Constructing The Muslim Enemy From The Crusades To 9 11

Dr. Deepa Kumar is an Associate Professor of Media Studies and Middle Eastern Studies at Rutgers University. Her work is driven by an active engagement with the key issues that characterize our era -- neoliberalism and imperialism. She has been active in various social movements for peace and justice and has written numerous articles in both scholarly journals and alternative media.

Kumar's first book, Outside the Box: Corporate Media, Globalization and the UPS Strike, is about the power of collective struggle in effectively challenging the priorities of neoliberalism. Her second book titled Islamophobia and the Politics of Empire, looks at how the "Muslim enemy" has historically been mobilized to suit the goals of empire.

Kumar began her research into the politics of empire shortly after the tumultuous events of 9/11. She is currently working on a third book on the discourses of terrorism within the mainstream media and in the political sphere in the US. 

Hosted by the Center for Asian American Studies with generous support from the Office of the President, the Department of English, Division of Diversity and Community Engagement, Middle Eastern Studies and the South Asia Institute.

American Anthrax

Media Roots presents American Anthrax, a documentary comprised of news footage that establishes, by history's own narration, how everything you've been told about the Anthrax Attacks is a lie. Conceptualized, edited and produced by Robbie Martin, co-host of Media Roots Radio.

September 11, 2001, shook the United States to the core, a country that had been nearly untouchable since its democratic inception. However, immediately following this horrific tragedy, another equally as impactful 'terrorist attack' occurred when weaponized anthrax was sent to multiple Congressman and journalists through the U.S. Postal Service.

The attacks on the World Trade Center and the Pentagon were both one-time events that happened in two prominent cities. Unlike 9/11, the Anthrax Attacks localized terrorism and spread fear to every corner of American life, where the simple act of getting your mail could prove to be fatal. Five people died as a result of breathing in the deadly anthrax spores, including postal workers and one NY Post reporter. Countless others were infected.

The Bush administration initially tried to link this 'second wave of terrorism' to al-Qaeda with zero proof. Once that talking point out-lived its usefulness, the official narrative began leaning towards Saddam Hussein and his mythological biological weapons program.

Establishment propagandists like John McCaine and ABC news reporters intentionally spread disinformation to plant the seed in the public mind that the anthrax came from Iraq, which eventually lead to Colin Powell's infamous 2003 WMD speech at the UN. All the while, the U.S. government was fully aware that the anthrax did not come from an external source, because the strain showed tell-tale signs of being a specific anthrax strain that was weaponized and manufactured by the U.S. military.

Regardless, the idea of the Anthrax Attacks being executed by an external terrorist organization remained conventional wisdom the public was conditioned into believing in the aftermath of 9/11. Eventually, two men were accused of being the perpetrators behind the attacks, yet no charges were ever brought to either of them. The first accused individual, Steven Hatfill, ended up being rewarded a multimillion dollar settlement from the government for being wrongly accused before any evidence was presented against him. The subsequent accused individual, Bruce Ivins, allegedly committed suicide while the FBI was trying to break him into confessing.

Ultimately, the FBI asked the National Academy of Sciences (NAS) to verify its evidence pointing to Ivins as the main suspect. Instead, the NAS concluded that the DNA in the anthrax sent in the mail was in fact not a match to the anthrax Ivins worked with. Before the National Academy of Sciences finished their independent investigation, the FBI rushed its pre-established conclusions about Ivins's guilt to the press, and the case was closed. To this day, the FBI has never commented on the many glaring contradictions in the official government narrative about the Anthrax Attacks.

Follow Robbie at @fluorescentgrey

http://www.mediaroots.org

The Detroit Sleeper Cell That Wasn't

... after years of legal wrangling, the “Detroit Sleeper Cell” became something very different: a cautionary tale about the dangers of pursuing terrorism cases too zealously and connecting dots where they might not exist.

The Justice Department, after winning terrorism convictions against two of the men in 2003, took the extraordinary step the next year of moving to throw out the charges and repudiating its own case. 

Prosecutors, remarkably, discredited their own witnesses and found fault with virtually every part of a case they had brought.

The prosecution, the Justice Department belatedly acknowleged, was a “three-legged stool” that toppled under its own weight.

The videotape found of Las Vegas landmarks, originally thought to be a terrorist “casing” video, might have been simply a tourist’s keepsake. An audiotape thought to contain an anti-American hate speech appeared to be just an old children’s song in Arabic about a duck.

And the odd sketch in a day planner of what looked like a blueprint for an attack on a Turkish air base? Perhaps nothing more than a mentally ill man’s doodling of a Middle East map, prosecutors were forced to acknowledge.

Prosecutors turned against prosecutors. Ethics inquiries were opened and criminal charges filed — this time against two government officials who helped put the case together. Attorney General Ashcroft was reprimanded by the judge in the case for falsely linking the suspects to the Sep. 11 attacks in violation of a gag order.

There were no clear winners in the case; a certain loser was the federal government itself, as its “new paradigm” of thwarting terrorists before they struck clashed headlong into age-old notions of justice and due process.

We in the media breathlessly covered every warning and tip about threats real and imagined: scuba divers, cargo trucks, tourist helicopters around the Statue of Liberty, a cable-cutting blowtorch on the Brooklyn Bridge and more, as if they were the next big attack. 

But by 2004, the year that the case collapsed in court, the pendulum had begun to shift. Three years removed from Sept. 11, the Bush administration was facing tougher scrutiny of its tactics in the “war on terror” from the media, the courts and the public at large. The Detroit case, once a symbol of the new threat of Islamic terrorism, became a symbol of government over-reaching instead.

Weeks after the collapse of the Detroit prosecution, a Times colleague, Danny Hakim, and I wrote a long investigative piece that examined the unraveling of such a high-profile case. What we found was infighting within the Justice Department, internal doubts about the strength of the case, tainted witnesses and questionable legal tactics.

We found that, inside the Justice Department, prosecutors believed aspects of the case were weak even as they were moving ahead with a major terrorism indictment against the Detroit men.

“We can charge this case with the hope that the case might get better,” the head of the counter-terrorism section wrote in 2002, “and the certainty that it will not get much worse.”

In fact, it did.

Twelve years after the dramatic arrests of “the Detroit Sleeper Cell,” remnants of the case are still being litigated in the federal courts. The difference now is that the Justice Department is the defendant — the result of a long feud between the department and a former employee, Richard Convertino, the original prosecutor in the Detroit case.

The Justice Department blamed Mr. Convertino for much of the bungled case and even brought criminal obstruction charges against him in 2006 for reportedly withholding evidence from defense lawyers for the Detroit men. But Mr. Convertino was acquitted of the charges and insisted he became the scapegoat for bad decisions that were largely made by higher-ups in Washington.

Last year, an appeals court revived a lawsuit that Mr. Convertino filed against the Justice Department. He is trying to establish that someone at the department improperly and anonymously leaked his name to The Detroit Free Press in 2004 as the target of an internal ethics investigation growing out of his handling of the Detroit case.

Earlier this year, a judge ordered the newspaper to turn over internal documents related to its original story on the ethics charges. The legal battle over Mr. Convertino’s lawsuit could mean still more embarrassment for the Justice Department in a case it once embraced.

How To Foil A Terrorist Plot In 7 Simple Steps

By Nora Ephron 

1. In order to foil a terrorist plot, you must first find a terrorist plot. This is not easy.

2. Not just anyone can find and then foil a terrorist plot. You must have an incentive.

The best incentive is to be an accused felon, looking at a long prison term. Under such circumstances, your lawyer will explain to you, you may be able to reduce your sentence by acting as an informant in a criminal case, preferably one involving terrorists.

3. The fact that you do not know any actual terrorists should not in any way deter you.

Necessity is the mother of invention: if you can find the right raw material -- a sad, sick, lonely, drunk, deranged, disgruntled or just plain anti-American Muslim somewhere in the United States -- you can make your very own terrorist.

4. Now the good part begins. Money!

The FBI will give you lots of money to take your very own terrorist out to lots of dinners where you, wearing a wire, can record yourself making recommendations to him about possible targets and weapons that might be used in the impending terrorist attack that your very own terrorist is going to mastermind, with your help.

It will even buy you a computer so you can go to Google Earth in order to show your very own terrorist a "top secret" aerial image of the target you have suggested.

5. More money!!

The FBI will give you even more money to travel to foreign countries with your very own terrorist, and it will make suggestions about terrorist groups you can meet while in said foreign countries.

6. Months and even years will pass in this fashion, while you essentially get the FBI to pay for everything you do.

(Incidentally, be sure your lawyer negotiates your expense account well in advance, or you may be forced -- as the informant was in the Buffalo terrorist case -- to protest your inadequate remuneration by setting yourself on fire in front of the White House.)

7. At a certain point, something will go wrong.

You may have trouble recruiting other people to collaborate with your very own terrorist, who is, as you yourself know, just an ordinary guy in a really bad mood.

Or, alternatively, the terrorist cell you have carefully cobbled together may malfunction and fail to move forward -- probably as a result of sheer incompetence or of simply not having been genuinely serious about the acts of terrorism you were urging it to commit.

At this point, you may worry that the FBI is going to realize that there isn't much of a terrorist plot going on here at all, just a case of entrapment.

Do not despair: the FBI is way ahead of you.

The FBI knows perfectly well what's going on. The FBI has as much at stake as you do.

So before it can be obvious to the world that there's no case, the FBI will arrest your very own terrorist, hold a press conference and announce that a huge terrorist plot has been foiled.

It will of course be forced to admit that this plot did not proceed beyond the pre-planning stage, that no actual weapons or money were involved, and that the plot itself was "not technically feasible," but that will not stop the story from becoming a front-page episode all over America and, within hours, boilerplate for all the Republican politicians who believe that you need to arrest a "homegrown" terrorist now and then to justify the continuing war in Iraq.

Everyone will be happy, except for the schmuck you shmikeled into becoming a terrorist, and no one really cares about him anyway.

So congratulations. You have foiled a terrorist plot. Way to go.

Manufacturing Terrorists

Inside The FBI's Terror Sting Operations.

By Michael German
Courtesy Of "Reason Online"

Imagine a country in which the government pays convicted con artists and criminals to scour minority religious communities for disgruntled, financially desperate, or mentally ill patsies who can be talked into joining fake terror plots, even if only for money. Imagine that the country's government then busts its patsies with great fanfare to justify ever-increasing authority and ever-increasing funding. According to journalist Trevor Aaronson's The Terror Factory, this isn't the premise for a Kafka novel; it's reality in the post-9/11 United States.

The Terror Factory is a well-researched and fast-paced exposé of the dubious tactics the FBI has used in targeting Muslim Americans with sting operations since 2001. The book updates and expands upon Aaronson's award-winning 2011 Mother Jones cover story, "The Informants." Most readers have likely heard about several alleged conspiracies to attack skyscrapers, synagogues, or subway stations, involving either individuals that the FBI calls "lone wolves" or small cells a credulous press tagged with such sinister appellations as the "Newburgh 4" or the "Liberty City 7." Many of these frightening plots were almost entirely concocted and engineered by the FBI itself, using corrupt agents provocateurs who often posed a far more serious criminal threat than the dim-witted saps the investigations targeted.

Drawing on court records and on interviews with the defendants, their lawyers, their families, and the FBI officials and prosecutors who oversaw the investigations, Aaronson portrays an agency that has adopted an "any means necessary" approach to its terrorism prevention efforts, regardless of whether there are real terrorists being caught. To the FBI, this imperative justifies recruiting informants with extensive criminal records, including convictions for fraud, violent crimes, and even child molestation, that in an earlier era would have disqualified them except in the most extraordinary circumstances.

In addition to providing leniency, if not forgiveness, for heinous crimes, the FBI pays these informants tens to hundreds of thousands of dollars, creating a perverse incentive for them to ensnare dupes into terror plots. Aaronson quotes an FBI official defending this practice: "To catch the devil you have to go to hell."

Such an analysis might make sense when police leverage one criminal to gain information about more serious criminal conspiracies—in other words, to catch a real "devil." But Aaronson's research reveals that the targets in most of these sting operations clearly pose little real threat. They may have a history of angry anti-government rhetoric, but they take no steps toward terrorist acts until they receive encouragement and resources from government agents.

Aaronson takes pains to avoid portraying those caught in the stings as completely innocent of malice. But he demonstrates that they almost universally lack violent criminal histories or connections to real terrorist groups. Most importantly, while they may have talked about committing violent acts, they rarely had weapons of their own and lacked the financial means to acquire them. Yet the government provides them with military hardware that would cost thousands of dollars and would be extremely difficult for even sophisticated criminal organizations to obtain, only to bust them in a staged finale.

This aspect of Aaronson's narrative is most troubling to me, as a former FBI agent who worked undercover in domestic terrorism investigations before 9/11. My concern is partly that the artificially inflated scope of the threat in these cases appears to be specifically designed to overwhelm judges, jurors, and the general public, who might otherwise view these methods as illegal entrapment. Indeed, the judge in a case in which an informant offered a seemingly reluctant James Cromitie $250,000 to participate in his plot, severely criticized the investigation, stating: "Only the government could have made a terrorist out of Mr. Cromitie, whose buffoonery is positively Shakespearean in scope." Yet she let the jury's conviction stand and sentenced Cromitie to 25 years in prison. Of 150 defendants charged in these schemes, Aaronson documents only two acquittals. The majority plead guilty to mitigate draconian penalties. Law enforcement has no business staging theatrical productions that intentionally exaggerate the seriousness of a defendant's criminal conduct.

More unsettling is the flawed reasoning that drives the use of these methods. FBI agents have been inundated with bigoted training materials that falsely portray Arabs and Muslims as inherently violent. The FBI has also embraced an unfounded theory of "radicalization" thatalleges a direct progression from adopting certain beliefs, or expressing opposition to U.S. policies, to becoming a terrorist. With such a skewed and biased view of the American Muslim community, the FBI's strategy of "preemption, prevention, and disruption" results in abusive surveillance, targeting, and exploitation of innocent people simply for exercising their First Amendment rights.

One area where Aaronson is off the mark, however, is in failing to recognize these tactics are neither new to the FBI nor exclusively used against Muslims. The FBI's earliest documented use of agents provocateurs was revealed during congressional investigations of labor "radicals," pacifists, and socialists in 1918. And the Church Committee's investigation of the FBI's COINTELPRO investigations revealed covert operations that targeted groups for First Amendment–protected activities from the 1950s through the 1970s.

In both cases, reform of these practices was implemented by restricting FBI intelligence activities and requiring a reasonable suspicion of criminal activity before initiating investigations. Conversely, the rapid increase in sting operations under the Obama administration is directly attributable to some 2008 amendments to the FBI's guidelines, which authorized the use of informants without requiring any factual predicate of wrongdoing.

The FBI has also used these dubious tactics against aged anti-government militiamen and misfit anarchists, so it there's more than Muslims in the crosshairs: Without reforming the FBI guidelines, anyone holding unorthodox views or challenging government policies could be similarly targeted.

Michael German is a former FBI agent who currently works for the American Civil Liberties Union. 

Missing The Point

Paul Brandeis Raushenbush writes:

In the immediate aftermath of the horrific shootingat the Sikh Gurdwara (that's the name of a Sikh House of Worship, not temple, not church), the media began to emphasize the difficulty many Americans have distinguishing between Sikhs and Muslims.

As Jian Ghomeshi tweeted: "It's both interesting and disturbing that CNN keeps feeling the need to point out that Sikhs are not Muslims."

Even some Sikh commentators found a need to make it clear that that they are peaceful people, which had a disturbing undertone of differentiating themselves from the bad, warring Muslims.

This is a good learning moment for the American people of all religions, and especially for the American media. Yes, Sikhs are not Muslims and Sikhs are not Hindus, but jumping to clarify difference leaves the unfortunate, if unintentional, perception that there is something wrong with those "others."

I am reminded of the run up to the election four years ago when the Obama campaign kept on emphasizing that the candidate was not a Muslim. Only Colin Powell had the guts to stand up and say the obvious: The fact that Obama isn't a Muslim should not be the focus of the campaign, rather we should all remind ourselves that it shouldn't matter if Obama were a Muslim.

Via: "The Huffington Post"

And, VIJAY PRASHAD observes:

Two quick reactions to the Oak Creek violence raised the hackles of some of the sharp organizers in the South Asian American community:

* This was an act of senseless violence. “No,” said Rinku Sen, publisher of Colorlines magazines. This is not “senseless,” she noted, but “racist.” This is the fifty-seventh mass shooting in the past thirty years in the United States. Each one is treated as the work of a freak. Patterns are shunned. Structural factors such as the prevalence of guns and the lack of social care for mentally disturbed people should of course be in the frame. 

But so too should the preponderance of socially acceptable hatred against those seen as outsiders. Intellectually respectable opinions about who is an American (produced, for example, by Sam Huntington, Who Are We? The Challenge to National Identity) comes alongside the politician’s casual racism (Romney’s recent suggestion that the US and the UK are “part of an Anglo-Saxon heritage,” erased in a whip lash the diversity of the United States and Britain). Racist attacks are authorized by a political culture that allows us to think in nativist terms, to bemoan the “browning” of America. 

By 2034, the Census department estimates, the non-white population of the US is going to be in the majority. With the political class unwilling to reverse the tide of jobless growth and corporate power, the politicians stigmatize the outsider as the problem of poverty and exploitation. 

This stigmatization, as Moishe Postone argues, obscures “the role played by capitalism in the reproduction of grief.” Far easier to let the Sikhs and the Latinos, the Muslims and the Africans bear the social cost for economic hopelessness and political powerlessness than to target the real problem: the structures that benefit the 1% and allow them to luxuriate in Richistan.

* Sikhs are not Muslims. The second argument, now clichéd, is to make the case that this is violence at the wrong address. Sikhs did nothing wrong, they are peace-loving and so on. It assumes that there are people who did do something wrong, are war-mongering and therefore deserve to be targeted. The liberal gesture of innocence has within it the sharp edge of Islamaphobia. It seems to suggest that Muslims are the ones who should bear this violence, since their ilk did the attacks on 9/11 and they are, all two billion of them, at war with the United States.  

The attack on Sikhs is not a mistaken attack. Sikhs are not mistaken for Muslims, but seen as part of the community of outsiders who are, as Patrick Buchanan puts it in States of Emergency: The Third World Invasion and Conquest of America, “a fifth column inside the belly of the beast…Should America lose her ethnic-cultural core and become a nation of nations, America will not survive.” Wisconsin’s Governor Scott Walker is not far from all this, being a fan of the Arizona anti-human legislation. 

The Sikh Coalition, an anti-bias group, is fully aware that this is not simply a situation of mistaken identity. Its 2008 report, Making Our Voices Heard, notes that although it is not the case that Sikhs are members of the Taliban or clones of Bin Laden, it is this recurrent identification that has by now “created an environment in which Sikhs are regularly singled out for abuse and mistreatment by both private and, at times, public actors.” 

Strikingly, forty-one percent of Sikhs in New York City reported being called derogatory names, half of the Sikh children reported being teased or harassed because of their Sikh identity and one hundred percent of Sikhs report having to endure secondary screenings at some US airports.

Via: "CounterPunch"

14 Key Characteristics Of A Fascist State

Manufactured fear, corporate welfare and false patriotism are also among the 14 key characteristics of a fascist state. Dr. Lawrence Britt has examined the fascist regimes of Hitler (Germany), Mussolini (Italy), Franco (Spain), Suharto (Indonesia) and several Latin American regimes. Britt found 14 defining characteristics common to each ~ and America has virtually all of them;

1. Powerful and Continuing Nationalism - Fascist regimes tend to make constant use of patriotic mottos, slogans, symbols, songs, and other paraphernalia.
2. Disdain for the Recognition of Human Rights - Because of fear of enemies and the need for security, the people in fascist regimes are persuaded that human rights can be ignored in certain cases because of "need."
3. Identification of Enemies/Scapegoats as a Unifying Cause - The people are rallied into a unifying patriotic frenzy over the need to eliminate a perceived common threat or foe.
4. Supremacy of the Military - Even when there are widespread domestic problems, the military is given a disproportionate amount of government funding, and the domestic agenda is neglected. Soldiers and military service are glamorized.
5. Rampant Sexism - The governments of fascist nations tend to be almost exclusively male-dominated. Under fascist regimes, traditional gender roles are made more rigid.
6. Controlled Mass Media - Sometimes to media is directly controlled by the government, but in other cases, the media is indirectly controlled by government regulation, or sympathetic media spokespeople and corporate executives.
7. Obsession with National Security - Fear is used as a motivational tool by the government over the masses.
8. Religion and Government are intertwined - Governments in fascist nations tend to use the most common religion in the nation as a tool to manipulate public opinion.
9. Corporate Power is protected - The industrial and business aristocracy of a fascist nation often are the ones who put the government leaders into power, creating a mutually beneficial business/government relationship and power elite.
10. Labor Power is suppressed – Because the organizing power of labor is the only real threat to a fascist government, labor unions are either eliminated entirely, or are severely suppressed.
11. Disdain for Intellectuals and the Arts - Fascist nations tend to promote and tolerate open hostility to higher education, and academia.
12. Obsession with Crime and Punishment - Under fascist regimes, the police are given almost limitless power to enforce laws. The people are often willing to overlook police abuses and even forego civil liberties in the name of patriotism.
13. Rampant Cronyism and Corruption - Fascist regimes almost always are governed by groups of friends and associates who appoint each other to government positions and use governmental power and authority to protect their friends from accountability.
14. Fraudulent Elections - Sometimes elections in fascist nations are a complete sham. Other times elections are manipulated by smear campaigns against or even assassination of opposition candidates, use of legislation to control voting numbers or political district boundaries, and manipulation of the media.

Culture Of Fear

Post by "CavalierZee"



The documentary details the epidemic of fear in our society, ranging from child predators to immigrants and from flu pandemic to terrorism. It features interviews with Dr. Noam Chomsky, a renowned linguist, human behaviorist, and political activist; US House Representative Dennis Kucinich, once US presidential candidate; and many other experts offering an in-depth exploration of the culture of fear. Culture of Fear is a term used by certain scholars, writers, journalists and politicians who believe that some in society incite fear in the general public to achieve political goals.

The term is used to describe fears about Islamic terrorism which, it is argued, are fears that are usually exaggerated or irrational in nature. The term has also been used to describe irrational fear in other contexts, such as citizens fearing persons of different ethnic backgrounds, or neighborhood residents fearing retribution if they assist police in identifying criminals.

Heaven on Earth: A Journey Through Sharia Law

By Eric Walberg.
Wednesday, Jun 13, 2012
Courtesy Of "Axis Of Logic"

by Sadakat Kadri
New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2012 

There are 50 Muslim-majority states in the world; 11 of them, including Egypt, have constitutions that acknowledge Islam as a source of national law. In Heaven on Earth, Sadakat Kadri, an English barrister and New York attorney, provides a much-needed and highly readable overview of Islamic legal history and an entertaining survey of the state of Islamic law today, full of fascinating anecdotes.

For instance, have you heard the one about the eleventh-century Sufi mystic whose prayers were interrupted by a familiar voice: "Oh, Abu Al-Hasan!" it boomed. "Do you want me to tell people what I know about your sins, so that they stone you to death?" "Oh, Lord," Al-Hasan whispered back. "Do you want me to tell people what I know about your mercy, so that none will ever feel obliged to bow down to you again?" "Keep your secret," came God's conspiratorial reply. "And I will keep mine."

Such risqué offerings aside, Kadri looks at the development of Islamic law from the time of the Prophet, focussing on attitudes to war, criminal justice, religious tolerance, and movements of reform through history. He provides valuable background for all those concerned and/or excited about today's resurgence of Islam. As the fastest growing religion, second only to Christianity in numbers (and surely first in terms of sincere practitioners), Islam is an increasingly powerful force not only in the world of religion, but in the realms of culture, politics and even economics.

The conventional wisdom about Islamic law is that the Prophet set out the legal basics in the Medinah surahs, the sharia, which was later codified as fiqh (jurisprudence) under the Umayyad and Abbasid caliphates as the four schools -- Hanafi, Maliki, Shafii and Hanbali. The original dynamism of Islamic jurisprudence, characterised especially in the Hanafi school by ijtihad (legal interpretation) was lost and "the gates of ijtihad closed" by the 14th century, as the Mongols devastated the Muslim world.

Today's Islam is supposedly eight centuries out of date and, according to the likes of religious scholar Hans Kung, needs both a Reformation and an Enlightenment a la Western civilisation to bring it into the 21st century.

The truth is very different. Yes, there was a burst of creativity in the 8th-11th centuries, which resulted in the Islamic world being far more "civilised" than a Europe stumbling through the Dark Ages. The transformation of sharia into fiqh began under the Abbasid Caliph Al-Mahdi (ruled 775-785), when the rising class of religious scholars (ulama) and the law itself gradually became independent of the ruler, and legal decisions had to be "witnessed and validated by upstanding men of the Muslim community, bound by oath: a jury, some four hundred years older than its English equivalent".

Interpretation, reasoning by analogy, consensus, and consultation flourished, creating a body of legal theory that did not so much "close" by the 14th century, but achieved a completeness that ensured that Islam would spread and remain the most vibrant of the world's religions over time. Kadri describes the development of Islamic fiqh as an "immense achievement. Formulated over the course of a few centuries, it took root across three continents and outshone Christendom for almost a millennium." It adapted to local conditions and customs, and "helped bind civilisations that were as diverse as any the world has seen."

The problem, as Kadri argues, is in the past century, especially the past "four decades of legal revivalism", that "have promoted theories that are eliminating space for fresh ideas and dissent wherever they gain ground".

Kadri provides a dispassionate analysis of the rise of violence within Islam which occurred since the 1970s, pointing to the Wahhabi movement, which in turn was inspired by a late arrival to fiqh -- the 13th century Ahmed Ibn Taymiyya, and his pupil Ibn Qayyim, whose stern warnings against apostasy and devotion to the salafi (the first few generations of Muslims) provide the stereotype of the austere and rigid approach to Islam so prominent in Western discourse today, one which indeed refuses innovation, calling on followers to imitate those who lived in the heroic period of Islamic history (taqlid).

The author traces how in the past few decades the call to violence and to the overthrow of kafir (unbeliever) leaders led to justifying killing of Muslims and anyone else who got in the way. Such innovations were formulated by the Egyptian Ayman Al-Zawahiri and Saudi Osama Bin Laden, inspired by their own reading of Ibn Taymiyya and the writings of Egyptian Sayyid Qutb in the 1960s.

But a higher proportion of US Muslims condemn military attacks on civilians than do Christian or Jewish Americans, and most victims of so-called Islamic terrorism are Muslims. Though he downplays the overwhelming violence of the US in its many wars over the past half-century, beside which Islam-inspired violence pales, Kadri does point out that violence is promoted just as much by such Islamophobes as Oslo-based American Bruce Bawer, author of While Europe Slept: How Radical Islam Is Destroying the West from Within (2010). Bawer argues -- hysterically -- that Europeans are yielding up their freedoms to the Muslim invaders, and that Muslims are reproducing "beyond the point of no return", which will soon mean "subservience or civil war" in Europe. Fellow Osloite Anders Breivik made 22 references to Bawer's writing in his online justification of the murder of more than 70 Norwegians in July 2011.

How Muslim emigres fit in to their new societies these days is an important theme in Heaven on Earth. The US is built on a culture of mass immigration and rapid assimilation, and despite the Islamophobia of especially the post 9/11 era, Muslims have adapted well to life in America and have prospered. In contrast, "Britain has historically received newcomers with a combination of curiosity, hostility, and indifference" fostering a "self-absorption in immigrant communities". The great militancy of British Muslims is the result.

In both countries -- infuriating local Islamophobes -- sharia has slipped in and now forms an essential element in those supposedly superior legal systems. The US federal arbitration law, passed by Congress in 1925, allows religious tribunals, and their judgments are given force of law by state and federal courts. Recent attempts to outlaw sharia (notably a referendum in Oklahoma) will fail with First Amendment appeals, predicts Kadri. After all, US Jews have had had their beth din religious courts for more than a century, and there are now Christian conciliators for those Christians who prefer canon law to the secular law of the land.

US courts "have been positively encouraging [its] use since the 1980s" for inheritance, business, and matrimonial disputes, "sorted out by Islamic scholars according to the sharia. "The precepts of Islamic law, like those of other religious codes, therefore have judicial force in the US already." Muftis near Birmingham UK set up the "Muslim Arbitration Tribunal to offer consenting parties the right to have their commercial and family disputes resolved according to Islamic law, for a small fee."

Kadri’s measured take on touchy subjects is well illustrated by his consideration of the infamous Danish cartoons defaming Mohammad. Though not condoning the violent response to the cartoons, he puts the blame on the Western promoters of "free speech": "Arguments about free speech and fair comment are beside the point when it comes to acknowledging sensitivities."

Kadri emphasises inner jihad -- the need to recognise that sharia governs one’s ego as well as society, and is a "path to salvation" rather than just a "set of orders". The new ferment in the Arab world gives rise to optimism for Kadri. Building on the 19th century Islamic reform movement, the Iranian revolution (which Kadri provides startling material on, based on his travels and interviews there), and recent events in the Arab world, the process of adapting democracy to Islam is well underway in our era of mass literacy. "The idea has spread that people should work out problems for themselves -- simply by reading the Quran, perhaps, or by thinking hard about what the Prophet, his companions, and the salafs of seventh century Arabia would have done."

"Sins are ultimately for God to judge." Mohammad and the early jurists preferred repentance to compulsion, and Muslim scholars mostly avoid the temptations of worldly power. Countering Western media hype, Kadri documents the "perennial reluctance of Muslim states to enforce the emblematic hadd (Quran-based) penalities".

All in all, the author concludes, this is "an excellent basis for social harmony today. The belief in a route toward salvation has always sought to transcend sins more than suppress them ... and humanity has no business anticipating the terrors of the hereafter." Warns Kadri, "mortals can only fail when they play God in the here and now."

Eric writes for Al-Ahram Weeklyhttp://weekly.ahram.org.eg/You can order his Postmodern Imperialism: Geopolitics and the Great Games or reach him athttp://ericwalberg.com/

Jews Face Special Risks Despite No “Specific, Credible Threat”

Secretary Speaks: Homeland Security Secretary Janet Napolitano speaks to staff at the Forward’s offices.

Homeland Security Sec'y Defends Controversial Grant Program

By Nathan Guttman
Published June 05, 2012, issue of June 15, 2012.
Courtesy Of "Forward"

Jews face special risks that require vigilance, though there is no “specific, credible threat” against Jewish targets, Janet Napolitano, secretary of the Department of Homeland Security, told the Forward during a visit to the newspaper’s New York offices.

In a June 4 meeting with the paper’s editorial staff, Napolitano cited the particular exposure she said Jews face in explanation of a DHS security grant program that mostly benefits Jewish groups.

“Unfortunately there are risks attendant on the Jewish community that are not attendant on all other communities,” she said.

Listen to an interview with Napolitano by Forward editor Jane Eisner and Washington correspondent Nathan Guttman:

A Forward report found that the program for DHS security grants for not-for-profit organizations was tailored to the Jewish community and that almost three-quarters of its funds went to Jewish institutions.

“The fact that it ends up going to many Jewish organizations doesn’t in itself bother me,” Napolitano said. She added that she had seen no evidence that the money was misspent, and that she believes the grant program has been successful.

Tension levels within the Jewish community, Napolitano said, hit a peak this past winter, following intensified rhetoric between Israel and Iran, and the indictment of an Iranian American in Texas for his role in an alleged plot by an Iranian official to bomb the Washington embassies of Israel and Saudi Arabia. These concerns prompted Napolitano to hold a conference call with 200 Jewish communal leaders last February, in which she discussed the threats and the actions taken to ensure the community’s safety.

During her tenure at DHS, Napolitano added, threats to the Jewish community came from foreign entities, from homegrown extremists and from “hate crime type of activity.”

On another topic, Napolitano said that the DHS has decided to allow Israeli citizens to enter the United States via a special fast-track program despite Israel’s decision not to grant Americans reciprocal consideration, as the United States usually requires.

Israel’s inclusion in the Global Entry program allows frequent visitors to the United States to complete a questionnaire about their backgrounds and thereafter enter the country by simply scanning their passports. Napolitano announced the decision to include Israeli citizens in the program during a May 20 visit to Israel. A reciprocity requirement that has been applied to all other countries seeking to join the program was waived in the case of Israel.

“We have a special friendship with Israel,” Napolitano explained. “President Obama is very committed to that relationship, and we are looking for ways to express that commitment within the portfolio of tasks that the Department of Homeland Security performs.”

At the same time, Napolitano was noncommittal when asked about a push by some members of Congress and the Israeli government to allow Israeli citizens to enter the United States without tourist visas at all, as is currently permitted for citizens of some European countries. The administration, she noted, has not yet expressed its view on this proposal.

During her recent visit to Israel, Napolitano discussed with Israeli officials the issue of securing borders while preserving the rights of refugees entering the country. Israel has been dealing recently with a wave of anti-immigrant sentiment aimed at African migrants seeking refuge in Israel. Napolitano did not, however, provide Israel with advice on the issue and would not comment on the Israeli government’s treatment of the Africans trying to enter the country.

On the issue of screening procedures in airports, however, the DHS secretary did make clear that the United States would not follow Israel’s model. Israel is known for employing screening techniques that profile air travelers based on their origin, ethnicity or faith. Security checks conducted at Ben Gurion International Airport routinely require one-to-one interviews. Napolitano said that the huge difference in scale makes screening via personal interviews impractical in the United States, with its scores of international entry points. “It’s against the law here to profile,” Napolitano added.

“Israel has perfected a system that works very well there,” Napolitano said. “They do a terrific job. But it’s not a system we can just transport 100% to the U.S. It won’t fit.”

Napolitano also pointedly declined to criticize New York City’s controversial program of surveillance of Muslim organizations and individuals with no known or suspected ties to terrorism. She said New York remains a potential terror target and that she was not going to “second-guess” any local police department or the program, which civil liberties groups believe amounts to illegal domestic spying.

Why I Threw Back My 'Global War On Terror' Medal

"I was a Nuclear Biological Chemical Weapons Specialist for a war that didn't have any Weapons of Mass Destruction! So I deserted. I'm one of the 40,000 people that left the United States Armed Forces because this is a lie!"

By Shawna Foster
Published on Friday, May 25, 2012
Courtesy Of "Common Dreams"

Those were the words I screamed into a microphone before thousands of people as I threw my Global War On Terror Service medal back to NATO. I had to throw it because no one from NATO came out to get it, and the police wouldn't allow us up to the barricade. Their fear of us -- US war veterans who challenge ten years of US war-making and publicly advocate for peace -- is symbolic of their fear to confront real problems.

I threw my medal back, though, in fact, I never deployed to Iraq or Afghanistan.

How was I even awarded this medal? Any service member who served in active duty after 9/11 was awarded this medal for NATO's Global War on Terror. Why? If you didn't know it, terrorists are everywhere, anywhere, and can strike at any time. Even in Omaha, Nebraska, where I waited to be deployed. Terrorists could have been there and so I was awarded this medal.

I threw back my medal because there is no 'global war on terror'. For that to be true, I'd have to be afraid. But, I am not afraid and I reject the peddling of fear that our leaders and media have fostered for more than ten years. When our nation becomes afraid, we are forced to do things we would rather not - like spend trillions of dollars on endless wars. Tragically, more than three thousand innocent people were killed on 9/11 at the hands of criminals and political terrorists. In response, our national leaders fabricated a war of lies that led to the death of thousands of US service members. We've been responsible for the death of 33,000 civilians living in Afghanistan. Tragedy beget massacres when we responded with fear and military might. And after 9/11, fear came to rule as true courage was sidelined.

I am not afraid anymore. I do not believe in the 'global war on terror'. I will not be made a coward by my government to hurt other people because I have been hurt. Instead, I will stand up as a United States citizen and disobey unlawful orders to perpetuate war. Ben Franklin once inferred that those 'who sacrifice liberty for security, deserve neither.' I agree. The United States has not "won" a war since War World II - instead, its imperial interests and rush to war have only bred international scorn. We go to war zones and the weapons often aimed at us are the ones we sold our "enemies" in the last war. If the United States truly wants to protect its people, it should courageously emphasize peace, not exploit the NATO mandate to justify unilateral actions.

Take your medals back NATO. Do the right thing. Disband the outdated military alliance and form a new coalition that fosters peace, not war. Adjust to a world beyond the Cold War and stop using 'terrorism' as an excuse to perpetuate endless wars and ever-growing military expenditures. Brokerage of peace is a more potent weapon against militant extremists than occupations and standing armies. NATO, you have made the problem worse, and I refuse to be a part of it.

As one who has rejected this false military campaign, I dare you to do the same. I dare you to be brave enough to hold yourself to account. I dare you to do the right thing: build a path towards peace and lead us away from war. I dare you to take my medal back.

Shawna Foster is a veteran of the US National Guard where she served as a Nuclear Biological Chemical Weapons Specialist. She now organizes with Iraq Veterans Against The War.

2011 - Year Of The Dupe

A Timeline & History: One Year Into The Engineered "Arab Spring," One Step Closer To Global Hegemony.

By Tony Cartalucci, Contributing Writer
Saturday, December 24, 2011
Courtesy Of "The Activist Post"

dupe

n.

1. An easily deceived person.

2. A person who functions as the tool of another person or power.

tr.v. duped, dup·ing, dupes To deceive (an unwary person).

In January of 2011, we were told that "spontaneous," "indigenous"uprising had begun sweeping North Africa and the Middle East in what was hailed as the "Arab Spring." It would be almost four months before the corporate-media would admit that the US had been behind the uprisings and that they were anything but "spontaneous," or "indigenous." In an April 2011 article published by the New York Times titled, "U.S. Groups Helped Nurture Arab Uprisings," it was stated:

A number of the groups and individuals directly involved in the revolts and reforms sweeping the region, including the April 6 Youth Movement in Egypt, the Bahrain Center for Human Rights and grass-roots activists like Entsar Qadhi, a youth leader in Yemen, received training and financing from groups like the International Republican Institute, the National Democratic Institute and Freedom House, a nonprofit human rights organization based in Washington.

The article would also add, regarding the US National Endowment for Democracy (NED):

The Republican and Democratic institutes are loosely affiliated with the Republican and Democratic Parties. They were created by Congress and are financed through the National Endowment for Democracy, which was set up in 1983 to channel grants for promoting democracy in developing nations. The National Endowment receives about $100 million annually from Congress. Freedom House also gets the bulk of its money from the American government, mainly from the State Department.

It is hardly a speculative theory, then, that the uprisings were part of an immense geopolitical campaign conceived in the West and carried out through its proxies with the assistance of disingenuous foundations, organizations, and the stable of NGOs they maintain throughout the world.

As we will see, preparations for the "Arab Spring" and the global campaign that is now encroaching on both Russia and China, as predicted in February 2011's "The Middle East & then the World," began not as unrest had already begun, but years before the first "fist" was raised, and within seminar rooms in D.C. and New York, US-funded training facilities in Serbia, and camps held in neighboring countries, not within the Arab World itself.

The Timeline - 2008-2010 Preparing the Battlefield 

December 3-5, 2008: Egyptian activists from the now infamous April 6 movement were in New York City for the inaugural Alliance of Youth Movements (AYM) summit, also known as Movements.org. There, they received training, networking opportunities, and support from AYM's various corporateand US governmental sponsors, including the US State Department itself. The AYM 2008 summit report (page 3 of .pdf) states that the Under Secretary of State for Public Diplomacy and Public Affairs, James Glassman attended, as did Jared C0hen who sits on the policy planning staff of the Office of the Secretary of State. Six other State Department staff members and advisers would also attend the summit along with an immense list of corporate, media, and institutional representatives.

Shortly afterward, April 6 would travel to Serbia to train under US-funded CANVAS, formally the US-funded NGO "Otpor" who helped overthrow the government of Serbia in 2000. Otpor, the New York Times would report, was a "well-oiled movement backed by several million dollars from the United States." After its success it would change its name to CANVAS and begin training activists to be used in other US-backed regime change operations.


Photo: Serbia's "Otpor," a model for future US-backed color revolutions.

Foreign Policy Magazine would report in their article, "Revoluton U," that CANVAS assisted protesters in the "Rose Revolution" of Georgia, the "Orange Revolution" of the Ukraine, and is currently working with networks from Belarus, Myanmar (Burma), all across the Middle East and North Africa, as well as with activists in North Korea, and 50 other countries.

2009: In a US State Department funded Radio Free Europe/Radio Liberty (RFE/RL) article titled, "Exporting Nonviolent Revolution, From Eastern Europe to The Middle East," it was stated, "Popovic then exported his nonviolent methods, helping train the activists who spearheaded Georgia's Rose Revolution in 2003 and Ukraine's Orange Revolution in 2004. And now, Popovic is deploying his new organization, called Canvas, even farther afield -- assisting the pro-democracy activists who recently brought down despotic regimes in Egypt and Tunisia."

Activists from Iran, Belarus, and North Korea were also confirmed by RFE/RL as having received training from CANVAS. The RFE/RL article places the activists' meeting with CANVAS sometime during 2009.

February 2010: The April 6 Movement, after training with CANVAS, would return to Egypt in 2010, along with UN IAEA Chief Mohammed ElBaradei. April 6 members would even be arrested while awaiting for ElBaradei's arrival at Cairo's airport in mid-February. Already, ElBaradei, as early as 2010, announced his intentions of running for president in the 2011 elections. Together with April 6,Wael Ghonim of Google, and a coalition of other opposition parties, ElBaradei assembled his "National Front for Change" and began preparing for the coming "Arab Spring."

Clearly then, unrest was long planned, with activists from Tunisia and Egypt on record receiving training and support from abroad, so that they could return to their home nations and sow unrest in a region-wide coordinated campaign.

An April 2011 AFP report would confirm this, when US State Department's Michael Posner stated that the "US government has budgeted $50 million in the last two years to develop new technologies to help activists protect themselves from arrest and prosecution by authoritarian governments." The report went on to explain that the US "organized training sessions for 5,000 activists in different parts of the world. A session held in the Middle East about six weeks ago gathered activists from Tunisia, Egypt, Syria and Lebanon who returned to their countries with the aim of training their colleagues there." Posner would add, "They went back and there's a ripple effect." That ripple effect of course, is the "Arab Spring."

The Timeline - 2011 Year of the Dupe

January 16, 2011: Al Arabiya News reported in their article, "Tunisian exiled reformist to head back home," that Moncef Marzouki was returning to Tunisia (from Paris) amidst the chaos sown by US State Department trained, supported, and equipped mobs who were "triggered" by the convenient release of US State Department cables via WikiLeaks. Quite clearly, considering the training Tunisian opposition groups received long before the cables were released, the WikiLeaks cables were merely used as a planned rhetorical justification for long ago premeditated foreign-funded sedition. Since then, WikiLeaks has been employed in an identical manner everywhere from Egypt to Libya, and even as far flung as Thailand.

Moncef Marzouki, it would turn out, was founder and head of the Arab Commission for Human Rights, a collaborating institution with the US NED World Movement for Democracy (WMD) including for a "Conference on Human Rights Activists in Exile" and a participant in the WMD "third assembly" alongside Marzouki's Tunisian League for Human Rights, sponsored by NED, Soros' Open Society, and USAID.

A "call for solidarity" by the International Federation for Human Rights (FIDH) mentions by name each and every group constituting the Tunisian opposition during the "uprising" in January 2011 as "FIDH member organisations." These include Marzouki's "Tunisian League for Human Rights," the "Tunisian Association of Democratic Women," and the "National Council for Liberties in Tunisia," or CNLT. FIDH, acting as an international nexus for various foreign-funded organizations carrying out sedition worldwide under the guise of "human rights," is itself fully funded by the US government through the National Endowment for Democracy, Soros' Open Society, and many others with clearly compromised affiliations.

January 28, 2011: After a warning by journalist/activist Dr. Webster Tarpley of World Crisis Radio, the alternative media began looking closer at the unrest in Egypt which began shortly after Tunisia's growing crisis. In "All is not what it seems in Egyptian Clashes," it was noted that protest leader Mohammed ElBaradei was in fact a devoted agent of the West, with a long standing membershipwithin the Wall Street/London funded International Crisis Group (ICG) along side "senior Israeli officials" including the current Israeli President Shimon Peres, the current Governor of the Bank of Israel, Stanley Fischer, and former Israeli Foreign Minister, Shlomo Ben-Ami. The ICG also includes senior American bankers and geopolitical manipulators including George Soros, Zbigniew Brzezinski, Richard Armitage, Samuel Berger, and Wesley Clark.

Photo: ElBaradei's ties to the West go much deeper than merely play-acting within the ineffectual, genocide-enabling UN. He is also a member of the corporate-financier funded International Crisis Group.

Ironically, Western media outlets insisted ElBaradei was both anti-American and strongly anti-Israeli in a ruse best described a year earlier in March 2010 in the Council On Foreign Relations' paper, Foreign Affairs' article "Is ElBaradei Egypt's Hero?":

Further, Egypt’s close relationship with the United States has become a critical and negative factor in Egyptian politics. The opposition has used these ties to delegitimize the regime, while the government has engaged in its own displays of anti-Americanism to insulate itself from such charges. If ElBaradei actually has a reasonable chance of fostering political reform in Egypt, then U.S. policymakers would best serve his cause by not acting strongly. Somewhat paradoxically, ElBaradei’s chilly relationship with the United States as IAEA chief only advances U.S. interests now. "

The most recent manifestation of this came when Israel farcically called ElBaradei an "Iranian agent." This latest performance further illustrates the immense level of duplicity with which world events are being manipulated.

February 17, 2011: The London-based National Front for the Salvation of Libya (NFSL) calls for a Libyan "Day of Rage" to match the US-destabilization rhetoric used in Tunisia and Egypt. The NFSL has been backed by the CIA-MI6 since the '80s and had made multiple attempts to overthrow Qaddafi's government with both terrorist attacks and armed insurrection.



Photo: Please note the "EnoughGaddafi.com" signs. EnoughGaddafi.com's webmaster is listed on the US State Department's Movements.org as the "Twitter" to follow.

February 18, 2011: In the wake of Honsi Mubarak's ousting, billionaire bankster George Soros' Open Society Institute was found to be behind NGOs drafting Egypt's new constitution. These "civil society" groups include the Arabic Network for Human Rights Information openly funded by George Soros' Open Society Institute and the Neo-Con lined NED funded Egyptian Organization for Human Rights. It appears that while the International Crisis Group was turning out the strategy, and their trustee ElBaradei leading the mobs into the streets, it is the vast array of NGOs their membership, including Soros, fund that were working out and implementing the details on the ground.

February 21, 2011: An interview with Ibrahim Sahad of the National Front for the Salvation of Libya (NFSL) on ABC Australia, featured every talking point covered by the mainstream corporate media from previous weeks regarding Libya, all with the White House and Washington Monument looming over him in the background. He made calls for a no-fly zone in reaction to unsubstantiated accusations Qaddafi was strafing "unarmed protesters" with warplanes.

March 2011's "US Libyan Policy: Zero Legitimacy," noted the clearly heavily armed, western-backed insurgency that was still being disingenuously portrayed by Western media as "peaceful protests."

February 28, 2011: "Destroying Libya" stated:

While Libyan opposition leader Ibrahim Sahad leads the rhetorical charge from Washington D.C., his National Front for the Salvation of Libya (NFSL) on the ground is armed to the teeth, as it has been throughout its 20 year history of attempted CIA backed rebellions against Qaddafi. In 1984, the NFSL tried to overthrow Qaddafi in a failed armed coup. The Daily Globe and Mail also recently confirmed that the NFSL along with the Libyan National Army, both under Sahad's new National Conference of Libyan Opposition (NCLO), had both "attempted coups and assassinations against Col. Gadhafi in the 1980s.

Already at this point, both British and US representatives were admitting Libyan rebels were indeed heavily armed, and instead of condemning the violence, openly called for additional weapons and military support to be provided.

March 17, 2011: The UN decided to enforce a no-fly zone over Libya to save the globalist-backed rebellion sputtering in failure and bordering on a "Bay of Pigs" disaster. Canadian, US, French, Arab, and UK jets were already reported to be preparing for the operation.

March 24, 2011: Unrest had already begun in Syria, as NATO began bombing Libya while Egypt and Tunisia had already fallen into political and economic chaos. In "Globalists Hit in Syria," the opposition is closely examined and documented to be once again a creation of Western-backed opposition groups.

Much of the "evidence" of Syria's unrest was being filtered through organizations such as theLondon-based Syrian Human-Rights Committee whose hearsay statements posted on its websitewere cited by corporate news media in outlandish reports of violence that also include "activists say" after each allegation. The "Syrian Observatory for Human Rights," also London-based, is now the exclusive source cited by corporate-media reports regarding Syria.

March 26, 2011: In Egypt, signs of a counterrevolution and the first signs of weakness in ElBaradei's chances to be installed as president began to show. Mobs pelted ElBaradei with rocks calling him "an American agent." WikiLeaks would again come to the aid of US interests and try to reintroduce the "anti-Western" image ElBaradei had been hamfisted in portraying.



Photo: The "barrier of legitimacy" is broken: a mob shouts "American agent" as they hurl rocks at ElBaradei who most certainly is an American agent - a trustee of the US International Crisis Groupalongside George Soros.

March 28, 2011: Fortune-500 funded Brookings Institution's "Libya's Test of the New International Order" is reported on -- exposing the war as not one of a "humanitarian" nature, but one aimed explicitly at establishing an international order and the primacy of international law.

Image: Red = US-backed destabilization, Blue = US occupying/stationed. China's oil and sea access to the Middle East and Africa are being or have already been cut. A similar strategy of isolation was used on Japan just before the onset of World War II.

April 17, 2011: Syria's unrest yields widespread arson as well as reports of gunmen targeting both protesters and state security forces in a bid to escalate violence. In, "Globalist War Machine Fixates on Syria," the "Libyan Precedent" is already being cited by US and French politicians as justification to use force against Syria. A later article, "Color Revolution's Mystery Gunmen," establishes a historical context within which to view the current violence in Syria and the fact that it is provocateurs sowing much of the violence.

April 21, 2011: Belarus President Alexander Lukashenko announces that his nation is now also under covert attack by Western forces to foster an "Arab Spring-style" insurrection. In, "Besieging Belarus," documented ties between Belarus opposition members and the same Western organizations and institutions fueling the Arab Spring are illustrated.

April 22, 2011: John McCain touches down in Benghazi, Libya and consorts with verified terrorists who were fresh back from Iraq and Afghanistan, killing US troops. A West Point report would later confirm (.pdf from West Point's CTC can be found here) with absolute certainty that the region from which the Libyan rebellion began was also the Libyan Islamic Fighting Group's (LIFG) center of operations. It would also expose the fact that LIFG were in fact long-time affiliates of Al Qaeda with LIFG members occupying the highest levels of leadership within the terrorist organization.


Photo: Ultimate act of treason: McCain calls for recognition and extra-legal support for the very men who had killed US troops in Iraq and Afghanistan. By denying "Al-Qaeda" a base in Iraq, but handing them the entire nation of Libya, he has brought American foreign policy to a new level of surrealism. 

May, 2011: In "Libya at Any Cost," the conflict in Libya was reported to be escalating, including NATO attempts to assassinate Qaddafi and the targeted killings of several of his family members including several of his grandchildren.

"America's Arab Deception" attempted to review the past several months of engineered chaos blowing through Northern Africa and the Middle East, while it was noted in, "You Can't Make This Stuff Up," that the National Endowment for Democracy already began its first round of self-aggrandizing, and passing out awards to several of the dupes and collaborators that made its campaign of carnage throughout the Arab World a reality.

June, 2011: In "Arab Spring brings Corporate Locust," the true agenda behind Egypt's, and indeed the entire "Arab Spring's" unrest became apparent as US representatives gave Fortune 500 executives a tour of destabilized Egypt and Tunisia in an effort to promote economic liberaliztion and privatization. John McCain and John Kerry led the tour and had co-sponsored bills to promote what would essentially be the meshing of Egypt and Tunisia's economy into the Wall Street/London international order.


Photo: McCain (left) and Kerry (right) gesticulate as they explain their paymaster's agenda within the confines of an Egyptian Coca-Cola factory. This is part of their latest trip surveying the effects of their US-funded opposition overthrowing Hosni Mubarak's government. 

In late June, France would admit to violating the terms of UN resolution 1973, and arming Libyan rebels.

July, 2011: The African Union would wholly reject the International Criminal Court's mandate against Libya, exposing the severe illegitimacy with which it operates. Ties to corporate-financier funded organizations are revealed in "It's Official: International Criminal Court has ZERO Mandate," as well as the tenuous nature of the ICC's claims against Libya's Qaddafi. It would later be confirmed by members of Libya's "human rights" community that indeed they, in collaboration with the rebel leaders, fabricated the numbers supplied to both the UN and the ICC, and that no verified or documented evidence of Qaddafi's "atrocities" were produced.

In Thailand, another long-running US-backed color revolution finally yielded results and saw the return of Wall Street proxy, Thaksin Shinawatra's political party to power. Various mouthpieces of the global elite, including the Council on Foreign Relations itself, gave stern warnings to Thailand's establishment to accept the tenuous results of the July election or face isolation and other consequences. Another Southeast Asian country, Malaysia would also see color revolution take to their streets -- this time in Malaysia by the yellow-clad, NED-funded Bersih movement.

Photo: Thaksin Shinawatra, a long time servant of the global elite, since before even becoming Thailand's prime minister in 2001, reports to the CFR in New York City on the eve of the 2006 military coup that ousted him from power. He has now returned to power in Thailand via a proxy political party led by his own sister, Yingluck Shinawatra. Securing the votes of only 35% of eligible voters puts on full display how tenuous his support really is within a nation he claims stands entirely behind him.

August, 2011: By August, even the corporate-media began admitting that Syria's opposition was "mostly unarmed," or in other words, armed. The opposition was starting to be more clearly defined as armed ethnic groups and armed militants of the Muslim Brotherhood.

By late August, NATO began a coordinated attack on Tripoli, Libya, involving an elaborate psychological-operation that claimed to have eliminated or captured the entire Qaddafi family in a single day. The following day, Saif Al-Qaddafi would turn up alive and well, and free, while leading fierce fighting that would carry on until October and result in NATO leveling the cities of Bani Walid and Sirte in particular, into piles of rubble. It had become entirely clear that NATO was providing air support not for democracy-loving freedom fighters, but for hardcore terrorists who were carrying outa systematic campaign of genocide and reprisals throughout the country.

Photo: Libya's rebels are far from motivated by democratic aspirations. Their grievances lie along ethnic, not political divides. "Gaddafi supporters" is the euphemism being used by the global corporate-media in describing the generally darker skinned and African tribes that form the majority of Western Libya's demographics and who are bearing the brunt of NATO-backed rebel atrocities. 

September, 2011: Sensing victory in Libya, corporate-financier funded think-tanks began preparing for the rebuilding and despoiling of the Libyan economy. In "Globalists to Rebuild Libya," NATO's Atlantic Council wrote a report detailing just how they would go about doing this.

Also as Libya's violence spiraled out of control and atrocities carried out by the rebels and their NATO backers became more obscene, it became clear how fraudulent the "War on Terror" was. In "Libyan Rebels Listed by US State Department as Terrorists," it is illustrated how NATO members were guilty of anti-terrorist laws for providing material support for listed terrorist organizations.

Image: A screenshot taken directly from the US State Department website showing the Libyan Islamic Fighting Group (LIFG) clearly listed as a foreign terrorist organization. This is important, as US Code prohibits providing material support to listed terrorist organizations. With revelations of Al Qaeda and LIFG fighters leading the Libyan rebellion with NATO-members' full military, financial, and diplomatic support, attempts are being made to plea ignorance as to the true nature of the rebels. Listed below LIFG, is MEK, an Iraqi/Iranian group also being armed and supported by the US. (click on image to enlarge) 

September also saw real humanitarian catastrophe unfold in Uganda, where a British corporation sanctioned genocide to clear land they had "leased" from the Ugandan government. Thus illustrates how the cause of "humanitarian concerns" is called on only when it serves Wall Street and London's interests, and otherwise ignored when it involves verifiable genocide carried out in the pursuit of furthering their wealth and power.


Photo: Robert Devereux, a long time investor, a long time con-artist spinning his company's despoiling of Africa as some sort of cutting-edge investment strategy that makes money and "helps" people. Even as Devereux made his disingenuous statements in 2010 regarding New Forests, the villagers in Uganda he was "helping" had already filed a court case a year earlier protesting the British company's encroachment on their land. These villagers would be forcibly displaced, many of them killed by Ugandan troops acting on behalf of Devereux. 

John McCain would land once again in Libya, this time in Tripoli to celebrate the destruction of the country and shake hands once again with the Libyan Islamic Fighting Group that delivered Qaddafi's Libya into the hands of the Wall Street/London elite.


Photo: It's all smiles and laughs in Tripoli as McCain, a chief proponent and driving force behind the US intervention in Libya, literally glorifies Al Qaeda's exploits in the now ruined nation. Miles away, the very rebels he was praising are purposefully starving the civilian population of Sirte in an effort to break their will, while they and NATO indiscriminately use heavy weapons aimed at crowded city centers. 

October 2011: While Tunisia and Egypt had fallen, and Libya too being seized by proxy forces fueled by the West, the Obama administration began withdrawing troops from Iraq. This suspicious withdrawal when otherwise the rest of the Middle East was under US proxy assault raised serious suspicions that an escalation, not retreat was to follow.

Rhetoric for war with Iran had been steadily increasing and the beginning of what looked like a covert war was being fought inside and along Iran's borders. A disastrous ploy of framing Iran for the alleged planned assassination of a Saudi ambassador in Washington D.C. fell apart when Iranians linked the plot to US-backed terrorist organization Mujahedin-e Khalq (MEK).

Image: MEK. Admittedly a terrorist organization, listed by the US State Department as being such, it is fully funded, armed, and backed by the United States, based in France and US-occupied Iraq, and allowed to conduct terrorist operations against the Iranian people. The "War on Terror" is a fraud.

It is more than likely that the withdrawal of troops from Iraq would simply provide the US "plausible deniability" for an Israeli airstrike on Iran.

November 2011: Syria's "peaceful protesters" who had been all along fully armed and attempting to stoke a Libyan-style civil war, were finally acknowledged as such by the corporate-media and, more importantly, by the corporate-funded think-tanks that supply them with their talking points. In "IISS: Syria's Opposition is Armed," it is states that a report out of the International Institute for Strategic Studies by Senior Fellow for Regional Security at IISS-Middle East, Emile Hokayem openly admitted that Syria's opposition was armed and prepared to drag Syria's violence into even bloodier depths.

Also in November, Wall Street and London's assault on Libya came full circle with the installation of Abdurrahim el-Keib as prime minister. El-Keib who spent decades in exile in the US, was formally employed by the Petroleum Institute, based in Abu Dhabi, UAE and sponsored by British Petroleum (BP), Shell, France's Total, the Japan Oil Development Company, and the Abu Dhabi National Oil Company.

Photo: And so begins the farce that is Western "democracy." One corporate-fascist puppet Mahmoud Jibril , steps down, another, Abdurrahim el-Keib, takes his place. In reality, it is NATO-states and their corporate sponsors that now determine Libya's fate. Pictured above, el-Keib poses with Mustafa Abdul-Jalil, chairman of the unelected, NATO-backed "National Transitional Council."

Joining el-Keib would be US-funded activist, Moncef Marzouki, named Tunisia's president. Marzouki's organization, the Tunisian League for Human Rights, was a US National Endowment for Democracy and George Soros Open Society-funded International Federation for Human Rights (FIDH) member organization. Marzouki, who spent two decades in exile in Paris, France, was also founder and head of the Arab Commission for Human Rights, a collaborating institution with the US NED World Movement for Democracy (WMD) including for a "Conference on Human Rights Activists in Exile" and a participant in the WMD "third assembly" alongside Marzouki's Tunisian League for Human Rights, sponsored by NED, Soros' Open Society, and USAID.

Photo: US NED-funded activist leader Moncef Marzouki after spending two decades in Paris, helps foist the facade of "democracy" onto the Tunisian people. Of course, he, or someone of equal servitude to the West was going to become "President." In 1993 Noam Chomsky would concisely describe the work of NED as "an attempt to impose what is called democracy, meaning rule by the rich and the powerful, without interference by the mob but within the framework of formal electoral procedures." In other words, those fighting in the "Arab Spring" did so for gilded tyranny.

In Egypt, in late November, a second "revolution" began unfolding on the streets. In reality it was the same Western-backed forces led by ElBaradei and the emerging Mamdouh Hamza, against Egyptian military forces that seemed to have gone back on whatever arrangements they made with the West after the fall of Mubarak.

The UN, in another attempt to escalate foreign intervention in Syria, would release a UN Human Rights Council report regarding Syrian "crimes against humanity" which was actually co-authored by Karen Koning AbuZayd, a director of the US Washington-based corporate think-tank, Middle East Policy Council, that includes Exxon men, CIA agents, US military and government representatives, and even the president of the US-Qatar Business Council, which includes amongst its membership, AlJazeera, Chevron, Exxon, munitions manufacturer Raytheon (who supplied the opening salvos during NATO's operations against Libya), and Boeing.

The report itself contained no verifiable evidence, but rather hearsay accounts recorded in Geneva by alleged "victims" "witnesses," and "defectors," put forth by "all interested persons and organizations." In other words, it was an open invitation for Syria's enemies to paint whatever image of the ruling government they pleased.

December 2011: With Tunisia and Libya fully run by Western proxies, Egypt and Syria still mired in chaos, and with globalists calling for war on Iran, the "Arab Spring" was nearly complete. However, the "Arab Spring" was only the first leg of a grander strategy to encircle Russia and China. In December, the campaigns to move in on Russia and China would begin in earnest.


Image: The "String of Pearls:" China's oil lifeline is to be cut by the destabilization and regimes changes being made throughout Africa and the Middle East. Along the "String" the US has been destabilizing nations from Pakistan to Myanmar, from Malaysia to Thailand, to disrupt and contain China's emergence as a regional power. 

Hillary Clinton, in Foreign Policy Magazine would pen, "America's Pacific Century," a Hitlerian declaration of imperial intent for American "leadership" in Asia for the next 100 years. From "Hillary Clinton and the New American (Pacific) Century:

Upon reading Clinton's declaration of intent for American leadership into the next century, readers may recall the similarly named, ranting "Project for a New American Century" signed off on by some of America's most notorious Neo-Conservatives, which almost verbatim made the same case now made by Clinton. In fact, America'sevolving confrontation with China, marked acutely by Obama's announcement of a permanent US military presence in Australia just this week, is torn directly from the pages of decades old blueprints drawn up by corporate-financier funded think-tanksthat truly rule America and its destiny.

As reported in June, 2011's 'Collapsing China,' as far back as 1997 there was talk about developing an effective containment strategy coupled with the baited hook of luring China into its place amongst the 'international order.' Just as in these 1997 talking-points where author and notorious Neo-Con policy maker Robert Kagan described the necessity of using America's Asian "allies" as part of this containment strategy, Clinton goes through a list of regional relationships the US is trying to cultivate to maintain 'American leadership' in Asia.

For example, the recently reinstalled Wall Street proxy regime in Thailand led by Thaksin Shinawatra and his sister Yingluck, has received reassurances by Clinton herself just this week stating that, 'it is in the national security and political interest of the United States to have this government succeed.' As reported in-depth in 'CONFIRMED: Thailand's Pro-Democracy Movement Working for US,' Thaksin Shinawatra and his political regime have had long standing, well documented ties to Wall Street and London. The US backing of puppet-regimes like Thaksin, installing them into power, and keeping them there is central to projecting power throughout Asia and keeping China subordinate, or as Kagan put it in his 1997 report, these proxy regimes will have China 'play Gulliver to Southeast Asia's Lilliputians, with the United States supplying the rope and stakes.'

In Myanmar (Burma) "democracy icon" Aung San Suu Kyi, whose entire movement is a creation of Wall Street and London, received Hillary Clinton as well as Thailand's proxy-PM Yingluck Shinawatra in a globalist show of support designating her as the defacto leader and point of contact within the Southeast Asian country. Clinton's visit coincided with a successful campaign led by US NGOs to oust Chinese interests in the nation that resulted in the halting of a dam that was to provide electricity, revenue, flood control and irrigation for the people of Myanmar.

Image: The Myitsone Dam, on its way to being the 15th largest in the world until construction was halted in September by a campaign led by Wall Street-puppet Aung San Suu Kyi, a stable of US-funded NGOs, and a terrorist campaign executed by armed groups operating in Kachin State, Myanmar. 

Meanwhile in Russia, Wall Street and London attacked more directly, attempting to interfere with Russian elections in December and resulting in several street protests led by overtly linked NED, Soros, and Rothschild operatives. NED-funded NGO "Golos" played a key role in portraying the elections as "rigged" and constituted America's extraterritorial meddling in Russia's sovereign affairs.


Image: NATO's creeping encirclement of Russia has now been combined with another round of "color revolution" destabilizations in Belarus and now in Russia itself.

A concerted effort by the corporate-media to misrepresent the unrest in Russia was pointed out in, "Russian Protests: Western Media Lies ," illustrating just how coordinated the overarching global destabilization being carried out actually is. In "Wall Street Vs. Russia," it was concluded:

It is quite clear that the National Endowment for Democracy, Freedom House, the Foreign Policy Initiative, and even the US State Department whose new foreign affairs advisory board is full of think-tanks representing overt corporate-financier interests, are not interested in 'democracy,' 'human rights,' or 'freedom' in Russia, but rather removing the Kremlin out of the way, and reestablishing the parasitic feeding on the Russian people and its economy they enjoyed after the fall of the Soviet Union.

In late December it would be confirmed that the same Al Qaeda militants that ravaged Libya with NATO's aid, were on their way to Syria to help overthrow the Assad government. LIFG leader Abdel Hakim Belhaj was confirmed to be on the Syrian border preparing troops of the so-called "Free Syrian Army."

This wasn't the only recent example of the West operating in tandem with listed terrorist groups. It was also reported in, "EXPOSED: US Troops Guarded Terrorist Camp in Iraq," that the US has been guarding a terrorist Mujahedin-e Khalq training camp inside Iraq with US troops and is planning to relocated them, possibly in a freshly abandoned US military base in Iraq while D.C. lobbyists work feverishly to have them de-listed, armed, and sent to conduct terrorist operations in Iran. Shocking comments are made in the Brookings Institution's report, "Which Path to Persia?" where US policy experts conspire to use the terrorist organization against the government of Iran. In essence, corporate-funded policy makers have transformed the US into a state-sponsor of terror.

Conclusion

The year 2011 was surely the year of the dupe. Youth enamored with lofty, naive notions of "freedom" sold to them by corporate-fascist funded NGOs were brought into the streets to create chaos and division which was then capitalized on by covert political and even military maneuvering by the West and its proxy forces. In Egypt the nation is teetering on the edge of being fully integrated into the Wall Street/London international order, while a big-oil representative is enjoying his new position as prime minister of Libya. In Tunisia a life-long stooge of Western machinations is now president, and an alarming campaign of NATO-backed violence and terrorism is gripping Syria.

With the encirclement of Russia and China, these dupes have witlessly brought the world to the edge of World War III, and clearly done nothing at all to improve their own state of being. As their nations fall under the control of increasing Western influence, the resources once used to placate them and defend their nationalism will now be diverted into the bottomless maw of the parasitic banking combines that are currently destroying both North America and Europe.

February's "The Middle East & then the World" is well worth reading again -- to see how far we've come over the last year since it was written, and what is left for the globalists to do. As the globalists come ever closer to China and Russia's doorsteps the stakes will continue to rise and the placid spectating Americans and Europeans have enjoyed this year will forever be lost.

Finally, consider what was written in one of the last articles of this year, "The End Game Approaches:"

Complacency will kill, apathy is complicity: as the elitist-engineered 'Arab Spring' reaches its conclusion, we stand on the precipice of being meshed into an inescapable, corporate-fascist, scientific planetary regime.... the End Game approaches.

Now more than ever, 'we the people' must steel ourselves against this immense corporate-fascist empire as it sprawls death, destruction, and domination, militarily and economically, across the planet. We must, our very survival depends on it,boycott and replace entirely the corporate-financier interests that drive this dark, expansive agenda. It has been literally spawned of our apathy, complicity, and ignorance, fueled by us -- the very source of corporate fascism's power -- and it must be our activism, resistance, and intellect that brings it to an end.

As far fetched as it may sound, every Pepsi we swig, every day we decide to drink beer and tune into our corporate-sponsored bread and circus, be it the modern day chariot races of NASCAR or the gladiatorial contests of the NFL, we bring inescapable eternal servitude to a corporate-fascist scientific dictatorship one step closer.

It is now 'do or die -- unlike in the past, mankind now possesses the technology to render the vast majority of the population intellectually inferior through mass medication, food poisoning, GMO crops that rot our bodies and minds from the inside-out, and the martial means of eliminating vast swaths of the population permanently. Not only is this a possibility, it is a reality the global elite have conspired over at great length through texts like Ecoscience penned by current White House science adviser John Holdren and former White House science adviser Paul Ehrlich who openly talk about mass, involuntary medication to forcibly sterilize the population, reduce our numbers and confine us within what they literally call a 'planetary regime.' The End Game approaches.

Let us not "hope" next year fairs better for free humanity. Let us with our two hands, our will, and our capable intellects ensure that it is better. The decision is not that of our "leaders" or "representatives," it is the decision of each and every one of us and what it is we do with our time, our money, our resources, our energy, and to where we pay our attention -- each and every day. Let us define where it is we want our destiny to take us, and start taking one step at a time to get there.

Let us wait no longer for "saviors," but rather look in the mirror and realize, God, the Universe, or whatever higher power you believe in, has already endowed you with everything you need, in your heart, your mind, and within your hands to prevail in whatever noble pursuit you, or "we the people" choose.

Tony Cartalucci's articles have appeared on many alternative media websites, including his own at 
Land Destroyer Report.