What does "Islamist" actually mean?

An interesting article, especially at the end with an analogy between the 1848 revolutions in Europe and the Arab Spring of today.

To put in my two cents worth: an important factor in the rise of the Islamic political movement is the abject failure of radical nationalist "Arab Socialist" governments, many of which led independence struggles against outright colonial occupation. The FLN of Algeria, Nassarism, the Baath parties, all became corrupt cliques that turned their back on the masses.
--RCong

An opinion piece from the Boston Globe

The Internationalist
Everyone’s an Islamist now
The case that a political term has outlived its usefulness
By Thanassis Cambanis


August 04, 2012

To watch the Arab world’s political transformation over the past year has been, in part, to track the inexorable rise of Islamism. Islamist groups—that is, parties favoring a more religious society—are dominating elections. Secular politicians and thinkers in the Arab world complain about the “Islamicization” of public life; scholars study the sociology of Islamist movements, while theologians pick apart the ideological dimensions of Islamism. This March, the US Institute for Peace published a collection of essays surveying the recent changes in the Arab world, entitled “The Islamists Are Coming: Who They Really Are.”
Saifallah Ben Houssein, the de facto leader of Tunisia’s Salafis.

Anis Mili /REUTERS/File

Saifallah Ben Houssein, the de facto leader of Tunisia’s Salafis.

From all this, you might assume that “Islamism” is the most important term to understand in world politics right now. In fact, the Islamist ascendancy is making it increasingly meaningless.

In Tunisia, Libya, and Egypt, the most important factions are led overwhelmingly by religious politicians—all of them “Islamist” in the conventional sense, and many in sharp disagreement with one another over the most basic practical questions of how to govern. Explicitly secular groups are an exception, and where they have any traction at all they represent a fragmented minority. As electoral democracy makes its impact felt on the Arab world for the first time in history, it is becoming clear that it is the Islamist parties that are charting the future course of the Arab world.

As they do, “Islamist” is quickly becoming a term as broadly applicable—and as useless—as “Judeo-Christian” in American and European politics. If important distinctions are emerging within Islamism, that suggests that the lifespan of “Islamist” as a useful term is almost at an end—that we’ve reached the moment when it’s time to craft a new language to talk about Arab politics, one that looks beyond “Islamist” to the meaningful differences among groups that would once have been lumped together under that banner.

Some thinkers already are looking for new terms that offer a more sophisticated way to talk about the changes set in motion by the Arab Spring. At stake is more than a label; it’s a better understanding of the political order emerging not just in the Middle East, but around the world.

***

The term “Islamist” came into common use in the 1980s to describe all those forces pushing societies in the Islamic world to be more religious. It was deployed by outsiders (and often by political rivals) to describe the revival of faith that flowered after the Arab world’s defeat in the 1967 war with Israel and subsequent reflective inward turn. Islamist preachers called for a renewal of piety and religious study; Islamist social service groups filled the gaps left by inept governments, organizing health care, education, and food rations for the poor. In the political realm, “Islamist” applied to both Egypt’s Muslim Brotherhood, which disavowed violence in its pursuit of a wealthier and more powerful Islamic middle class, and radical underground cells that were precursors to Al Qaeda.

What they had in common was that they saw a more religious leadership, and more explicitly Islamic society, as the antidote to the oppressive rule of secular strongmen such as Hafez al-Assad, Hosni Mubarak, and Saddam Hussein.
Libya’s Mahmoud Jibril.

Manu Brabo/Associated Press/File

Libya’s Mahmoud Jibril.

Over the years, the term “Islamist” continued to be a useful catchall to describe the range of groups that embraced religion as a source of political authority. So long as the Islamist camp was out of power, the one-size-fits-all nature of the term seemed of secondary importance.

But in today’s ferment, such a broad term is no longer so useful. Elections have shown that broad electoral majorities support Islamism in one flavor or another. The most critical matters in the Arab world—such as the design of new constitutional orders in Egypt, Tunisia, and Libya—are now being hashed out among groups with competing interpretations of political Islam. In Egypt, the non-Islamic political forces are so shy about their desire to separate mosque from government that many eschew the term “secular,” requesting instead a “civil” state.

In Tunisia’s elections last fall, the Islamist Ennahda Party—an offshoot of the Muslim Brotherhood—swept to victory, but is having trouble dealing with its more doctrinaire Islamist allies to the right. In Libya, virtually every politician is a socially conservative Muslim. The country’s recent elections were won by a party whose leaders believe in Islamic law as a main reference point for legislation and support polygamy as prescribed by Islamic sharia law, but who also believe in a secular state—unlike their more Islamist rivals, who would like a direct application of sharia in drafting a new constitutional framework.

In Egypt, the two best-organized political groups since the fall of Mubarak have been the Muslim Brotherhood and the Salafi Noor Party—both “Islamist,” but dramatically different in nearly all practical respects. The Brotherhood has been around for 84 years, with a bourgeois leadership that supports liberal economics and preaches a gospel of success and education. The rival Salafi Noor Party, on the other hand, includes leaders who support a Saudi-style extremist view of Islam that holds the religious should live as much as possible in a pre-modern lifestyle, and that non-Muslims should live under a special Islamic dispensation for minorities. A third Islamist wing in Egypt includes the jihadists—the organization that assassinated President Anwar Sadat in 1981, which has officially renounced violence and has surfaced as a political party. (Its main agenda item is to advocate the release of “the blind sheikh,” Omar Abdel-Rahman, imprisoned in the United States as the mastermind of the 1993 World Trade Center bombing.)

***

‘Islamist” might be an accurate label for all these parties, but as a way to understand the real distinctions among them it’s becoming more a hindrance than a help. A useful new terminology will need to capture the fracture lines and substantive differences among Islamic ideologies.

In Egypt, for example, both the Muslim Brotherhood and the Salafis believe in the ultimate goal of a perfect society with full implementation of Islamic sharia. Yet most Brothers say that’s an abstract and unattainable aim, and in practice are willing to ignore many provisions of Islamic law—like those that would limit modern finance, or those that would outright ban alcohol—in the interest of prosperity and societal peace. The Salafis, by contrast, would shut down Egypt’s liquor industry and mixed-gender beaches, regardless of the consequences for tourism or the country’s Christian minority.

There’s a cleavage between Islamists who still believe in a secular definition of citizenship that doesn’t distinguish between Muslims and non-Muslims, and those who believe that citizenship should be defined by Islamic law, which in effect privileges Muslims. (Under Saudi Arabia’s strict brand of Islamist government, the practice of Christianity and Shiite Islam is actually illegal.) And there’s the matter of who would interpret religious law: Is it a personal matter, with each Muslim free to choose which cleric’s rulings to follow? Or should citizens be legally required to defer to doctrinaire Salafi clerics?

Many thinkers are trying to craft a new language for the emerging distinctions within Islamism. Issandr El Amrani, who edits the blog The Arabist and has just started a new column for the news site Al-Monitor about Islamists in power, suggests we use the names of the organizations themselves to distinguish the competing trends: Ikhwani Islamists for the establishment Muslim Brothers and organizations that share its traditions and philosophy; Salafi Islamists for Salafis, whose name means “the predecessors” and refers to following in the path of the Prophet Mohammed’s original companions; and Wasati Islamists for the pluralistic democrats that broke away from the Brotherhood to form centrist parties in Egypt.

Gilles Kepel, the French political scientist who helped popularize the term “Islamist” in his writings on the Islamic revival in the 1980s, grew dissatisfied with its limits the more he learned about the diversity within Islamism. By the 1990s, he shifted to the more academic term “re-Islamification movements.” Today he suggests that it’s more helpful to look at the Islamist spectrum as coalescing around competing poles of “jihad,” those who seek to forcibly change the system and condemn those who don’t share those views, and “legalism,” those who would use instruments of sharia law to gradually shift it. But he’s still frustrated with the terminology’s ability to capture politics as they evolve. “I’ve tried to remain open-eyed,” he said.

It’s also helpful to look at what Islamists call themselves, but that only offers a perfunctory guide, since many Islamists consider religion so integral to their thinking that it doesn’t merit a name. Others might seek for domestic political reasons to downplay their religious aims. For example, Turkey’s ruling party, a coterie of veteran Islamists who adapted and subordinated their religious principles to their embrace of neoliberal economics, describes itself as a party of “values,” rather than of Islam. In Libya, the new government will be led by the personally conservative technocrat Mahmoud Jibril; though his party could be considered “Islamist” in the traditional sense, it’s often identified as secular in Western press reports, to distinguish it from its more religious rivals. Jibril himself prefers “moderate Islamic.”

The efforts to come up with a new language to talk about Islamic politics are just beginning. They are sure to evolve as competing movements sharpen their ideologies, and as the lofty rhetoric of religion meets the hard road of governing. The importance of moving beyond “Islamism” will only grow: After all, what we call the “Islamic world” includes about a quarter of the world’s population, stretching from Muslim-majority nations in the Arab world, along with Turkey, Pakistan, and Indonesia, to sizable communities from China to the United States. For Islam, the current political moment could be likened to the aftermath of 1848 in Europe, when liberal democracy coalesced as an alternative to absolute monarchy. Only after that, once virtually every political movement was a “liberal” one, did it become important to distinguish between socialists and capitalists, libertarians and statists—the distinctions that have seemed essential ever since.

Ali Abunima compares Obama's response to Bulgaria bombing with the shooting at Sikh Temple

Blogs » Ali Abunimah's blog
Obama more sympathetic to Israelis killed in Bulgaria than to Sikh Americans murdered in Wisconsin
Submitted by Ali Abunimah on Mon, 08/06/2012 - 20:44

President Barack Obama during a phone call from Air Force One on 1 August 2012.
(White House Photo)

As soon as news came of a bomb attack that killed Israeli tourists in Bulgaria on 18 July, US President Barack Obama condemned it in the most strident terms – even though, then, as now, the perpetrator and his motive remain unknown.

Obama’s statement left no room for ambiguity:

I strongly condemn today’s barbaric terrorist attack on Israelis in Bulgaria. My thoughts and prayers are with the families of those killed and injured, and with the people of Israel, Bulgaria, and any other nation whose citizens were harmed in this awful event. These attacks against innocent civilians, including children, are completely outrageous. The United States will stand with our allies, and provide whatever assistance is necessary to identify and bring to justice the perpetrators of this attack. As Israel has tragically once more been a target of terrorism, the United States reaffirms our unshakeable commitment to Israel’s security, and our deep friendship and solidarity with the Israeli people.

Such sentiments at the killing of innocent people are understandable. But why has Obama so far refused to condemn in equally strong terms Wade Michael Page’s murderous rampage that killed six people at the Sikh Temple in Oak Creek, Wisconsin yesterday?
Obama won’t call it “terrorism”

In one White House statement yesterday, Obama called the Wisconsin massacre “a senseless act of violence.” In another, he called it “a tragic shooting.”

It has since been confirmed that the FBI is treating the attack as “domestic terrorism” and it has now become clear that the killer has a long history of white supremacist views and activism.

Yet in further comments today, Obama treated the attack as just another (all too awful) mass shooting as happened in Aurora, Colorado on 20 July.

As ABC reports:

President Obama said today that he is “heartbroken” by the deadly shooting at the Sikh religious center in Wisconsin and renewed his call to reduce violence across the country.

“I think all of us recognize that these kinds of terrible tragic events are happening with too much regularity for us not to do some soul searching and to examine additional ways that we can reduce violence,” the president told reporters in the Oval Office when asked about the gunman who killed six people in Oak Creek Sunday.

The president made similar remarks after the deadly shooting in Aurora, Colo., last month, but is not proposing any additional gun controls. “What I want to do is bring together law enforcement, community leaders, faith leaders, elected officials at every level to see how we can make continued progress,” he said today.

Obama reluctant to point to racism

Obama continued, according to ABC:

“We don’t yet know fully what motivated this individual to carry out this terrible act. If it turns out, as some early reports indicated, that it may have been motivated in some way by the ethnicity of those who were attending the temple, I think the American people immediately recoil against those kinds of attitudes,” the president said. “It will be very important for us to reaffirm once again that in this country, regardless of what we look like, where we come from, who we worship, we are all one people and we look after one other and we respect one another.

The president’s comments came as he signed the “Honoring America’s Veterans and Caring for Camp Lejeune Families Act” at the White House.

Page was a veteran of the United States Army.
Silence in the face of racist incitement

Obama’s shameful timidity in forthrightly condemning what happened in Wisconsin is hardly surprising. After all, this is a president with a “kill list” for Muslims including Americans.

But even for show, could he really not muster the kind of outrage he did for Israelis, for his own fellow citizens?

Is it appropriate that Obama condemned what happened to Israelis in Bulgaria as “barbaric terrorism” while he is merely “heartbroken” at the slaughter in Wisconsin, as if he is a mere bystander and not the president of the United States?

When Obama declares that “we are all one people” who must look after one another regardless of what we look like, it is he who needs to practice what he preaches.

Obama has been consistent in his refusal to confront the racism unleashed by his candidacy and subsequent election that came atop post-9/11 Muslim-bashing and dehumanization of people of color inherent in warmongering abroad.

His reponse to accusations that he’s Muslim is never ‘so what if I were?’ but always along the lines of ‘no, no I’m a Christian like you.’

Two summers ago, right-wing activists invented the fake “Ground Zero mosque” controversy to generate fear and hatred in the run-up to the 2010 mid-term elections. What I always found more frightening than the noise from Islamophobic clowns was the silence of elected officials, especially Democrats who purport to uphold liberal and inclusive values.

With their silence, they gave consent, and the crescendo of racist fearmongering – that targets more than just Muslims – has continued to rise.
Neither Sikhs nor Muslims are collectively guilty

Sikhs were among the first victims of the racist backlash after 9/11. It is common to say they are mistaken for Muslims who are the real targets of such attacks. This is wrong. Muslims are no more collectively guilty than Sikhs or any other group. But more importantly violent racists are not interested in distinctions.

In 2010, when he traveled to India, Obama refused to visit the main shrine of Sikhism, the Golden Temple in Amritsar, because he did not want to be photographed wearing a Sikh headcovering and be confused for a Muslim by illiterate Americans back home.

Obama was pandering to racists then, as he is despicably doing now. The difference now is that blood has been spilled in Wisconsin, and the time for this kind of cowardice ought to have passed.

Isreali Morality at work

From Haaretz
Opinion
The secret behind an Iran war order
Israel's leadership cannot gamble on the notion that it will be able to drag the United States into the war if enough Israeli lives are sacrificed.
By Sefi Rachlevsky | Aug.07, 2012 | 9:19 AM


The sweeping opposition by heads of the defense establishment to attacking Iran before the American presidential elections stems from a secret. The details of this secret are now being expressed privately by Israel's leaders. Does this expression - at least in the case of Defense Minister Ehud Barak - come from a desire that the senselessness of these ideas will help thwart them? Perhaps. Let's hope so.

Whatever the case may be, this is how things are. In private talks, Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu and Barak reiterate the logic behind going to war against Iran at this time. They claim that the aim of conducting a war now is to drag the United States into it, contrary to the Americans' wishes.

The logic is simple. According to Netanyahu and Barak, Israel has the military power to delay Iran's nuclear project by only one year. This is the up-to-date estimate based on operations research by the body in charge of the matter in Israel: the air force. There is no significance to a delay of that length. There is, however, a force that can stop the Iranian project militarily: the United States. The problem, Netanyahu says, is that the U.S. administration is not willing to do so.

The solution is simple. A moment before the U.S. presidential elections, when Mitt Romney - the candidate of Netanyahu's patron, Sheldon Adelson - is breathing down Barack Obama's neck, and in the wake of the large number of casualties and the extensive damage that the Iranian response is likely to cause in the region and particularly in Israel, the American president will have no choice but to order his armed forces to join in the war.

Netanyahu is gambling that if Obama does not do so, he will lose the elections. Then Romney will replace him and, as a token of gratitude, will complete the military work. And if the gamble fails? For that there is no backup plan.

It is imperative to understand the substance of the gamble. There are two discipline when it comes to Israeli security.The main one, the Ben-Gurion discipline, which becomes the Rabin discipline in the case of Iran. The main conviction of tthis discipline is that, when it comes to strategic moves, it is essential to have a real treaty and support from a superpower. One does everything for those ends. No gamble can be taken without them.

There is also an additional, rarer disciplne: "the rotten business" school. Its main belief is that it is possible to force a superpower into moves through a violent conspiracy. That is the way in which undercover Israeli terrorist attacks against American targets were carried out in Egypt in the 1950s, in the hope of forcing the Americans to attack Egypt - an affair that came to be known as "the rotten business."

The stakes in the present gamble are much higher. Making an attack on Iran right now means betting all of our chips. And we are not referring to an independent Israeli action. What we are referring to is the exact opposite. Adelson's billions and campaigns were destined for this moment: dragging America into a war to save Israel. Indeed, Netanyahu succeeded in this fashion to curb U.S. pressure on Israel to negotiate for peace. But dragging America into a war in a way that echoes convicted Israeli spy Jonathan Pollard and the Protocols of Zion belongs on a different planet.

These things have to be stated clearly. No leadership in Israel has the right to send the Israel Defense Forces to war and to endanger tens of thousands of citizens and soldiers when it does not have the power to win the war with its own forces. No person has the authority to gamble in this way with the lives of Israelis. Involving America in a war can only be done with prior agreement and by means of a moderate policy that will make this possible. A leadership that has failed to achieve that cannot gamble on the notion that it will be able to drag the United States into the war if enough Israeli lives are sacrificed.

During the unnecessary battle over the Mitla Pass during the Sinai Campaign of 1956, Yehuda Kan Dror was sent on a suicide mission to locate the sources of Egyptian fire which would surely kill him. Now tens of thousands of people are supposed to serve as a target for the fire that might perhaps drag the Americans into a war and perhaps even cause a change in the American government. An order of that kind is the most imbecilic of orders. Israel's army and citizens are not Yehuda Kan Dror under a single leader. Chief of Staff Benny Gantz and the senior officers do not have the "possibility" of not carrying out this blackest of orders - they have the duty not to carry it out. The original "rotten business" pales when compared with the conspiracy that is embodied here. It is forbidden to give an order of this kind. It is forbidden to carry it out.

Gore Vidal 1925-2012, a great truth teller passes

Social beans, social consciousness and the immiseration of the poor sucker American people

"It is not consciousness of men that determines their being, but, on the contrary, their social being that determines their consciousness." Karl Marx

“No one ever went broke underestimating the intelligence of the American people.” HL Menken


A) The inexorable, desperate, insatiable drive for profits by the world capitalist class, and the consequent relentless pauperization of the working class (oh, in the USA we don't have a working class, just substitute “middle class”- same thing) : True

B) The growing awareness, organization and preparation of that class to resist and rise up and expropriate the expropriators: False

Marx has been proven right about the trajectory of capitalism; but wrong on the subjective factor: social being does not determine social consciousness.

Regarding A) what we see now is a tour de force of unleashed finance capital burrowing its blood-sucking snout into anything that smells of money. The standard of living of workers in the “advanced capitalist countries” has to be driven ever-downward. It's happening before our very eyes at breakneck speed. What Marx saw as the inevitable end stage of world capitalism from his vantage point in the late 19th century is coming to pass.

Economists, politicians and the media can no longer crow about the triumph of Western democratic capitalism and the vanquishing of communism and Marxist ideology. From the economic boom brought about by spending for WW II in the 1940s to the mid 1970s the standard of living went up and life seemed good for workers in the USA and Europe. Then it stalled and began a downward trend. At first the powers that be refused to notice...Reagan's sleight of hand and the “supply side” ruled the roost in the 1980s. In the 1990s the internet bubble gave an illusion of growth and the more recent housing bubble dulled the senses of everyone until 2008. Now that drop in the standard of living and income among most people in the US (and Europe) is evident.

What was hailed as the ending of the boom and bust cycle of capitalism between Eisenhower and LBJ, and the subsequent “end of ideology” proclaimed in Daniel Bell's supposed landmark book of the same name wasn't the inauguration of a new era; it was just a temporary interlude of peace and prosperity (but it was a little short on the “peace” side). Now we're back to the law of the jungle and pillage by the robber barons that are the normal feature of full bore “free market” capitalism.

Not only have the 1960s been repealed, and the New Deal been mainly rolled back, we are seeing the progressive era reforms of the late 19th and early 20th century being attacked: Pure Food and Drug Act repeal anyone? Do we need more rat shit in our processed food? How about Republican Teddy Roosevelt's conservationism and trust busting? TR was a commie traitor.

We can see that everything that corporations touch turns to shit. Privatized jails; privatized military forces; privatized “health” care; for profit “universities” that suck up government grant money, pay executives millions in compensation and leave the poor suckers that they recruited as students out in the cold with no degree worth anything and mountains of debt; and it's worse in poorer countries: subsidized farm products from the US are dumped into Mexico, Haiti, etc and drive farmers out of business to starve....the great free market.

In some places people pushed to the limit and beyond will fight back. They know they are being screwed and who is doing the screwing.

But not in the good old USA.

What Marx called “false consciousness” reigns supreme. He recognized that ideology (part of the cultural superstructure of society) can delude the exploited masses. Religion, mindless patriotism, racism...can cloud the minds of the masses and divert them from understanding their class position; that there is a ruling class that they will never, ever belong to; that they have to unite with their fellow workers regardless of race or sex to fight for their basic economic rights; they have to overthrow the system that represses them. But this, Marx though, would be temporary and the people would come to see that they had been fooled and free their minds of capitalist ideology. They had to. Their oppression and degradation would be so bad that it would wake them up!

Well...no such luck.

We Americans are blessed with exceptionalism, every one can rise up and be rich, we believe; of course there's a lot of evidence to the contrary and we all are being pushed down...but it's not pleasant to believe it, so we don't.

The ruling class has been successful in stupidizing and dummying down the people. They are putty in the hands of the info-tainment and religion industries. People whose lives have been destroyed by rampant corporate capitalism are standing up and.....giving support to the ones that have kicked their ass up and down the block. They vote for them. They get angry about....uhhhh...Muslims! And ….uhhh unbalanced government budgets...and uhh...support our troops who are uhhh...somewhere...Afghanistan, and Wyoming and Iceland, whatever.

When people are too self-involved, smug, racist, stupid, ignorant, to know what their best interests are and embrace a fantasy dreamland as a response to their being actually oppressed like everyone else in the world....then what can you do? I'm too old for all of this. That's why I'm indulging in a cynical rant.

PS- in my better moods I can recognize there have been some changes in consciousness: about Palestine and Israel among some people when they are exposed to the truth; Occupy Wall Street and the popularization of the 1% vs the 99%; and that polling shows that most people favor taxing the rich and don't want more wars...BUT, these developments don't lead to much action and the counter-story is still being swallowed by enough people to make any real changes iffy.
---rc

Robert Fisk: War of Lies in Syria

from the 7/30/12 issue of The Independent

Has there ever been a Middle Eastern war of such hypocrisy? A war of such cowardice and such mean morality, of such false rhetoric and such public humiliation? I'm not talking about the physical victims of the Syrian tragedy. I'm referring to the utter lies and mendacity of our masters and our own public opinion – eastern as well as western – in response to the slaughter, a vicious pantomime more worthy of Swiftian satire than Tolstoy or Shakespeare.

While Qatar and Saudi Arabia arm and fund the rebels of Syria to overthrow Bashar al-Assad's Alawite/Shia-Baathist dictatorship, Washington mutters not a word of criticism against them. President Barack Obama and his Secretary of State, Hillary Clinton, say they want a democracy in Syria. But Qatar is an autocracy and Saudi Arabia is among the most pernicious of caliphate-kingly-dictatorships in the Arab world. Rulers of both states inherit power from their families – just as Bashar has done – and Saudi Arabia is an ally of the Salafist-Wahabi rebels in Syria, just as it was the most fervent supporter of the medieval Taliban during Afghanistan's dark ages.

Indeed, 15 of the 19 hijacker-mass murderers of 11 September, 2001, came from Saudi Arabia – after which, of course, we bombed Afghanistan. The Saudis are repressing their own Shia minority just as they now wish to destroy the Alawite-Shia minority of Syria. And we believe Saudi Arabia wants to set up a democracy in Syria?

Then we have the Shia Hezbollah party/militia in Lebanon, right hand of Shia Iran and supporter of Bashar al-Assad's regime. For 30 years, Hezbollah has defended the oppressed Shias of southern Lebanon against Israeli aggression. They have presented themselves as the defenders of Palestinian rights in the West Bank and Gaza. But faced with the slow collapse of their ruthless ally in Syria, they have lost their tongue. Not a word have they uttered – nor their princely Sayed Hassan Nasrallah – about the rape and mass murder of Syrian civilians by Bashar's soldiers and "Shabiha" militia.

Then we have the heroes of America – La Clinton, the Defence Secretary Leon Panetta, and Obama himself. Clinton issues a "stern warning" to Assad. Panetta – the same man who repeated to the last US forces in Iraq that old lie about Saddam's connection to 9/11 – announces that things are "spiralling out of control" in Syria. They have been doing that for at least six months. Has he just realised? And then Obama told us last week that "given the regime's stockpile of nuclear weapons, we will continue to make it clear to Assad … that the world is watching". Now, was it not a County Cork newspaper called the Skibbereen Eagle, fearful of Russia's designs on China, which declared that it was "keeping an eye … on the Tsar of Russia"? Now it is Obama's turn to emphasise how little clout he has in the mighty conflicts of the world. How Bashar must be shaking in his boots.

But what US administration would really want to see Bashar's atrocious archives of torture opened to our gaze? Why, only a few years ago, the Bush administration was sending Muslims to Damascus for Bashar's torturers to tear their fingernails out for information, imprisoned at the US government's request in the very hell-hole which Syrian rebels blew to bits last week. Western embassies dutifully supplied the prisoners' tormentors with questions for the victims. Bashar, you see, was our baby.

Then there's that neighbouring country which owes us so much gratitude: Iraq. Last week, it suffered in one day 29 bombing attacks in 19 cities, killing 111 civilian and wounding another 235. The same day, Syria's bloodbath consumed about the same number of innocents. But Iraq was "down the page" from Syria, buried "below the fold", as we journalists say; because, of course, we gave freedom to Iraq, Jeffersonian democracy, etc, etc, didn't we? So this slaughter to the east of Syria didn't have quite the same impact, did it? Nothing we did in 2003 led to Iraq's suffering today. Right?

And talking of journalism, who in BBC World News decided that even the preparations for the Olympics should take precedence all last week over Syrian outrages? British newspapers and the BBC in Britain will naturally lead with the Olympics as a local story. But in a lamentable decision, the BBC – broadcasting "world" news to the world – also decided that the passage of the Olympic flame was more important than dying Syrian children, even when it has its own courageous reporter sending his despatches directly from Aleppo.

Then, of course, there's us, our dear liberal selves who are so quick to fill the streets of London in protest at the Israeli slaughter of Palestinians. Rightly so, of course. When our political leaders are happy to condemn Arabs for their savagery but too timid to utter a word of the mildest criticism when the Israeli army commits crimes against humanity – or watches its allies do it in Lebanon – ordinary people have to remind the world that they are not as timid as the politicians. But when the scorecard of death in Syria reaches 15,000 or 19,000 – perhaps 14 times as many fatalities as in Israel's savage 2008-2009 onslaught on Gaza – scarcely a single protester, save for Syrian expatriates abroad, walks the streets to condemn these crimes against humanity. Israel's crimes have not been on this scale since 1948. Rightly or wrongly, the message that goes out is simple: we demand justice and the right to life for Arabs if they are butchered by the West and its Israeli allies; but not when they are being butchered by their fellow Arabs.

And all the while, we forget the "big" truth. That this is an attempt to crush the Syrian dictatorship not because of our love for Syrians or our hatred of our former friend Bashar al-Assad, or because of our outrage at Russia, whose place in the pantheon of hypocrites is clear when we watch its reaction to all the little Stalingrads across Syria. No, this is all about Iran and our desire to crush the Islamic Republic and its infernal nuclear plans – if they exist – and has nothing to do with human rights or the right to life or the death of Syrian babies. Quelle horreur!

Africans as "flood," Palestinians as "demographic threat": Ruth Marcus’ vulgar racism in Washington Post

Blogs » Ali Abunimah's blog
Africans as "flood," Palestinians as "demographic threat": Ruth Marcus’ vulgar racism in Washington Post
Submitted by Ali Abunimah on Wed, 07/25/2012 - 12:35

Only when it comes to Israel do “mainstream” American commentators permit themselves to indulge in the kind of racism Washington Post columnist Ruth Marcus treats us to when she writes:

Israel faces a demographic threat to the Jewish state from its fast-growing Arab population, even without a deluge of African refugees with no religious ties or political loyalties to the country. Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu has warned that “60,000 infiltrators are liable to become 600,000 and lead to the eradication of Israel as a Jewish and democratic state.”

Not one mainstream commentator in the US has dared argue that white supremacy in the United States faces a “demographic threat” from Latinos because California and Texas have become “majority-minority” states, or had truck with the notion that the US faces “eradication as a white and democratic state” just because most babies now born in the US are non-white.

Marcus also has the chutzpah to write that Israel is a “country founded as a haven for refugees from the Holocaust.” Is she really unaware that 750,000 indigenous Palestinians were forcibly expelled and they and their descendants not allowed to return so that this “haven” could come into existence amid the ruins of Palestinian cities, villages and countryside?

True, Marcus declares the violence against and denigration of Africans now so common in Israel as “unacceptable” and “unsettling” but doesn’t object to the underlying premise of a “demographic threat.”

In her view and that of the Israelis she channels, Palestinians – and Africans – are inferior beings. The ongoing catastrophe caused to Palestinians due to violent Zionist colonization of their homeland is unworthy of mention and Palestinians and Africans are a “threat” merely because they live, breathe and – like all other humans – reproduce.

It is language directly reminiscent of the rulers of apartheid South Africa.

The question then is, what kind of “democracy” is “threatened” by the mere births of the ‘wrong’ kind of babies? And what would Ruth Marcus say if Jewish babies were deemed a “demographic threat” in any country?

The United States has no shortage of racism and nativism, and in large parts of the country anti-immigrant sentiment.

But we don’t talk about babies of the ‘wrong’ color or ethnicity or religious background “eradicating” the country or its democracy and we should not acquiesce when politicians use such language.

And those who do are rightly labeled as indulging in the type of vulgar racism that ought to have been banished along with Jim Crow.

Post Script: The only criticism I'd have of this article is that Jim Crow is being reestablished in the United State through so-called "anti-voter fraud" laws and immigrant racial profiling. Also, check out the book "The New Jim Crow," by Michelle Alexander.
--RC