Lying again

Anyone who thinks that George Bush is a man who is chastened by recent events and has decided that more lies would not serve his cause would have been disabused of that notion by his Veterans Day speech.

At this hour, a new generation of Americans is defending our flag and our freedom in the first war of the 21st century. The war came to our shores on September the 11th, 2001.

But it didn't. The war that America is fighting has been going on for a lot longer than four years. Often, Bush and his team are castigated for continuing to link Iraq to Al Qaeda by making out that their action in the former is part of a war on the latter. Clearly, it was not, but it is part of America's ongoing fight against the poor world, prosecuted to ensure that the rich remain rich and the poor poor, among other things.

But the poor guys having their arses shot off in Iraq are not defending America's flag or freedom. They are occupying another nation against all norms of international behaviour for several reasons, none very savoury. Top of the list is control of Iraq's resources, crucial to America, not just for the oil that will power its SUVs in the future but as a counterbalance to OPEC's badboy antiAmericans such as Venezuela.

That morning, we saw the destruction that terrorists intend for our nation. We know that they want to strike again. And our nation has made a clear choice: We will confront this mortal danger to all humanity; we will not tire or rest until the war on terror is won.

Bush relentlessly pushes a simple message. He knows it is still selling. The message is, terrorists want to destroy America.

But do they? They say they don't. It's key to understanding the various Islamists that their cause, their quarrel, is primarily internal. Their interest in America begins and more or less ends with America's support for corrupt regimes in the Middle East and elsewhere and its meddling in third world politics.

The Qutbista analysis of why it is fighting America does shift, but it centres on America's interventionism. It's the strand that connects Iraq and Palestine, Afghanistan and Indonesia. These are places where America has interfered in the Muslim world and not to the benefit of Muslims -- except for rich, cryptofascist dictators and their cohorts, who are rewarded by America everywhere in the world.

In the four years since September the 11th, the evil that reached our shores has reappeared on other days, in other places -- in Mombasa and Casablanca and Riyadh and Jakarta and Istanbul and Madrid and Beslan and Taba and Netanya and Baghdad, and elsewhere.

Has it though? It's important to recognise that the perpetrators of these acts are generally connected only by their religion, and not in any other way. It serves them to agree that they're AQ, and it's often claimed on Islamic websites that AQ is behind the acts of violence, but even in this age of the global village, making out even the slimmest of links among most of them is difficult.

It doesn't help deal with the problem either to ignore that we are not dealing with a monolithic group with one straightforward goal (to destroy whatever we think they're destroying this week: our values, "democracy", stuff -- nonsense when one considers that Jordan is not a democracy, nor Saudi Arabia, nor Morocco, nor Egypt, although some have elections from time to time for one thing or another, and few of the places bombed share "values"; far from it, President Mubarak would choke on mine). They are many different groups with overlapping but distinct aims.

In the past few months, we have seen a new terror offensive with attacks on London and Sharm el-Sheikh, another deadly strike in Bali, and this week, a series of bombings in Amman, Jordan, that killed dozens of innocent Jordanians and their guests.

I note the word "offensive", which implies a military action on a big scale. It calls to mind the Tet Offensive, which was a huge push by the Vietcong.

But these are isolated acts that happen to have come at roughly the same time.

All these separate images of destruction and suffering that we see on the news can seem like random, isolated acts of madness

It's notable that Bush combines "isolated acts", which they were, wit "random", which they were not.

One can only note that terrorists are "mad" to bomb our infrastructure, but we are quite sane to do it to them. What a difference a B52 makes!

-- innocent men and women and children who have died simply because they boarded the wrong train, or worked in the wrong building, or checked into the wrong hotel. Yet, while the killers choose their victims indiscriminately, their attacks serve a clear and focused ideology

Do they? What is it then? I note that neither Bush, nor Blair nor any member of their respective teams ever outlines what this ideology actually is.

I doubt Bush knows.

In one paragraph, this is what they want: having noted that the Islamic world is run by corrupt badboys, mostly supported by the Yanks, and seemingly ruined by them, with little hope of social justice for the people, Islamic intellectuals looked at two routes to renewal. One was socialism, the other a rebirth of Islam. What is important is the need for renewal, and the intellectuals' desire for greater equity. It's hard to discern through the reams of bullshit written about the Qutbistas that their ideology is fundamentally egalitarian, but at base it is (although, as we all know, what you build on your base can make the final structure very far removed from the foundations). Early Islam was thought to be the perfect society. Because Muhammad was the "perfect man", the way he lived is exactly right for a Muslim. He was honest, scrupulous, fair, just. This is what the Islamic renewalists wanted, still want. They came to believe that if you don't want the same thing, you are not really a Muslim, just as you could argue that if you don't go to church and worship God, you're not really a Christian. (There is a lot more to their programme of course, in particular centring around the two big divides in Islam: that between Sunni and Shia, which could perhaps be characterised as similar to that between those sects of Christianity that are structured with elders and popularly supported ministers and those with a hierarchy; and the other between strict monotheists and those who are a little more flexible (a common enough divide in all big religions; one could compare Buddhism and the divide between the strict antideism of Zen and the spirit-worshippers of Tibetan Buddhism.)

Yes, the occasional Qutbista occasionally mutters about winning the whole world for Islam, but this is rather uncommon, and is not a strong flavour in Islamism. Most Islamists want to regenerate the world of Islam, not conquer the nonIslamic world. They are realists in the main. Even bin Laden has realistic aims, nothing similar to those he is supposed to have.

-- a set of beliefs and goals that are evil, but not insane.

But what is evil? Is it evil to want to regenerate your nation, to want to free it from foreign influence and return it to what you believe was a happier state?

Is it evil to be willing to kill people to control their oil, for water, for money?

What exactly does bin Laden believe that's evil? His views on Jews are very ugly, and although Islam was progressive on women's rights in 700 (and frankly, would be today were it put into place in the Middle East), its beliefs now lag ours (beliefs are not the same as deeds though; Muslims point to the exploitation of women in our society and the downgrading of "womanly" activities such as childrearing and ask whether we're actually ones to talk).

Is it evil to think that the Sauds are not perfect for Saudi Arabia? Evil to think they have exploited their people for their own, and America's benefit, when they could have used the enormous wealth they have to benefit the people much more?

Fuck, I think that! Am I evil? I think that bin Laden's ideals would be a damned sight better for the Middle East than Bush's in most areas. His egalitarian, just society is a lot more palatable than Bush's devil-take-the-hindmost capitalism.

Adapt it so that it is fairer to women and less antagonistic to Jews (not a feature of Muhammad's thought but an accretion of the prevailing feelings of the Arabs) and I don't think it is such a bad vision. Yes, Islam has a whiff of convert or kill about it, but Christianity has a lot of burning flesh and dead "savages" in its past too.

Some call this evil Islamic radicalism; others, militant Jihadism; and still others, Islamo-fascism. Whatever it's called, this ideology is very different from the religion of Islam.

No, it's not. This is a simple lie spread by the Bushes and Blairs because, I feel, they are not interested in finding out what Islam is, its history and how it views the world.

This form of radicalism exploits Islam to serve a violent, political vision: the establishment, by terrorism, subversion and insurgency, of a totalitarian empire that denies all political and religious freedom.

Well, actually no.

It is radicalism, that's true. It seeks a rebirth of Islamic society. But to suggest it exploits Islam is to miss the point. It no more exploits Islam than Bush exploits democracy.

Oh.

Was the Caliphate a "totalitarian empire"? No, it was not. It did not "deny all religious freedom". It was from time to time repressive of Jews, but not in all places and at all times. When times were tough, Jews tended to take the blame. That's a common theme around the world. A people who stand aside as a recognisable Other are going to be targets and scapegoats. People just aren't all that tolerant, no matter where you go. You can argue that they should be, and should have been, but they aren't and weren't. It's easy to direct antigovernment feeling into antisemitism. Hitler didn't invent the idea. The Caliphate allowed a fair amount of political freedom too. Here's not the place to discuss mediaeval politics but suffice it to say that the heavily centralised administration that is made possible by mechanised transport and communication at the speed of light was not possible anywhere in the Middle Ages and simply did not exist. Bush is mistaking absolutism, which was common to all parts of the world, for totalitarianism, which is a different thing.

When Muslims say they want to return to the Caliphate, they do not mean they want to return to empire in any case. What they are saying is that they wanted to return to a panIslamic ideal, a time when most Muslim lands were under one ruler, and had a commonality that transcended national boundaries. When one looks at the lives of the major figures of the high Islamic period, it's notable how they travelled, lived in different places and were accepted as part of many different societies. This wasn't because anyone forced the locals to accept them, but because the Ummah was a sort of commonwealth.

Indeed, the Qutbistas are absolutely opposed to totalitarianism. They oppose the Sauds, the Hashemis and they despised Saddam, whose regime could very much be described as "fascist" and which we supported, as we do fascists the whole world round, and will continue to do so as long as we allow corporations and not people to call the shots in our policy.

There was much more of the same. You'd presume Bush was ignorant, if you didn't know that he has speechwriters that deliver this stuff. Are they all clueless about what Islamists are and believe? Well, maybe. But they know for sure that a sophisticated discussion of what they are, what they believe, and what we are, what we believe would have Bush's arse kicked to the kerb as quickly as you can say "doing it for the oil". So the masses are fed this bullshit about global ideologies of evil while a global ideology of sacrificing human wellbeing to the making of dollars continues on its merry way.

posted by Dr Zen @ 1:20 pm