The Great Islamophobic Crusade

For a small but significant portion of the American population, there is no issue of greater importance than the threat of Islam. Not a debt that threatens to bankrupt the country, nuclear armed adversaries that could in theory kill hundreds of millions of people, or special interests in control of Washington DC. Such an assessment is clearly based on an enormous exaggeration of the strength of Muslim extremists, and at first it might seem inexplicable how it could become so widespread.

This article explains that a dedicated effort by far right Israeli/Jewish extremists is pushing the anti-Islamic sentiment, in order to coopt Americans to their cause:

The Great Islamophobic Crusade

Nine years after 9/11, hysteria about Muslims in American life has gripped the country.

With it has gone an outburst of arson attacks on mosques, campaigns to stop their construction, and the branding of the Muslim-American community, overwhelmingly moderate, as a hotbed of potential terrorist recruits. The frenzy has raged from rural Tennessee to New York City, while in Oklahoma, voters even overwhelmingly approved a ballot measure banning the implementation of Sharia law in American courts (not that such a prospect existed). This campaign of Islamophobia wounded President Obama politically, as one out of five Americans have bought into a sustained chorus of false rumors about his secret Muslim faith. And it may have tainted views of Muslims in general; an August 2010 Pew Research Center poll revealed that, among Americans, the favorability rating of Muslims had dropped by 11 points since 2005.

Erupting so many years after the September 11th trauma, this spasm of anti-Muslim bigotry might seem oddly timed and unexpectedly spontaneous. But think again: it's the fruit of an organized, long-term campaign by a tight confederation of right-wing activists and operatives who first focused on Islamophobia soon after the September 11th attacks, but only attained critical mass during the Obama era. It was then that embittered conservative forces, voted out of power in 2008, sought with remarkable success to leverage cultural resentment into political and partisan gain.

This network is obsessively fixated on the supposed spread of Muslim influence in America. Its apparatus spans continents, extending from Tea Party activists here to the European far right. It brings together in common cause right-wing ultra-Zionists, Christian evangelicals, and racist British soccer hooligans. It reflects an aggressively pro-Israel sensibility, with its key figures venerating the Jewish state as a Middle Eastern Fort Apache on the front lines of the Global War on Terror and urging the U.S. and various European powers to emulate its heavy-handed methods.

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The Wall Street Journal and Ron Paul

The Wall Street Journal has been known, for a while now, to be one of the main pillars of the neocon/Israeli-lobby propaganda machine. It was one of the principal media organizations behind the drumming up of support for the invasion of Iraq, and it has recently published several articles from the warmongering godfather of neoconservatism, Norman Podhoretz, urging the US to bomb Iran rather than use diplomacy.

One of their columnists, Bret Stephens, recently wrote a commentary attacking Ron Paul's policy of non-interventionism and libertarianism is general.

In it he calls Ron Paul "fringe", his position one borne of "libertarian conceit", and his followers "cult-like". He defends the current US policy of interventionism and especially continued US aid to Israel and military interventionism in the affairs of Israel's neighbors.

Bret Stephens is a Jewish neoconservative and former editor and chief for the right wing Israeli paper the 'Jerusalem Post'. When John Mearsheimer of the University of Chicago, and Stephen Walt, of the Kennedy School of Government at Harvard University published their groundbreaking work "The Israel Lobby and US Foreign Policy", Bret Stephens, predictably, was one of its main critics.

The Wall Street Journal is an important facet of the Israeli lobby's propaganda efforts and its attack on Ron Paul is part of this effort to promote pro-Israeli interventionist US foreign policy.

Here are a few of the ridiculous arguments made by Stephens to try to discredit Ron Paul's policy position:

Dr. Paul's own remedy is that if "we trade with everybody and talk with them . . . there's a greater incentive to work these problems out." But here's a rub.

As historian Michael Oren observes in "Power, Faith and Fantasy," his history of America's 230-year involvement in the Middle East, as early as the 1790s "many Americans had grown dismayed with the country's Middle East policy of admonishing the [Barbary] pirates while simultaneously coddling them with bribes." It was precisely out of a desire to "trade with everybody" that the early American republic was forced to build a navy, and then to go to war, to defend its commercial interests, a pattern that held true in World War I and the Persian Gulf "Tanker War" of the 1980s.

1) The fight against the Barbary pirates was extremely limited compared to the 700+ American military bases in 130 countries, plus the US occupation of Iraq and Afghanistan that is going on today. One can't compare a small naval incursion against pirate bases to decade long occupations involving half a million troops. Get real.

2) The tanker wars of the 1980's were a DIRECT result of American sponsorship of Iraq in its war against Iran. Even if we were to accept that a tanker wars scenario could happen in a world where the US didn't intervene every where, protecting those tankers is a far cry from 700+ military bases in 130 countries, with half a million American troops.

3) World War 1 was a completely unnecessary war that did not serve America's national interest. It served the narrow interests of the banks that, according to the Nye Committee, loaned Great Britain 85 times more than they loaned Germany (and therefore did not want the UK to lose the war). American intervention in WW1 cost America over a hundred thousand lives and led to the Versailles Treaty, which led to World War 2.

These details of history pose a problem not just to Dr. Paul's views of the Middle East, but to the intellectual architecture of libertarianism itself. Liberal societies are built on the belief in (and defense of) individual rights, but also on the overawing power of government to transform natural rights into civil ones. In the same way, trade between nations is only possible in the absence of robbers, pirates and other rogues. Whose job is it to get rid of them?

A strict libertarian might offer that mercenaries could be authorized to build aircraft carriers, Aegis cruisers and nuclear submarines to keep the freedom of the seas in the Straits of Hormuz and Malacca. But what happens when the pecuniary interests of mercenaries collide with the political interests of the U.S. or some other government? Ultimately, some kind of decisive power is needed there too, at least if the trading opportunities libertarians claim are so precious stand any chance of flourishing.

Private mercenaries should protect those Americans who trade in foreign countries. One can't expect the American government to protect American enterprises that go to dangerous foreign nations to do business. That would be, in essence, socializing the risk of international business. If foreign nations are obstructing international trade routes, then that is a job that the US navy can take care of. No foreign military bases or decade long occupations are needed to keep international water ways open. This is a ridiculous argument and justification for America's current policy of interventionism.

As far as mercenaries being "authorized to build aircraft carriers, Aegis cruisers and nuclear submarines", no absolutely not. The American government should not sanction or give access to proprietory American military technology to any mercenaries contracted by US nationals in foreign countries. If an American wants to do business in a foreign nation, the American government should have no authority to aid him/her in any way.

Mankind is not comprised solely of profit- and pleasure-seekers; the quest for prestige and dominance and an instinct for nihilism are also inscribed in human nature, nowhere more so than in the Middle East. Libertarianism makes no accounting for this. It assumes the relatively tame aspirations of modern American life are a baseline for human nature, not an achievement of civilization.

That's absolute nonsense. Libertarianism makes no assumptions about human nature, it makes simple declarations about the rights of man. One does not have a right to force someone else to contribute money to the protection of a foreign interest. It's as simple as that. All of this philosophical bullshit about nihilism and "the quest for prestige and dominance" has nothing to do with this discussion.

There is a not-incidental connection here between libertarianism and pacifism. George Orwell once observed that pacifism is a doctrine that can only be preached behind the protective cover of the Royal Navy. Similarly, libertarianism can only be seriously espoused under the protective cover of Leviathan.

Who said any thing about pacifism? The libertarian does not argue against fighting, but against forcing, by government mandate, every citizen to bear the costs of foreign adventures that do not serve the purpose of furthering national security.

I'm not surprised that Bret Stephens completely misses the argument for a non-interventionist foreign policy and uses weak spurious historical analogies to counter Ron Paul. A weak argument such as his cannot stand the light of honest scrutiny.

Buchanan blasts Rudy and Israeli lobby in new Article

I wish more had the courage of Pat Buchanan to challenge the sinister war mongers behind the top candidates of the 2008 elections. Here is his latest article:


Is a Vote for Rudy a Vote for War?

Rudy Giuliani has made a "promise" not to allow Iran to acquire a nuclear capability, even if it requires U.S. military action. Though the U.S. Army is scrimping to meet recruitment goals, Rudy has pledged to add at least 10 new combat brigades.

Speaking to an Atlantic Bridge conference in London, Rudy called for NATO expansion to include Japan, India, Australia, Singapore and Israel. Has Rudy thought this through?

Why would Japan and Australia, each of which already has a U.S. commitment to come to its defense, commit to go to war with a nuclear-armed Russia if it invaded Estonia? For joining NATO would require them to treat an attack on Estonia, or any other NATO nation in Europe, as an attack upon themselves.

Why should the United States commit to war for India, which has territorial conflicts and has fought wars with China and Pakistan? What vital interest is it of ours who holds Kashmir? As for Israel, are American boys now to fight Hezbollah and Hamas?

While FDR talked to Stalin, Ike and JFK to Khrushchev, and Nixon to Mao, Rudy would not talk to any "enemies bent on our destruction or those who cannot deliver on their agreements." Would he be even-handed in the Israeli-Palestinian dispute? Answers Rudy, "America shouldn't be even-handed in dealing with ... an elected democracy ... and a group of terrorists."

If Rudy rivals McCain as the hawk's hawk in the Republican race, the foreign policy advisers he has signed up make the Vulcans of Bush look like Howard Zinn and Ramsey Clark. Arnaud de Borchgrave titled his column about them "Dogs of War."

Team leader is Charles Hill, a co-signer of the Sept. 20, 2001, neocon ultimatum to Bush, nine days after 9/11, warning the president if he did not attack Iraq, his failure to do so "will constitute an early and perhaps decisive surrender to the war on international terrorism."

Yet Iraq had nothing to do with 9/11.

A second member of Rudy's team is Martin Kramer, an Israeli-American who, according to Ken Silverstein of Harper's, "spent 25 years at Tel Aviv University and whose Middle East policy can best be summarized as, 'What's Best for Israel?'" Silverstein calls Rudy's eight-man advisory group "AIPAC's Dream Team" – AIPAC being the Israeli lobby, two of whose leaders go on trial in January for espionage against the United States.

According to the New York Times, another key Rudy adviser is Daniel Pipes, "who has called for profiling Muslims at airports and scrutinizing American Muslims in law enforcement, the military and the diplomatic corps." Another is AEI's Michael Rubin, "who has written in favor of revoking the United States' ban on assassinations."

Best known of Rudy's advisers is Norman Podhoretz, who wrote in June, "The Case for Bombing Iran" in Commentary, thinks we are in "World War IV" and writes that "as an American and as a Jew, I pray with all my heart" Bush will bomb Iran. Podhoretz sees us at Munich in 1938 and Mahmoud Ahmadinejad as Hitler.

"Like Hitler," writes Podhoretz, Ahmadinejad "is a revolutionary whose objective is to overturn the going international order and to replace it in the fullness of time with a new order dominated by Iran and ruled by the religio-political culture of Islamofascism."

Time to return to Planet Earth. Ahmadinejad is not only jeered at Columbia but at colleges in Tehran. He is openly attacked by rivals. He does not control the Iranian Revolutionary Guard. He does not decide on war or peace. He runs a regime with 2 percent of U.S. gross domestic product, no nukes and no navy or air force to rival ours. He is a Shi'ite in a Sunni world. How is this 5 foot, 4 inch Persian going to strong-arm the United States, Russia and China – not to mention an Israel with 300 nukes – into his "new order"?

After the axis-of-evil speech threatening war on Iraq, Iran and North Korea, Podhoretz wrote that Bush had not gone far enough.

The "regimes that richly deserve to be overthrown ... should extend to Syria and Lebanon and Libya, as well as 'friends' of America like the Saudi royal family and Egypt's Hosni Mubarak, along with the Palestinian Authority." After toppling them all, wrote Podhoretz, as he mocked the "timorous ... incorrigibly cautious Colin Powell," let's find "the stomach to impose a new political culture on the defeated."

Bush found the stomach. Near 4,000 Americans are dead, 27,000 wounded, Walter Reed is full, and Norman is looking for new wars. On a recent National Review cruise, he ranted that Iraq was an "amazing success," "a triumph. It couldn't have gone better." As for Saddam's WMDs, they were secretly "shipped to Syria."

After meeting with his candidate, Podhoretz emerged happy to assure us, "There is very little difference in how he (Rudy) sees the war and I see it." If true, a vote for Rudy is a vote for endless war.

And, as James Madison said, wars are the death of republics.

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