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.