THE ROOTS OF ISLAMOPHOBIA

THE RESPONSIBILITY FOR ISLAMOPHOBIA Since the election of Donald Trump to the White House, and his recruitment of several extremists in his cabinet and advisers, there has been a sharp rise in racist temperament especially against Muslims, and now we have had the murderous attack on mosques in Canada. The Canadian government – unlike the US government in similar cases such as the 2012 mass-murder in a Sikh temple in Wisconsin – labeled the attack(s) as a ‘terrorist’ one, even though the perpetrators were not Muslim. In the US, terrorism is whatever the government calls it, and tends to focus on ‘radical Islam’. So when white men create carnage and terror with automatic weapons in public places like cinemas (for example), or black churches, that is not ‘terrorism’, because the interests of powerful lobbies like the NRA are at stake. In reports and the funeral ceremony in Montreal yesterday, references were made to social media influencing the perpetrators, and inflaming their ‘ignorance’. But the main source of Islamophobia remains strangely unidentified. Put it simply, it is the major Western news media, which takes it lead from the US, ‘echoing’ the US line. The worst attack attributed to Muslims is 9/11, which killed less than 3000 people. Hundreds of millions of American and non-American citizens remain skeptical about the 9/11 Commission report. All manner of plausible theories abound on the internet; from claims that Mossad agents lined the World Trade Towers with demolition bombs (supported by the collapse of Building 7 which was not hit by a plane), to others that the crater in the Pentagon was not consistent with a 747 airliner hitting it, or that airliners were hijacked but not used in the actual attacks and so on. But they are dismissed as ‘conspiracy theories’, or as they are now called, ‘fake news’. But who has been the greatest disseminator of fake news, if not the major Western news media? Long before Trump ran for office, the major Western news media has been presenting a ‘fake’ perspective on ‘Islamic’ terrorism. The greatest war-crime of the 21st century – the invasion of Iraq – was carried out with major support for it by Western reporters and editors. The reports of cumulatively hundreds of thousands of Iraqis killed and millions turned into refugees, are rarely mentioned. Similarly, the hundreds of thousands destroyed in Afghanistan, done willfully to force the Taliban to hand over Osama bin Laden, or similar numbers of casualties and refugees created by the West’s destruction of Libya and Syria are rarely mentioned in ‘official news’. These are all ‘Muslim’ victims; literally millions of them. And the perpetrators are Western countries led by the US, which no one bothers to say is the world’s leading ‘SuperPredator’ nation. That it also considers itself a ‘Christian’ country is mind-boggling. ‘No man can have 2 Masters.. it is either God or Mammon’. Yet the world’s leading Mammon-worshipping country is able to pretend in broad daylight that it is a Christian country, while murdering millions of Muslims and non-Muslims with invasions, terror bombings, and black ops (to name a few methods) to maximize its ownership of Mammon, while successfully portraying itself as the victim of 'radical Islam',which it calls the greatest threat to civilization. But it is really ‘radical Christianity’ which is, and has been for centuries, the greatest threat to the planet, now literally threatening its existence with climate change and nuclear holocaust. ‘Capitalism’ is merely the latest incarnation, earlier ones being ‘white man’s burden’, ‘mission civilisatrice’, and ‘Manifest Destiny’. The worst elements of colonialism and imperialism – the work of ‘Christian’ countries – remain alive through open and secret wars in some 138 countries. But we are rarely told the ‘true’ facts. And this infects the seemingly best of our journalists as well. After the Paris attacks which killed 129 some while ago, Western journalists including Canada’s Peter Mansbridge went to Paris to pontificate about the ‘horrors’ of those attacks, and the earlier ones on Charlie Hebdo. Has Mansbridge or any Canadian news anchor, ever used the word ‘horrors’ to describe Western bombing of Muslim countries? If 129 dead is a horror, what words would suffice to describe the murder of hundreds of thousands, or of millions? ‘The horror, the horror’, of a sick, diseased Western civilization which has murdered millions of Muslims, not in a ‘clash of civilizations’, but because the biggest oil reserves on the planet are located in Muslim countries, but successfully pretends it is under attack from ‘radical Islam’. The so-called terrorist attacks by misguided Islamists outraged by the monstrous crimes committed against their countries are but pitiful pin-pricks of retaliation compared to the Western crimes which provoked them. Sadly, so long as the West continues its depradations, so will the pin-pricks continue. The Western news media understand their role – to focus on the pin-pricks, while rarely mentioning the catastrophes which provoked them, except as noble or well-intentioned mistakes. What is this, if not fanning the flames of Islamophobia? No one asks the relevant questions…for example, was Charlie Hebdo journalistic satire? What is to be gained by portraying the Islamic prophet in demeaning fashion? What has he to do with current events? Why ignore so many far more deserving targets – such as the PIGS on Wall Street who have destroyed the middle class in the West? Or the corporate anus-lickers who wrote Citizens United? Or more significantly – are there Muslim armies in Western countries? Why are Western armies in Muslim countries? Western crimes against Islam go back to the Sykes-Picot agreement and the dissolution of the Ottoman Empire, and include the 1953 Iranian coup. In a prime-time discussion with other journalists, Mansbridge referred to ISIS's references to these historical facts as 'propaganda'.... for obvious reasons, to falsify history... and delegitimize Islamic grievances. There is plenty that is ugly and hateful about the words and actions of Trump and his camp. But the roots of Islamophobia lie in American Empire, or as it should be called –‘radical Capitalism’. Trump’s travel ban for Muslims entering the US from 7 countries is being debated. Not debated is the real and terrible plight of Muslim (and other) nations, which have no practical way of banning the travel of American armies, bombs, Navy Seals, and drones. The world remains at the mercy of the SuperPredator nation.

NEOLIBERALISM - THE ECONOMICS OF FRAUD, THEFT AND ARMED ROBBERY

THE ECONOMICS OF FRAUD AND THEFT Attached is a 407 bill. I accidentally entered the 407 and departed it at the next exit. The bill shows a Toll charge of 46 cents, plus trip toll charge of $1, plus camera charge of $4.05, plus account fee of $3.75, for a total of $9.26. That's an impressive statement of 'efficiency' by the private sector. Efficiency at maximising private profit at citizenry cost. The last few decades have been described as the neo-liberal assault on populations and democracy. It might equally be called the Economics of Fraud and Theft, a fundamentalist 'religion' called the 'free market'. Free for whom? For the 0.1% and their slaves? The major components of this religion included privatisation of public property in different parts of the world, including of resources like water, on the theory that the public sector is inefficient and the free market will do better. From the cost of the subway in London, England, to the cost of electricity in Ontario, to private medical care in the US this is undeniably a scam. Everywhere private sector costs are grotesquely higher, and massive thefts of public property took place at bargain prices, creating the billionaire class of oligarchs who rule most Western countries and Western-influenced countries like Russia. A second leg of this religion was deregulation - to 'free the business class from red-tape and encourage innovation'. This reached ultimate heights in the unregulation of derivatives, where regulation was stopped on inception. A quadrillion dollars of derivatives contracts is estimated to exist on the balance sheets of American banks, and despite clever mathematical formulas suggesting precision, no one can really estimate the degree of risk and fraud they contain. Hence, despite the multi-trillion dollars of 'quantitative easing' (creating money from thin air by privately owned central banks led by the Federal Reserve), 'liquidity' remained elusive. Deregulation and the gutting of the SEC led to innovations like securitization (the creation of dangerous instruments like CDOs which destroyed mortgage audit trails, allowed the sale of trillions of dollars of junk CDOs bearing fraudulent AAA ratings, because billions of dollars in commissions and fees were earned by Wall Street). Financial officers openly spoke of 'off-balance sheet financing', or violating the requirement of 'full disclosure' on balance sheets. This part of the religion relies on 'self-interest' leading to optimal solutions.... as if eliminating traffic rules, speed limits and police would lead to safer and more optimal driving because every driver's self-interest would guarantee it. Dr. Chomsky has challenged the 'free-market innovation' assumption, stating that most of the major components of the post-industrial economy like the computer, the internet, wi-fi, smart phones, and so on, were developed at public cost and risk, in institutions like MIT funded by the taxpaying 99%, but the benefits went elsewhere. But economics students were consistently led to parrot the idea that 'public investment crowds out private investment'. A third leg was 'supply-side economics'. .... The Trudeau government pulled off a minor revolution when it campaigned on tax increases. Since Reagan however the mantra continued virtually unabated that tax cuts for the rich would lead them to invest and this would create 'trickle-down' jobs. But the Laffer curve was another fraud, as the super-rich took the cuts and then disinvested, dismantling manufacturing in major Western economies and moving it to cheap-labor countries, citing 'market forces' and 'globalization'. Why isn't there a movement to reclaim the falsely earned tax cuts back? In the UK in particular but generally in the West, working-class people were encouraged to invest in speculative things like stocks and real estate to distract attention from their stagnant or declining wage. The attack on the deceased Keynes and his replacement by the ‘monetarist’ Milton Friedman almost certainly was ideological. Keynes counselled putting money in the hands of the 99%, who would spend it on the necessities of life. This created the post-WW2 social welfare states, which stuck in the craw of the super-rich, who could not stand the notion of a middle class earning a decent wage. So they set about destroying it, following the advice of the 'Powell memorandum'. Friedman's monetarist theory of growth of money supply a point or so ahead of inflation has been proven to be a 'false doctrine', as credit creation by the Fed proceeds in ways intended to create and support bubbles, with inevitable crashes. A major unasked question is why are the Federal Reserve, the IMF and most central banks privately owned, and why is the identity of the owners secret? Why do private bankers have the license to print/create money from thin air, and then charge the public interest? How much of today's government debts and deficits would vanish if this license (protected by the world's greatest weapons of mass destruction and deception) were to be taken away, and returned where it arguably belongs - in the hands of 'the people'. And no modern economic theory concerns itself with the Economics of Armed Robbery aka Empire.... the use of weapons, armed forces, and 'intelligence agencies' to allow powerful nations to rob and plunder the weak. Perhaps that's what the 'free' market refers to - the freedom of the Empire to do what it wants. To be fair though, the US-UK 'Ivy League' (Harvard, Oxford, etc.) do refer to the strange 'resource curse' which causes countries possessing oil, gold, minerals etc. to plunge into an abyss which the wonderful West then miraculously benefits from..... the unofficial activities of the 'Christian' West in engendering these events by inciting civil wars, insurgencies, toppling of democracies, bribing and arming military or non-military insurrections, etc., do not form part of the profession of economics, which requires its adherents to spend years in the study of exquisite mathematical models leading to 'equilibrium', based on assumptions (rationality, 'efficient markets', etc) which have no equivalence in reality. A 407 BILL.pdf