The Facticity in Fanaticism

Muslims - The Fervent Fanatics

Why are those who brandish Islam given exclusive copyright to the terms “fanatics, radicals, extremists, fundamentalists”?

I consent there are extremists among Muslims, and they have to be discouraged and disparaged in every which way possible; but name one religion which does not hold such cantankerous elements –except Buddhism and Zoroastrianism.

It is pertinent here to mention the drama series 'The Book of Daniel' - which depicted a drug addict talking to a modern and entirely decent Jesus - taken down by NBC due to the threat of Christians to boycott its sponsors in January 2005. I guess if the drama series was about Mohammad, 30 different channels would have been screening it by now in the name of liberty. There are of course sordid paintings of Jesus and a crucifix in urine, but how many are recreated in mainstream print media? Yes, there is South Park, and I’m an ardent admirer of its satire, but they have presented Jesus as naive and confused in the modern socio-political environment; never carrying bombs in his head, and most certainly never selling whores in the name of religion.

Muslims belong to a separate theology, and have a distinct way of ideating. Every culture, every nation has their separate notions of the acceptable and the obnoxious. It is absolutely preposterous and condescending to expect them to conform to western ideas of liberty and civilization.

Muslims - The Fanatical Terrorists

Muslims are blowing buildings apart, bombing children and innocent lives, and of course that should be scorned and bunged immediately. But is it terrorism only when some individuals involve themselves in the hideous act of murdering innocent people? Is it not terrorism when a state sabotages a whole city with its fighter jet planes and ultra modern warheads?

Or is it terrorism only when the media says so?

Let’s glance at some apposite facts here:
On Nov. 15 2005, a Pentagon spokesman admitted to BBC, “White phosphorus was used as an incendiary weapon against enemy combatants in Iraq. But it is not a chemical weapon. They are not outlawed or illegal”. (1)
Really? White phosphorus or Willie Pete - its old name from Vietnam - is the same chemical substance America so vehemently accused Saddam Hussein of using against rebelling Kurds.

A document from the US Department of Defense, dated April 1991, and titled "Possible use of phosphorous chemical" alleges, "Iraqi forces loyal to President Saddam (Hussein) may have possibly used white phosphorous (WP) chemical weapons against Kurdish rebels and the populace in Erbil … and Dohuk provinces, Iraq."(2).

And if any doubts about its ghastly effects remains, then watch a documentary broadcasted on the Italian network RAI, called "Fallujah: the Hidden Massacre". It claims “the corpses in Fallujah showed strange injuries, some burnt to the bone, others with skin hanging from their flesh … The faces have literally melted away, just like other parts of the body. The clothes are strangely intact." (3)

Iraqi NGOs and medical workers estimate between 4,000 and 6,000 dead in Fallujah, mostly civilians - a proportionately higher death rate than in Coventry and London during the blitz. 36,000 of the city's 50,000 homes were destroyed, along with 60 schools and 65 mosques and shrines. The destruction of Fallujah in Mike Marqusee words “was an act of barbarism that ranks alongside My Lai, Guernica and Halabja.” (4)

If U.S. brutality still isn't axiomatically pernicious, then how about the fact discovered by George Monbiot from The Marine Corps Gazette and stated in his article entitled “Behind the phosphorus clouds are war crimes within war crimes” on November 22, 2005 in The Guardian (5) that U.S Marines had been using in Iraq warheads containing "about 35 percent thermo baric novel explosive (NE) and 65 percent standard high explosive. They deployed it "to cause the roof to collapse and crush the insurgents fortified inside interior rooms." (6)

An article published in the Gazette in 2000 details the effects of their use by the Russians in Grozny. Thermo baric, or "fuel-air" weapons, it says, form a cloud of volatile gases or finely powdered explosives. "This cloud is then ignited and the subsequent fireball sears the surrounding area while consuming the oxygen in this area. The lack of oxygen creates an enormous overpressure. ... Personnel under the cloud are literally crushed to death. Outside the cloud area, the blast wave travels at some 3,000 meters per second. ... As a result, a fuel-air explosive can have the effect of a tactical nuclear weapon without residual radiation. ... Those personnel caught directly under the aerosol cloud will die from the flame or overpressure. For those on the periphery of the strike, the injuries can be severe. Burns, broken bones, contusions from flying debris and blindness may result. Further, the crushing injuries from the overpressure can create air embolism within blood vessels, concussions, multiple internal hemorrhages in the liver and spleen, collapsed lungs, rupture of the eardrums and displacement of the eyes from their sockets."(7)

Such catastrophes are in no need of Muslims for commiseration, any humane civilization with a live conscience will voluntarily oblige.

Israel's history of brutality and injustice needs no overture; it is as rampant now as it was 50 years ago. I will only mention here the introductory paragraph of an article published in The Guardian, on 25th May 2005:
"Last October, 13-year-old Iman al-Hams was shot and wounded by an Israeli army unit in the southern Gaza Strip town of Rafah, despite being identified as a little girl, and wearing a school uniform. Iman was machine-gunned by the unit's commander. She had 17 bullets in her body, and three in her head, a Palestinian doctor told the Guardian. Iman is one of 654 Palestinian children to have been killed in the occupied territories since September 2000. Several were killed as they sat at their desks in class. Three and a half thousand children have been wounded. Over 300 are in Israeli prisons. "(8)

Spin Doctors - The Con Artists in Modern Propaganda War

Now why isn't most of the world aware of these facts, certainly none of it has been mentioned on CNN, FOX, or MSNBC. Step forward the seminal moguls of our era, the sagacious and unscrupulous spin-doctors, with their minds on the pulse of the masses; their artifices embellish veneer sympathies and garble confabulating animosities in the minds and hearts of their target populace.

There must be thousands of twisted and buried facts under the rubble, only years later a few are found out; here, I'll present some extremely interesting and eye-opening episodes:

The classic and one of the most infamous incidents of spin doctoring occurred after Iraq usurped Kuwait on August 2, 1990. Kuwaiti kingdom and senior Bush needed immediate consent from American population in order to interlope Iraq. They hired firms of Hill & Knowlton and Burson-Marsteller for $ 10.7 million to accomplish this trickery, through off course the Kuwaiti monarch’s foreign bank accounts.
Hill & Knowlton concocted the news that bloodthirsty Iraqi soldiers invaded a hospital in Kuwait City, pulled more than 300 infants from incubators and left them to die on concrete floors. And to prove this they showed a 15-year-old girl, named Nayirah (first name only), claiming she was present at the Al-Addan hospital in Kuwait City when Iraqi soldiers arrived.

In Nayirah’s words, "the Iraqi soldiers come into the hospital with guns and go into the rooms where babies were in incubators. They took the babies out of the incubators and left the babies on the cold floor to die."

Under moral pressure from such factitious accounts, the world imagined Iraqis as incarnation of evil adamant for another holocaust, and polls galloped in favor of an attack on Iraq.

Years later, it turned out that Nayirah was a member of the Kuwaiti royal family, and her father, Saud Nasir al-Sabah, was none other than the Kuwaiti ambassador to the U.S. She hadn’t even been in Kuwait City during the period of time that was being talked about. Her father actually sat in the hearing room as his daughter testified. (9)

The truth first appeared in John McArthur’s book Second Front, and it was covered in some of the smaller magazines, but no sort of major coverage whatsoever.
Founder of the Washington PR firm, The Rendon Group, John Rendon told cadets at the U.S. Air Force Academy in 1996, “Did you ever stop to wonder, how the people of Kuwait City, after being held hostage for seven long and painful months, were able to get hand-held American, and for that matter, the flags of other coalition countries?” He paused for effect. “Well, you now know the answer. That was one of my jobs then.” (9)

Let’s recall a relatively recent event...
When on April 9, 2003 the statue of Saddam was finally brought down in Baghdad's Firdos Square, U.S. media commentators rushed to assign iconic connotations to the toppling, ranking it alongside the fall of the Berlin Wall or the protesters opposing tanks at Tiananmen Square.

“Jubilant Iraqis Swarm the Streets of Capital”, Rampton and Stauber quoted The New York Times as saying. The main papers and television channels in the U.S. showed the same scene, proffered similar comments.

But a BBC photo sequence of the statue's fall displayed a sparse crowd of approximately 200 people, they observe; a Reuters long-shot photo of Firdos Square showed that it was nearly empty, sealed off by U.S. tanks. (10)
With a little connotation a fairly innocuous incident was embellished in to the fall of the decade. This is the power of media in our age. For most of the world now, media is the solitary eye, the lone ear.

And now news that leaked out only 2 months ago, revealing one of America’s many strategies to brain wash Iraqis.

Los Angeles Times reported on Nov. 30, 2005, “American military is secretly paying Iraqi newspapers to publish stories written by American troops in an effort to burnish the image of the U.S. mission in Iraq." The articles are penned by "information operations" troops, then translated and placed in Iraqi news outlets by a PR firm contracted by the military. "Though the articles are basically factual," the Times reports, like most payola pieces, "they present only one side of events and omit information that might reflect poorly on the U.S. or Iraqi governments, officials said. Records and interviews indicate that the U.S. has paid Iraqi newspapers to run dozens of such articles, with headlines such as 'Iraqis Insist on Living Despite Terrorism,' since the effort began this year."

Last year a movie named ‘Syriana’ was released, it was one of the most thought provoking movies released from Hollywood in years, and clearly depicted the invidious hypocrisy in American foreign policy; but 60% of the intellectual movie critics in USA could not understand the movie.

The critic from Houston chronicle wrote in her review – “I'm not sure I understand it and I’m not sure I care”.

Why? Because for once it projects Pentagon as the axis of evil concatenated. I guess their cerebral levels are better left with the ‘forty year old virgin’.
During the French crisis with Muslims in the last few months; the radio hosts in morning talk radio here had these comments on air – “These Muslims possess all the oil in the world, why don’t those sheikhs help them out, why are they always begging or creating rifts with us.”

Such blunt ignorance and haughty apathy on public radio - which has now become a daily routine of neo-con radio hosts poking fun and making ludicrous comments about Muslims; can you imagine any public media spokesperson in Pakistan with words like these about any other religion or nation?

Lately American newspapers have been replete with maleficent articles egging American populace on how the attack on Iran is now imminent to save the democratic saintly world. Nowhere is it mentioned that "Iran, even by the CIA's estimates, is at least five years away from making a nuclear bomb; that the IAEA has certified that Iran is not pursuing banned nuclear activities; that the technology Iran needs to make nuclear arms and long-range rockets is yet to be acquired, and that this can be prevented through vigilance."(11)

And no need to mention that Iran will need centuries to create an arsenal as potent and of as great magnitude as the one Israel currently possess, but of course Israel is America’s ally and Iran the land of Satan.

Impotent Leaders

The single most lamentable dilemma inflicting Muslim countries is that there is not a single leader worth his salt to stand up and sincerely work for his country and nation, while the United States of Amnesia proudly present the modern leader of crusades against the axis of evil, President George Bushy; and Israel have always had leaders - since Ben Gurion to Ariel Sharon - worthy of being tagged soldiers of the nation; what Muslims have been perpetually enduring are President Musharraf, King Fah’d, and President Mubarak, now unctuous leaders like these can ever really be mubarak?

Perhaps for America.

Mr. Mushy cannot waste a day without using the word moderation; now what kind of moderation does he mean? Does he talk about health reforms, education, minority rights, women rights, liberation from feudalism, and erasure of hideous blasphemy laws and karokari traditions? No, in his dictionary moderation is under the thesaurus for pop music, dancing youth and fashion shows; nothing wrong with any of that, everyone should have the fundamental right towards entertainment, but should that what a leader be all about? Was that all his idol Ata-Turk stood for? And concomitantly he has combined in his government the same Islamic radicals he discards and ridicules with such fervor; these religious parties are currently enjoying the political power they could never hold in Pakistan's brief history.
In the last three decades, Pakistan suffered a solipsistic feudal lord propelling socialism, a solipsistic self-appointed caliph perpetrating sophistical jihad with ubiquitous guns and opium, and is currently traumatized by a solipsistic despot advocating ostensible moderation. And off course in between we had two leaders, not so solipsistic, but one controlled by her mian jee, and the other by his abba jee; both competed with great zeal and unflagging commitment in an interminable relay race for corruption.

With titular leaders like these who can blame Muslims for their truculence.
With generals like Arafat and other profligating nabobs and poltroons of Al-Fatah, who can blame Palestinian kids for pelting stones at military tanks of Israel, and what will those kids eventually grow up to be?

Doctors? Lawyers?

And who can we blame for these obsequious mannequins?
It was the U.S. which overthrew the democratically elected government of Prime Minister Mossadegh in Iran in 1953 and imposed in its place the regime of the Shah, which eventually resulted in the Khomeini revolution of 1979.
It was the U.S., which once saw the Baathists as its "party of choice" in Iraq, so long as the Baathists were butchering communists and Iranis.

It was the U.S., which backed King Hussein in April 1957, six months after Jordan's first election, which had brought a leftist to power as prime minister. Hussein dismissed the government and banned almost all political parties.
It was the U.S., which welcomed Algeria's decision in January 1992 to cancel elections when it appeared that the Islamic Salvation Front, an Islamist party, would win a majority in parliament.

And it is solely the U.S. vehemently backing our very own factotum, the Dictator cum President cum Chief of the Army Staff cum Chief Executive Officer of the sinking firm named Pakistan, Mr. Mushy.

And it is also the U.S which concurrently renounces it's imperial despotism, "sixty years of Western nations excusing and accommodating the lack of freedom in the Middle East" Bushy said, and announced his Greater Middle East Initiative (GMEI)--to work for a "forward strategy of democracy and freedom in the Middle East.” every au fait is aware about the origins and excessively opportunistic histories of Karzai (12), Talabani (13), Allawai, and Chalabi (14), but now when confronted with what MSNBC calls "a stunning victory" of the Islamic Resistance Party (Hamas) in Palestine, he retorts: "the United States does not support political parties that want to destroy our ally, Israel, and. [we insist] that people must renounce that part of their platform."

Not just that, they are holding 2 billion Dollars worth of aid promised to Palestine; with a myriad of sanctions already implied on them and Palestinian youth burdened with despondency and null economy, what kind of future generation do they hope will emanate from the derisory settlings of West Bank and Gaza, now concatenated as Palestine.

Almost every nation has a leader to look up to; Muslims like derelict children have had a dark barren sky, with a litany of leaders but incredulously not one they could call their own. Consequently a minority of ignorant and intolerant amongst them have usurped in their own hands the duty to uphold Allah, and their respective country's pitiable indignation in the comity of nations have resolved them in to factions, and canonized their utopian (or dystopian) glory: a totalitarian theocracy.

The gist of the matter is that extremism is not a privilege of a certain dogma or religion, it is the damien of illiteracy, suppression, and ignorance; and in any part of the world pertaining this tangible axis of evil, extremism will be perennially circumambient.
And then there are leaders like Bush, Osama, Saddam, and Musharraf, and certainly many others to feed on it like parasites.

References:

1. Quoted by Paul Reynolds, 16th November 2005. White Phosphorus: weapon on the edge. BBC News Online.
2. Gulflink.osd.mil
3. The Documentary can be watched here
4. Mike Marqusee, 10th November 2005. Fallujah: A name that lives in infamy. The Guardian.
5. George Monbiot, November 22, 2005. Behind the phosphorus clouds are war crimes within war crimes. The Guardian.
6. F J West, July 2005. The Fall of Fallujah. The Marine Corps Gazette.
7. Lester W. Grau and Timothy Smith, August 2000. A Crushing Victory: Fuel-air explosives and Grozny 2000. The Marine Corps Gazette.
8. Ronnie Kasrils and Victoria Brittain, 25th May 2005. Both Palestinians and Israelis will benefit from a boycott. The Guardian
9. Stuart Ewen, PR: A social History of Spin.
10. Sheldon Rampton and John Stauber, Weapons of Mass Deception.
11. Prem Shankar Jha, 16th January 2006. The Axis of Excess. Outlook India
12. Jon Lee Anderson, 6th June 2005. The Man In The Palace. The New Yorker
13. Democracy Now. 7th April 2005. Iraq's new president Jalal Talabani: Ally of CIA, Iranian Intelligence and Saddam Hussein.
14. Think Progress. 8th November 2005. Sleeping With the Enemy: Chalabi's Sordid History.