The problem of authoritarian religious/ racial nationalism has assumed pandemic proportions. In the case of Iran, it is based on theocracy, but is more commonly based on an implicit or explicit political alliance with religious authority and tradition, i.e. Saudi Arabia, Israel, India, Russia, Britain, the U.S., Hungary, Myanmar, Serbia, and Turkey. China is a special instance as the atheistic state has assumed extraordinary fascist powers based on the historical usurpation of Confucianism. Apart from Iran, Turkey and Saudi Arabia, what do all these countries have in common? They all derive support for their authoritarian religious nationalism from Islamophobia. Even Iran and Saudi Arabia derive part of their political rationalization on a sectarian form of Islamophobia- historical denial of either Sunni or Shia legitimacy.
I am not referring simply to racial or religious chauvinism- which has always been with us, but to authoritarian state policies that range from suppression of civil and religious liberty to prison camps, ethnic cleansing and genocide. And I am referring to state policies that have developed especially in the last twenty years. And I am referring to countries some of which are self avowed defenders of liberty and democracy, most notably the U.S. and Israel.
What is the role of Islamophobia in all this?
The trauma of 9/11 resulted in the U.S. falling into a permanent state of “Shock and Awe”: We have been in multiple wars and military projects ever since the symbolic crashing of capitalism in New York in 2001. We immediately invaded Afghanistan and have remained there ever since, making it the longest war in U.S. history, and yet we control at this time less than half the country. We destroyed Iraq on the basis of a lie that has never been politically accounted for: There was no congressional investigation of the single greatest war crime since the Holocaust. (We have Obama to thank for that.) We have invaded and helped destroy Syria and Libya, and we have aided Saudi Arabia to wage war crimes on a massive scale in Yemen. We are engaged in extra judicial drone assassinations in numerous countries not only in the Middle East but also in Africa. And we now threaten Iran on a daily basis with the transparent lie that they seek to develop nuclear weaponry. Virtually the entire world except for the U.S. and Israel know and declare this to be, like George Bush’s assertion of Iraqi weapons of mass destruction, a lie.
How could such a massive parade of viciousness and lies roll on and on, year after year, with nearly full congressional support?
The answer lies in U.S. dependency on Saudi oil and regional hegemony and support of Israel as a settler colonial state with a US lobby infamous for its power and ruthlessness. The U.S. government and corporate media are so completely pro Israel that it is literally impossible to have a sustained public debate of the facts of Zionist Apartheid without being accused of anti-Semitism. This tragic fact has become a massive black hole into which all sane discourse on the Middle East disappears. It is a masterstroke of utterly perverse propaganda that has highjacked U.S. foreign (and domestic) policy like no other single issue. (Russiagate, by comparison, is a trifle.) The bogeyman is, of course, the omnipresent Muslim terrorist who is allied with the dispossessed Palestinian ingrate.
And yet there is a complete taboo in government and corporate media of discussing, let alone acknowledging, that we are a failed Orwellian and Islamophobic state. Our democracy has been flushed down a corporate Spy and War Machine and Zionist toilet to further the fossil fuel industry and settler colonialism.
But the story doesn’t end there. The absolutely tremendous dedication of the US to the Terror Wars and concomitant support of Israel and Saudi Arabia has so upended the Middle East that Islamophobia is raging like a super fire storm across the planet:
China has incarcerated up to two million Muslims in Xinjiang so as to render them non-Muslims; India is planning to expel up to two million Muslims as illegal immigrants; the Zionist lobby in Britain has successfully smeared Jeremy Corbyn and the Labor Party as anti-Semites because of support for Palestinian rights; 700,ooo Rohingya Muslims were ethnically cleansed from Myanmar and remain stateless; the recent winner of the Nobel Prize for literature, Peter Handke, has denied Serbian atrocities against Bosnian Muslims; France, Britain, the U.S., Germany and roughly thirty other governments have adopted the position that anti-Zionism is anti-Semitic; the U.S. has fully endorsed the most egregiously racist and criminal Israeli state policies and actions; the U.S. has fully endorsed and protected the murderer, MBS, crown prince of Saudi Arabia, as a pawn to promote U.S. hegemony, etc.
The U.S., champion of righteousness in defeating the Axis powers, has in the years since the end of the second World War metamorphosed into the world’s greatest rogue terrorist state and the greatest supporter of both the absolute monarchy of Saudi Arabia, world wide supporter of Salafi fundamentalism, and the fascist state of Zionist Apartheid. In fact both these countries only exist because of U.S. financial largesse and military support.
As I write, Israel is moving toward a final solution of the several million Palestinians whose land, villages, homes, olive trees, grazing lands and water have been systematically stolen by the fascist settler colonial state of Zionist Apartheid.
The U.S. has become a Death Star in its support for rabid religious/ racial nationalism.
