Oh sure and no Moslims in the world have Non Moslim Phobia.
* No Moslims hate Non Moslims.
* There is no JehaaD going on against Non Moslims in almost all Moslim Countries.
* There have been no 16,000 JehaaDi Sneak Attacks all around the world since 9/11.
* Moslims do not hate Non Moslims.
--- In alochona@yahoogroups.com, qrahman@... wrote:
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> Islamophobes seduced by Crusader myth
> By John Feffer
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> http://www.atimes.com/atimes/Middle_East/LK10Ak04.html
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> The Muslims were bloodthirsty and treacherous. They conducted a sneak attackagainst the French army and slaughtered every single soldier, 20,000 in all. Morethan 1,000 years ago, in the mountain passes of Spain, the Muslim horde cut downthe finest soldiers in Charlemagne's command, including his brave nephewRoland. Then, according to the famous poem that immortalized the tragedy,Charlemagne exacted his revenge by routing the entire Muslim army.
>
> The Song of Roland, an 11th century rendering in verse of an eighthcentury battle, is a staple of Western civilization classes at colleges aroundthe country. A "masterpiece of epic drama," in the words of itsrenowned translator Dorothy Sayers, it provides a handy preface for studentsbefore they delve into readings on the
> Crusades that began in 1095. More ominously, the poem hasschooled generations of Judeo-Christians to view Muslims as perfidious enemieswho once threatened the very foundations of Western civilization.
>
> The problem, however, is that the whole epic is built on a curious falsehood.The army that fell upon Roland and his Frankish soldiers was not Muslim at all.In the real battle of 778, the slayers of the Franks were Christian Basquesfurious at Charlemagne for pillaging their city of Pamplona. Not epic at all, the battle emergedfrom a parochial dispute in the complex wars of medieval Spain. Onlylater, as kings and popes and knights prepared to do battle in the FirstCrusade, did an anonymous bard repurpose the text to serve the needs of anemerging cross-against-crescent holy war.
>
> Similarly, we think of the Crusades as the archetypal "clash ofcivilizations" between the followers of Jesus and the followers ofMohammed. In the popular version of those Crusades, the Muslim adversary has,in fact, replaced a remarkable range of peoples the Crusaders dealt with asenemies, including Jews killed in pogroms on the way to the Holy Land, rivalCatholics slaughtered in the Balkans and in Constantinople, and Christianheretics hunted down in southern France.
>
> Much later, during the Cold War, mythmakers in Washingtonperformed a similar act, substituting a monolithic crew labeled "godlesscommunists" for a disparate group of anti-imperial nationalists in anattempt to transform conflicts in remote locations like Vietnam, Guatemala,and Iraninto epic struggles between the forces of the Free World and the forces ofevil. In recent years, the Bush administration did it all over again byportraying Arab nationalists as fiendish Islamic fundamentalists when weinvaded Iraq and prepared totopple the regime in Syria.
>
> Similar mythmaking continues today. The recent surge of Islamophobia in the United Stateshas drawn strength from several extraordinary substitutions. A clearlyChristian president has become Muslim in the minds of a significant number ofAmericans. The thoughtful Islamic scholar Tariq Ramadan has become a closetfundamentalist in the writings of Paul Berman and others. And an Islamic centerin lower Manhattan,organized by proponents of interfaith dialogue, has become an extremist"mosque at Ground Zero" in the TV appearances, political speeches,and Internet sputterings of a determined clique of right-wing activists.
>
> This transformation of Islam into a violent caricature of itself - as if AnnCoulter had suddenly morphed into the face of Christianity - comes at asomewhat strange juncture in the United States. Anti-Islamicrhetoric and hate crimes, which spiked immediately after September 11, 2001,had been on the wane. No major terrorist attack had taken place in the U.S. or Europe since the London bombings in 2005. The current Americanpresident had reached out to the Muslim world and retired the controversialacronym GWOT, or "global war on terror".
>
> All the elements seemed in place, in other words, for us to turn the page on anugly chapter in our history. Yet it's as if we remain fixed in the eleventhcentury in a perpetual battle of "us" against "them." Likethe undead rising from their coffins, our previous "crusades" never goaway. Indeed, we still seem to be fighting the three great wars of themillennium, even though two of these conflicts have long been over and thethird has been rhetorically reduced to "overseas contingencyoperations".
>
> The Crusades, which finally petered out in the 17th century, continue to shapeour global imagination today. The Cold War ended in 1991, but key elements ofthe anticommunism credo have been awkwardly grafted onto the new Islamistadversary. And the "war on terror", which US President Barack Obamaquietly renamed shortly after taking office, has in fact metastasized into thewars that his administration continues to prosecute in Afghanistan, Pakistan,Iraq, Yemen and elsewhere.
>
> Those in Europe and the United States who cheer on these wars claim thatthey are issuing a wake-up call about the continued threat of al-Qaeda, theTaliban, and other militants who claim the banner of Islam. However, whatreally keeps Islamophobes up at night is not the marginal and backwards-lookingIslamic fundamentalists but rather the growing economic, political, and globalinfluence of modern, mainstream Islam. Examples of Islam successfully grapplingwith modernity abound, from Turkey'snew foreign policy and Indonesia'seconomic muscle to the Islamic political parties participating in elections in Lebanon, Morocco,and Jordan.Instead of providing reassurance, however, these trends only inciteIslamophobes to intensify their battles to "save" Westerncivilization.
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> As long as our unfinished wars still burn in the collective consciousness - andstill rage in Kabul, Baghdad, Sana'a, and the tribal areas of Pakistan -Islamophobia will make its impact felt in our media, politics, and daily life.Only if we decisively end the millennial Crusades, the half-century Cold War,and the decade-long "war on terror" (under whatever name) will weovercome the dangerous divide that has consumed so many lives, wasted so muchwealth, and distorted our very understanding of our Western selves.
>
> The Crusades continue
> With their irrational fear of spiders, arachnophobes are scared of bothharmless daddy longlegs and poisonous brown recluse spiders. In extreme cases,an arachnophobe can break out in a sweat while merely looking at photos ofspiders. It is, of course, reasonable to steer clear of black widows. Whatmakes a legitimate fear into an irrational phobia, however, is the tendency tolump all of any group, spiders or humans, into one lethal category and then toexaggerate how threatening they are. Spider bites, after all, are responsiblefor at most a handful of deaths a year in the United States.
>
> Islamophobia is, similarly, an irrational fear of Islam. Yes, certain Muslimfundamentalists have been responsible for terrorist attacks, certain fantasistsabout a "global caliphate" continue to plot attacks on perceivedenemies, and certain groups like Afghanistan'sTaliban and Somalia'sal-Shabaab practice medieval versions of the religion. But Islamophobes confusethese small parts with the whole and then see terrorist jihad under everyIslamic pillow. They break out in a sweat at the mere picture of an imam.
>
> Irrational fears are often rooted in our dimly remembered childhoods. Ourirrational fear of Islam similarly seems to stem from events that happened inthe early days of Christendom. Three myths inherited from the era of theCrusades constitute the core of Islamophobia today: Muslims are inherentlyviolent; Muslims want to take over the world; and Muslims can't be trusted.
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> The myth of Islam as a "religion of the sword" was a staple ofCrusader literature and art. In fact, the atrocities committed by Muslimleaders and armies - and there were some - rarely rivaled the slaughters of theCrusaders, who retook Jerusalemin 1099 in a veritable bloodbath. "The heaps of the dead presented animmediate problem for the conquerors," writes Christopher Tyerman in God'sWar. "Many of the surviving Muslim population were forced to clear thestreets and carry the bodies outside the walls to be burnt in great pyres,whereat they themselves were massacred." Jerusalem's Jews suffered a similar fate whenthe Crusaders burned many of them alive in their main synagogue. Four hundredyears earlier, by contrast, Caliph Umar put no one to the sword when he tookover Jerusalem,signing a pact with the Christian patriarch Sophronius that pledged "nocompulsion in religion".
>
> This myth of the inherently violent Muslim endures. Islam "teachesviolence", televangelist Pat Robertson proclaimed in 2005. "The Koranteaches violence and most Muslims, including so-called moderate Muslims, openlybelieve in violence," was the way Major General Jerry Curry (US Army,retired), who served in the Jimmy Carter, Ronald Reagan, and Bush Sradministrations, put it.
>
> The Crusaders justified their violence by arguing that Muslims were bent on takingover the world. In its early days, the expanding Islamic empire did indeedimagine an ever-growing dar-es-Islam (House of Islam). By the time ofthe Crusades, however, this initial burst of enthusiasm for holy war had longbeen spent. Moreover, the Christian West harbored its own set of desires whenit came to extending the Pope's authority to every corner of the globe. Eventhat early believer in soft power, Francis of Assisi, sat down with Sultanal-Kamil during the Fifth Crusade with the aim of eliminating Islam throughconversion.
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> Today, Islamophobes portray the building of Cordoba House in Lower Manhattan as just another gambit in this millennial power grab:"This is Islamic domination and expansionism," writes right-wingblogger Pamela Geller, who made the "Ground Zero Mosque" into a mediaobsession. "Islam is a religion with a very political agenda," warnsex-Muslim Ali Sina. "The ultimate goal of Islam is to rule theworld."
>
> These two myths - of inherent violence and global ambitions - led to the firmconviction that Muslims were by nature untrustworthy. Robert of Ketton, a 12thcentury translator of the Koran, was typical in badmouthing the prophetMohammad this way: "Like the liar you are, you everywhere contradictyourself." The suspicion of untrustworthiness fell as well on anyChristian who took up the possibility of coexistence with Islam. Pope Gregory,for instance, believed that the 13th century Crusader Frederick II was theAntichrist himself because he developed close relationships with Muslims.
>
> For Islamophobes today, Muslims abroad are similarly terrorists-in-waiting. Asfor Muslims at home: "American Muslims must face their either/or,"writes the novelist Edward Cline, "to repudiate Islam or remain a quiet,sanctioning fifth column." Even American Muslims in high places, likeCongressman Keith Ellison (D-MN), are not above suspicion. In a 2006 CNNinterview, Glenn Beck said, "I have been nervous about this interview withyou, because what I feel like saying is: 'Sir, prove to me that you are notworking with our enemies'."
>
> These three myths of Islamophobia flourish in our era, just as they did almosta millennium ago, because of a cunning conflation of a certain type of Islamicfundamentalism with Islam itself. Bill O'Reilly was neatly channeling thisCrusader mindset when he asserted recently that "the Muslim threat to theworld is not isolated. It's huge!" When deputy undersecretary of defensefor intelligence William Boykin, in an infamous 2003 sermon, thundered "whatI'm here to do today is to recruit you to be warriors of God's kingdom,"he was issuing the Crusader call to arms.
>
> But O'Reilly and Boykin, who represent the violence, duplicity, andexpansionist mindset of today's Western Crusaders, were also invoking a morerecent tradition, closer in time and far more familiar.
>
> The totalitarian myth
> In 1951, the Central Intelligence Agency and the emerging anticommunist elite,including soon-to-be-president Dwight Eisenhower, created the Crusade forFreedom as a key component of a growing psychological warfare campaign againstthe Soviet Union and the satellite countries it controlled in Eastern Europe. The language of this "crusade" was intentionallyreligious. It reached out to "peoples deeply rooted in the heritage ofwestern civilization," living under the "crushing weight of a godlessdictatorship." In its call for the liberation of the communist world, itechoed the nearly thousand-year-old Crusader rhetoric of "recovering"Jerusalem andother outposts of Christianity.
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> In the theology of the Cold War, the Soviet Union replaced the Islamic world as the untrustworthy infidel.However unconsciously, the old Crusader myths about Islam translated remarkablyeasily into governing assumptions about the communist enemy: the Soviets andtheir allies were bent on taking over the world, could not be trusted withtheir rhetoric of peaceful coexistence, imperiled Western civilization, andfought with unique savagery as well as a willingness to martyr themselves forthe greater ideological good.
>
> Ironically, Western governments were so obsessed withfighting this new scourge that, in the Cold War years, on the theory that
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> my enemy's enemy is my friend, they nurtured radical Islamas a weapon. As journalist Robert Dreyfuss ably details in his book The Devil'sGame, the US funding of themujahideen in Afghanistanwas only one part of the anticommunist crusade in the Islamic world. Toundermine Arab nationalists and leftists who might align themselves with theSoviet Union, the United States(and Israel)worked with Iranian mullahs, helped create Hamas, and facilitated the spread ofthe Muslim Brotherhood.
>
> Though the Cold War ended with the sudden disappearance ofthe Soviet Union in 1991, that era's mindset -and so many of the Cold Warriors sporting it - never went with it. Theprevailing mythology was simply transferred back to the Islamic world. Inanticommunist theology, for example, the worst curse word was"totalitarianism", said to describe the essence of theall-encompassing Soviet state and system. According to the gloss that earlyneoconservative Jeanne Kirkpatrick provided in her book Dictatorships andDouble Standards, the West had every reason to support right-wing authoritariandictatorships because they would steadfastly oppose left-wing totalitarian dictatorships,which, unlike the autocracies we allied with, were supposedly incapable ofinternal reform.
>
> According to the new "Islamofascism" school - andits acolytes like Norman Podhoretz, David Horowitz, Bill O'Reilly and PamelaGeller - the fundamentalists are simply the "new totalitarians", ashidebound, fanatical, and incapable of change as communists. For a moresophisticated treatment of the Islamofascist argument, check out Paul Berman, arightward-leaning liberal intellectual who has tried to demonstrate that"moderate Muslims" are fundamentalists in reformist clothing.
>
> These Cold Warriors all treat the Islamic world as anundifferentiated mass - in spirit, a modern Soviet Union- where Arab governments and radical Islamists work hand in glove. They simplyfail to grasp that the Syrian, Egyptian, and Saudi Arabian governments havelaunched their own attacks on radical Islam. The sharp divides between theIranian regime and the Taliban, between the Jordanian government and thePalestinians, between Shi'ites and Sunni in Iraq, and even among Kurds alldisappear in the totalitarian blender, just as anti-communists generally failedto distinguish between the communist hardliner Leonid Brezhnev and thecommunist reformer Mikhail Gorbachev.
>
> At the root of terrorism, according to Berman, are"immense failures of political courage and imagination within the Muslimworld", rather than the violent fantasies of a group of religious outliersor the Crusader-ish military operations of the West. In other words, somethingflawed at the very core of Islam itself is responsible for the violence done inits name - a line of argument remarkably similar to one Cold Warriors madeabout communism.
> All of this represents a mirror image of al-Qaeda'sarguments about the inherent perversities of the infidel West. As during theCold War, hardliners reinforce one another.
>
> The persistence of Crusader myths and their transpositioninto a Cold War framework help explain why the West is saddled with so manymisconceptions about Islam. They don't, however, explain the recent spike inIslamophobia in the USafter several years of relative tolerance. To understand this, we must turn tothe third unfinished war: the "war on terror", launched by George WBush.
>
> Fanning the flames
> Obama was careful to groom his Christian image during hiscampaign. He was repeatedly seen praying in churches, and he studiously avoidedmosques. He did everything possible to efface the traces of Muslim identity inhis past.
>
> His opponents did just the opposite. They emphasized hismiddle name, Hussein, challenged his birth records, and asserted that he wastoo close to the Palestinian cause. They also tried to turn liberalconstituencies - particularly Jewish-American ones - against the presumptivepresident. Like Frederick II for an earlier generation of Christianfundamentalists, since entering the Oval Office Obama has become the Antichristof the Islamophobes.
>
> Once in power, he broke with Bush administration policiestoward the Islamic world on a few points. He did indeed push ahead with hisplan to remove combat troops from Iraq (with some importantexceptions). He has attempted to pressure Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu'sgovernment to stop expanding settlements in occupied Palestinian lands and tonegotiate in good faith (though he has done so without resorting to the kind ofpressure that might be meaningful, like a cutback of or even cessation of USarms exports to Israel). In a highly publicized speech in Cairo in June 2009, he also reached outrhetorically to the Islamic world at a time when he was also eliminating thename "global war on terror" from the government's vocabulary.
>
> For Muslims worldwide, however, this war continues. The United States has orchestrated a surge in Afghanistan.The CIA's drone war in the Pakistani borderlands has escalated rapidly. US specialforces now operate in 75 countries, at least 15 more than during the Bushyears. Meanwhile, Guantanamo remains open, the United States still practices extraordinary rendition,and assassination remains an active part of Washington's toolbox.
>
> The civilians killed in these overseas contingencyoperations are predominantly Muslim. The people seized and interrogated aremostly Muslim. The buildings destroyed are largely Muslim-owned. As a result,the rhetoric of "Crusaders and imperialists" used by al-Qaeda fallson receptive ears. Despite his Cairo speech, thefavorability rating of the United Statesin the Muslim world, already grim enough, has slid even further since Obamatook office - in Egypt, from41% in 2009 to 31% percent now; in Turkey,from 33% to 23%; and in Pakistan,from 13% to 8%.
>
> The USwars, occupations, raids, and repeated air strikes have produced much of thisdisaffection and, as political scientist Robert Pape has consistently argued,most of the suicide bombings and other attacks against Western troops andtargets as well. This is revenge, not religion, talking - just as it was forAmericans after September 11, 2001. As commentator M Junaid Levesque-Alam astutelypointed out: "When three planes hurtled into national icons, did anger andhatred rise in American hearts only after consultation of Biblicalverses?"
>
> And yet those dismal polling figures do not actually reflecta rejection of Western values (despite Islamophobe assurances that they meanexactly that). "Numerous polls that we have conducted," writespollster Stephen Kull, "as well as others by the World Values Survey andArab Barometer, show strong support in the Muslim world for democracy, for humanrights, and for an international order based on international law and a strongUnited Nations."
>
> In other words, nine years after September 11, a secondspike in Islamophobia and in homegrown terrorist attacks like that of thewould-be Times Square bomber has been born of two intersecting pressures:American critics of Obama's foreign policy believe that he has backed away fromthe major civilizational struggle of our time, even as many in the Muslim worldsee Obama-era foreign policy as a continuation, even an escalation, of Bush-erapolicies of war and occupation.
>
> Here is the irony: alongside the indisputable rise offundamentalism over the last two decades, only some of it oriented towardsviolence, the Islamic world has undergone a shift which deep-sixes the clich้ that Islam has held countries back frompolitical and economic development. "Since the early 1990s, 23 Muslimcountries have developed more democratic institutions, with fairly runelections, energized and competitive political parties, greater civilliberties, or better legal protections for journalists," writes PhilipHoward in The Digital Origins of Dictatorship and Democracy. Turkey hasemerged as a vibrant democracy and a major foreign policy player. Indonesia, the world's most populous Muslimcountry, is now the largest economy in Southeast Asiaand the 18th-largest economy in the world.
>
> Are Islamophobes missing this story of mainstream Islam'saccommodation with democracy and economic growth? Or is it this story (notIslamofascism starring al-Qaeda) that is their real concern?
>
> The recent preoccupations of Islamophobes are telling inthis regard. Pamela Geller, after all, was typical in the way she went afternot a radical mosque, but an Islamic center about two blocks from Ground Zeroproposed by a proponent of interfaith dialogue. As journalist Stephen Salisburywrites, "The mosque controversy is not really about a mosque at all; it'sabout the presence of Muslims in America, and the free-floatinganxiety and fear that now dominate the nation's psyche." For her latestventure, Geller is pushing a boycott of Campbell'sSoup because it accepts halal certification - the Islamic version of koshercertification by a rabbi - from the Islamic Society of North America, a groupwhich, by the way, has gone out of its way to denounce religious extremism.
>
> Paul Berman, meanwhile, has devoted his latest book, TheFlight of the Intellectuals, to deconstructing the arguments not of Osama binLaden or his ilk, but of Tariq Ramadan, the foremost mainstream Islamictheologian. Ramadan is a man firmly committed to breaking down the olddistinctions between "us" and "them". Critical of the Westfor colonialism, racism, and other ills, he also challenges the injustices ofthe Islamic world. He is far from a fundamentalist.
>
> And what country, by the way, has exercised EuropeanIslamophobes more than any other? Pakistan? Saudi Arabia?Taliban Afghanistan?No, the answer is: Turkey."The Turks are conquering Germanyin the same way the Kosovars conquered Kosovo: by using higher birthrates," argues Germany'sIslamophobe du jour, Thilo Sarrazin, a member of Germany's Social Democratic Party.The far right has even united around a Europe-wide referendum to keep Turkey out ofthe European Union.
>
> Despite his many defects, George W Bush at least knew enoughto distinguish Islam from Islamism. By targeting a perfectly normal Islamiccenter, a perfectly normal Islamic scholar, and a perfectly normal Islamiccountry - all firmly in the mainstream of that religion - the Islamophobes haveactually declared war on normalcy, not extremism.
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> The victories of the Tea Party movement and the increasedpower of Republican militants in congress, not to mention the renaissance ofthe far right in Europe, suggest that we willbe living with this Islamophobia and the three unfinished wars of the Westagainst the rest for some time. The Crusades lasted hundreds of years. Let'shope that Crusade 2.0, and the dark age that we find ourselves in, has a farshorter lifespan.
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> http://www.atimes.com/atimes/Middle_East/LK10Ak04.html
>
>
> John Feffer is theco-director of Foreign Policy in Focus at the Institute for Policy Studies,writes its regular World Beat column, and will be publishing a book onIslamophobia with City Lights Press in 2011. He would like to thank SamerAraabi, Rebecca Azhdam, and Peter Certo for research assistance.
>
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