the price of Iraqi oil will remain the market price, and no special favors will be done the Americans by the Iraqis, as none have been done by any Arab or Muslim state, anywhere, at any time.
There is much to deplore in American foreign policy toward Muslim states. That policy has been grounded on a misunderstanding of Islam, on a failure to recognize the central nature of Jihad (to be promoted, through a variety of instruments, whenever possible), to recognize how completely Muslim doctrine (derived from the immutable canonical texts -- not only the Qur'an, but Hadith and Sira a s well) that divides the world uncompromisiingly between dar al-Islam and dar al-harb, between Believer and Infidel. The failure of American foreign policy has led to the pursuit of a will-o'-the-wisp -- Arab or Muslim goodwill.
It has led to much else. Had Islam not been seen only as a "bulwark against Communism" (which led to all sorts of follies, including a misreading of Turkey, and a dreamy belief that tens of thousands of Stinger missiles should be distributed to Afghani mujahedin), the Americans might have understood that they must work not to arm but to disarm Muslim countries, or to sell them only the equivalent of jeeps, rifles, and zumbookars. The United States realized after World War II that its wartime ally, the Soviet Union, was -- and had always been -- its enemy, because of its ideology. After the Cold War ended, however, it has still not been sufficiently realized that those stout "anti-Communists" -- because Muslim -- states, such as Saudi Arabia, whose interests so misleadingly seemed to coincide with ours in Afghanistan, are -- and always have been -- our enemies, and in a more profound way than Communism (which is still a product of the West, and unlike Islam, cannot hide or explain away its own failures in the very area -- economic performance -- where it promises paradise).
The political, economic, social, and intellecutal failures of Muslim states and peopoles are a result of Islam itself. But they cannot see it, and many Muslim states cushion or hide their failures through the fantastic accident of OPEC oil revenues, and others (Egypt, Pakistan, Jordan, the "Palestinians") do what they can to extract foreign aid from Infidels (never fellow Muslims, who are loyal to the umma, and will pay for weapons and prize-money to the families of suicide bombers, but not anything else).
The Arab and Muslim states will continue, absrudly, to berate and blame the West, and America, for the faults of their own societies that are really the result of Islam. All such blame should never be accepted; it only encourages the patient in his delusions. Everything should be done to force that patient to begin to recognize the sources of his disorder, the sources of misrule, the sources of poverty or failure, despite trillions in undeserved OPEC revenues, to create modern economies, the failure to have left much by way of worth for at least a thousand years, when compared, say, to the West, or China, or even societies that once seemed less impressive than Islam, but now seem more -- such as those of Meso-America.
Saudi Arabia, the richest and with Iran the most malevolent of Muslim states (because Iran and Saudi Arabia are the states where the sharia is in force, where Islam remains undiluted by local ways or cultural softenings and distractions), did not suddenly begin to offer up hatred for infidels in its textbooks and sermons in the last few years -- it has been doing it all along, but only in the last few years has anyone in the West began to notice, or occasionally to write about it) been seen as a state likely to use some of its undeserved oil revenues to promote Islam (and that is the most natural thing for the Saudis to do -- the obvious, unstoppable thing) by paying for madrasas and mosques all over, and by distributing ill-disguised bribes to former government officials, diplomats, intelligence agents, journalists, and academics all over the Western world, in order to keep the Saudi claque clapping everytime someone from the Al-Saud family steps out on stage,
There is much to find fault with in American foreign policy vis-a-vis the Muslims and Arabs. But it is not the kind of fault that the Muslims themselves charge -- that we have demonized them, have been "racists" and "Islamophobes." Quite the reverse. It is only in the past few years, and despite the best efforts of Western governments (how many times do we have to endure being assured by our rulers that Islam is a "religion" of "tolerance" and "peace" -- all three words are highly misleading). How many stories of Muslim persecution of non-Muslims have been buried, or never covered? How many statements made in khutbas (sermons) can be found on the Internet, but never reported in the Western press? How many historical studies, by the dozens of great Orientalists whose names now scarcely register -- Joseph Schacht, say, or C. Snouck Hurgronje, or Edmond Fagnan -- who studied Jihad, or those important works pioneering scholar of dhimmitude, Bat Ye'or -- have simply been ignored, as if these scholars, and their works, had never existed, while the vaporings and apologetics, by people who are either working out their own psychic disarray (Karen Armstrong), or repaying those who, directly or indirectly, support them (John Esposito), or are simply the snappy-phrasing Irwin Coreys ("Dr. Irwin Corey, world's greatest authority" was a comic act of the 1950s), such Davos-attending mountebanks as Tom Friedman, with his well-reimbursed lectures and books, guides to nothing and to nowhere.
What "race" are the Muslims, again?
I know they don't want to belong to the regular old human one, so which are they?
Islamophobia is Islamophonya
Can I copyright that?
Islamophobia is Islamophonya
Nice one Charles :)
Thousands of people, Arabs, South Asians, Iranians and others were swept up and had their civil liberties nullified. They were detained and interrogated by law enforcement agencies, like the newly formed Department of Homeland Security. Some were “disappeared” and not heard from for months, and over 13,000 were put in deportation proceedings for minor visa violations.
If it so damned tough being a muslim in the US, then there is a simple answer to that problem.
"13,000 were put into deportation hearings..."
Great!
But how many were deported. I'm sure if the number were significant they wouldn't have obfuscated with this "passive voice" formulation.
It's probably a few dozen, at best.
Even though all were illegal intruders into the country.
I wish thousands were being thrown out daily.
Meanwhile...
I hear no anti-Islam rhetoric anywhere.
It would be refreshing if there were enough understanding of the threat for there to be any honest disgust and outrage with the violence that the Islamic fanatics are unleashing everywhere.
But the only sound I hear are Muslims bewailing a non-existent persecution, while I hope for a real reaction from the government to the invasion of the nation and for the illegals to be kicked back to Tunisia or Saudi Arabia or Jordan or Malaysia or Yemen or Morocco or wherever.
They want the death of the West and its Bill of Rights replaced by Koranic imperialism and Sharia Law.
They can work out their 7th century problems in their self-made wastelands where it belongs.
I'll buy their marzipan, but not their dogma.
If I recall correctly, you europeans are immigrants as well. you people came over and slaughtered innocent native americans. so , if all illegal immigrants must leave, then you must leave along with the mexicans, arabs, are any other minority you have a problem with. This country was founded on the backs of african slaves, therefor if anybody can lay claim to this country, it should be us.
What is this guy talking about?
I hated these little sheet-heads long before Fox news, and Bush jumped into the Game, and if anything, Bush is way too civilized & soft on them. - I learned from experience long ago they can't be trusted in anything, even something as simple as a card game, and always make sure to protect your goats and sheep when one or more are around.
Why am I not surprised that this Guy cites the ACLU and CAIR as agencies supposedly representative of Civil Rights. - Funny how it's always they're Civil rights being violated when the US Bill of rights was never fashioned for Foreign Muslim Fascists, to begin with.
You're going to need something more powerful then twisted words to beat US at anything, there, Rayan.
:)~` ``