The Great Islamophobic Crusade

Inside the Bizarre Cabal of Secretive Donors, Demagogic Bloggers, Pseudo-Scholars, European Neo-Fascists, Violent Israeli Settlers, and Republican Presidential Hopefuls Behind the Crusade

By Max Blumenthal

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.

Little of recent American Islamophobia (with a strong emphasis on the “phobia”) is sheer happenstance. Years before Tea Party shock troops massed for angry protests outside the proposed site of an Islamic community center in lower Manhattan, representatives of the Israel lobby and the Jewish-American establishment launched a campaign against pro-Palestinian campus activism that would prove a seedbed for everything to come. That campaign quickly -- and perhaps predictably -- morphed into a series of crusades against mosques and Islamic schools which, in turn, attracted an assortment of shady but exceptionally energetic militants into the network’s ranks.

Besides providing the initial energy for the Islamophobic crusade, conservative elements from within the pro-Israel lobby bankrolled the network’s apparatus, enabling it to influence the national debate. One philanthropist in particular has provided the beneficence to propel the campaign ahead. He is a little-known Los Angeles-area software security entrepreneur named Aubrey Chernick, who operates out of a security consulting firm blandly named the National Center for Crisis and Continuity Coordination. A former trustee of the Washington Institute for Near East Policy, which has served as a think tank for the American Israeli Public Affairs Committee (AIPAC), a frontline lobbying group for Israel, Chernick is said to be worth $750 million.

Chernick’s fortune is puny compared to that of the billionaire Koch Brothers, extraction industry titans who fund Tea Party-related groups like Americans for Prosperity, and it is dwarfed by the financial empire of Haim Saban, the Israeli-American media baron who is one of the largest private donors to the Democratic party and recently matched $9 million raised for the Friends of the Israeli Defense Forces in a single night. However, by injecting his money into a small but influential constellation of groups and individuals with a narrow agenda, Chernick has had a considerable impact.

Through the Fairbrook Foundation, a private entity he and his wife Joyce control, Chernick has provided funding to groups ranging from the Anti-Defamation League (ADL) and CAMERA, a right-wing, pro-Israel, media-watchdog outfit, to violent Israeli settlers living on Palestinian lands and figures like the pseudo-academic author Robert Spencer, who is largely responsible for popularizing conspiracy theories about the coming conquest of the West by Muslim fanatics seeking to establish a worldwide caliphate. Together, these groups spread hysteria about Muslims into Middle American communities where immigrants from the Middle East have recently settled, and they watched with glee as likely Republican presidential frontrunners from Mike Huckabee to Sarah Palin promoted their cause and parroted their tropes. Perhaps the only thing more surprising than the increasingly widespread appeal of Islamophobia is that, just a few years ago, the phenomenon was confined to a few college campuses and an inner city neighborhood, and that it seemed like a fleeting fad that would soon pass from the American political landscape.

Birth of a Network

The Islamophobic crusade was launched in earnest at the peak of George W. Bush’s prestige when the neoconservatives and their allies were riding high. In 2003, three years after the collapse of President Bill Clinton’s attempt to resolve the Israeli-Palestinian issue and in the immediate wake of the invasion of Iraq, a network of Jewish groups, ranging from ADL and the American Jewish Committee to AIPAC, gathered to address what they saw as a sudden rise in pro-Palestinian activism on college campuses nationwide. That meeting gave birth to the David Project, a campus advocacy group led by Charles Jacobs, who had co-founded CAMERA, one of the many outfits bankrolled by Chernick. With the help of public relations professionals, Jacobs conceived a plan to “take back the campus by influencing public opinion through lectures, the Internet, and coalitions,” as a memo produced at the time by the consulting firm McKinsey and Company stated.

In 2004, after conferring with Martin Kramer, a fellow at the Washington Institute for Near East Policy, the pro-Israel think tank where Chernick had served as a trustee, Jacobs produced a documentary film that he calledColumbia Unbecoming. It was filled with claims from Jewish students at Columbia University claiming they had endured intimidation and insults from Arab professors. The film portrayed that New York City school’s Department of Middle East and Asian Languages and Cultures as a hothouse of anti-Semitism.

In their complaints, the students focused on one figure in particular: Joseph Massad, a Palestinian professor of Middle East studies. He was known for his passionate advocacy of the formation of a binational state between Israel and Palestine, as well as for his strident criticism of what he termed “the racist character of Israel.” The film identified him as “one of the most dangerous intellectuals on campus,” while he was featured as a crucial villain in The Professors: The 101 Most Dangerous Academics in America, a book by the (Chernick-funded) neoconservative activist David Horowitz. As Massad was seeking tenure at the time, he was especially vulnerable to this sort of wholesale assault.

When the controversy over Massad’s views intensified, Congressman Anthony Weiner, a liberal New York Democrat who once described himselfas a representative of “the ZOA [Zionist Organization of America] wing of the Democratic Party,” demanded that Columbia President Lee Bollinger, a renowned First Amendment scholar, fire the professor. Bollinger responded by issuing uncharacteristically defensive statements about the “limited” nature of academic freedom.

In the end, however, none of the charges stuck. Indeed, the testimonies in the David Project film were eventually either discredited or never corroborated. In 2009, Massad earned tenure after winning Columbia’s prestigious Lionel Trilling Award for excellence in scholarship.

Having demonstrated its ability to intimidate faculty members and even powerful university administrators, however, Kramer claimed a moral victory in the name of his project, boasting to the press that “this is a turning point.” While the David Project subsequently fostered chapters on campuses nationwide, its director set out on a different path -- initially, into the streets of Boston in 2004 to oppose the construction of the Islamic Society of Boston Cultural Center.

For nearly 15 years, the Islamic Society of Boston had sought to build the center in the heart of Roxbury, the city’s largest black neighborhood, to serve its sizable Muslim population. With endorsements from Mayor Thomas Menino and leading Massachusetts lawmakers, the mosque’s construction seemed like a fait accompli -- until, that is, the Rupert Murdoch-owned Boston Herald and his local Fox News affiliate snapped into action. Boston Globe columnist Jeff Jacoby also chimed in with a series of reports claiming the center’s plans were evidence of a Saudi Arabian plot to bolster the influence of radical Islam in the United States, and possibly even to train underground terror cells.

It was at this point that the David Project entered the fray, convening elements of the local pro-Israel community in the Boston area to seek strategies to torpedo the project. According to emails obtained by the Islamic Society’s lawyers in a lawsuit against the David Project, the organizers settled on a campaign of years of nuisance lawsuits, along with accusations that the center had received foreign funding from “the Wahhabi movement in Saudi Arabia or… the Moslem Brotherhood.”

In response, a grassroots coalition of liberal Jews initiated inter-faith efforts aimed at ending a controversy that had essentially been manufactured out of thin air and was corroding relations between the Jewish and Muslim communities in the city. Jacobs would not, however, relent. “We are more concerned now than we have ever been about a Saudi influence of local mosques,” he announced at a suburban Boston synagogue in 2007.

After paying out millions of dollars in legal bills and enduring countless smears, the Islamic Society of Boston completed the construction of its community center in 2008. Meanwhile, not surprisingly, nothing came of the David Project’s dark warnings. As Boston-area National Public Radio reporter Philip Martin reflected in September 2010, “The horror stories that preceded [the center’s] development seem shrill and histrionic in retrospect.”

The Network Expands

This second failed campaign was, in the end, more about movement building than success, no less national security. The local crusade established an effective blueprint for generating hysteria against the establishment of Islamic centers and mosques across the country, while galvanizing a cast of characters who would form an anti-Muslim network which would gain attention and success in the years to come.

In 2007, these figures coalesced into a proto-movement that launched a new crusade, this time targeting the Khalil Gibran International Academy, a secular Arabic-English elementary school in Brooklyn, New York. Calling their ad hoc pressure group, Stop the Madrassah -- madrassah being simply the Arab word for “school” -- the coalition’s activists included an array of previously unknown zealots who made no attempt to disguise their extreme views when it came to Islam as a religion, as well as Muslims in America. Their stated goal was to challenge the school’s establishment on the basis of its violation of the church-state separation in the U.S. Constitution. The true aim of the coalition, however, was transparent: to pressure the city’s leadership to adopt an antagonistic posture towards the local Muslim community.

The activists zeroed in on the school’s principal, Debbie Almontaser, a veteran educator of Yemeni descent, and baselessly branded her “a jihadist” as well as a 9/11 denier. They also accused her of -- as Pamela Geller, a far-right blogger just then gaining prominence put it, “whitewash[ing] the genocide against the Jews.” Daniel Pipes, a neoconservative academic previously active in the campaigns against Joseph Massad and the Boston Islamic center (and whose pro-Likud think tank, Middle East Forum, has received $150,000 from Chernick) claimed the school should not go ahead because “Arabic-language instruction is inevitably laden with Pan-Arabist and Islamist baggage.” As the campaign reached a fever pitch, Almontaser reported that members of the coalition were actually stalking her wherever she went.

Given what Columbia Journalism School professor and former New York Times reporter Samuel Freedman called “her clear, public record of interfaith activism and outreach,” including work with the New York Police Department and the Anti-Defamation League after the September 11th attacks, the assault on Almontaser seemed little short of bizarre -- until her assailants discovered a photograph of a T-shirt produced by AWAAM, a local Arab feminist organization, that read “Intifada NYC.” As it turned out, AWAAM sometimes shared office space with a Yemeni-American association on which Almontaser served as a board member. Though the connection seemed like a stretch, it promoted the line of attack the Stop the Madrassah coalition had been seeking. 

Having found a way to wedge the emotional issue of the Israel-Palestine conflict into a previously New York-centered campaign, the school’s opponents next gained a platform at the Murdoch-owned New York Post, where reporters Chuck Bennett and Jana Winter claimed her T-shirt was “apparently a call for a Gaza-style uprising in the Big Apple.” While Almontaser attempted to explain to the Post’s reporters that she rejected terrorism, the Anti-Defamation League chimed in on cue. ADL spokesman Oren Segal told the Post: “The T-shirt is a reflection of a movement that increasingly lauds violence against Israelis instead of rejecting it. That is disturbing.”

Before any Qassam rockets could be launched from Almontaser’s school, her former ally New York Mayor Michael Bloomberg caved to the growing pressure and threatened to shut down the school, prompting her to resign. A Jewish principal who spoke no Arabic replaced Almontaser, who later filed a lawsuit against the city for breaching her free speech rights. In 2010, the Equal Employment Opportunity Commission ruled that New York’s Department of Education had “succumbed to the very bias that the creation of the school was intended to dispel” by firing Almontaser and urged it pay her $300,000 in damages. The commission also concluded that the Post had quoted her misleadingly.

Though it failed to stop the establishment of the Khalil Gibran Academy, the burgeoning anti-Muslim movement succeeded in forcing city leaders to bend to its will, and having learned just how to do that, then moved on in search of more high-profile targets. As the New York Times reported at the time, "The fight against the school... was only an early skirmish in a broader, national struggle."

“It’s a battle that has really just begun,” Pipes told the Times.

From Scam to Publicity Coup

Pipes couldn’t have been more on the mark. In late 2009, the Islamophobes sprang into action again when the Cordoba Initiative, a non-profit Muslim group headed by Feisal Abdul Rauf, an exceedingly moderate Sufi Muslim imam who regularly traveled abroad representing the United States at the behest of the State Department, announced that it was going to build a community center in downtown New York City. With the help of investors, Rauf’s Cordoba Initiative purchased space two blocks from Ground Zero in Manhattan. The space was to contain a prayer area as part of a large community center that would be open to everyone in the neighborhood.

None of these facts mattered to Pamela Geller. Thanks to constant prodding at her blog, Atlas Shrugged, Geller made Cordoba’s construction plans a national issue, provoking fervent calls from conservatives to protect the “hallowed ground” of 9/11 from creeping Sharia. (That the “mosque” would have been out of sight of Ground Zero and that the neighborhood was, in fact, filled with everything from strip clubs to fast-food joints didn't matter.) Geller’s activism against Cordoba House earned the 52-year-old full-time blogger the attention she apparently craved, including a long profile in theNew York Times and frequent cable news spots, especially, of course, on Fox News.

Mainstream reporters tended to focus on Geller’s bizarre stunts. She posted a video of herself splashing around in a string bikini on a Fort Lauderdale beach, for instance, while ranting about “left-tards” and “Nazi Hezbollah.” Her call for boycotting Campbell’s Soup because the company offered halal-- approved under Islamic law (as kosher food is under Jewish law) -- versions of its products got her much attention, as did her promotion of a screed claiming that President Barack Obama was the illegitimate lovechild of Malcolm X.

Geller had never earned a living as a journalist. She supported herself with millions of dollars in a divorce settlement and life insurance money from her ex-husband. He died in 2008, a year after being indicted for an alleged $1.3 million scam he was accused of running out of a car dealership he co-owned with Geller. Independently wealthy and with time on her hands, Geller proved able indeed when it came to exploiting her strange media stardom to incite the already organized political network of Islamophobes to intensify their crusade.

She also benefited from close alliances with leading Islamophobes from Europe. Among Geller’s allies was Andrew Gravers, a Danish activist who formed the group Stop the Islamicization of Europe, and gave it the unusually blunt motto: “Racism is the lowest form of human stupidity, but Islamophobia is the height of common sense.” Gravers’ group inspired Geller’s own U.S.-based outfit, Stop the Islamicization of America, which she formed with her friend Robert Spencer, a pseudo-scholar whose bestselling books, includingThe Truth About Muhammad, Founder of the World’s Most Intolerant Religion, prompted former advisor to President Richard Nixon and Muslim activist Robert Crane to call him, “the principal leader… in the new academic field of Muslim bashing.” (According to the website Politico, almost $1 million in donations from Chernick has been steered to Spencer’s Jihad Watch group through David Horowitz’s Freedom Center.)

Perfect sources for Republican political figures in search of the next hot-button cause, their rhetoric found its way into the talking points of Newt Gingrich and Sarah Palin as they propelled the crusade against Cordoba House into the national spotlight. Gingrich soon compared the community center to a Nazi sign next to the Holocaust Memorial Museum, while Palin called it “a stab in the heart” of “the Heartland.” Meanwhile, Tea Party candidates like Republican Ilario Pantano, an Iraq war veteran who killedtwo unarmed Iraqi civilians, shooting them 60 times -- he even stopped to reload -- made their opposition to Cordoba House the centerpiece of midterm congressional campaigns conducted hundreds of miles from Ground Zero.

Geller’s campaign against “the mosque at Ground Zero” gained an unexpected assist and a veneer of legitimacy from established Jewish leaders like Anti-Defamation League National Director Abraham Foxman. “Survivors of the Holocaust are entitled to feelings that are irrational,” heremarked to the New York Times. Comparing the bereaved family members of 9-11 victims to Holocaust survivors, Foxman insisted, “Their anguish entitles them to positions that others would categorize as irrational or bigoted.”

Soon enough, David Harris, director of the (Chernick-funded) American Jewish Committee, was demanding that Cordoba’s leaders be compelled to reveal their “true attitudes” about Palestinian militant groups before construction on the center was initiated. Rabbi Marvin Hier of the Simon Wiesenthal Center of Los Angeles, another major Jewish group, insisted it would be “insensitive” for Cordoba to build near “a cemetery,” though his organization had recently been granted permission from the municipality of Jerusalem to build a “museum of tolerance” to be called The Center for Human Dignity directly on top of the Mamilla Cemetery, a Muslim graveyard that contained thousands of gravesites dating back 1,200 years.

Inspiration from Israel

It was evident from the involvement of figures like Gravers that the Islamophobic network in the United States represented a trans-Atlantic expansion of simmering resentment in Europe. There, the far-right was storming to victories in parliamentary elections across the continent in part by appealing to the simmering anti-Muslim sentiments of voters in rural and working-class communities. The extent of the collaboration between European and American Islamophobes has only continued to grow with Geller, Spencer, and even Gingrich standing beside Europe’s most prominent anti-Muslim figure, Dutch parliamentarian Geert Wilders, at a rally against Cordoba House. In the meantime, Geller was issuing statements of supportfor the English Defense League, a band of unreconstructed neo-Nazis and former members of the whites-only British National Party who intimidate Muslims in the streets of cities like Birmingham and London.

In addition, the trans-Atlantic Islamophobic crusade has stretched into Israel, a country that has come to symbolize the network’s fight against the Muslim menace. As Geller told the New York Times’ Alan Feuer, Israel is “a very good guide because, like I said, in the war between the civilized man and the savage, you side with the civilized man.”

EDL members regularly wave Israeli flags at their rallies, while Wilders claims to have formed his views about Muslims during the time he worked on an Israeli cooperative farm in the 1980s. He has, he says, visited the country more than 40 times since to meet with rightist political allies like Aryeh Eldad, a member of the Israeli Knesset and leader of the far right Hatikvah faction of the National Union Party. He has called for forcibly “transferring” the Palestinians living in Israel and the occupied West Bank to Jordan and Egypt. On December 5th, for example, Wilders traveled to Israel for a “friendly” meeting with Foreign Minister Avigdor Lieberman, then declared at a press conference that Israel should annex the West Bank and set up a Palestinian state in Jordan.

In the apocalyptic clash of civilizations the global anti-Muslim network has sought to incite, tiny armed Jewish settlements like Yitzar, located on the hills above the occupied Palestinian city of Nablus, represent front-line fortresses. Inside Yitzar’s state-funded yeshiva, a rabbi named Yitzhak Shapira has instructed students in what rules must be applied when considering killing non-Jews. Shapira summarized his opinions in a widely publicized book,Torat HaMelech, or The King’s Torah. Claiming that non-Jews are “uncompassionate by nature,” Shapira cited rabbinical texts to declare that gentiles could be killed in order to “curb their evil inclinations.” “There is justification,” the rabbi proclaimed, “for killing babies if it is clear that they will grow up to harm us, and in such a situation they may be harmed deliberately, and not only during combat with adults.”

In 2006, the rabbi was briefly held by Israeli police for urging his supporters to murder all Palestinians over the age of 13. Two years later, according to the Israeli newspaper Haaretz, he signed a rabbinical letter in support of Israeli Jews who had brutally assaulted two Arab youths on the country's Holocaust Remembrance Day. That same year, Shapira was arrested as a suspect in helping orchestrate a rocket attack against a Palestinian village near Nablus.

Though he was not charged, his name came up again in connection with another act of terror when, in January 2010, the Israeli police raided his settlement seeking vandals who had set fire to a nearby mosque. One of Shapira's followers, an American immigrant, Jack Teitel, has confessed to murdering two innocent Palestinians and attempting to the kill the liberal Israeli historian Ze'ev Sternhell with a mail bomb.

What does all this have to do with Islamophobic campaigns in the United States? A great deal, actually. Through New York-based tax-exempt non-profits like the Central Fund of Israel and Ateret Cohenim, for instance, the omnipresent Aubrey Chernick has sent tens of thousands of dollars to support the Yitzar settlement, as well as to the messianic settlers dedicated to “Judaizing” East Jerusalem. The settlement movement’s leading online news magazine, Arutz Sheva, has featured Geller as a columnist. A friend of Geller’s, Beth Gilinsky, a right-wing activist with a group called the Coalition to Honor Ground Zero and the founder of the Jewish Action Alliance (apparently run out of a Manhattan real estate office), organized a large rally in New York City in April 2010 to protest the Obama administration’s call for a settlement freeze.

Among Chernick’s major funding recipients is a supposedly “apolitical” group called Aish Hatorah that claims to educate Jews about their heritage. Based in New York and active in the fever swamps of northern West Bank settlements near Yitzar, Aish Hatorah shares an address and staff with a shadowy foreign non-profit called the Clarion Fund. During the 2008 U.S. election campaign, the Clarion Fund distributed 28 million DVDs of a propaganda film called Obsession as newspaper inserts to residents of swing states around the country. The film featured a who’s who of anti-Muslim activists, including Walid Shoebat, a self-proclaimed “former PLO terrorist.” Among Shoebat’s more striking statements: “A secular dogma like Nazism is less dangerous than is Islamofascism today.” At a Christian gathering in 2007, this “former Islamic terrorist” told the crowd that Islam was a “satanic cult” and that he had been born again as an evangelical Christian. In 2008, however, the Jerusalem Post, a right-leaning newspaper, exposed him as a fraud, whose claims to terrorism were fictional.

Islamophobic groups registered only a minimal impact during the 2008 election campaign. Two years later, however, after the Republicans regained control of the House of Representatives in midterm elections, the network appears to have reached critical mass. Of course, the deciding factor in the election was the economy, and in two years, Americans will likely vote their pocketbooks again. But that the construction of a single Islamic community center or the imaginary threat of Sharia law were issues at all reflected the influence of a small band of locally oriented activists, and suggested that when a certain presidential candidate who has already been demonized as a crypto-Muslim runs for reelection, the country’s most vocal Islamophobes could once again find a national platform amid the frenzied atmosphere of the campaign.

By now, the Islamophobic crusade has gone beyond the right-wing pro-Israel activists, cyber-bigots, and ambitious hucksters who conceived it. It now belongs to leading Republican presidential candidates, top-rated cable news hosts, and crowds of Tea Party activists. As the fervor spreads, the crusaders are basking in the glory of what they accomplished. “I didn’t choose this moment,” Geller mused to the New York Times, “this moment chose me.”

Max Blumenthal is an award-winning journalist whose work has appeared in the New York Times, the Los Angeles Times, the Daily Beast, the Nation, the Huffington Post, the Independent Film Channel, Salon.com, Al Jazeera English, and other publications. He is a writing fellow for the Nation Institute and author of the bestselling bookRepublican Gomorrah: Inside the Movement That Shattered the Party(Nation Books).

Chalmers Johnson Discusses American Empire and the war Against Al Qaeda in 2004

This is a segment of an 8 part video, but the assessment is still true today as even under Obama these types of governmental practice resemble the end of empire and repetition of imperialist mistakes of the past.

In the same vein, a great editorial from Mark Levine (HERE) informs that Obama is very indistinct from Bush's Terror Policy. It says:

The false choice of human rights vs. national security 

Instead, President Obama has essentially continued almost every major Bush security policy, either by default or design. State secrets, targeted killings, renditions and indefinite detention, opposing the right of habeas corpus, preventing victims of admitted torture from seeking judicial redress, expanding the Afghan war while moving - however gingerly - to secure a long-term presence in Iraq; all these must surely be making Bush, and especially Cheney, happy and wealthier men.

As Michael Hayden, Bush's last CIA Director, put it in a recent interview, "Obama has been as aggressive as Bush" in defending executive prerogatives and powers that have enabled and sustained the ‘war on terror.’ 

But just how close to the dark side Obama has moved became evident in the last couple of weeks, specifically from two angles. 

In the first, a federal appeals court overturned a lower court decision allowing former CIA prisoners to sue companies that participated in their rendition and torture in overseas prisons. In deciding that the plaintiffs could not sue despite an ample public (rather than classified) record supporting their claims, Judge Raymond C. Fisher supported the Obama Administration's contention that, in his words, sometimes there is a "painful conflict between human rights and national security" in which the former must be sacrificed to preserve the latter. 

But this is an utterly ludicrous concept, since a core reason for so much of the frustration, nihilistic anger, radicalisation and ultimately violence involved in Islamist terrorism and insurgencies lies precisely in the long term, structural denial of the most basic human rights by governments in the region, the lion's share of whom continue to be supported by the United States despite their behaviour on the grounds of ‘national security’. 

What neither Attorney General Eric Holder nor the President seems to understand is that there can be no contradiction between human rights and national security, since the absence of human rights can never but lead to a lack of security. 

What's more, the very idea in the globalised era that one country's "national" security (especially that of the global "hyper-power," the United States) can be defined apart from and in contrast to the security of other nations is so ridiculous. One wonders how supposedly intelligent people, like former law school professors - turned presidents, can in good faith imagine and declare it

The Politicization of the 9-11 Anniversary: Reflections Marred by the Misinformed Mainstream

Today marks the ninth anniversary of the infamous day notoriously referred to now simply as 9/11.  This year's occurrence has been marked by the interesting coincident phenomena of the end of Ramadan and the Eid Holiday of Muslims occurring the day before.  This, alongside the simultaneous controversy and commentary associated with the construction of a mosque at Ground Zero and a small town pastor wanting to burn the Quran, highlights the increasing animosities of the War on Terror. The press, in typical fashion, will focus on the patriotism this day and help to memorialize and commemorate in its typical simplistic fashion as social networking sites, youtubers, and other digital mediums so too will help to ritualize what once was just another day in September.  Many will participate without even noticing that the majority of media coverage fails to acknowledge an all too important voice in the discussion; the voice of the "terrorists" themselves. 

While mainstream media across the world mourns the deaths of the more than 3,000 people that died that day, little will be said about the hundreds of thousands, in actuality millions, that have died as a result of the United States' and its allies retaliatory aggression since. They will also comment little with regard to the reality of the very different world we live in today as a result of that event and its follow-up.  But as individuals take time to reflect on the anniversary of 9/11, an anniversary that has come to mark the contemporary era, they base their reflections on their particular circumstance, experience, and worldview. As this year's anniversary rolls around, it is more important to emphasize the necessity that we look outside information and interpretations we are used to and rather to opposing views whenever we want ot fully grasp a particular phenomenon. It is only when we turn to try to understand opposing viewpoints that the same divisions and conflicts that have been perpetual both before and since 9/11 may finally be mediated. 

One of the first things a supporter of the Global War on Terror led by the United States would recognize if he or she took the time to analyze the opposite spectrum in the clash of civilizations would be that the objectives of the "terrorists" have largely been recognized.

The eve of the 9-11 attacks witnessed the United States of America as a unipolar force in the world. The fall of the USSR in the early 1990's birthed an entire decade dominated by U.S. decision making.  The idea of a neo-liberal new world order espoused by George W. Bush, Bill Clinton, conservative and democrat alike throughout the 1990's marked what many considered to be the beginning of the end to conflict in ideology and consolidation of the entire globe to the model of free markets and democracy. The world was covered in nation states, the major rival communist power had declined, and the phenomenon of globalization was ready to merge the world into the same dominant creed. The problem was that this new world order, its professed free markets and democracy, in actuality promoted nothing of the sort. Instead its model promoted the success of big business, multinational corporations, and global finance, while propping up dictators and despots from Mexico to Indonesia.  Many of the authoritarian regimes supported by this model were over Muslim nations and what most don't realize is that 9-11 was as much a reaction, not to the espoused ideals of this international order, but to the actual effects the implementation of this order had in the real world.

Nine years after 9-11, the international arena is dominated by discussions about the War on Terror, as states have utilized the terror scare in much the same way the Iron Curtain rhetoric was utilized after World War II to pave the way for the Cold War. People across the globe today have less freedom and liberty as a result, and democracies are malfunctioning from East to West, including some of the most developed nations. For example, riots in Greece and similar conditions in many developed countries seem to foreshadow a reality of the civil unrest the United States could face itself someday. Already discussions about austerity are occurring in America alongside a nation divided politically. This as corporate and financial consolidation occurs across the globe and we speak not of democracy for all but of a new, authoritarian state capitalism competing with the neo-liberal model once considered the end of history.   Domestic conflict and internal strife is one of the necessary existent variables the "terrorists" need for victory.

America is still embroiled in wars in Afghanistan and Iraq.  In Pakistan, Somalia, Yemen and other countries like them, proxy wars fought today with mechanical drones and foreign armies, prepare citizens of today for perpetual, longterm war tomorrow. As billions are spent each month in the process and no one talks of cutting back military expenditure, as the fields, scope and expense of the war exasperate, it seems America and her allies may be stuck in a unsustainable quagmire that leads ultimately to failure. 

The George W. Bush III era marked a complete alteration of global perceptions with regard to America and its effect on the world.  Barack Obama has so far done very little to curb those perceptions, and bank bailouts and corporate subsidies alongside the foreign wars serve as proof to people everywhere that governments have become but tools of an elite corporatist  military security complex that cares little about the everyday man on the street.  Thus, the idea of an End of History has been put in the dustbin and people subsist on what has become normalcy in their lives simply because there is no alternative and certainly not because they are content with the circumstances of the present.  

Despite the recent rhetoric of withdrawal from Iraq, progress in Afghanistan, economic recovery and other lies, it is becoming increasingly difficult to perpetuate American dominance alongside the fabrication that the United States is the vanguard of freedom and democracy in the world.  Commemorations and celebratory speeches marking 9/11 may boost the morale of small segments of the people, but the speeches that most need heard and listened to are those that are blotted out from the mainstream.  They are not the words of domestic dissidents benefiting as well from the comforts of empire. Nine years after the Global War on Terror's initiation it is time for people to finally listen to the words of the "terrorists" themselves. 

Shortly after 9/11, major media outlets agreed not to publish any of the statements of the "terrorists" for fear that the messages may include encrypted messages with directives for more attacks. CBS said it was committed to "responsible journalism that informs the public without jeopardizing American lives".  This allowed the elite to promote the lie that America was attacked by religious extremists who hated her freedoms and democracy while nothing could be further from the truth.  Instead, they would show clips of the press releases and statements that came in as a justification in the aftermath of 9/11, 2001.   CNN, for example, continuously showed footage of Osama bin Laden saying: “If inciting people to do that is terrorism and if killing those who kill our sons is terrorism, then let history be witness that we are terrorists.” However, a review of bin Laden quotes from 9/11/2001 unto today shows that most of the stated causes of the attack on September 11, 2001 had nothing to do with  western liberties and that the intended consequences of the attack have largely been realized. Today the causes cited by the "terrorists" preside due to the continuous press blackout, and the approach taken in the War on Terror continues to provide the fodder for which entire generations may find themselves in war. 

Shortly after 9/11, bin Laden was interviewed by Tayseer Alouni of Al-Jazeerah (later put in Guantanomo for the coverage).  In the interview he stated emphatically, 

"But I mention that there are also other events that took place, bigger, greater and more dangerous than the collapse of the towers. It is that this Western civilization, which is backed by America, has lots its values and appeal [qiyamuhaa]. The immense materialistic towers were destroyed, which preach Freedom, and Human Rights, and Equality. It became a total mockery and that clearly appeared when the US government interfered and banned the media outlets from airing our words which don't exceed a few minutes, because they felt that the truth started to appear to the American people, and that we truly aren't terrorists by the definition they want, but because we are being violated in Palestine, in Iraq, in Lebanon, in Sudan, in Somalia, in Kashmir, in the Philippines and in every place, and that this is a reaction from the young men of this nation [ummah] against the violations by the British Government. Therefore, they declared what they declared, and they ordered what they ordered, and they forgot everything they mentioned about Free Speech, and Unbiased Opinion and all those matters. So I say that Freedom and Rights in America, and Human Rights, have been sent forward to the guillotine with no return unless they are quickly reinstated. The government will take the American people and the West in general will enter into a choking life, into an unsupportable hell, because of the fact that those governments have very strong ties, and are under the payroll, of the Zionist lobby, which serves the needs of Israel who kills our sons and our children without right so that they can keep on ruling with total control"

 Obviously, it is U.S. foreign policy and the hypocrisy of its espoused rhetoric vis a vis true action that led to the attacks. Additonally, it seems that bin Laden predicted a decline in domestic condition akin to what we see these days.  

In 2002 bin Laden issued another declaration, this time specifically giving a justification for the attacks of 9/11. In it he stated the reason America was attacked as, "very simple: Because you attacked us and continue to attack us." He went on to describe US foreign policy in the Muslim world, its invasions, its support for Israel, its propping up of dictators and other atrocities that killed thousands before 9/11, none of which had anything to do with American freedom, democracy or human rights.

In 2006, just 5 years into the war, bin Laden declared, "The mujahedeen recently forced Bush to resort to emergency funds to continue the fight in Afghanistan and Iraq, which is evidence of the success of the bleed-until-bankruptcy plan -- with Allah's permission,'' thus highlighting that it is a plan of luring America into economic strangulation and a war of attrition that was the true purpose behind the attacks on September 11. With discussions of debt after trillions spent at war, with little military and economic gain attributable to the  events since, it 

 There are many more quotes and declarations. The point is that millions still live completely unaware of why America was attacked that day, oblivious to the cause, ignorant of the objectives. The "terrorists" have set up a very effective propaganda campaign using the internet as a result of being boycotted by the mainstream press, but today, few mainstream Americans know any of what the "terrorists" say, while millions of Muslim youth across the globe are all too familiar with the message at hand.  As a result, reading the names of those killed on 9-11 as commemoration, while ignoring the names of the millions dead in the Muslim world will have worse consequences than burning the Quran in the longterm.  

Nine years in, the War on Terror rages onward and most of the objectives of the "terrorists" have been realized. Effective insurgencies continue to exist not only in Afghanistan and Iraq, but in many countries across the world.  Mujahideen or "terrorists" are unified in their struggle as each and every day the arrogance of the United States is all too clear to the rest of the world. The economic condition of the Western countries continues to fall, political processes fail and majorities now oppose the direction of their governments with large majorities disapproving of American influence abroad.  Still, there is little mention in the public discussion about the political and economic causes cited by the perpetrators of 9/11.   

In June of this year, CIA Director Leon Panetta told ABC News that Al Qaeda’s presence in Afghanistan is now “relatively small…I think at most we’re looking at maybe 50 to 100.” This was to defend the claims of the Obama Adminstration that they were winning the war, and needed to send tens of thousands of additonal troops to the region in order to protect America from attacks plotted on foreign soil.  What failed to be mentioned was that U.S. intelligence never numbered members of Al-Qaeda as anything more than a few hundred individuals. According to the FBI, there were only 200 sworn members at the time of 9/11.  Al Qaeda was founded, not on the belief that they could mobilize a military big enough to take on America in combat, but on the belief that they had to attack America in order to prevent it from further intervening and influencing the authoritarian situations of the Muslim world.  It was always about ideology and incitement and never about raw force and power.  The only chance they had to succeed in such an asymmetrical situation was in the event that America continued to subject the world to such rhetorical propaganda, ignored the real causes of 9-11, acted unilaterally with the all its military might and subsequently radicalized a sufficient portion of the Muslim world. The amazing thing is that through it all, the United States has not altered its practices whatsoever. The rhetoric has changed but few are listening and it looks like a small fringe group of around 200 terrorists have taken on the global hegemon and are on the verge of achieving their goals.

Human beings are ritualistic, and societies have forever used holidays and commemorations to ensure a continued allegiance to the creed of its elite.  9-11 is no different; as the ceremonies at the Pentagon and at Ground Zero will document a message that justifies perpetual war, ignores reality and helps to justify a world system that enslaves and dehumanizes. Certainly the ritual rhetoric of "freedom and democracy" will reign supreme, continuously exerting a stronghold on the minds of its loyal adherents.  No mention of the causes as proclaimed by the "terrorists" will be inserted into that discourse and for good measure. Were people able to understand and think rationally, peace and prosperity could be ushered in tomorrow.  Bin Laden has offered peace for years. In 2006, for example he proclaimed,

 We don't mind offering you a long-term truce on fair conditions that we adhere to. We are a nation that God has forbidden to lie and cheat. So both sides can enjoy security and stability under this truce so we can build Iraq and Afghanistan, which have been destroyed in this war."  The mainstream press made sure not to cover that segment of the speech.

This year, after global citizens tune off the press coverage of the names being read of the dead from Ground Zero, or the President's rhetorical speech it would do them much justice if they took a few minutes to listen to the other side. 

Each year, around 9/11, the "terrorists" release a video highlighting their interpretation of present circumstances.  Below is the version from 2009:

download in entirety (PART 1) and (PART 2)

The wars will only be ended and security will only be returned once people take the time to address the grievances of the perpetrators of 9-11, to at least analyze the influence the United States continues to exert in the Muslim world. As long as people shun their message as propagandistic, rejecting it altogether because of the means they choose to utilize in reaction to their perceived oppression, so long as people neglect to recognize that most of the acronyms and adjectives used by Western leaders to describe the "terrorists" are as applicable to itself, then the clash of civilizations will forever go forth and all of humanity loses.  

As the anniversary of 9-11 is commemorated this year, a pastor who wanted to burn the Quran is insulted and proclaimed insane by a mainstream press that worries about its contribution to the animosities of Muslims across the world.  What no one is ready to recognize is that this man is a product of his environment, of a world that prevents any discourse creeping into the mainstream that fails to coincide with the view of an elite.  The Quran burning pastor has little interaction with the complexities of a world that is not black and white and has no awareness of the variables that produced 9-11. In that sense he is little different than the majority and represents a very typical stance. Decrying the "terrorists" without any reflection, investigation and rational analysis of the claims of the attackers is typical of a dominant majority so too brainwashed by media propaganda. It is as true whether you prefer Fox News, CNN, or MSNBC.  In so far as this ignorance continues, the only loser in War on Terror can be freedom, liberty, and human rights themselves.  Perhaps that is what the "real terrorists" desire. Here is to the opening of minds to other views.