Neocon persiflage from Murdoch fishwrapper:
"I believe the US-led invasion of Iraq was a mistake, but once it was done it was a job that needed to be completed. History will show that invasion has most likely had the adverse effect of strengthening the arm of fundamentalist Islamo-fascists who seek to subjugate their people under a theocratic dictatorship. But unlike Iraq, the decision by John Howard to send troops into Afghanistan was not so much to maintain our alliance with the US but to defend the values of liberty, equality and justice that are fundamental to our way of life... Failure to defeat the totalitarian far right wing Islamo-fascists, who distort the Islamic faith to suit their extremist ideology, could set off a domino effect in the Middle East with the potential to unleash a new global force, hell-bent on subjugation under their ugly ideology." (Why we need to be there, Paul Howes, The Sunday Telegraph, 3/10/10)
Scholarly reflection from Cambridge University Press:
"Initially, it would seem, the radical Islamism of the twenty-first century belongs to an inclusive class of revolutionary movements that might best be identified, didactically, as antidemocratic - one of an indeterminate number of movements that include a wide variety of related forms - among which one might find a subclass of neofascisms. For the purpose of our analysis, however, Islam's jihadists-salafists hardly qualify for membership in the latter category. Today's Islamists are religious eccentrics, antinationalists of conviction, political reactionaries, indifferent to economic growth and industrial development, and committed to terrorism as their principal method of restoring the dignity and glory of their ummah. They simply do not satisfy the criteria that would make them credible neofascists. The twentieth century witnessed the emergence of religious movements that might conceivably be considered neofascist; Islamic fundamentalism, struggling to restore an Islam of yesteryear, happens not to be of their number." (The Search for Neofascism: The Use & Abuse of Social Science, A James Gregor, 2006, pp 195-196)
Showing posts with label Islamo-Fascism. Show all posts
Showing posts with label Islamo-Fascism. Show all posts
Tuesday, October 5, 2010
Thursday, April 8, 2010
Crying (Lone) Wolf
"Near Eleusis, in Attica, there lurked a bandit named Damastes, called Procrustes, or 'The Stretcher'. He had an iron bed in which travelers who fell into his hands were compelled to spend the night. His humour was to stretch the ones who were too short until they died, or, if they were too tall, to cut off as much of their limbs as would make them short enough. None could resist him, and the surrounding countryside became a desert." (goines.net)
The procrusteans of today's counterterrorism industry (and their journalist stenographers), have been giving Major Nidal Malik Hasan, the Fort Hood murderer, a going over:
"While the hunt for bin Laden and his henchmen remains a focus of counterintelligence efforts abroad and in Pakistan particularly, US officials understand that the al-Qaeda threat has long since mutated from a bin Laden-centric attack strategy into a hierarchy of threat levels, external and increasingly internal. 'One of the phenomena that our counterintelligence people face now is that they have to worry about the big threat of a mass casualty attack along the lines of a repeat of [sic] 9/11... and also the extreme other end, which is the lone fanatic converted by the internet', says a former CIA officer and White House adviser, Bruce Riedel. 'The latter is someone who, at most, is peripherally linked to any kind of foreign terrorist organisation, like Major [Nidal Malik] Hasan at Fort Hood, but who can still be quite deadly'. The jihadi landscape reveals several degrees of al-Qaeda affiliation, says Lydia Khalil, an analyst with the Council on Foreign Relations. The original leadership has passed a baton to regional subsidiaries, often coopting the nationalist struggles of disaffected local groups. Then there are 'associated free agents' who choose to commandeer al-Qaeda's rhetoric and cause, Khalil says. 'Next, there are groups of entrepreneurial jihadists: radicals from outside conflict zones who nurse simmering grievances and conceive small-bore plots, rather than attempting spectacular attacks... And then come the 'lone wolves'. Nidal Hasan has been charged with opening fire on fellow soldiers at Fort Hood, Texas, last November, killing 13. Paul Pillar, a US intelligence veteran, says: 'They are people who are inspired at least in part by the sort of ideological framework that bin Laden represents and has propounded. They are motivated at least as much by anger over specific policies and events and conflicts, but they are not sent or directed to conduct operations by al-Qaeda central'." (Osama who?: Capturing or killing the al-Qaeda leader has become less important in America's war against terrorism, Simon Mann, Sydney Morning Herald, 2-4/4/10)
So Major Nidal Hasan is your typical lone fanatic/wolf, right? Wrong. Even the procrusteans above seem to feel the need to qualify their representation of him as a jihadi of the lone wolf variety, deploying such caveats as peripherally linked and inspired at least in part.
It has fallen to author* Mark Ames to blow the whistle on those who would cry (lone) wolf over Major Hasan. Here are the opening paragraphs of his salutary essay, The memory scrub about why Ft Hood happened is almost complete... If it weren't for archives (alternet.com, 24/11/09):
"What happened to all the initial reports that accused Fort Hood killer Maj. Nidal Hasan of having snapped because he was distraught over the Army's refusal to grant him either a discharge or an exemption from being deployed to Iraq or Afghanistan, wars which the Muslim psychiatrist abhorred - and how it was this callous Army refusal to accomodate Maj. Hasan that led to his downward spiral into despondency, rage and mass murder? We heard quite a bit about this in the first couple of days, and then - poof! That part of the Fort Hood story disappeared so neatly that I almost started to wonder if I'd imagined it - such is the power of media bombardment versus a mere soap bubble like the human memory. I might have forgotten too and gone along with the reality-scrub, the way all of Official America has gone, but thanks to all the news archives, it was possible to check the record as it was first reported on November 5, and trace how a key part of the Nidal Hasan story was airbrushed away from reality.
"The Army's pig-headed failure to accomodate Maj. Hasan was, for a time, the most important - and most damaging - detail for understanding his shooting rampage. Because if Maj. Hasan tried to get out of his deployment, and if he telegraphed every warning signal possible (emailing terrorists, cruising 7-11s in his Al-Qaeda costume) to bolster his case to reverse his deployment orders, and all the while the Army bureaucracy ignored him despite his 20 years' service - then that means the massacre can't be blamed just on one crazy Islamofascist's inner evil. Instead, much of the blame for driving Maj. Hasan to crack would fall on his superiors in the Army, who held his fate in their hands. They could have shown some flexibility, but instead treated him with the kind of callous bureaucratic insolence and nasty ethnic harassment you'd expect to find in a 19th century army, not 21st century America. If the Army really did fail to respond to a million-billion signals from Maj. Hasan, then it means we'd have to investigate more than just his evil little Muslim soul. We'd also have to look at the environment that changed him from a good loyal soldier into a cracked lunatic. That would mean examining just how screwed up the Army culture really is, how poorly it manages its resources and personnel, and why we went so long without knowing how bad things were...
"We'd also have to examine the link between Hasan's rampage and the Army's record number of suicides this year - which so far nearly equals the total number of US combat deaths in Iraq. A lot of this year's suicides involve Army personnel which hadn't yet shipped out to the war zones, like Maj. Hasan - a grim statistic that belies the chickenhawks' screeching attacks denying the existence of pre-combat stress syndrome. But the problem with investigating questions like these is that the answers could be one giant bummer - nothing makes an American's brain switch into 'hibernate' mode more quickly. The point being that as the horror of the Fort Hood massacre started to emerge, a lot of people were interested in superimposing a more comforting, simplistic version of events over the anbiguous, demoralizing reality. According to the new version of what led to the Fort Hood massacre, all along Maj. Hasan was a sleeper-jihadist moled up inside the Army structure, patiently waiting for his Al-Qaeda handlers in AfPak to give him the jihadi signal - and in the meantime, the Islamofascist sleeper cell ran around Walter Reed scaring the shit out of his Army colleagues for 2 years straight with his frothing lectures threatening to behead Infidels and pour hot oil down their necks."
[*Going Postal: Rage, Murder & Rebellion: From Reagan's Workplaces to Clinton's Columbine & Beyond, 2005]
The procrusteans of today's counterterrorism industry (and their journalist stenographers), have been giving Major Nidal Malik Hasan, the Fort Hood murderer, a going over:
"While the hunt for bin Laden and his henchmen remains a focus of counterintelligence efforts abroad and in Pakistan particularly, US officials understand that the al-Qaeda threat has long since mutated from a bin Laden-centric attack strategy into a hierarchy of threat levels, external and increasingly internal. 'One of the phenomena that our counterintelligence people face now is that they have to worry about the big threat of a mass casualty attack along the lines of a repeat of [sic] 9/11... and also the extreme other end, which is the lone fanatic converted by the internet', says a former CIA officer and White House adviser, Bruce Riedel. 'The latter is someone who, at most, is peripherally linked to any kind of foreign terrorist organisation, like Major [Nidal Malik] Hasan at Fort Hood, but who can still be quite deadly'. The jihadi landscape reveals several degrees of al-Qaeda affiliation, says Lydia Khalil, an analyst with the Council on Foreign Relations. The original leadership has passed a baton to regional subsidiaries, often coopting the nationalist struggles of disaffected local groups. Then there are 'associated free agents' who choose to commandeer al-Qaeda's rhetoric and cause, Khalil says. 'Next, there are groups of entrepreneurial jihadists: radicals from outside conflict zones who nurse simmering grievances and conceive small-bore plots, rather than attempting spectacular attacks... And then come the 'lone wolves'. Nidal Hasan has been charged with opening fire on fellow soldiers at Fort Hood, Texas, last November, killing 13. Paul Pillar, a US intelligence veteran, says: 'They are people who are inspired at least in part by the sort of ideological framework that bin Laden represents and has propounded. They are motivated at least as much by anger over specific policies and events and conflicts, but they are not sent or directed to conduct operations by al-Qaeda central'." (Osama who?: Capturing or killing the al-Qaeda leader has become less important in America's war against terrorism, Simon Mann, Sydney Morning Herald, 2-4/4/10)
So Major Nidal Hasan is your typical lone fanatic/wolf, right? Wrong. Even the procrusteans above seem to feel the need to qualify their representation of him as a jihadi of the lone wolf variety, deploying such caveats as peripherally linked and inspired at least in part.
It has fallen to author* Mark Ames to blow the whistle on those who would cry (lone) wolf over Major Hasan. Here are the opening paragraphs of his salutary essay, The memory scrub about why Ft Hood happened is almost complete... If it weren't for archives (alternet.com, 24/11/09):
"What happened to all the initial reports that accused Fort Hood killer Maj. Nidal Hasan of having snapped because he was distraught over the Army's refusal to grant him either a discharge or an exemption from being deployed to Iraq or Afghanistan, wars which the Muslim psychiatrist abhorred - and how it was this callous Army refusal to accomodate Maj. Hasan that led to his downward spiral into despondency, rage and mass murder? We heard quite a bit about this in the first couple of days, and then - poof! That part of the Fort Hood story disappeared so neatly that I almost started to wonder if I'd imagined it - such is the power of media bombardment versus a mere soap bubble like the human memory. I might have forgotten too and gone along with the reality-scrub, the way all of Official America has gone, but thanks to all the news archives, it was possible to check the record as it was first reported on November 5, and trace how a key part of the Nidal Hasan story was airbrushed away from reality.
"The Army's pig-headed failure to accomodate Maj. Hasan was, for a time, the most important - and most damaging - detail for understanding his shooting rampage. Because if Maj. Hasan tried to get out of his deployment, and if he telegraphed every warning signal possible (emailing terrorists, cruising 7-11s in his Al-Qaeda costume) to bolster his case to reverse his deployment orders, and all the while the Army bureaucracy ignored him despite his 20 years' service - then that means the massacre can't be blamed just on one crazy Islamofascist's inner evil. Instead, much of the blame for driving Maj. Hasan to crack would fall on his superiors in the Army, who held his fate in their hands. They could have shown some flexibility, but instead treated him with the kind of callous bureaucratic insolence and nasty ethnic harassment you'd expect to find in a 19th century army, not 21st century America. If the Army really did fail to respond to a million-billion signals from Maj. Hasan, then it means we'd have to investigate more than just his evil little Muslim soul. We'd also have to look at the environment that changed him from a good loyal soldier into a cracked lunatic. That would mean examining just how screwed up the Army culture really is, how poorly it manages its resources and personnel, and why we went so long without knowing how bad things were...
"We'd also have to examine the link between Hasan's rampage and the Army's record number of suicides this year - which so far nearly equals the total number of US combat deaths in Iraq. A lot of this year's suicides involve Army personnel which hadn't yet shipped out to the war zones, like Maj. Hasan - a grim statistic that belies the chickenhawks' screeching attacks denying the existence of pre-combat stress syndrome. But the problem with investigating questions like these is that the answers could be one giant bummer - nothing makes an American's brain switch into 'hibernate' mode more quickly. The point being that as the horror of the Fort Hood massacre started to emerge, a lot of people were interested in superimposing a more comforting, simplistic version of events over the anbiguous, demoralizing reality. According to the new version of what led to the Fort Hood massacre, all along Maj. Hasan was a sleeper-jihadist moled up inside the Army structure, patiently waiting for his Al-Qaeda handlers in AfPak to give him the jihadi signal - and in the meantime, the Islamofascist sleeper cell ran around Walter Reed scaring the shit out of his Army colleagues for 2 years straight with his frothing lectures threatening to behead Infidels and pour hot oil down their necks."
[*Going Postal: Rage, Murder & Rebellion: From Reagan's Workplaces to Clinton's Columbine & Beyond, 2005]
Tuesday, April 8, 2008
From Howardistas to Horowistas
"All dictatorships and would-be dictators strategically target key individuals. Job loss or career setbacks are the first kinds of pressure these people are likely to face...The National Socialist German Students' League was set up in 1926. It sought to get independent professors fired and to direct the universities' resources toward Nazi goals rather than toward pure research. By 1933, propaganda Minister Goebbels set in motion one of these purges. 'By the beginning of the academic year 1933-34, 313 full professors had been dismissed...By 1934, some 1600 out of 5000 university teachers had been forced out of their jobs...Very quickly, newly Nazified Education Mininstries made political criteria central not only for appointments but also for teaching and research'. On May 10, 1933, pro-Nazi students also orchestrated a series of book burnings - events designed to look 'spontaneous' but actually directed behind the scenes by Goebbels." The End of America: Letter of Warning to a Young Patriot - A Citizen's Call to Action, Naomi Klein, 2007
A campaign to enlist university and high school students to spy on their teachers for evidence of alleged left-wing bias was launched last month by the Young Liberals. Endorsed by the federal Liberal Party and operating under the slogan 'Education Not Indoctrination', the Young Liberals claim that students holding what they call 'mainstream views' are not only being subjected to 'leftist propaganda' but even penalised for their 'mainstream views' by their teachers. The Baby Howardistas, therefore, have announced that it is their mission to collect examples of such 'bias' (or worse!) for a proposed Senate inquiry into same.
An idea of where this was all coming from came in a report (Young Libs campaign to out biased dons) in The Australian on 12/3/08: "The National Tertiary Education Union rejected the notion of any widespread systemic bias in Australian universities and said the Young Liberals' campaign had been borrowed from a similar movement in the US, led by conservative intellectual David Horowitz."
David Horowitz is a neocon agitator who started out as a leftist radical in the 60s but later morphed into a Reagan Republican. He specialises in pro-war campus advertising campaigns, and (like the rest of his neocon tribe) has used 9/11 and the Bush/Cheney 'war' on terror as a cover to advance a reactionary, authoritarian agenda through such front groups as the David Horowitz Freedom Center, Students for Academic Freedom and FrontPage Mag.com.
Horowitz has, for example, branded Barbara Lee, the only member of Congress to vote against giving Bush a blank check for his 'war' on terror, a "communist [who] actively collaborated with [America's enemies] in their war against America," and campaigned against "the so-called Peace Movement," claiming that "campus leftists hate America more than the terrorists."
More recently he has campaigned around the issue of 'academic freedom', asserting that students need protection from having their religious and political views questioned (or in his own words, "subjected to a 'hostile environment' ") and from discussion of anything he deems "controversial." In other words, under the banner of academic freedom, Horowitz would have students free of free speech.
Last year he organized an 'Islamo-Fascism Awareness Week' (October 22-26) aimed at what he called the two "Big lies of the political left: that George Bush created the war on terror and that Global Warming is a greater danger to Americans than the terrorist threat." Its themes were "the Oppression of Women in Islam and the threat posed by the Islamic crusade against the West." In addition to teach-ins, sit-ins and protests, pamphlets with titles such as 'The Islamic Mein Kampf', 'Why Israel is the Victim', 'Jimmy Carter's War Against the Jews', and 'What Every American Needs to Know About Jihad' were distributed on campuses across the US.
Horowitz's rants posted (3/08) on FrontPageMag.com reveal a Zionist ultra, red in tooth and claw: Palestinians are "genocidal/Jew-killers"; "Hamas has to be smashed, defeated, pulverized, driven out of existence"; the "western 'progressive' left' [are] the fifth column allies, abettors and fellow-travellers of Islamic jihad"; "Hamas has turned the entire population of Gaza into a suicide bomb."
A taste of the kind of 'evidence' we can expect to see submitted to the hoped-for Senate inquiry by our very own Howardistas turned Horowistas may be found in a FrontPageMag.com post on 23/10/06, hyperbolically called Hamas High. Its author, one Eric Danis, writes that: "I moved from Andover, Massachusetts to Israel over 5 years ago, so the day-to-day happenings in my hometown are largely off my radar screen. However, Andover High School physics teacher Ron Francis, a former teacher of mine, first caught my attention when I saw an article he wrote in February of 2006. The article was entitled 'Media Bias Against Hamas', and was written in an attempt to support the Palestinian terror group Hamas and to demonize Israel. Francis never once condemned Hamas' terror tactics or its anti-Semitic ideology, and he even discussed the 'silver lining' of Hamas' [electoral] victory. Francis challenged Israel's right to exist in the article by complaining that 'the question of the validity of a Jewish-privilege state is never raised'."
That Francis' tenure at Andover High was not terminated, despite Danis' letters of protest from Israel (mentioned in his 'essay'), is obviously a very sore point for the young Horowista. He petulantly concludes with a shake of the head: "It seems that most people in apathetic Andover do not care...I expect more than silence in the face of hatred from my hometown."
Poor Eric. He should count his blessings. How fortunate for him that, by virtue of the discriminatory and racist Israeli Law of Return, he is at one and the same time a) able to live out his Zionist fantasies in Israel/Palestine; b) as a dedicated Horowista, scorn the indigenous population of same, besieged and starving in the Gaza Ghetto, as perpetrators of genocide; c) smear his former teacher, clearly a man of conscience and courage, for exercising his First Amendment right to free speech, with a view to depriving him of his livelihood as a teacher; and d) retain the luxury of a "hometown" in the US to which he can repair as the whim takes him, quite unlike the Palestinian "Jew-killers" who can only travel if they first dynamite their prison walls and risk getting tortured in an Egyptian dungeon.
The Horowistas... Coming to a school near you?
A campaign to enlist university and high school students to spy on their teachers for evidence of alleged left-wing bias was launched last month by the Young Liberals. Endorsed by the federal Liberal Party and operating under the slogan 'Education Not Indoctrination', the Young Liberals claim that students holding what they call 'mainstream views' are not only being subjected to 'leftist propaganda' but even penalised for their 'mainstream views' by their teachers. The Baby Howardistas, therefore, have announced that it is their mission to collect examples of such 'bias' (or worse!) for a proposed Senate inquiry into same.
An idea of where this was all coming from came in a report (Young Libs campaign to out biased dons) in The Australian on 12/3/08: "The National Tertiary Education Union rejected the notion of any widespread systemic bias in Australian universities and said the Young Liberals' campaign had been borrowed from a similar movement in the US, led by conservative intellectual David Horowitz."
David Horowitz is a neocon agitator who started out as a leftist radical in the 60s but later morphed into a Reagan Republican. He specialises in pro-war campus advertising campaigns, and (like the rest of his neocon tribe) has used 9/11 and the Bush/Cheney 'war' on terror as a cover to advance a reactionary, authoritarian agenda through such front groups as the David Horowitz Freedom Center, Students for Academic Freedom and FrontPage Mag.com.
Horowitz has, for example, branded Barbara Lee, the only member of Congress to vote against giving Bush a blank check for his 'war' on terror, a "communist [who] actively collaborated with [America's enemies] in their war against America," and campaigned against "the so-called Peace Movement," claiming that "campus leftists hate America more than the terrorists."
More recently he has campaigned around the issue of 'academic freedom', asserting that students need protection from having their religious and political views questioned (or in his own words, "subjected to a 'hostile environment' ") and from discussion of anything he deems "controversial." In other words, under the banner of academic freedom, Horowitz would have students free of free speech.
Last year he organized an 'Islamo-Fascism Awareness Week' (October 22-26) aimed at what he called the two "Big lies of the political left: that George Bush created the war on terror and that Global Warming is a greater danger to Americans than the terrorist threat." Its themes were "the Oppression of Women in Islam and the threat posed by the Islamic crusade against the West." In addition to teach-ins, sit-ins and protests, pamphlets with titles such as 'The Islamic Mein Kampf', 'Why Israel is the Victim', 'Jimmy Carter's War Against the Jews', and 'What Every American Needs to Know About Jihad' were distributed on campuses across the US.
Horowitz's rants posted (3/08) on FrontPageMag.com reveal a Zionist ultra, red in tooth and claw: Palestinians are "genocidal/Jew-killers"; "Hamas has to be smashed, defeated, pulverized, driven out of existence"; the "western 'progressive' left' [are] the fifth column allies, abettors and fellow-travellers of Islamic jihad"; "Hamas has turned the entire population of Gaza into a suicide bomb."
A taste of the kind of 'evidence' we can expect to see submitted to the hoped-for Senate inquiry by our very own Howardistas turned Horowistas may be found in a FrontPageMag.com post on 23/10/06, hyperbolically called Hamas High. Its author, one Eric Danis, writes that: "I moved from Andover, Massachusetts to Israel over 5 years ago, so the day-to-day happenings in my hometown are largely off my radar screen. However, Andover High School physics teacher Ron Francis, a former teacher of mine, first caught my attention when I saw an article he wrote in February of 2006. The article was entitled 'Media Bias Against Hamas', and was written in an attempt to support the Palestinian terror group Hamas and to demonize Israel. Francis never once condemned Hamas' terror tactics or its anti-Semitic ideology, and he even discussed the 'silver lining' of Hamas' [electoral] victory. Francis challenged Israel's right to exist in the article by complaining that 'the question of the validity of a Jewish-privilege state is never raised'."
That Francis' tenure at Andover High was not terminated, despite Danis' letters of protest from Israel (mentioned in his 'essay'), is obviously a very sore point for the young Horowista. He petulantly concludes with a shake of the head: "It seems that most people in apathetic Andover do not care...I expect more than silence in the face of hatred from my hometown."
Poor Eric. He should count his blessings. How fortunate for him that, by virtue of the discriminatory and racist Israeli Law of Return, he is at one and the same time a) able to live out his Zionist fantasies in Israel/Palestine; b) as a dedicated Horowista, scorn the indigenous population of same, besieged and starving in the Gaza Ghetto, as perpetrators of genocide; c) smear his former teacher, clearly a man of conscience and courage, for exercising his First Amendment right to free speech, with a view to depriving him of his livelihood as a teacher; and d) retain the luxury of a "hometown" in the US to which he can repair as the whim takes him, quite unlike the Palestinian "Jew-killers" who can only travel if they first dynamite their prison walls and risk getting tortured in an Egyptian dungeon.
The Horowistas... Coming to a school near you?
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