On August 18th, 2010
Courtesy Of "The Foreign Policy Journal"
On August 4, 2010, Rabbi Michael Lerner, editor of Tikkun Magazine and chair of the Interfaith Network of Spiritual Progressives, published an article in Sabbah Report, entitled “Shame on ADL for Opposing Mosque 2Blocks from Ground Zero.”
Rabbi Lerner’s position on the ADL’s (Anti-Defamation League) objection to building an Islamic Community Center in Manhattan, near Ground Zero is praiseworthy. But his interpretation of ADL’s reasons for resisting such a project lacks insight. ADL leader Abe Foxman’s statement: “In our judgment, building an Islamic Center in the shadow of the World Trade Center will cause some victims more pain – unnecessarily – and that is not right,” spells out the real reasons behind the decision. That decision cunningly reinforces the notion that Muslim fundamentalists were behind the attacks of 9/11 – a position also perpetrated by the architects of those attacks.
Rabbi Lerner’s statement: “It was not ‘Muslims’ or Islam that attacked the World Trade Center, but some Muslims who held extreme versions of Islam and twisted what is a holy and peace-oriented tradition to justify their acts and their hatred,” echoes George W. Bush’s address to a joint session of Congress on Thursday, September 20, 2001, whereby the blame for 9/11 was put on “a fringe form of Islamic extremism … that perverts the peaceful teachings of Islam.” Unfortunately, both positions – the first, explicitly, the second, apologetically – demonize Islam.
As rightly noted by Jack G. Shaheen in his book Reel Bad Arabs: How Hollywood Vilified a People (see also, Reel Bad Arabs – Part 1, Part 2, Part 3, Part 4, Part 5), a consistent stereotype of Arabs and their religion existed since the earliest, most obscure days of Hollywood. Perhaps, this was the continuation of European fascination with Orientalism. However, in the hands of Hollywood, it acquired a new malicious bend that increased proportionally with the number of Jewish entrepreneurs in Hollywood. Arabs were typically presented as rich and stupid, and their Western captives as victims of prejudice, manipulation and oppression. This pattern was further exploited by Zionists to include violence and acts of terrorism.
In 1993 Foreign Affairs published an article by Harvard Professor Samuel P. Huntington entitled: “The Clash of Civilizations?” that expanded into a book with the same title in 1996. The article endorsed the idea that “during the Cold War, the world was divided into the First, Second and Third Worlds.” According to Huntington, “those divisions … [were] no longer relevant”: “It is far more meaningful now to group countries not in terms of their political or economic systems or in terms of their level of economic development but rather in terms of their culture and civilization.” “It is my hypothesis that the fundamental source of conflict in this new world will not be primarily ideological or primarily economic. The great divisions among humankind and the dominating source of conflict will be cultural. Nation states will remain the most powerful actors in world affairs, but the principal conflicts of global politics will occur between nations and groups of different civilizations.”
Amplifying the “differences among civilizations,” Huntington emphasized the role played by history, language, culture and tradition. According to Huntington, differences of religion are the most important among cultural discrepancies: “Even more than ethnicity, religion discriminates sharply and exclusively among people. A person can be half-French and half-Arab and simultaneously even a citizen of two countries. It is more difficult to be half-Catholic and half-Muslim.” Huntington identified seven or eight major civilizations including “Western, Confucian, Japanese, Islamic, Hindu, Slavic-Orthodox, Latin American and possibly African,” predicting that the most important conflict will occur “along the cultural fault lines separating these civilizations from one another”: “The fault lines between civilizations will be the battle lines of the future.”
According to Huntington, the same “fault lines” will replace the “political and ideological boundaries of the Cold War as the flash points for crisis and bloodshed”: “… Conflicts between groups in different civilizations will be more frequent, more sustained and more violent than conflicts between groups in the same civilization.” Huntington identifies these conflicts as “the most likely and most dangerous source of escalation that could lead to global wars.” “The West and the Rest” in Huntington’s prediction of future clashes amounts to a conflict between “the West and several Islamic-Confucian states.” Islam is not identified as the single source of conflict; rather it appears in juxtaposition with Confucian civilization. Yet, Huntington’s reliance on the opinions of Indian Muslim author M. J. Akbar – “The West’s ‘next confrontation’ … ‘is definitely going to come from the Muslim world” – allows him to ignore the advice of Bernard Lewis, whose article “The Roots of Muslim Rage” inspired his title.
Bernard Lewis’ statement: “We are facing a mood and a movement far transcending the level of issues and policies and the governments that pursue them. This is no less than a clash of civilizations – the perhaps irrational but surely historic reaction of an ancient rival against our Judeo-Christian heritage, our secular present, and the worldwide expansion of both,” quoted by Huntington, had a continuation: “It is crucially important that we on our side should not be provoked into an equally historic but also equally irrational reaction against that rival” – that was perhaps more relevant for the argument than the emphasis on the clash of civilizations. This statement and the embedded advice were ignored by Huntington. Instead, Huntington sites historical and modern factors to promote the idea that a “bloody” clash between Western and Islamic civilizations is imminent: “Conflict along the fault line between Western and Islamic civilizations has been going on for 1,300 years.”
A superficial overview of history allows him to state that “Islam has bloody borders.”This statement, notoriously emphasizing a civilizational conflict between “Islam and the West,” became the credo of Zionists like Steven Emerson, whose crusade against Muslims conveniently took yet another turn – anti-Muslim attitudes were camouflaged as anti-terrorist sentiments. Emerson’s 1994 PBS video, Jihad in America “was faulted for bigotry and misrepresentations.” Robert Friedman accused Emerson of “creating mass hysteria against American Arabs.” Emerson accused Bill Clinton for “legitimizing self-declared ‘civil rights’ and ‘mainstream’ Islamic organizations that in fact operated as propaganda and political arms of Islamic fundamentalist movements.” He went as far as to declare that “Muslim terrorist sympathizers were hanging out at the White House.”
Conveniently ignoring the growing problem of Jewish fundamentalism in Israel and the United States (see, “The Ugly Face of the Zionist Jihad: The Halachic Guide for the Killing of Gentiles”), and typically prefacing his “diatribes” by stating that there are good Muslims and bad Muslims, Emerson blacklisted Islam by espousing in a deliberate assault against it: “The level of vitriol against Jews and Christianity withincontemporary Islam, unfortunately, is something that we are not totally cognizant of, or that we don’t want to accept. We don’t want to accept it because to do so would be to acknowledge that one of the world’s great religions – which has more than 1.4 billion adherents – somehow sanctions genocide, planned genocide, as part of its religious doctrine.”
After the events of 9/11, a few of Emerson’s earlier comments acquired the status of “prophesy.” In 1994 he claimed that radical Muslims in the United States were plotting the “mass murder of all Jews, Christians and moderate Muslims.” In 1996 he attacked the Council on Foreign Relations for including “Muslim points of views” in its newsletter. And finally, in1997 he warned that “the U.S. has become occupied fundamentalist territory.”
The anti-Muslim rhetoric of the “grand inquisitor” acquires a new meaning, when one considers Emerson’s “friends.” Yigal Carmon, “a right-wing Israeli intelligence commander, who endorsed the use of torture” stayed in Emerson’s Washington apartment during his trips “to lobby Congress against Middle East peace initiatives.” A retired CIA counterterrorism specialist Vince Cannistraro said that Emerson’s allies, Pomerantz, Revell and Carmon were “Israeli-funded.” “How do I know that?” Cannistraro explained – “Because they tried to recruit me.” Cannistraro’s assertions were vehemently denied, but others suspected Israeli backing as well. Jerusalem Post of September 17, 1994 noted that Emerson had “close ties to Israeli intelligence,” Mossad, whose director reported only to the Israeli Prime Minister.
Hollywood’s groundwork was certainly useful to all that planned on instigating a clash of civilization between Muslims and non-Muslims. Huntington’s civilizational conflict between “Islam and the West” became the cornerstone of Zionist propaganda. But long before the establishment of Israel, the Zionist intellectual Maurice Samuel in hisYou Gentiles of 1924 polarized the Gentile and the Jewish worlds: “There are two life-forces in the world I know: Jewish and Gentile, ours and yours … Your outlook on life, your dominant reactions, are the same to-day as they were two thousand years ago. All that has changed is the instrument of expression” (pp. 19-20). Samuel admits that the “surface credo of a Jewish faith” imposed on a Gentile way of life did not make a fundamental difference: “But in the end your true nature works itself into the pattern of the borrowed faith, and expresses itself undeniably” (p. 22).
According to Samuel there is a “clear and fateful division of life – Jewish and Gentile,” with an “unsounded abyss between” them. Gentiles have a “way of living and thinking” that is distinctly different from Jews: “I do not believe that this primal difference between gentile and Jew is reconcilable. You and we may come to an understanding, never to a reconciliation. There will be irritation between us as long as we are in intimate contact. For nature and constitution and vision divide us from all of you forever…” (pp. 22-23).
Samuel’s description provides a classic example of a real “clash of civilizations.” The notion of a clash also fits Samuel’s final solution, based on the destruction of the existing world order: “A century of partial tolerance gave us Jews access to your world. In that period the great attempt was made, by advance guards of reconciliation, to bring our two worlds together. It was a century of failure. … We Jews, we, the destroyers, will remain the destroyers forever. Nothing that you will do will meet our needs and demands. We will forever destroy because we need a world of our own, a God-world, which it is not in your nature to build” (p. 155).
The modern equivalent of Samuel’s “God-world” and “destroyers” is religiously motivated terrorism – the accusation conveniently hurled at Muslims. After 9/11 – a false flag operation, no doubt – every Mossad-induced terrorist hoax, from shoe-bombers to crotch-bombers, is blamed on Muslims. Meanwhile, terrorist attacks on civilians of a humanitarian aid ship are dubbed as self-defence. There certainly is a clash of civilizations, witnessed by its concomitant double standard. But the clash is not between Muslims and non-Muslims, as the Zionists claim. Rather, the real clash, as Samuel described so promptly, is between Jews and Gentiles. The bogus clash, conveniently induced through tags like “Islam has bloody borders,” is of Zionist origin. It fits the Zionist strategy of demonizing Islam, and is an expedient cover for the real clash between Jews and Gentiles.
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