The far right regularly accuses liberals and gays of being fascists and being a threat to "freedom." The reality is, of course, that it is the far right and today's Republican Party that are the advocates of a new American fascism. This fascism is dressed up in the guise of patriotism and protecting American values (most often so-called "Judeo-Christian values"). Hitler and the Nazis used similar tactics in the early days of their take over of Germany in the 1930's. Frighteningly, the Republican Party and the ugliest elements of its base want to take America down a similar road. A column in Salon looks at the disturbing phenomenon championed by those like Ted Cruz and Donald trump. Here are highlights:
It would appear that our descent into irrationality has not
yet hit its limit. Yesterday, Republican frontrunner Donald Trump said
that he would consider forcing Muslims to register with the government
to be part of a tracking database.Here’s what he said:
MSNBC’s Vaughn Hillyard: Should there be a system a database to track Muslims?
Trump:
There should be a lot of systems, beyond databases, we should have a
lot of systems, and today you can do it.But right now we have to have
order, we have to have strength, we have to have a wall and we cannot
let what’s happening to this country happen any longer.
Hillyard: Is that … your White House would…(inaudible)
Trump: I would certainly implement that.
This took place at a ropeline in Iowa where Trump was campaigning. The question didn’t come out of nowhere. Earlier in the day Yahoo News had published an interview in
which Trump said that he would deport any Syrian refugees allowed to
enter this country under President Obama and didn’t rule out draconian
surveillance measures to track American Muslims. He ominously warned:
“We’re going to have to do things that we never did before. And some
people are going to be upset about it, but I think that now everybody is
feeling that security is going to rule. And certain things will be done
that we never thought would happen in this country in terms of
information and learning about the enemy. And so we’re going to have to
do certain things that were frankly unthinkable a year ago.”
The MSNBC reporter asked him why Muslims databases would be different
than having Jews register in Nazi Germany. He replied, “You tell me.”
So,
the leading candidate for the Republican nomination for president has
once more upped the ante on the xenophobia that’s been sweeping through
the right wing for some time. Mexicans, Muslims, it all the same. Gotta
build that wall, track them, deport them, keep ’em out.
Unfortunately,
the nervousness coursing though society after the terrorist attack in
Paris has made this kind of talk sound less unreasonable to more people,
and we had the Congress yesterday struggling to find a way to appease
voters who were calling into their offices demanding that refugees be
denied entry into the country.
The explanation as to why 47 Democrats would join in this immigrant
bashfest is as prosaic as it is depressing. They fear being called “soft
on terrorism.” A bunch of hysterical voters who listen to demagogues on
cable TV and talk radio called their offices to demand they put a stop
to this foreign threat. Rather than be leaders and try to calm the
waters, they just went with the flow, knowing that this legislation
is unlikely to become law, but wanting to be able to tell their
constituents they voted to bar refugees from our shores and keep the
children safe. (Well, the good American children anyway. Syrian
children will not be so lucky.)
Why they believe this will work for them is unknown. . . . Voters who succumb to xenophobia will likely vote for the Republican alternative. Stoking paranoia is the GOP specialty.
And
anyway, this is a soulless sort of politics. This isn’t a highway bill
or a tax hike. It’s an issue of life and death. These are votes that
should be taken on merit, not political calculation (which very often
turn out badly — ask Hillary Clinton). And feeding this xenophobic beast
in an environment in which the frontrunner of the Republican Party is
endorsing government registration of American Muslims is a very risky business. This kind of thing can get out of hand quickly.
The public’s fear of Syrian refugees may be understandable but it is
nonetheless irrational, and political leaders have a responsibility to
be rational at times like these, if for no other reason than to actually
protect the nation instead of playing kabuki games for political
purposes.
[E]nabling Islamophobia is one of the most dangerous things our leaders can do:
The
Islamic State of Iraq and al-Sham, or ISIS, is pursuing a strategy
explicitly designed to provoke hostility toward innocent Muslims in
Western society in order to radicalize these communities and recruit
them to their cause. Listening to the American political debate in the
wake of the tragic terrorist attacks in Paris, that strategy may be
working. Islamophobic rants are both morally offensive and factually
inaccurate and play right into the hands of our terrorist enemies.
Hopefully, the House will calm down and the Senate will derail this
bill. But more importantly, one hopes that Democrats and whatever sane
Republicans are left will recognize that every time they feed this
xenophobic monster it makes Donald Trump and his ilk stronger. And if
they make Donald Trump and his ilk stronger they are also making the
ISIS terrorists stronger. That’s a bad policy on every level.
Since the terror attacks in Paris a week ago, the Republican presidential candidates have been in overdrive providing propaganda materials to the extremists of ISIS who seek to demonstrate that the West is at war against Islam as a whole rather than the blood thirsty savages of ISIS. Ted Cruz, Donald Trump (who proposed making Muslims in America wear ID badges akin to Jews in Nazi Germany), Chris Christie and Marco Rubio have provided a cavalcade of video clips and sound bites that must be viewed as gifts by the ISIS hate merchants. Perhaps most ironic - or, perhaps sick is a better description - is that these Republicans are making their foul statements as they pander to the element base of the GOP that like ISIS cites an supposed holy book to justify hate and misogyny. Indeed, the Christofascists hate the same things as ISIS: gays, women's equality, science and knowledge, independent thought, and modernity itself. A piece in the New York Times looks at how fundamentalist religion is the enemy of human rights and the values of The Enlightenment that built the positive aspects of western civilization:
Earlier
this year, before most of us started paying close attention, the death
cult of the Islamic State released a video of two men being thrown from
the rooftop of a building. They were executed before an approving mob
for the crime of being gay — part of a systematic campaign to hunt down
and exterminate suspected homosexuals.
At
about the same time, a woman accused of committing adultery was stoned
to death, an occurrence that rarely draws a second look inside the
psychopathic bubble of the Islamic State. For that is a place of brutal,
ritualistic rape of children, a place that released a manual explaining
that it is permissible, under religious law, to “have intercourse with a
female slave who hasn’t reached puberty.” Allah would approve, it
claimed.
After this confederacy of killers took credit for the slaughter of
innocents in Paris, its reasons were in keeping with the anti-humanist
hatred at the core of its beliefs.
The massacre proved Voltaire’s observation — “those who can make you believe absurdities can make you commit atrocities.”
So
when somebody says we’re in the midst of a clash of civilizations — as
Senator Marco Rubio did in the days of hysteria following the Paris
attack — it’s an insult to the civilized world. Framing it that way
gives the barbarians of the Islamic State a narrative for the toxicants
they spread in the guise of religion. The Islamic State is not, by any
stretch, a civilization.
Civilization
is boulevards of people sipping wine in cafes, or listening to secular
music — both crimes in Islamic State-controlled territory. “They were
trying to kill our very culture,” a young woman in Paris told my
colleague Liz Alderman in The Times. “They will not succeed.”
Civilization
is defiance, embodied in the words of President François Hollande,
directed at people who hate all that France stands for. “The terrorists
want to erase everything: culture, youth, life, and also history and
memory,” he said. “We will not yield to terrorism by suspending our way
of life.”
But that’s what some politicians in the United States are pushing for — discarding the honorable in a tremor of fear.
Civilization does not close its door to an orphaned toddler looking to
start a new life in the United States, as Gov. Chris Christie of New
Jersey has proposed. Civilization does not apply a religious test to
victims of religious fanaticism, as Senator Ted Cruz, Republican of
Texas, wants to do. Only those who pray to Jesus, in his plan, would be
allowed to resettle the United States. . . . saying non-Christians are unworthy of being given shelter in our country only feeds an Islamic State recruitment pitch.
A
bigger fear than a homeless victim of a savage war is a homegrown crazy
with an assault rifle. If only the two-year vetting process now applied
to those seeking refuge were used to screen unstable Americans
purchasing guns at the mall.
A
great crisis can act as a valuable filter, a winnowing that separates
true leaders from all the rest, the courageous from the cowards.
Hollande, who has been impressive beyond expectations, has also called
out the clash-of-worlds fear-mongers.
“We
are not committed to a war of civilizations, because these assassins
don’t represent any civilization,” he said. “We are at war against
terrorism, jihadism, which threatens the whole world.”
The world’s worst terrorists are Muslim in name, and Muslim in warped
practice, with Muslims as most of their victims. That truth should not
be denied. They cite a holy book to do horrible things. They are damned
today by all but a handful of nations. And they are doomed, as all hate
ideologies eventually are, because civilization is more sustainable than
a cult that worships suicide.
With the 24/7 chatter - and in the case of Republicans, verbal diarrhea - about terrorism and the threat of Islamic extremists, there is sadly near total silence on the role that wealthy citizens of Saudi Arabia (and perhaps even the government) have played in funding Islamic extremism around the world. Similarly, there is very little discussion of the fact that within that country, human rights abuses are rampant and many of the Medieval practices of ISIS are the norm. In my view, until Saudi Arabia is forced to either join the civilized world, expect the extremism to continue. Will America and other western nations have the guts to confront Saudi Arabia? Probably not because of one thing: oil. Energy independence, especially renewable energy sources, should be a national security issue and America and its western allies need to push for the day when the Saudis will be irrelevant and can no longer get a free pass on human rights abuses and other extremist policies. An op-ed in the New York Times looks at the similarities between Saudi Arabia and ISIS. Here are highlights:
Black Daesh, white Daesh. The former slits throats, kills, stones, cuts
off hands, destroys humanity’s common heritage and despises archaeology,
women and non-Muslims. The latter is better dressed and neater but does
the same things. The Islamic State; Saudi Arabia. In its struggle
against terrorism, the West wages war on one, but shakes hands with the
other. This is a mechanism of denial, and denial has a price: preserving
the famous strategic alliance with Saudi Arabia at the risk of
forgetting that the kingdom also relies on an alliance with a religious
clergy that produces, legitimizes, spreads, preaches and defends
Wahhabism, the ultra-puritanical form of Islam that Daesh feeds on.
Wahhabism, a messianic radicalism that arose in the 18th century, hopes
to restore a fantasized caliphate centered on a desert, a sacred book,
and two holy sites, Mecca and Medina. Born in massacre and blood, it
manifests itself in a surreal relationship with women, a prohibition
against non-Muslims treading on sacred territory, and ferocious
religious laws. The West’s denial regarding Saudi Arabia is striking: It salutes the
theocracy as its ally but pretends not to notice that it is the world’s
chief ideological sponsor of Islamist culture. The younger generations
of radicals in the so-called Arab world were not born jihadists. They
were suckled in the bosom of Fatwa Valley, a kind of Islamist Vatican
with a vast industry that produces theologians, religious laws, books,
and aggressive editorial policies and media campaigns.
The Saudi royals are caught in a perfect trap: Weakened by succession
laws that encourage turnover, they cling to ancestral ties between king
and preacher. The Saudi clergy produces Islamism, which both threatens
the country and gives legitimacy to the regime.
It is worth reading certain Islamist newspapers to see their reactions
to the attacks in Paris. The West is cast as a land of “infidels.” The
attacks were the result of the onslaught against Islam. Muslims and
Arabs have become the enemies of the secular and the Jews. The
Palestinian question is invoked along with the rape of Iraq and the
memory of colonial trauma, and packaged into a messianic discourse meant
to seduce the masses. Such talk spreads in the social spaces below,
while up above, political leaders send their condolences to France and
denounce a crime against humanity. This totally schizophrenic situation
parallels the West’s denial regarding Saudi Arabia.
All of which leaves one skeptical of Western democracies’ thunderous
declarations regarding the necessity of fighting terrorism. Their war
can only be myopic, for it targets the effect rather than the cause.
Since ISIS is first and foremost a culture, not a militia, how do you prevent future generations from turning to jihadism when the
influence of Fatwa Valley and its clerics and its culture and its
immense editorial industry remains intact?
Jihadism is denounced as the scourge of the century but no consideration is given to what created it or supports it. This may allow saving face, but not saving lives. Daesh
has a mother: the invasion of Iraq. But it also has a father: Saudi
Arabia and its religious-industrial complex. Until that point is
understood, battles may be won, but the war will be lost.
Jihadists will be killed, only to be reborn again in future generations and raised on the same books. The
attacks in Paris have exposed this contradiction again, but as happened
after 9/11, it risks being erased from our analyses and our
consciences.
Until either (i) Saudi Arabia's oil becomes irrelevant and its power to blackmail is ended, or (ii) that nation is forced into modernity and Islamic extremism condemned and its clerics denied power, don't expect things to get better. The root of the evil is ignorance embracing and hatred inspiring religion. Be it fundamentalist Christianity or fundamentalist Islam, both are evils that need to be eradicated from the face of the earth. Look across history and there is one constant evil inflaming hate, discrimination and murder: religion.
With the Republicans whining and shrieking about the dangers of religious extremists (of the Muslim type, of course) in the wake of the Paris attacks, they are conveniently blind to the ugly extremism that permeates much of the GOP base. In the GOP play book, it is perfectly fine for "conservative Christians" to advocate the murder and execution of gays - just like ISIS, by the way - and somehow there is nothing extremist about it. Indeed, as we saw Mike Huckabee, Ted Cruz, and Bobby Jindal all attended a gathering where the execution of gays was repeatedly supported. Yes, all feign ignorance about the event, even though all received demands that they cancel their appearances because of the extremist position of event organizers (in short, they lied). Candidly, it is hard for Republicans to credible on the issue of religious extremism when it is now the GOP's stock in trade - along with racism and sexism. A piece in The Advocate looks at the GOP's hypocrisy. Here are highlights:
Unless you watch Rachel Maddow’s MSNBC show,
you probably aren’t aware of the fact that Republican presidential
candidates Mike Huckabee, Ted Cruz, and Bobby Jindal (the latter dropped
out of the race on Tuesday) all recently attended a “religious freedom”
rally in Iowa hosted by antigay preacher Kevin Swanson, who has
repeatedly called for the execution of homosexuals. Unlike the
Duggar-styled martyr-complex performance art of Kim Davis, Swanson’s
brand of bigotry is overtly bloodthirsty, with rhetoric echoing hateful
pastor Scott Lively, a central figure in the persecution of LGBT Ugandans and part of the impetus for their proposed “kill the gays” legislation.
On her show, Maddow showed extensive clips from Swanson, and
characterized the event as “a ‘kill-the-gays’ call to arms,” but the
rest of the media has by and large ignored the scandal. Huff Po’s Michelangelo Signorile recently noted that The New York Times, The Washington Post
and the majority of mainstream outlets either ignored the comments
altogether, or focused their attention on the conferences derision of
atheists or the Swanson’s outlandish claim that drowning children is
preferable to letting them read Harry Potter, and suggested that the
media’s tacit acceptance of this rally “suggest we’ve not come as far on
LGBT rights as we all like to tell ourselves.”
I believe journalists have a responsibility to report on a group of
political candidates’ casual acceptance of murder. Where exactly is the
line between a declaration of your backwards belief and an incitement of
violence? If the only weapon we have to limit this kind of speech is
the court of public opinion, why are journalists allowing Swanson and
his political companies to exist in a vacuum?
In a recent interview with Fox and Friends, Cruz stated that the “enemy
is radical Islamic terrorism. As long as we have a Commander-in-Chief
unwilling to even utter the words radical Islamic terrorism we will not
have a concerted effort to defeat these radicals before they murder more
and more innocents,” insinuating that the war was not in fact with
ISIS, but with an extremist religion. While Cruz may not consider LGBT
people ‘innocents,’ it’s still hard to reconcile his affiliation with
Swanson with his condemnation of extremism. If your deeply held
religious belief is that gay people should be put to death, then you
are, categorically, an extremist.
What, exactly, separates Kevin Swanson from the ISIS leaders calling for
the execution of homosexuals?
It seems particularly ironic that the
political candidates who are most vocal about barring Syrian refugees
from entering this country out of fear of “radical Islam” are fervent
advocates of turning this country into a radical Christian theocracy
that subjugates women, gays, transgender people and anyone that falls
outside of their definition of morality.
[P]erhaps all of these men are actually committed to rousing as much
homophobic, xenophobic, misogynistic sentiment as possible during their
time in the political spotlight to ensure a consumer base for their
inevitable homophobic, xenophobic, misogynistic book deals and lucrative
speaking engagements.
[W]e’re going to see more and more opportunist bigots like Huckabee, Cruz,
and Jindal taking advantage of it, and laughing all the way to the
bank. If the media won’t speak out on our behalf, we have a
responsibility to speak out against the media for enabling this kind of
bigotry.
Passengers aboard the "St. Louis." These refugees from Nazi Germany were forced to return to Europe
While cooler heads argue logic, reason and deliberate screening efforts should prevail in processing refugees fleeing violence in their home countries, many in the Republican Party are doing exactly what ISIS wants and needs for its propaganda efforts. From John Kasich's idiotic calls for a government agency to promote "Judeo-Christian" values, to Ted Cruz and others' calls to only accept Christian refugees, to efforts to claim that the Koran calls for death and murder while ignoring the horrors advocated in the Old Testament, the Paris attacks are being used to turn the struggle against ISIS into a war of religions. That, of course is precisely what ISIS wants and needs as a recruiting and propaganda tool. Sadly, the Republicans eager to prostitute themselves to the ugly, ignorant and extremist elements of the GOP base either do not care about the damage they are doing or are too stupid to grasp it. A column in the New York Times looks at the sickening conduct and the farce it makes of supposed support of the Gospel message. Here are excerpts:
Desperate refugees flee persecution and war, but American politicians — worried about security risks — refuse to accept them.
That’s
the situation today, but it’s also the shameful way we responded as
Jews were fleeing Nazi Germany in the 1930s. In the shadow of one world
war, on the eve of another, Americans feared that European Jews might be
left-wing security threats.
[I]n January 1939, Americans polled
said by a two-to-one majority that the United States should not accept
10,000 mostly Jewish refugee children from Germany. That year, the
United States turned away a ship, the St. Louis, with Jewish refugee
children; the St. Louis returned to Europe, where some of its passengers
[some estimates say half] were murdered by the Nazis.
All the Republican presidential candidates say that we should bar Syrian
refugees or apply a religious test and accept only Christians.
Gov. Chris Christie of New Jersey says we shouldn’t accept Syrians even if they are toddlers and orphans. And the House of Representatives may vote this week on legislation to impede the resettlement of Syrian refugees.
Remember what a Syrian immigrant looks like — the father of Steve Jobs.
Yes,
security is critical, but I’ve known people who have gone through the
refugee vetting process, and it’s a painstaking ordeal that lasts two
years or more. It’s incomparably more rigorous than other pathways to
the United States.
If
the Islamic State wanted to dispatch a terrorist to America, it
wouldn’t ask a mole to apply for refugee status, but rather to apply for
a student visa to study at, say, Indiana University. Hey, governors,
are you going to keep out foreign university students?
Or the Islamic State could simply send fighters who are French or
Belgian citizens (like some of those behind the Paris attacks) to the
U.S. as tourists, no visa required. Governors, are you planning to ban
foreign tourists, too?
If Republican governors are concerned about security risks, maybe they
should vet who can buy guns. People on terrorism watch lists are legally
allowed to buy guns in the United States, and more than 2,000 have done so since 2004. The National Rifle Association has opposed legislation to rectify this.
The Islamic State is trying to create a religious divide and an anti-refugee backlash,
so that Muslims will feel alienated and turn to extremism. If so,
American and European politicians are following the Islamic State’s
script. Let’s be careful not to follow that script further and stigmatize all Muslims for ISIS terrorism.
The top priority must be making Syria habitable so that refugees need not flee.
Helping Syrian refugees today doesn’t solve the Middle East mess any
more than helping Jewish refugees in 1939 would have toppled Hitler. But
it’s the right thing to do. Syrians, no less than those Jewish
refugees, no less than my father, are human beings needing help, not
flotsam.
Sadly, to much of the GOP base, if one is not a white, heterosexual, conservative Christian, you are flotsam - flotsam to be discarded and deprived of rights and compassion. So much for heeding the Gospel message of feeding the hungry, clothing the naked, giving shelter to the homeless and treating others as you would want to be treated. Thankfully, the younger generations see this hypocrisy and are walking away from religion.
Since the beginning of the Republican presidential contest we have seen the would be presidential nominees - and many others in the GOP - seeking to play and pander to every prejudice and fear and the religious extremism of the party base. Much of this effort has involved dog whistle calls supporting white supremacy and the Christofascists' demands for special rights and false claims of persecution and their abject fear of modernity itself and what they perceive to be lost white privilege. The attacks in Paris last week have sent the party base and the pandering political whores into overdrive. A piece in Salon looks at the phenomenon as well as the hypocrisy of the supposed "godly folk." Here are some highlights:
Last week, the biggest story in conservative circles had to
do with Starbucks’ decision to issue coffee cups in plain red and green
holiday colors rather than festooning them with Christmas-based imagery.
This week, conservatives are howling over the potential for Syrian
refugees to be granted entry into the United States.
There’s
an idea floating around social media that perfectly illustrates how
these two stories correlate: Odd how the GOP was so enraged by Starbucks
cups that excluded the religious significance of Christmas — a holiday
founded on the story of refugees looking for shelter
— and yet they don’t mind denying a “room at the inn” for countless
other Middle East families. So much for the religious significance of
Christmas when there’s inchoate fear to indulge!
[I]n the wake of the terrorist attacks in Paris, Republicans are
further entrenching against admitting refugees into the U.S. because
there might — might! — be an ISIS terrorist disguising himself as a Syrian escaping his nation’s civil war.
It’s
yet another example of how the GOP almost always drops the ball when it
comes to serious solutions to complicated problems. Let’s review:
• Spectacular
al-Qaida attacks using airplanes crashing into buildings? Invade and
occupy Iraq, even though al-Qaida didn’t operate there — although they
sure have done so since the invasion — postwar — and even though Saddam
Hussein had nothing to do with 9/11.
• A
terrorist attack against our consulate in Benghazi resulting in four
American deaths? Investigate it with more vigor and outrage than a
terrorist attack that resulted in 3,000 American deaths.
• A
voter fraud rate of about 0.0002 percent? Disenfranchise hundreds of
thousands of Americans (mostly Democrats) with Jim Crow-style Voter ID
laws.
The list goes on and on.
In this case, Republicans ranging from Fox News demagogues to the
governors of Alabama, Arizona, Arkansas, Florida, Georgia, Idaho,
Illinois, Indiana, Iowa, Kansas, Louisiana, Maine, Maryland,
Massachusetts, Michigan, Mississippi, Nebraska, Nevada, . . . . New
Jersey, New Mexico, North Carolina, Ohio, Oklahoma, South Carolina,
Tennessee, Texas and Wisconsin have pledged to disallow Syrian refugees
from having a proverbial “room at the inn.”
Of course we learned that governors don’t have the authority to ban
refugees from their states. In other words, states have no authority
over the federal government when it comes to immigration policy. The
Supreme Court ruled in Hines v. Davidowitz: “The supremacy of the
national power in the general field of foreign affairs, including power
over immigration, naturalization and deportation, is made clear by the
Constitution.”
Then again, the GOP is increasingly ruled by states’ rights zealots who
routinely posture about ignoring Supreme Court rulings such as the one
legalizing same-sex marriage, so it’ll come as no surprise to see Bobby
Jindal and Greg Abbott inveighing against admitting refugees, given the
opportunity.
The GOP is obviously pandering to the racist tendencies of its base.
Like always. And those tendencies demand validation. If the yokels
believe the Syrian refugees are harboring ISIS sleeper cells, then they
clearly are. Facts be damned.
And while Republicans from Donald
Trump to AM radio screechers market in the specious connection between
incidents of gun violence or terrorism and locations with strict gun
laws, it’s worth noting that between 2004 and 2014, 2,000 terrorists
from the FBI’s watch list were able to successfully purchase firearms
in the United States, thanks to the GOP and its salacious love affair
with the National Rifle Association. . . . . Rep. Tony Dale (R) strongly opposes allowing refugees into his state. Why? Because it’s too easy to buy guns there.
But what about any other would-be terrorists? Texas welcomes you.
Thanks, Rep. Dale, for telegraphing Texas’ easy availability of firearms
to any terrorist who wants them. Smart. By the way, according to a study by the New America Foundation, most terrorists inside the U.S. are white Americans.
Almost
twice as many people have died in attacks by right-wing groups in
America than have died in attacks by Muslim extremists. Of the 26
attacks since 9/11 that the group defined as terror, 19 were carried out
by non-Muslims.
None of this is to suggest the threat from ISIS should be taken lightly. . . . . there’s a smart way to pursue this goal, and there’s a really dumb,
scattershot way of doing it. The GOP is busily showing us the latter by
randomly demonizing innocent Syrian refugees, even though 51 percent are children under 17.
Someone should find out how many unborn Syrians are among the refugees.
Surely if most of the refugees were fetuses under the age of 17 weeks, the GOP would stumble over its own feet to rescue them. The birthed ones are, sadly, on their own.
If the circumstances surrounding Paris weren’t so utterly tragic, the
GOP’s flailing, nonsensical reaction to the attack and to the ongoing
refugee crisis would be almost as hilarious as its reaction to the
stupid Starbucks cup design.
While many of the white Christofascists of the Republican Party base have surprisingly rallied to Ben Carson (surprising because they loath a black man in the White House in general) thanks to Carson insane religiosity, the GOP debates and the growing complexities of foreign affairs issues are exposing Carson's ignorance, especially in the area of foreign policy. Even his advisers are admitting that Carson is over his head - I'd say WAY over his head - and the question becomes whether his increasingly obvious unfitness and lack of knowledge will finally end his luster with the portion of the GOP base most out of touch from objective reality. A piece in the New York Times looks at Carson's adviser's efforts to deal with the man's blatant ignorance. Note that Carson's only paid foreign policy adviser is out of Liberty University, a continual embarrassment to the Commonwealth of Virginia and gathering place for Christofascist nutcases. Here are article excerpts:
Ben Carson’s
remarks on foreign policy have repeatedly raised questions about his
grasp of the subject, but never more seriously than in the past week,
when he wrongly asserted that China had intervened militarily in Syria
and then failed, on national television, to name the countries he would
call on to form a coalition to fight the Islamic State.
Faced
with increasing scrutiny about whether Mr. Carson, who leads in some
Republican presidential polls, was capable of leading American foreign
policy, two of his top advisers said in interviews that he had struggled
to master the intricacies of the Middle East and national security and
that intense tutoring was having little effect.
“Nobody
has been able to sit down with him and have him get one iota of
intelligent information about the Middle East,” said Duane R. Clarridge,
a top adviser to Mr. Carson on terrorism and national security. He also
said Mr. Carson needed weekly conference calls briefing him on foreign
policy so “we can make him smart.”
As
the deadly assaults in Paris claimed by the Islamic State reframe the
presidential race, the candidates’ foreign policy credentials are
suddenly under scrutiny. And Mr. Carson has attracted extra attention
because his statements give rise to questions about where, as a retired
neurosurgeon without government experience, he turns for information and
counsel on complex global issues.
But the briefings do not always seem to sink in, Mr. Clarridge said.
After Mr. Carson struggled on “Fox News Sunday” to say whom he would
call first to form a coalition against the Islamic State, Mr. Clarridge
called Mr. Williams in frustration. “We need to have a conference call
once a week where his guys roll out the subjects they think will be out
there, and we can make him smart,” Mr. Clarridge said he told Mr.
Williams.
Once
written off by political insiders, Mr. Carson has rocketed to the top
tier of candidates and has traded off a lead in recent polls with Donald
J. Trump.
But
the stress of his ascent has revealed an inexperienced political
operation and a lack of connections to informed and respected advisers.
Whereas Jeb Bush can call on dozens of experts from the foreign policy
establishment who once worked for the administrations of his father and
brother, Mr. Carson so far has only one paid national security adviser,
Robert F. Dees, a retired Army general on the staff of Liberty
University in Virginia.
On
Facebook, where the campaign connects to its vast grass-roots army, two
of his top campaign aides posted a video on Monday highlighting his
“Fox News Sunday” interview with no hint of Mr. Carson’s private
acknowledgment that he had performed poorly. The Facebook page included
what it said was supporting evidence
of Mr. Carson’s claim of Chinese involvement in Syria: a satellite
image of a purported Chinese-made radar system in Syria, and a Syrian
soldier posing on a Chinese-made armored vehicle.
But
the effort to claim that Mr. Carson had meant only that there was
Chinese-made matériel in Syria, not military personnel, was contradicted
by his top Middle East adviser, Mr. Clarridge.
Carson is truly frightening and, in my view, needs a mental health care intervention. The man is supremely confident that he knows everything and is seemingly unable to recognize his own limitations and shocking ignorance on a host of matters. We do not need him anywhere near the White House.
One other thing that John Kasich said in the context of whether or not Syrian refugees should be allowed into America was to the effect that "the American public usually gets it right." Kasich made the statement to justify turning away Syrian refugees. In point of fact, America has gotten it seriously wrong on immigration many times over the course of the nation's history - especially if the immigrants were of different faiths and darker skin color. The image above shows how wrong public opinion was in the 1930's in the context of taking in Jewish refugees. This piece looks at America's less than stellar track record. Here are some excerpts:
It’s a comforting thought to look at the refugees fleeing ISIS — the
same ones to whom Republicans want to deny entry into the United States —
and say that we’re better than this, that Americans as a whole will
rise up and refuse to be so cold, so heartless. But those of us who are
eager to help people in need are truly in the minority, historically
speaking.
As World War II approached, Fortune Magazine published
the results of a 1938 poll that should serve as a grim reminder that
Americans can and will latch on to bigotry in any sense. Today, we
pretend that America has always accepted Jewish people. Unfortunately,
the poll reveals that the majority — 67 percent — openly rejected taking
in Jewish refugees from Germany, Austria, and other countries oppressed
by the Nazis “with conditions as they are.” Only 23 percent of
Americans, most of whom opposed raising immigration quotas, said that
accepting Jewish refugees was a good idea.
2016 Republican presidential hopeful Chris Christie’s opinion
that we should not even accept Muslim “5-year-old orphans” is one that
should stay buried in our shameful past — but a January 1939 poll
heartbreakingly reveals that Americans even opposed taking care of
Jewish children.
In September, the Washington Post’s Ishaan Tharoor
reminded us that the bigotry espoused by the Right and the hatred they
level at Muslim refugees is exactly like the anti-Semitism of the
1930’s:
No matter the alarming rhetoric of [Adolf] Hitler’s
fascist state — and the growing acts of violence against Jews and others
— popular sentiment in Western Europe and the United States was largely
indifferent to the plight of German Jews.
“Of all the groups in the 20th century,” write the authors of the 1999 book, “Refugees in the Age of Genocide,”
“refugees from Nazism are now widely and popularly perceived as
‘genuine’, but at the time German, Austrian and Czechoslovakian Jews
were treated with ambivalence and outright hostility as well as
sympathy.”
“Part of that hostility was fueled, as some of the European grievances are now, by stereotypes of the refugees as harbingers of a dangerous ideology, in this instance communism and anarchist violence,” Tharoor notes.
If this sounds familiar, it should. Every day, Republicans remind us — incorrectly — that Muslims are of the devil,
that their ways and beliefs are somehow dangerous to the good, pristine
America they know and love…and that has not existed since Jim Crow
ended.
Driving home I heard John Kasich being interviewed and the topic of defeating ISIS and Islamic extremism came up. In addition to advocating "boots on the ground" (and then evasively dancing around naming the number of American lives he'd throw away), Kasich shockingly indicated that he would establish a propaganda department to spread "Judeo-Christian values" to win the war of ideas against ISIS. That statement along proves to my mind that Kasich is unfit for the White House. If one looks at history, it is the values and ideas of The Enlightenment that moved mankind forward and which are the real basis of modern Western civilization. Religion and Christianity in particular have a bloody track record of giving the world, hate, bigotry and the murder of those with differing beliefs. Be it the annihilation of other Christian sects during the early years of Christianity, the Crusades, Europe's wars of religion, the extermination of native peoples in the Americas, Judeo-Christian values have proven deadly. The Washington Post looks at Kasich's ridiculous proposal. Here are article highlights:
During aspeech Tuesday at the National Press
Club, Ohio Governor and
Republican presidential candidate John Kasich offered a litany of ideas meant
to broaden the influence of the United States and combat the rise of the
Islamic State. Among them was one that, on its face, seemed to contradict the
1st Amendment to the Constitution.
U.S. public
diplomacy and international broadcasting have lost their focus on the case for
Western values and ideals and effectively countering our opponents' propaganda
and disinformation. I will consolidate them into a new agency that has a clear
mandate to promote the core, Judeo-Christian Western values that we and our
friends and allies share: the values of human rights, the values of democracy,
freedom of speech, freedom of religion and freedom of association."
Curious about the
constitutionality of such a thing, we called New York University civil
liberties professor Burt Neuborne, former legal director of the ACLU and
founding legal director of the Brennan Center for Justice.
"The
'Judeo-Christian' phrase, my sense is, is an unfortunate phrase by the
governor," Neuborne said. "What he really means is historically the
values associated with Western culture.
A President
Kasich, though, "couldn't create an agency designed to promote strictly
religious values," Neuborne said. "To the extent he's insisting in
making it a religious institution, he's making it harder on himself. But my bet
is that's not what he intended."
Apparently, Kasich failed to notice that Bobby Jindal's self-prostitution to the Christofascists did not save his campaign. And, as noted above, he is apparently so ignorant of history that he doesn't understand that it was The Enlightenment - which embraced knowledge and reason and rejected religious based ignorance and bigotry - that is the basis of what we now consider to be western values. Sadly, the author of the Post piece is seemingly as ignorant as Kasich on this point.
Personally, I never understood why Bobby Jindal ever thought he was a viable presidential candidate. He may have won the governorship of Louisiana, but I never saw much of the racist, Christofasist base of the Republican Party voting for someone who was of Hindu descent. True, Jindal is Christian, but most in the GOP base cannot look beyond skin color - which why I find it so baffling that Ben Carson has done as well as he has in the polls of the GOP base. Jindal may have recognized this reality and seemingly sought to counter it by shamelessly prostituting himself to the Christofascists and adopted every anti-gay, anti-equality, anti-modernity position popular with the worse knuckle draggers of the far right. Apparently, shameless misogyny and self-prostitution simply was not enough. Huffington Post looks at Jindal's decision to end his hopeless campaign. Here are highlights:
Louisiana Gov. Bobby Jindal (R) ended his presidential campaign on Tuesday.
"I've come to the realization that this is not my time, so I've come
here to announce that I am suspending my campaign for president of the
United States," he told Fox News' Bret Baier.
Jindal, who entered the presidential race in
June, has remained near the back of the Republican pack since then. In
recent months, his persistently low polling numbers relegated him to the
smaller televised events that preceded each of the main GOP debates.
Jindal has served as Louisiana's governor since 2008, the year he
oversaw the mass evacuation of his state's coastal areas during
Hurricane Gustav. Since then, he's established himself as a hard-line
conservative . . . .
Earlier this year, the governor launched an executive order to
fulfill the spirit of HB 707, a defeated bill intended to allow
Louisiana citizens and businesses to discriminate against same-sex
couples without punishment.
During his campaign, like many other GOP candidates, Jindal threw his support behind Kim Davis, the Kentucky county clerk who refused to issue marriage licenses to same-sex couples, citing her religious convictions.
Before Jindal exited the race, Willie Robertson, a star of the A&E reality show "Duck Dynasty," appeared to withdraw his support of Jindal and
endorse Trump instead. Jindal's campaign denied that Robertson had
broken bad on the governor, saying that Robertson simply "admires"
Trump's "business acumen."
My view is "good riddance." Now, Jindal needs to focus on repairing the huge damage that he has done to Louisiana, especially public education and public higher education.
While we hear bellicose statements from Republicans and much scapegoating of refugees in the wake of the Paris attacks last week, there is far too little reflection on how and why ISIS and Islamic extremism has grown and spread. A book review in the New York Times looks at the rise of ISIS. A piece in Huffington Post looks at the roots of Islamic extremism in Saudi Arabia and how that country more than any other has exported virulent extremism more than any other, including Iran, the favorite bogey man of Republicans and the far right. Sadly, much of such analysis ignores the role that the West - translate the United States - has played in creating the conditions for ISIS to flourish not to mention funding some of the early movements that have evolved into Al Quaida and now ISIS. A piece in Salon looks at America and its allies' role in creating this nightmare. Here are excerpts:
History takes no prisoners. It shows, with absolutely
lucidity, that the Islamic extremism ravaging the world today was borne
out of the Western foreign policy of yesteryear.
Gore
Vidal famously referred to the USA as the United States of Amnesia. The
late Chinese Premier Zhou Enlai put it a little more delicately,
quipping, “One of the delightful things about Americans is that they
have absolutely no historical memory.”
In order to understand the
rise of militant Salafi groups like ISIS and al-Qaida; in order to wrap
our minds around their heinous, abominable attacks on civilians in the
U.S., France, Syria, Iraq, Lebanon, Nigeria, Turkey, Yemen, Afghanistan
and many, many more countries, we must rekindle this historical memory.
Where did violent Islamic extremism come from? In the wake of the horrific Paris attacks on Friday, November the 13,
this is the question no one is asking — yet it is the most important
one of all. If one doesn’t know why a problem emerged, if one cannot
find its root, one will never be able to solve and uproot it.
[W]e must delve into the history of the Cold War, the historical period lied about in the West perhaps more than any other.
How the West cultivated Osama bin Laden
We needn’t reach back far into history, just a few decades. A much-circulated photo of an article published in British newspaper the Independent in 1993 exemplifies the West’s twisted hypocrisy. Titled “Anti-Soviet warrior puts his army on the road to peace,” it features a large photo of Osama bin Laden, who, at the time, was a close Western ally.
The newspaper noted that bin Laden organized a militia of thousands
of foreign fighters from throughout the Middle East and North Africa,
and “supported them with weapons and his own construction equipment” in
their fight against the USSR in the 1980s. “We beat the Soviet Union,”
bin Laden boasted.
The mujahedin, this international Islamic
extremist militia organized and headed by bin Laden, is what eventually
morphed into both al-Qaida and the Taliban.
In Greek mythology, Cassandra was blessed with the power of prophecy,
but cursed in that no one would ever heed her warnings. Eqbal Ahmad,
the late political scientist, historian and expert in the study of
terrorism, was a modern-day Cassandra.
In a speech at the University of Colorado, Boulder in October 1998, Ahmad warned that the U.S. policy in Afghanistan would backfire:
“In
Islamic history, jihad as an international violent phenomenon had
disappeared in the last 400 years, for all practical purposes. It was
revived suddenly with American help in the 1980s. When the Soviet Union
intervened in Afghanistan, Zia ul-Haq, the [U.S.-backed] military
dictator of Pakistan, which borders on Afghanistan, saw an opportunity
and launched a jihad there against godless communism. The U.S. saw a
God-sent opportunity to mobilize one billion Muslims against what Reagan
called the ‘Evil Empire.’
“Money started pouring in. CIA agents
starting going all over the Muslim world recruiting people to fight in
the great jihad. Bin Laden was one of the early prize recruits. He was
not only an Arab. He was also a Saudi.
“Saddam was defeated,
but the American troops stayed on in the land of the Ka’aba [the most
sacred site of Islam, in Mecca], foreign troops. He wrote letter after
letter saying, ‘Why are you here? Get out! You came to help but you have
stayed on.’ Finally he started a jihad against the other occupiers. His
mission is to get American troops out of Saudi Arabia. His earlier
mission was to get Russian troops out of Afghanistan.”
For bin Laden, Ahmad added, “America has broken its word. . . .“They’re going to go for you. They’re going to do a lot more,” Ahmad
warned, three years before the 9/11 attacks. “These are the chickens of
the Afghanistan war coming home to roost.”
We now know that Ahmad
was right. But, like Cassandra, the powerful ignored his sagacious
admonition, and suffered the horrific consequences.
Extremist “freedom fighters”
In the 1950s and ’60s,
Afghanistan was a somewhat secular country in which women were granted
relatively equal rights. What turned Afghanistan into the hotbed for
extremism it is today? Decades of Western meddling.
Throughout the
1980s, the U.S. government supported and armed bin Laden and his
mujahedin in Afghanistan, in their fight against the Soviet Union.
President Ronald Reagan famously met with the mujahedin in the Oval Office in 1983.
Those “freedom fighters” are the forefathers of ISIS and al-Qaida. When
the last Soviet troops were withdrawn in 1989, the mujahedin did not
simply leave; a civil war of sorts followed, with various Islamist
militant groups fighting for control in the power vacuum. The Taliban
came out on top, and established a medieval theocratic regime to replace
the former “godless” socialist government.
This
Cold War strategy ended up being successful: After the fall of the
USSR, the secular socialist groups that dominated the resistance
movements of the Middle East were replaced by Islamic extremists ones
that had previously been supported by the West.
It is not a coincidence that most of the secular countries in the history
of the Middle East have been socialist of some sort. In contrast, the
most reactionary countries — the countries where women are not granted
equal rights and where the rule of law is based on Sharia — have
frequently tended to be close Western allies. Why? The West was much,
much more interested in preserving capitalism than it was in allowing
secularism, gender equality and relative economic equality to flourish
under socialism.
[T]he
reality is the Middle East was significantly more progressive and
secular during the height of the Cold War than it is today. That’s not a
coincidence. The U.S. and its allies destroyed secularism as part of
their larger Cold War strategy.
The Cold War bites back
This
Cold War strategy continues to bite back today, and hard. Because of
this policy, we have now ended up with capitalist dystopias like those
in Saudi Arabia, Qatar or the UAE — filthy rich oil states where businessmen are drowning in money while the migrant modern-day slaves upon which their economies are built die in droves, and theocratic monarchies imprison or even behead anyone who challenges the regime.
The
Gulf states remain some of the most reactionary and extremist countries
on the planet, and they happen to be close Western allies. Saudi
Arabia, in particular, is the fountainhead of militant Sunni Islamism — and yet the Obama administration has done more than $100 billion in arms deals with the Saudi monarchy in just five years. [M]odern Sunni extremist groups like ISIS and al-Qaida are “a product of
Saudi ideals, Saudi money, and Saudi organizational support.” Government
cables leaked by WikiLeaks demonstrate that the U.S. is well aware that al-Qaida and other Salafi groups are supported by rich Saudis.
[I]t is now widely acknowledged
that the illegal U.S.-led war in Iraq — a catastrophic occupation that
led to the deaths of at least 1 million people — destabilized the entire
Middle East, creating the extreme conditions in which militant groups
like al-Qaida spread like wildfire, eventually leading to the emergence
of ISIS. The former head of intelligence for the U.S. Central Command
and Joint Special Operations Command (JSOC), retired Army Lt. Gen.
Michael T. Flynn, agrees.
U.S. policies in Iraq “absolutely” strengthened Salafi militant groups
like al-Qaida, Lt. Gen. Flynn conceded. “We definitely put fuel on a
fire,” he lamented.
Saddam Hussein was the first Frankenstein’s monster U.S. policy
created in Iraq, al-Qaida was the second, and now ISIS is the third.
Blaming Islam is projection
The
pundits in the West blaming Islam for the rise of extremism are
projecting their own countries’ crimes onto the world’s 1.6 billion
Muslims.
The kinds of people who blame Islam and Muslims for the
spread of extremism are the kinds of people who have utmost faith in
Western empire. . . . . they, deep-down, believe Western empire to be fundamentally rooted in
good will, in humanitarianism, in progress, in the proselytizing of
civilization.
This is the same logic that justified genocidal
European colonialism, Western expansionism and Manifest Destiny, and the
White Man’s Burden. And it is this same logic that promotes militarist policies and anti-Muslim and anti-refugee bigotries in response to Islamist militants’ attacks — only serving to further fuel the fire of extremism.
“Everybody’s worried about stopping terrorism. Well, there’s a really easy way: stop participating in it.”
ISIS needs to be stopped. But the West needs to defeated it without continuing the very policies that have fueled its rise.
