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The wide gap between U.S. President
George W. Bush's words and deeds vis-à-vis Islam and Muslims
doomed to failure his speech at the United nations on September
19, which could neither appease Muslims nor pacify the ever growing
Islamophobia.
Hardly a week had passed since
his speech than Winston Churchill - author, journalist, former
Member of Parliament and grandson of the former British prime
minister - was speaking at an American university to condemn
"Radical Islam" as posing to Western civilization a
threat similar to that of the Nazis and the Soviets. (1)
President Bush has denied that
the West is engaged in a war against Islam as a "false propaganda,"
but confirmed his country's determination to carry on with its
"war on terror" and its "great ideological struggle"
at the start of the 21st century exclusively against Muslims
and Muslim countries.
"My country desires peace,"
Bush told world leaders at the opening of the 61st session of
the UN General Assembly, adding: "Extremists in your midst
spread propaganda claiming that the West is engaged in a war
against Islam. This propaganda is false... We respect Islam."
(2)
Bush is also on record as saying
that "Islam is a religion of peace" and praising Islam's
"commitment to religious freedom," statements that
were criticized by the popular U.S. televangelist Pat Robertson.
These rare expressions of respect
to Islam would have been welcomed by Muslims were they not swept
to utter oblivion in the collective memory of the American public
by his incessantly flowing anti-Muslim terminology: Islamic radicalism,
Islamic fascism, Islamic extremism and extremists, Islamic or
Islamist terrorism and terrorists, radical Islamists or Islamist
and Islamic radicals, etc.
HisSeptember 19speech was almost exclusively confined to the Middle East,
an overwhelmingly Muslim region. The absence of even a reference
to the North Korean pillar of his so-called "axis of evil"
was revealing enough that his WWIII (3) "on terror"
has shrunk to focus exclusively on the Muslim Middle East.
"At the start of the 21st
century, it is clear that the world is engaged in a great ideological
struggle, between extremists who use terror as a weapon to create
fear, and moderate people who work for peace," he said,
defining the battle lines of his WWIII.
Four days earlier he identified
those extremists as being "Islamic," who "want
to impose" their "ideology throughout the broader Middle
East." Earlier, on August 10, CNN quoted Bush as saying
that, "this nation is at war with Islamic fascists."
He also defined a modern Anglo-Saxon
white man's mission in the 21st century as "our obligation
to defend civilization and liberty, to support the forces of
freedom and moderation throughout the Middle East." (4)
How can mainstream Muslims
perceive Bush or the United States as respecting Islam when their
overwhelming propaganda machine is producing this torrential
flow of anti-Muslim terminology and their overpowering war machine
is disintegrating Muslim societies to pre-state age, allegedly
to defend the freedom of American people. How could a leader
secure his people's freedom when he deprives other peoples of
their freedoms!
Jim Lobe is a respected reporter
of the Asia Times; in a recent article I misquoted him as attributing
to Bush's co-ideologist, Nweit Gingrich, the term "WWIII
on Islam." Lobe rightly felt highly indignant that his credibility
was compromised by my misquotation. Gingrich did not literary
say it by the word, but he and Bush said it in each and every
other word.
Bush's "strategies are
not wrong, but they are failing," in part because "they
do not define the scale of the emerging World War III, between
the West and the forces of Islam," Gingrich said. (5)
Bush's attempt to verbally
separate between Islam and Muslims in his propaganda to justify
his pre-emptive American militaristic and hegemonic foreign policy
is hopeless and doomed to failure.
Five years after U.S. President
George W. Bush launched his global war on terrorism, this war
has boiled down to a war on Islam: One cannot target all those
Muslims, their countries and their Islamic syllabus without targeting
their religion.
His global war on terrorism
targets "Islamic terrorism" almost exclusively. "Till
recently, of the 36 organisations on the U.S. State Department's
banned list, 24 were Muslim. The rest were Basque and Irish separatists
and leftist groups. There were no Christian, Buddhist or Hindu
groups. The State Department also lists 26 countries whose nationals
represent an 'elevated security risk' to the U.S. Barring North
Korea, all are Muslim-majority countries." (6)
Bush's religious terminology
is shooting his unreligious war in the legs, antagonizing not
only the mainstream Muslims but also the non-Muslim large Christian
minority in the midst of their ethnic compatriots because this
minority feels threatened by his inciting anti-Muslim propaganda,
which creates an explosive antagonistic environment that plays
in the hands of the same extremists whom he uses as a scapegoat
for his unjust pre-emptive wars.
"Ignorance" of the
Middle East and its people is a false thesis that sometimes is
cited as a justification for Bush's militarist polices and verbal
anti-Muslim blunders. But Bush, whose country has been bleeding
the region's oil wealth for a century, could not be credited
even with the benefit of ignorance.
All the anti-Islamist terminology
cannot blur the fact that the issue is oil. There's no question
that controlling the oil and the profits from oil is a U.S. top
priority in the Middle East, particularly as Washington is not
only bracing for a future competition with China and India for
that resource, but also is already in fierce race with Europe
and Japan to take hold of the strategic asset, which is getting
more precious and more expensive by the day, because whoever
sets hands on it will decide who is the future leader of the
globalized world economy; hence the U.S. war on Afghanistan in
the vicinity of the central Asian oil reservoir and on Iraq in
the heart of the Middle East oil reserves huge depot.
In his most blatant self-contradiction
Bush declared: "Freedom, by its nature, cannot be imposed,
it must be chosen."
However he did not hesitate
to arrogantly dictate to world leaders and whipping Muslims into
line in his U.N. speech: The world "must," the United
Nations "must," the nations gathered "in this
chamber (U.N. General Assembly) must", the Muslim world
"must," the "leaders" of Iraqis "must,"
the Syrian government "must;" and to the Hamas-led
Palestinian government he had an outright order: "Serve
the interests of the Palestinian people. Abandon terror, recognize
Israel's right to exist, honor agreements, and work for peace."
Bush accuses Islamists of forcing
their version of things on others while he unsheathes his sword
out and high to dictate a 21st century white man mission to convert
Muslims to a version of Islam that serves U.S. interests.
No wonder the National Intelligence
Estimate concluded that the "pervasive anti-U.S. sentiment
among most Muslims," is a "movement that is likely
to grow more quickly than the West's ability to counter it over
the next five years." (7)
And Bush still can't come to
grips with the question of "Why they hate us." Bush's
line: "They hate us because of our freedoms."
No Mr. President, they hate
you because your administration and its predecessors have been
for decades depriving them of their liberty, freedoms, resources
and elected governments, in a historic trend that extends from
removing an elected leader in Iran in the 1950s because of his
nationalizing the oil and replacing him by the Shah, a brutal
dictator, to suffocating the Palestinian people to squeeze out
the elected Hamas-led government from power in 2006.
Bush's scare tactics aimed
at American public should not blur the divide in Bush's WWIII.
The battle lines should be redrawn to be between U.S. and Israeli
militarism and military occupation and expansion and the liberation
movements that were led by nationalists or Pan-Arabists in the
20th century and now are led by Islamists.
Bush absurdly, unconvincingly
and arrogantly postured as the liberator of the Muslim and Arab
masses, promoting the U.S. Democracy as a campaign of changing
Muslim and Arab regimes, by military force if needed.
However, Muslims and especially
Arabs are very well aware thatthe end of the Cold War
and the collapse of the former USSR have made Islam a useful
scapegoat for tightening the US grip on the unipolar world.
Books by the Orientalist Bernard Lewis and Samuel Huntington's
The Clash of Civilizations became popular in the west
because they promoted the idea that Islam was the main threat
to Western "civilization."
They are also aware that this
war to establish total and lasting U.S. global hegemony, a sort
of modern-day Roman Empire, is spearheaded in the heartland of
Muslims and Islam, the Arab world, where all the regimes are
targeted sooner or later; it makes no difference whether they
are Islamic, Islamist, secular, liberal, or Pan-Arab regimes,
monarchies or republics.
Nicola Nasser is a veteran Arab journalist in Kuwait,
Jordan, UAE and Palestine. He is based in Ramallah, West Bank
of the Israeli-occupied Palestinian territories.
Notes
(1) Winston Churchill at the
Union University on September 26. Reported by the Baptist Press
BP on Sept. 27, 2006.
(2) President Bush's speech
at the 61st session of the UN General Assembly on September 19,
2006.
(3)"WWIII" is a term
used by the former Republican Speaker of the House of Representatives
Newt Gingrich in a recent speech at the neo-conservative American
Enterprise Institute (AEI); he was quoted by Jim Lobe, Asia Times
on September 14, 2006.
(4) Bush's news conference
at the White House on Friday, September 15, 2006.
(5) Jim Lobe, Asia Times on
September 14, 2006.
(6) Praful Bidwai, Inter Press
Service, September 7, 2006. Reported by http://www.snpx.com
(7) The Washington Post on
September 27, 2006.
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