Today in the United States, the rising attacks by white supremacists against Jewish, Muslim, and African American people, institutions and icons have all come together under one propaganda outlet code named "alt-right", whose chief ideologue Stephen Bannon (the Abu Bakr al-Baghdadi of the "alt-right") is now sitting right next to the president of the US in the Oval Office as his top consigliere.
What is the nature of this disease, and where does it come from? We already have a number of excellent studies on the matter, among them I might mention Peter Gottschalk and Gabriel Greenberg's Islamophobia: Making Muslims the Enemy; Deepa Kumar's Islamophobia and the Politics of Empire; Nathan Lean's The Islamophobia Industry: How the Right Manufactures Fear of Muslims; and Carl Ernst (Ed), Islamophobia in America: The Anatomy of Intolerance; and to which we must add Terry Eagleton's exquisite dismantling of the New Atheists, Reason, Faith, and Revolution: Reflections on the God Debate.
These studies have all been necessary and groundbreaking but nowhere near sufficient. The disease of Islamophobia - like any other kind of phobia - has varied symptoms and requires continued critical diagnosis.
Boastful ignorance
Today, the world attention is rightly drawn to top Islamophobes like Stephen Bannon and Sebastian Gorka or the conspiracy theorist Frank Gaffney and their ilk, all and more congregating around Donald Trump in the Oval Office.
Hidden from sight under their disguise is a far more pernicious version of the illness in the far more popular liberal circles best represented by the mass-media manufactured court jesters like Bill Maher and his sidekick Sam Harris.
If you were to ask me who is the single most pestiferous American Islamophobe alive today I will not say Bannon, Michael Flynn, Stephan Miller, or even Gorka, all of them now chief among the career opportunist zealot Crusaders cheering Trump on.
I would say, without a moment of hesitation, Maher and Harris, and before he passed away that careerist Christopher Hitchens, are far more dangerous Stormtrooper lieutenants of Islamophobia.
These liberal Islamophobes are finagling their hatred of Muslims with smiling faces, silly jokes, phony arguments, forced laughter and manufactured consent - with the full cooperation of otherwise perfectly respectable outlets.
Masses of millions of Americans are out demonstrating against those notorious racists gathered around Trump. Maher and Harris are snake oil charmers selling their hate on prime time television.
These liberal Islamophobes, proverbially the enemy of that which they do not understand, pontificate their pathological fear of Islam and Muslims with fake authority and false familiarity.
Sitting next to Maher, Harris issues an Executive Order that Islam "must be reformed". But by what authority, what education, what knowledge, what scholarship and who gave him that authority?
Comment: It's not so black and white. There are dark and backward elements of Islam, just as there are with all mainstream religions. Such things should be acknowledged and addressed. A person doesn't have to be a scholar to see such things. But this doesn't excuse bigotry like Maher's.
Between the two of them Maher and Harris cannot tell a word of Arabic from Persian, Turkish, or Urdu if it hit them in the face, and yet, they sit there and like two Taliban bandits sharp shooting through camera lenses to the periodic laughter of approval by their popped up audiences.
Today, there are two complementary threats to that necessary internal reform definitive to Muslim intellectual history since its fateful encounter with European colonialism: Baghdadi and his gang of cutthroat criminals on one side and Maher and his fraternity club of liberal and right-wing Islamophobes on the other.
Think of it: Among the entire gang of liberal and conservative Islamophobes, they cannot tell an Arabic from a Persian word. They are the functional equivalent of ignorant sheikhs and their Shia counterparts across the Middle East who come and issue fatwas about the "West" without a word of English or any other European language to their names.
And right there is the predicament of our time caught in between two gangs of ignoramus xenophobes, pitting one battalion of armed ignorance against another.
Unhinged bigotry
They dare to talk about the "battle of ideas" without a single citation of any living or dead Muslim theologian, philosopher, mystic, poet, artist, or public intellectual evident in their vertiginously vacuous prose.
The monumentality of their ignorance is only sanctioned by their self-entitled white privileges. They are white; they can say whatever they want.
At the height of the Enlightenment modernity, Europe ended up in German concentration camps. At the height of American democracy, they are ruled by Trump. And they dare to talk about "battle of ideas"! What ideas?
Comment: While Trump's travel ban efforts may be considered a hostile measure against Muslim immigrants, he is also among the few in Washington who has taken a serious stance against terrorism in the Middle East. This, in part, does differentiate Trump from his predecessors, but it's not a black and white issue either as there are many colliding interests which seek to muddy the waters and implement continual chaos. Trump isn't the agent of looming disaster, but that's not to say that the existing power structure will not try to drive things over the edge as a result of Trump challenging the status quo. The height of American democracy has long passed, if it ever even existed.
The history of their own country began with the genocidal destruction of Native Americans, continued with the despicable history of African slavery, and at the heights of their technological achievements with dropping an atom bomb on Japan. Battle of what ideas against what ideas?
Such highfalutin nonsense about "battle of ideas", however, is a subterfuge for a much simpler banality of ignorance. It is no longer a matter of accusing Maher of being the bigot that he is, for his open espousing of wanton racism is now a matter of public knowledge after his recent bromance with the notorious neo-Fascist poster boy Milo Yiannopoulos.
None of this is to say Muslims en masse are God's gift to humanity. Islamophilia is as deranged as Islamophobia. There are an estimated 1.5 billion Muslims around the globe. They have their share of criminal thugs, homicidal sociopaths, psychotic gangs, etc.
But to address such pathologies you will need a minimum of sympathy for the common humanity of millions of other Muslims who have nothing to do with these criminals.
Comment: Yes. The large majority of people on this planet are just seeking to live their lives in peace. Unfortunately, both history and current day events show there are influential forces that seek disruption, war, and conflict. We need to act in ways that afford us the most protection, which by and large means rooting out the things which separate a given group from the rest of society. Liberalism teaches people to accept a group's behavior and preferences, even when they offend common sensibilities. It is the offence of uncommon sensibilities that they actually have a problem with. This doesn't do anyone any favors, and it sure does not afford protection. In fact, it drives wedges between people. A little willingness to adjust can go a long way towards mending fences.
Today, there are two complementary threats to that necessary internal reform definitive to Muslim intellectual history since its fateful encounter with European colonialism: Baghdadi and his gang of cutthroat criminals on one side and Maher and his fraternity club of liberal and right-wing Islamophobes on the other.
This historic rise of Islamophobia will have a transformative impact on Muslims and the current turn in their critical thinking. The most serious among Muslim intellectuals are today undergoing the pains of moral and imaginative rebirth.
Comment: Muslim leaders have a responsibility to work on such problems, but the West is not relieved of the part it has played. Western 'intervention' has deep responsibility for these same issues.
Their enemies like Maher and Bannon are the enemies of humanity, for Islamophobia is a thin subterfuge for a much more malignant xenophobia, fear of anyone and anything that does not look or sound like them.
We Muslims are privileged, perhaps we are even destined, to fight for our civil liberties in renewed universal terms - not just for ourselves but for all the other subaltern components of humanity fighting against white supremacy in the US and Europe.
We will emerge from this fight having morally universalised our political particulars. We will face Maher and Bannon face to face, eyeball to eyeball, with our learned humanity against their illiterate barbarity.
Hamid Dabashi is Hagop Kevorkian Professor of Iranian Studies and Comparative Literature at Columbia University in New York.
When Britain introduced reform (Wahhabism, through the family of Saud) they presented it as a return to the original Islam. Although it is not, but it was a way for Muslims to accept Wahhabism. Who will accept the reform?
Instead of reforms, should support better forces instead of the current practice of supporting extremists (as now in Syria). Most people do not want extremism and if things are left to the natural course, it would not be such a problem.
But when Afghanistan began to introduce reforms toward socialism, the United States has used precisely the radical Muslims to stop it.
Noam Chomsky: "Like Britain before it, the US has tended to support radical Islam and to oppose secular nationalism, which both imperial states have regarded as more threatening to their goals of domination and control. When secular options are crushed, religious extremism often fills the vacuum. Furthermore, the primary US ally over the years, Saudi Arabia, is the most radical Islamist state in the world and also a missionary state, which uses its vast oil resources to promulgate its extremist Wahabi/Salafi doctrines by establishing schools, mosques, and in other ways, and has also been the primary source for the funding of radical Islamist groups, along with Gulf Emirates - all US allies.
It's worth noting that religious fanaticism is spreading in the West as well, as democracy erodes."
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On being asked, "about any regrets having supported Islamic fundamentalism, which has given arms and advice to future terrorists?"
Brzezinski replied - "What is more important in world history? The Taliban or the collapse of the Soviet empire? Some agitated Moslems or the liberation of Central Europe and the end of the cold war?" (Le Nouvel Observateur, 1998)[Link]
As the US mobilizes for covert war in Afghanistan (see 1978 and July 3, 1979), a CIA special envoy meets Afghan mujaheddin leaders at Peshawar, Pakistan, near the border to Afghanistan. All of them have been carefully selected by the Pakistani ISI and do not represent a broad spectrum of the resistance movement. One of them is Gulbuddin Hekmatyar, a drug dealer with little support in Afghanistan, but who is loyal to the ISI. The US will begin working with Hekmatyar and over the next 10 years over half of all US aid to the mujaheddin will go to his faction (see 1983). Hekmatyar is already known as brutal, corrupt, and incompetent. [McCoy, 2003, pp. 475] His extreme ruthlessness, for instance, his reputation for skinning prisoners alive, is considered a plus, as it is thought he will use that ruthlessness to kill Russians. [Link]
I heard Allah’s Apostle, peace be upon him, saying, “In the last days of this world there will appear some young foolish people who will use (in their claim) the best speech of all people (i.e. the Holy Qur’an) and they will abandon Islam as an arrow going through the game. Their belief will not go beyond their throats (i.e. they will have practically no belief)... (Narrated by Ali, Sahih Al-Bukhari 4:808)
The Prophet, peace be upon him, said, “Leave him, for he has companions who pray and fast in such a way that you will consider your fasting negligible in comparison to theirs. They recite Qur’an but it does not go beyond their throats (i.e. they do not act on it) and they will desert Islam as an arrow goes through a victim’s body, so that the hunter, on looking at the arrow’s blade, would see nothing on it; he would look at its Risaf and see nothing, he would look at its Nadi and see nothing, and he would look at its Qudhadh (1) and see nothing (neither meat nor blood), for the arrow has been too fast even for the blood and excretions to smear. The sign by which they will be recognized is that among them there will be a black man, one of whose arms will resemble a woman’s breast or a lump of meat moving loosely." (Narrated by Abu Said Al Khudri, Sahih Al-Bukhari 4:807)
ISIS captors cared little about religion, says former hostage [Link]
Leaked ISIS documents: The majority of recruits knew nothing about Islam [Link]
As far back as 2007, Pulitzer Prize-winning veteran journalist Seymour Hersh would warn of the creation of just such a terror group in his 9-page report in the New Yorker titled, "The Redirection Is the Administration’s new policy benefitting our enemies in the war on terrorism?" He stated that (emphasis added):
"To undermine Iran, which is predominantly Shiite, the Bush Administration has decided, in effect, to reconfigure its priorities in the Middle East. In Lebanon, the Administration has cooperated with Saudi Arabia’s government, which is Sunni, in clandestine operations that are intended to weaken Hezbollah, the Shiite organization that is backed by Iran. The U.S. has also taken part in clandestine operations aimed at Iran and its ally Syria. A by-product of these activities has been the bolstering of Sunni extremist groups that espouse a militant vision of Islam and are hostile to America and sympathetic to Al Qaeda." [Link]
“In Syria, if the choice is between Iran and the Islamic State, I choose the Islamic State. They don’t have the capabilities that Iran has,” Ya’alon told a conference held by the Institute of National Security Studies in Tel Aviv. [Link]
Israel's Defense Minister Moshe Ya’alon: "It appears to be that we - Israel, are at same page with this camp (sunni)."https://youtu.be/LL7Buyk0zzg?t=720(youtube "Saban Forum 2015: A conversation with Moshe Ya’alon, Israel’s minister of defense" 00:12:00 (h:m:s)