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"Those
who will not pay tribute under threat of menace must ultimately face
the menace."
Jason
Hirthler,
We the Sheeple:The Blind Reading the Blind,
Counterpunch,
December 8, 2017.
America’s
unending search for necessary external enemies transitioned from
South East Asia to the Muslim world, the Middle East being at the
heart of this shift. The invention of enemies is essential fodder
for imperialism’s continued extreme capitalist avarice and the
attendant theft of resources for enriching the already bloated
pockets of corporations, the true wielders of American imperial
power. The full cycle is completed with the attention now being
directed to the Uighurs of China and the Rohingya of Myanmar and
sporadically, North Korea. Central and South
American nations
get the unwanted attention from their bullying nemesis to the north,
ostensibly to save them from themselves.
The
same can be said of the domestic front where hate
crimes against Asians
are on the rise, events that carry the weight of American imperial
racist history.
It did not take long for Trump’s “China virus”
label for Covid-19 to inspire a
mass shooting in Atlanta,
GA, of mostly Asian women. The nabbed suspect, in his own words,
became
a Christian
at the tender age of 8 years old and had a love for guns. The blood
of the victims had barely dried when pretexts of the suspect, having
a “bad day” (not his victims), according
to the County Sheriff's Office Director of Communications Jay Baker
and sex as a motive
for the killings
were being offered in the Western “free press”. Racist
motives are now being excised with surgical precision by law
enforcement officers themselves, who would react in stark contrast
had the perpetrators been African American or Muslim.
His
victims included a White woman and a Hispanic man. Ignorance
continues to inform blind hatred of Bible thumping racists,
reminiscent of Sikhs being shot, mistaken
for Muslims,
or “towel heads” as the killer had intended. The
“ragheads” of Iraq morphed into towel heads at home.
Reports of these crimes studiously avoid the term “terrorism”,
one naturally reserved for Muslims. These atrocities were committed
despite Biden’s futile
earlier call for hate crimes against Asians to stop.
Biden’s appeals in the face of bombing
targets in Syria a month earlier
killing 22 civilians when he was barely one month in office was a
macabre practical joke. No sooner had the blood of the victims of
his bombing mission clotted, than Biden wittingly labels
Putin a killer.
America’s favorite pastimes at home and abroad never take long
to plague those unseemly aliens, especially Muslim ones. Else the
neoliberal hegemon, always replete with avarice would run out of gas.
In
both SE Asia and the Middle East, millions of lives have been
sacrificed. Lies – imperial lies always masquerading as truth,
juxtaposed with the tired pretexts of spreading “democracy,
freedom and human rights”, results of which are still pendant
17 years after the invasion and illegal military occupation of Iraq.
Promoting “democracy” abroad that is desperately wanting
in America itself is a reflection of the country’s infantile
mien coupled with a ravenous domestic appetite for silver screen
heroes tasked with saving humanity,
not just White America, from perishing at the hands of caped
scoundrels or hideous looking extraterrestrial aliens. After the
digital celebrities have pulled off their heroic, money-spinning
missions on the screen, America will resume normal service and turn
on its minorities at home and the usual suspects abroad with
unparalleled reckoning.
A
truly authentic embodiment of evil in the post-WWII era, George W.
Bush, had been quick to fabricate
the term “axis of evil”.
It provided the perfect cover and distraction from his own
then-impending genocidal blood lust which was to be let loose on
Iraq, a year later. The man, a thoroughgoing racist and pedigree
redneck, was paying homage to the traditions of his supremacist
ancestors at home. That this extreme misanthrope, a certified mass
murderer, Islamophobe and regime changer at that, should
be sick to the stomach
at fellow aspiring domestic regime changers, albeit feeble ones,
compared to his insatiable bloodthirst should carry a modicum of
conscience, must surely stretch all credulity.
As
America’s digital demigods busy themselves with saving humanity
from alien threats while raking in millions of dollars from braindead
fans, “lesser” peoples are somberly reminded that despite
there being occasional targets of America's murderous foreign
policies, their self-appointed patron remains a “force
for good”,
a well-worn cliché now repeated by the
we-lie-we-cheat-we-steal pompous Pompeo himself. Truth be told, it is
the benefit that is exclusive to White America that is being masked
as a “good” for expendable aliens. That evil, deadly and
grizzly pursuits should carry with them as much as a sliver of good
for those on the receiving end of America’s endless wars is a
species of logic understood solely by the perpetrators and their
muddled devotees.
Now
if you were to learn that countries like the US, Britain, and France
(who have collaborated in the wanton murder of nearly 2 million
mostly Muslim civilians in unprovoked wars in the Middle East and
Afghanistan) had a soft spot for Muslims, you would be forgiven for
treating any such frail and hypocritical gestures with a hefty dose
of cynicism. Not surprisingly, two countries that have taken an
infamous lead in the genocide and dispossession of their native
populations, Canada and the US, have
now joined hands
in declaring the treatment of Uighurs by China as genocide. Not
a scintilla of evidence
of such a nonsensical claim has been presented, going by the
definition of genocide as the
deliberate murder of a whole community or race
(Collins Dictionary). Regardless, the concept of
“it-takes-one-to-know-one” is being pushed to its absurd
limits, where one side of the genocide equation is utterly peerless.
When burdened with the guilt of your history of genocide, you quickly
succumb to the temptation of seeing others in similar wicked terms,
which you employ as a self-placation tactic. Knowing full well that
your genocidal history is indelible, you derive comfort from foisting
an equivalent falsehood on others devoid of similar crimes. Little
wonder, a Guardian
op-ed piece went
on a feeding frenzy
calling China’s treatment genocide. No mention of the
fatalities count required to satisfy that definition, given Britain
along with her US puppet master would easily qualify as genocidal
nations having dispatched an estimated a million and a half Iraqis to
their deaths, making both nations extreme Islamophobes.
Now
the idea of China “reeducating”
the Uighur Muslims is as repulsive as it is immoral and inexcusable
because it involves force, bullying, and coercion of a defenseless
minority. It is a breach of a fundamental human right of the freedom
of choice whether of expression, culture, religion, or assembly. But
genocide it is not. Citizens of all countries, minorities especially
must be guaranteed such freedom and their governments ensure its
enforcement as an inalienable right. Yet Zionist Israel is the only
country shielded not only from criticism but criminalizing such
criticism in the US and Western Europe. Constitutional guarantees in
these countries are being wittingly undermined to appease Zionist
power exempting them from censure, including the long-overdue Israeli
war crimes investigation by the ICC.
This latter long-overdue measure was roundly rejected by the British
Prime Minister, Boris Johnson, who by sheer coincidence happens to be
half Jewish.
The
granting and protection of inalienable rights should apply equally to
China as it should to Britain, the US, Israel, and France. Still, was
there such an uproar in the West when millions of Chinese citizens
were subjected
to much more stringent reeducation measures
during the cultural revolution of Mao Ze Dung? As long as America’s
nemeses are in a self-destruct mode, Western fake human rights
principles can be conveniently placed on hold, with the hopes their
designated enemies would perish in an act of collective suicide.
This would naturally create a vacuum to suck in America’s
insatiable appetite for natural resources – all conveniently
packaged in savior mode. Humans are only those persons in the good
books of America and her cronies – including the homicidal
medieval Saudi theocracy. The rest can wallow in their subhuman mud
baths.
There
is an intriguing parallel between a once pet leader of the West, Aung
San Suu Kyi, an undeserving recipient of the Nobel Prize for Peace
with fellow premature laureates and later anointed “drone
king”, Barack Obama, who
had ostensibly “nurtured” Suu Kyi.
Aside from sharing ill-begotten awards, they both had acquired a
ghoulish taste for Muslim blood. One through a genocidal
regime against Myanmar’s Muslim minority,
the Rohingya, the other through indiscriminate
drone strikes
in majority Muslim countries as far-flung as Afghanistan, Syria,
Pakistan, Yemen, and Somalia. As noted above, the fact the US along
with her Canadian lapdog and genocidal comrade-in-arms were quick to
label China’s treatment of Uighur a genocide, without a shred
of evidence, the US was hesitant
to label an obvious Myanmar genocide
as such, displaying the now all too familiar phenomenon of selective
Islamophilia.
Another
majority Muslim population in occupied Palestine is off-limits to the
Western press, in one of modern history's most effective silencing
measures: criticism of Israel. Palestinians are excluded from any
benefits of residual Western Islamophilia, not even the selective
variety.
But
this paradoxical coexistence of selective Islamophilia and its more
favored and heinous antipode, Islamophobia, is a mind game intended
for domestic consumption. Especially in the US, where the Main
Stream Media produces gullible
sheeple
by the millions. And with unfailing regularity.
In
the Middle East, Iran, Yemen and Syria, all majority Muslim
countries, have now taken pride of place in America’s
ever-burgeoning list of fabricated enemies, along with non-Muslim
Venezuela, Nicaragua, and Cuba. While these serve as examples of
selective Islamophilia, the extreme version of this phenomenon –
extreme
American and Western Islamophilia,
anoints the least democratic countries on the planet, Saudi
Arabia,
the UAE, Egypt, and Bahrain who receive unqualified support from the
US and her allies, because of their sinful affluence (Egypt excluded)
and a seemingly endless supply of dollars waiting to be sucked into
the coffers
of America’s Military-Industrial Complex.
Biden, in a reversal of Trump’s crude and frank Islamophobia,
is indulging himself, tongue in cheek, in selective Islamophilia. He
announced the temporary
suspension of arms sales to Saudi Arabia and the UAE, including a
massive $23 billion
for the supply of 50 Lockheed-Martin F-35 stealth fighter jets to the
UAE. It is tempting to predict that this brief spurt of selective
Islamophilia targeting Yemen, will be short-lived since the sale of
arms to the UAE is about to resume. Regardless, the crumbling
British Empire, in dire need of cash will not follow suit. Nothing
personal, just business. Yemenis can then continue where they left
off – watch their children die of starvation, disease, and lack
of medicines, while lucrative arms deals are being negotiated to
bring their Houthi defenders to their knees. We reiterate that
patronizing
aggrieved groups with palliatives
are integral to racist culture: they address the symptoms rather than
causes of a malady.
Iran,
Syria, Lebanon and non-Muslim Venezuela inhabit the other extreme in
this spectrum: that of Islamophobia. Iran is being placed in slow
motion genocidal mode with devastating
and starving
sanctions. Western Europe helplessly stood by as Trump unilaterally
withdrew
from the JCPOA, an agreement signed by the US, China, Russia,
Germany, Iran, the United Kingdom, and the European Union. In a
blatantly misleading description that places the blame on the victim,
Iran, Google’s
link to Wikipedia
describes Iran’s nuclear position as “defected” and
the American one as “withdrawn”, with Iran placed before
the US, creating a false impression that it was Iran’s
“defection” that led to America’s withdrawal from
the agreement. In a blatant distortion of reality, Iran
is now said to be in “breach” of JCPOA.
The fact that Iran had scrupulously complied with the agreement and
that Israel’s estimated
200 nuclear warheads
are off-limits in the Western press as is their disregard and opting
out of any nuclear nonproliferation agreement is outside the limits
of honest discourse in the Main Stream Media.
Israel,
in lockstep with America, has been busy killing Iranian nuclear
scientists, sabotaging their nuclear facilities and attacking Iranian
commercial ships while Israel’s client, the US, has killed an
Iranian general with a drone strike inside Iraq. Iran’s
potential return to JCPOA is being sabotaged
in plain view.
The country is pitched against the combined might of the US, Israel,
and Western Europe, the latter having done absolutely nothing to
mitigate sanctions regimes imposed on them, despite their earlier
hollow promises to Iran to help in sanctions relief. A mix of
habitual Islamophobic postures and racist nonchalance is being served
on Iran with the beneficiaries of America's selective Islamophilia
happy to consort with America. But America's wonted
lies
have become a staple in their Islamophobic and selective Islamophilic
postures as a bedrock of their foreign policy in the Middle East.
This phenomenon gets to the heart of the racist nature of the
imperial project which began in earnest in America’s founding
years, one that is shamelessly billed as a monumental historic
achievement of the “Founding Fathers”.
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