Anti-Empire Report
Where Has All This Islamic
Fundamentalism Come From?
Murdering journalists … them and us
By William Blum
January 20, 2015 "ICH"
- After Paris, condemnation of religious
fanaticism is at its height. I’d guess that
even many progressives fantasize about
wringing the necks of jihadists,
bashing into their heads some thoughts about
the intellect, about satire, humor, freedom
of speech. We’re talking here, after all,
about young men raised in France, not Saudi
Arabia.
Where has all this Islamic
fundamentalism come from in this modern age?
Most of it comes – trained, armed, financed,
indoctrinated – from Afghanistan, Iraq,
Libya, and Syria. During various periods
from the 1970s to the present, these four
countries had been the most secular, modern,
educated, welfare states in the Middle East
region. And what had happened to these
secular, modern, educated, welfare states?
In the 1980s, the United
States overthrew the Afghan government that
was progressive, with full rights for women,
believe it or not
, leading to the creation of
the Taliban and their taking power.
In the 2000s, the United
States overthrew the Iraqi government,
destroying not only the secular state, but
the civilized state as well, leaving a
failed state.
In 2011, the United States
and its NATO military machine overthrew the
secular Libyan government of Muammar
Gaddafi, leaving behind a lawless state and
unleashing many hundreds of jihadists
and tons of weaponry across the Middle East.
And for the past few years
the United States has been engaged in
overthrowing the secular Syrian government
of Bashar al-Assad. This, along with the US
occupation of Iraq having triggered
widespread Sunni-Shia warfare, led to the
creation of The Islamic State with all its
beheadings and other charming practices.
However, despite it all,
the world was made safe for capitalism,
imperialism, anti-communism, oil, Israel,
and jihadists. God is Great!
Starting with the Cold
War, and with the above interventions
building upon that, we have 70 years of
American foreign policy, without which – as
Russian/American writer Andre Vltchek has
observed – “almost all Muslim countries,
including Iran, Egypt and Indonesia, would
now most likely be socialist, under a group
of very moderate and mostly secular
leaders”.
Even the ultra-oppressive
Saudi Arabia – without Washington’s
protection – would probably be a very
different place.
On January 11, Paris was
the site of a March of National Unity in
honor of the magazine Charlie Hebdo,
whose journalists had been assassinated by
terrorists. The march was rather touching,
but it was also an orgy of Western
hypocrisy, with the French TV broadcasters
and the assembled crowd extolling without
end the NATO world’s reverence for
journalists and freedom of speech; an ocean
of signs declaring Je suis Charlie
… Nous Sommes Tous Charlie; and
flaunting giant pencils, as if pencils – not
bombs, invasions, overthrows, torture, and
drone attacks – have been the West’s weapons
of choice in the Middle East during the past
century.
No reference was made to
the fact that the American military, in the
course of its wars in recent decades in the
Middle East and elsewhere, had been
responsible for the deliberate deaths of
dozens of journalists. In Iraq, among other
incidents, see Wikileaks’ 2007
video of the cold-blooded murder of two
Reuters journalists; the 2003 US
air-to-surface missile attack on the offices
of Al Jazeera in Baghdad that left
three journalists dead and four wounded; and
the American firing on Baghdad’s Hotel
Palestine the same year that killed two
foreign cameramen.
Moreover, on October 8,
2001, the second day of the US bombing of
Afghanistan, the transmitters for the
Taliban government’s Radio Shari
were bombed and shortly after this the US
bombed some 20 regional radio sites. US
Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld defended
the targeting of these facilities, saying:
“Naturally, they cannot be considered to be
free media outlets. They are mouthpieces of
the Taliban and those harboring terrorists.”
And in Yugoslavia, in
1999, during the infamous 78-day bombing of
a country which posed no threat at all to
the United States or any other country,
state-owned Radio Television Serbia
(RTS) was targeted because it was
broadcasting things which the United
States and NATO did not like (like how
much horror the bombing was causing). The
bombs took the lives of many of the
station’s staff, and both legs of one of the
survivors, which had to be amputated to free
him from the wreckage.
I present here some views
on Charlie Hebdo sent to me by a
friend in Paris who has long had a close
familiarity with the publication and its
staff:
“On international
politics Charlie Hebdo was
neoconservative. It supported every
single NATO intervention from Yugoslavia
to the present. They were anti-Muslim,
anti-Hamas (or any Palestinian
organization), anti-Russian, anti-Cuban
(with the exception of one cartoonist),
anti-Hugo Chávez, anti-Iran, anti-Syria,
pro-Pussy Riot, pro-Kiev … Do I need to
continue?
“Strangely enough, the
magazine was considered to be ‘leftist’.
It’s difficult for me to criticize them
now because they weren’t ‘bad people’,
just a bunch of funny cartoonists, yes,
but intellectual freewheelers without
any particular agenda and who actually
didn’t give a fuck about any form of
‘correctness’ – political, religious, or
whatever; just having fun and trying to
sell a ‘subversive’ magazine (with the
notable exception of the former editor,
Philippe Val, who is, I think, a
true-blooded neocon).”
Dumb and Dumber
Remember Arseniy Yatsenuk?
The Ukrainian whom US State Department
officials adopted as one of their own in
early 2014 and guided into the position of
Prime Minister so he could lead the
Ukrainian Forces of Good against Russia in
the new Cold War?
In an interview on German
television on January 7, 2015 Yatsenuk
allowed the following words to cross his
lips: “We all remember well the Soviet
invasion of Ukraine and Germany. We will not
allow that, and nobody has the right to
rewrite the results of World War Two”.
The Ukrainian Forces of
Good, it should be kept in mind, also
include several neo-Nazis in high government
positions and many more partaking in the
fight against Ukrainian pro-Russians in the
south-east of the country. Last June,
Yatsenuk referred to these pro-Russians as
“sub-humans”
,
directly equivalent to the Nazi term “untermenschen”.
So the next time you shake
your head at some stupid remark made by a
member of the US government, try to find
some consolation in the thought that high
American officials are not necessarily the
dumbest, except of course in their choice of
who is worthy of being one of the empire’s
partners.
The type of rally held in
Paris this month to condemn an act of terror
by jihadists could as well have
been held for the victims of Odessa in
Ukraine last May. The same neo-Nazi types
referred to above took time off from
parading around with their swastika-like
symbols and calling for the death of
Russians, Communists and Jews, and burned
down a trade-union building in Odessa,
killing scores of people and sending
hundreds to hospital; many of the victims
were beaten or shot when they tried to flee
the flames and smoke; ambulances were
blocked from reaching the wounded … Try and
find a single American mainstream media
entity that has made even a slightly serious
attempt to capture the horror. You would
have to go to the Russian station in
Washington, DC,
RT.com, search “Odessa fire” for many
stories, images and videos. Also see the
Wikipedia entry on the 2 May 2014 Odessa
clashes.
If the American people
were forced to watch, listen, and read all
the stories of neo-Nazi behavior in Ukraine
the past few years, I think they – yes, even
the American people and their
less-than-intellectual Congressional
representatives – would start to wonder why
their government was so closely allied with
such people. The United States may even go
to war with Russia on the side of such
people.
L’Occident n’est pas
Charlie pour Odessa. Il n’y a pas de défilé
à Paris pour Odessa.
Some thoughts about this
thing called ideology
Norman Finkelstein, the
fiery American critic of Israel, was
interviewed recently by Paul Jay on The
Real News Network. Finkelstein
related how he had been a Maoist in his
youth and had been devastated by the
exposure and downfall of the Gang of Four in
1976 in China. “It came out there was just
an awful lot of corruption. The people who
we thought were absolutely selfless were
very self-absorbed. And it was clear. The
overthrow of the Gang of Four had huge
popular support.”
Many other Maoists were
torn apart by the event. “Everything was
overthrown overnight, the whole Maoist
system, which we thought [were] new
socialist men, they all believed in putting
self second, fighting self. And then
overnight the whole thing was reversed.”
“You know, many people
think it was McCarthy that destroyed the
Communist Party,” Finkelstein continued.
“That’s absolutely not true. You know, when
you were a communist back then, you had the
inner strength to withstand McCarthyism,
because it was the cause. What destroyed the
Communist Party was Khrushchev’s speech,” a
reference to Soviet premier Nikita
Khrushchev’s 1956 exposure of the crimes of
Joseph Stalin and his dictatorial rule.
Although I was old enough,
and interested enough, to be influenced by
the Chinese and Russian revolutions, I was
not. I remained an admirer of capitalism and
a good loyal anti-communist. It was the war
in Vietnam that was my Gang of Four and my
Nikita Khrushchev. Day after day during 1964
and early 1965 I followed the news
carefully, catching up on the day’s
statistics of American firepower, bombing
sorties, and body counts. I was filled with
patriotic pride at our massive power to
shape history. Words like those of Winston
Churchill, upon America’s entry into the
Second World War, came easily to mind again
– “England would live; Britain would live;
the Commonwealth of Nations would live.”
Then, one day – a day like any other day –
it suddenly and inexplicably hit me. In
those villages with the strange names there
were people under those falling
bombs, people running in total
desperation from that god-awful machine-gun
strafing.
This pattern took hold.
The news reports would stir in me a
self-righteous satisfaction that we were
teaching those damn commies that they
couldn’t get away with whatever it was they
were trying to get away with. The very next
moment I would be struck by a wave of
repulsion at the horror of it all.
Eventually, the repulsion won out over the
patriotic pride, never to go back to where I
had been; but dooming me to experience the
despair of American foreign policy again and
again, decade after decade.
The human brain is an
amazing organ. It keeps working 24 hours a
day, 7 days a week, and 52 weeks a year,
from before you leave the womb, right up
until the day you find nationalism. And that
day can come very early. Here’s a recent
headline from the Washington Post:
“In the United States the brainwashing
starts in kindergarten.” (8)
Oh, my mistake. It
actually said “In N. Korea the brainwashing
starts in kindergarten.”
Let Cuba Live! The
Devil’s List of what the United States has
done to Cuba
On May 31, 1999, a lawsuit
for $181 billion in wrongful death, personal
injury, and economic damages was filed in a
Havana court against the government of the
United States. It was subsequently filed
with the United Nations. Since that time its
fate is somewhat of a mystery.
The lawsuit covered the 40
years since the country’s 1959 revolution
and described, in considerable detail taken
from personal testimony of victims, US acts
of aggression against Cuba; specifying,
often by name, date, and particular
circumstances, each person known to have
been killed or seriously wounded. In all,
3,478 people were killed and an additional
2,099 seriously injured. (These figures do
not include the many indirect victims of
Washington’s economic pressures and
blockade, which caused difficulties in
obtaining medicine and food, in addition to
creating other hardships.)
The case was, in legal
terms, very narrowly drawn. It was for the
wrongful death of individuals, on behalf of
their survivors, and for personal injuries
to those who survived serious wounds, on
their own behalf. No unsuccessful American
attacks were deemed relevant, and
consequently there was no testimony
regarding the many hundreds of unsuccessful
assassination attempts against Cuban
President Fidel Castro and other high
officials, or even of bombings in which no
one was killed or injured. Damages to crops,
livestock, or the Cuban economy in general
were also excluded, so there was no
testimony about the introduction into the
island of swine fever or tobacco mold.
However, those aspects of
Washington’s chemical and biological warfare
waged against Cuba that involved human
victims were described in detail, most
significantly the creation of an epidemic of
hemorrhagic dengue fever in 1981, during
which some 340,000 people were infected and
116,000 hospitalized; this in a country
which had never before experienced a single
case of the disease. In the end, 158 people,
including 101 children, died.
That only 158 people died,
out of some 116,000 who were hospitalized,
was an eloquent testimony to the remarkable
Cuban public health sector.
The complaint describes
the campaign of air and naval attacks
against Cuba that commenced in October 1959,
when US president Dwight Eisenhower approved
a program that included bombings of sugar
mills, the burning of sugar fields,
machine-gun attacks on Havana, even on
passenger trains.
Another section of the
complaint described the armed terrorist
groups, los banditos, who ravaged
the island for five years, from 1960 to
1965, when the last group was located and
defeated. These bands terrorized small
farmers, torturing and killing those
considered (often erroneously) active
supporters of the Revolution; men, women,
and children. Several young volunteer
literacy-campaign teachers were among the
victims of the bandits.
There was also of course
the notorious Bay of Pigs invasion, in April
1961. Although the entire incident lasted
less than 72 hours, 176 Cubans were killed
and 300 more wounded, 50 of them permanently
disabled.
The complaint also
described the unending campaign of major
acts of sabotage and terrorism that included
the bombing of ships and planes as well as
stores and offices. The most horrific
example of sabotage was of course the 1976
bombing of a Cubana airliner off Barbados in
which all 73 people on board were killed.
There were as well as the murder of Cuban
diplomats and officials around the world,
including one such murder on the streets of
New York City in 1980. This campaign
continued to the 1990s, with the murders of
Cuban policemen, soldiers, and sailors in
1992 and 1994, and the 1997 hotel bombing
campaign, which took the life of a
foreigner; the bombing campaign was aimed at
discouraging tourism and led to the sending
of Cuban intelligence officers to the US in
an attempt to put an end to the bombings;
from their ranks rose the Cuban Five.
To the above can be added
the many acts of financial extortion,
violence and sabotage carried out by the
United States and its agents in the 16 years
since the lawsuit was filed. In sum total,
the deep-seated injury and trauma inflicted
upon on the Cuban people can be regarded as
the island’s own 9-11.
William Blum
is the author of:
-
Killing Hope: US Military and CIA
Interventions Since World War 2
-
Rogue State: A Guide to the World’s Only
Superpower
-
West-Bloc Dissident: A Cold War Memoir
-
Freeing the World to Death: Essays on
the American Empire
Portions of
the books can be read, and signed copies
purchased, at
www.killinghope.org
Notes
