Understanding Islamophobia in the U.S.

By S.P.SETH

Will he or will he not? Apparently, he won’t. We are talking here about the American pastor Terry Jones who first threatened, and has now suspended/called off his call for the burning of copies of Koran to coincide with the ninth anniversary of the 9/11 terrorist attacks that killed nearly 3000 people in the United States.

In a highly polarized world, even a loony pastor with 30 followers can attract international attention for saying or advocating something outrageous. And this is what the small town pastor Terry Jones of Gainesville in Florida, United States, did by advocating the burning of Koran. His reason, if one might call it that, is “to expose Islam” as a “violent and oppressive religion.”

This raises an important question. Which is: why did the media, politicians and almost everyone else make him a celebrity of sorts? Simply: because his advocacy touched the raw nerves of many in the US who might share his belief that Islam is a “violent and oppressive religion”, but wouldn’t go so far as burning the copies of Koran.

The US Government, as well as its military brass, feared that it might create some uncontrollable mayhem, putting the lives of US soldiers in Afghanistan and Iraq at risk, and much more. Which led American leaders from President Obama to Defense Secretary Robert Games and General Petraeus to highlight the danger, and call on Jones to desist from his act of dangerous stupidity.

His timing was perfect---from his point of view. Of course, there was the fortuitous coincidence of the festival of Eid falling on the same day as the 9^th anniversary of the World Trade Centre carnage. At the same time, the United States is in the midst of an anti-Muslim frenzy on the question of building a mosque, a couple of blocs from the old World Trade Centre in New York.

Many Americans regard it an outrage that an Islamic house of worship should be built near where so many Americans died in a terrorist attack perpetrated in the name of Islam. As it is, according to a recent American poll, 49 per cent of the Americans disapprove of Islam. But the opposition to the building of the mosque, on the basis of media coverage of the issue in the US, appears much higher.

It is not just the proposed mosque near the World Trade Center that Americans have aversion to. Indeed, Americans, by and large, don’t want any new mosque near where they live. The anti-Muslim frenzy is further highlighted by the reported figure that about 20 per cent of Americans (one in five) believe that President Obama is a Muslim, making him somehow a suspect figure. And, among the Republican voters, the proportion is reportedly as high as 41 percent.

The core issue is that in the minds of many Americans, the 9/11 terrorists and the Muslim community at large have somehow become inextricably linked. The racial profiling at security checkouts at airports and in other places is an example of it.

Even before 9/11, Samuel Huntington’s Clash of Civilizations thesis (articulated in the nineties in an article in Foreign Affairs journal and developed later in a book), involving broadly Islam and Christianity, had given it an intellectual underpinning.

In the Muslim world, the Israeli-Palestinian issue was already seen as reflecting not only bias but also active American support of the Israeli cause. The security of Israel, its ever-expanding national boundaries, as well its legitimacy as a state, united almost all significant parties and groups in the United States, with the powerful Jewish lobby leaving nothing to chance.

As Peter Beinart writes in the New York Review of Books, “… in the United States, groups like AIPAC [American Israel Public Affairs Committee] and the Presidents’ [of the Jewish groups] patrol public discourse, scolding people who contradict their vision of Israel as a state in which all leaders cherish democracy and yearn for peace.” Therefore, any significant public criticism of Israel’s Palestinian policy in the United States can bring about retribution.

However, when people in the Islamic world (and elsewhere) see images of Palestinians being routinely attacked by the Israeli army with helicopter gunships, phosphorous bombs, heavy artillery and so on, the reaction among the Muslims all over the world is one of popular outrage combined with utter helplessness. This is reflected as much towards the Israelis as the United States, being the superpower that is underwriting Israel and its actions.

There was some hope that under President Obama, the United States might reach out to the Islamic world. And his Cairo speech was a good start. Recognizing Palestine as a major issue clouding the US image in the Islamic world, he was keen to get started.

But the Israeli side was not used to dealing with an American President with ideas of his own, and they started crying foul. Which initially created some difficulties in Israel’s relations with the Obama administration. The new Israeli-Palestinian peace talks are likely to go the same way as in the past. If so, Israeli intransigence on Palestine is likely to remain a crucial issue in the US relations with the Islamic world.

The US invasions of Afghanistan and Iraq, further fuelled hostility between the US (the West) and the Islamic world, particularly at the popular level. Talking of popular level, the US involvement with Arab monarchies and its authoritarian regimes has often put it at odds with the people in these countries. Indeed, it has been one blunder after the other in the US policy.

At another level, many Muslim societies have sought to project their collective frustrations on the Western world for their own inability to make much headway in dealing with their own internal problems. They (their governments) have, by and large, failed to make a dent into their society’s problems of hunger, employment, education, social welfare, political reform and so on.

And where they have received foreign aid, it has been squandered and/or gone to fill the pockets of a hopelessly corrupt governing elite.

Since the existing order is failing or has failed, the al-Qaeda, Taliban, al Shabab and other militant groups in different Muslim countries are filling the gap. And they are the storm troopers of militant movements that are targeting their internal and external enemies. Among the latter, the US is top of the list.

At the same time, for the United States, used as it has been to dealing with enemy states, it has found it difficult to prevail on an amorphous enemy that is neither here nor there. And this so-called asymmetrical force, which has managed to paralyze the US military machine in hot spots like Afghanistan and Iraq and is mushrooming in Somalia, Yemen and elsewhere (Pakistan, for instance), is frustrating many Americans.

The 9/11 attacks were the first on US homeland after World War 11, and continue to traumatize the nation. And since its perpetrators acted in the name of Islam, many people in the US find the juxtaposition of terrorism and Islam as the easiest and the most convenient explanation for the 9/11 tragedies.

Against this backdrop, it is not difficult to see how loonies like pastor Terry Jones and his ilk can find ready audience in the United States.

Note: This article was first published in Daily Times

Understanding Islamophobia in the U.S.

By S.P.SETH

Will he or will he not? Apparently, he won’t. We are talking here about the American pastor Terry Jones who first threatened, and has now suspended/called off his call for the burning of copies of Koran to coincide with the ninth anniversary of the 9/11 terrorist attacks that killed nearly 3000 people in the United States.

In a highly polarized world, even a loony pastor with 30 followers can attract international attention for saying or advocating something outrageous. And this is what the small town pastor Terry Jones of Gainesville in Florida, United States, did by advocating the burning of Koran. His reason, if one might call it that, is “to expose Islam” as a “violent and oppressive religion.”

This raises an important question. Which is: why did the media, politicians and almost everyone else make him a celebrity of sorts? Simply: because his advocacy touched the raw nerves of many in the US who might share his belief that Islam is a “violent and oppressive religion”, but wouldn’t go so far as burning the copies of Koran.

The US Government, as well as its military brass, feared that it might create some uncontrollable mayhem, putting the lives of US soldiers in Afghanistan and Iraq at risk, and much more. Which led American leaders from President Obama to Defense Secretary Robert Games and General Petraeus to highlight the danger, and call on Jones to desist from his act of dangerous stupidity.

His timing was perfect---from his point of view. Of course, there was the fortuitous coincidence of the festival of Eid falling on the same day as the 9^th anniversary of the World Trade Centre carnage. At the same time, the United States is in the midst of an anti-Muslim frenzy on the question of building a mosque, a couple of blocs from the old World Trade Centre in New York.

Many Americans regard it an outrage that an Islamic house of worship should be built near where so many Americans died in a terrorist attack perpetrated in the name of Islam. As it is, according to a recent American poll, 49 per cent of the Americans disapprove of Islam. But the opposition to the building of the mosque, on the basis of media coverage of the issue in the US, appears much higher.

It is not just the proposed mosque near the World Trade Center that Americans have aversion to. Indeed, Americans, by and large, don’t want any new mosque near where they live. The anti-Muslim frenzy is further highlighted by the reported figure that about 20 per cent of Americans (one in five) believe that President Obama is a Muslim, making him somehow a suspect figure. And, among the Republican voters, the proportion is reportedly as high as 41 percent.

The core issue is that in the minds of many Americans, the 9/11 terrorists and the Muslim community at large have somehow become inextricably linked. The racial profiling at security checkouts at airports and in other places is an example of it.

Even before 9/11, Samuel Huntington’s Clash of Civilizations thesis (articulated in the nineties in an article in Foreign Affairs journal and developed later in a book), involving broadly Islam and Christianity, had given it an intellectual underpinning.

In the Muslim world, the Israeli-Palestinian issue was already seen as reflecting not only bias but also active American support of the Israeli cause. The security of Israel, its ever-expanding national boundaries, as well its legitimacy as a state, united almost all significant parties and groups in the United States, with the powerful Jewish lobby leaving nothing to chance.

As Peter Beinart writes in the New York Review of Books, “… in the United States, groups like AIPAC [American Israel Public Affairs Committee] and the Presidents’ [of the Jewish groups] patrol public discourse, scolding people who contradict their vision of Israel as a state in which all leaders cherish democracy and yearn for peace.” Therefore, any significant public criticism of Israel’s Palestinian policy in the United States can bring about retribution.

However, when people in the Islamic world (and elsewhere) see images of Palestinians being routinely attacked by the Israeli army with helicopter gunships, phosphorous bombs, heavy artillery and so on, the reaction among the Muslims all over the world is one of popular outrage combined with utter helplessness. This is reflected as much towards the Israelis as the United States, being the superpower that is underwriting Israel and its actions.

There was some hope that under President Obama, the United States might reach out to the Islamic world. And his Cairo speech was a good start. Recognizing Palestine as a major issue clouding the US image in the Islamic world, he was keen to get started.

But the Israeli side was not used to dealing with an American President with ideas of his own, and they started crying foul. Which initially created some difficulties in Israel’s relations with the Obama administration. The new Israeli-Palestinian peace talks are likely to go the same way as in the past. If so, Israeli intransigence on Palestine is likely to remain a crucial issue in the US relations with the Islamic world.

The US invasions of Afghanistan and Iraq, further fuelled hostility between the US (the West) and the Islamic world, particularly at the popular level. Talking of popular level, the US involvement with Arab monarchies and its authoritarian regimes has often put it at odds with the people in these countries. Indeed, it has been one blunder after the other in the US policy.

At another level, many Muslim societies have sought to project their collective frustrations on the Western world for their own inability to make much headway in dealing with their own internal problems. They (their governments) have, by and large, failed to make a dent into their society’s problems of hunger, employment, education, social welfare, political reform and so on.

And where they have received foreign aid, it has been squandered and/or gone to fill the pockets of a hopelessly corrupt governing elite.

Since the existing order is failing or has failed, the al-Qaeda, Taliban, al Shabab and other militant groups in different Muslim countries are filling the gap. And they are the storm troopers of militant movements that are targeting their internal and external enemies. Among the latter, the US is top of the list.

At the same time, for the United States, used as it has been to dealing with enemy states, it has found it difficult to prevail on an amorphous enemy that is neither here nor there. And this so-called asymmetrical force, which has managed to paralyze the US military machine in hot spots like Afghanistan and Iraq and is mushrooming in Somalia, Yemen and elsewhere (Pakistan, for instance), is frustrating many Americans.

The 9/11 attacks were the first on US homeland after World War 11, and continue to traumatize the nation. And since its perpetrators acted in the name of Islam, many people in the US find the juxtaposition of terrorism and Islam as the easiest and the most convenient explanation for the 9/11 tragedies.

Against this backdrop, it is not difficult to see how loonies like pastor Terry Jones and his ilk can find ready audience in the United States.

Israeli-Palestinian negotiations

By S.P.SETH

One thing can be said about the Israeli-Palestinian talks that they are not going to advance the peace process in any meaningful way. In the first place, these are being held under US pressure, with Israel unwilling to concede any ground. The Palestinians have already lost much of their homeland, first with the creation of the state of Israel and, secondly, with the Israeli occupation of West Bank, Gaza (blockaded and pounded by the Israeli forces at will), East Jerusalem and much more.

Israel continues to create new “realities” on ground by building new settlements and demolishing Palestinian homes, as well as creating an apartheid state with Palestinian territories surrounded and blockaded by the Israeli army. And there is the long so-called security wall Israel has built, poaching more Palestinian land and dividing families.

What it means is that Palestine has nothing to negotiate with, except to reclaim their land. They have already been stripped of much of their homeland and resources. Therefore, they have nothing more to give Israel. In any case, Israel has never felt the need to ask the Palestinians, as and when they have felt like grabbing whatever. They have always taken by force whatever they needed and more, and there is no end to it.

The pertinent question then is: why has the world turned a blind eye to Israel’s rapacious plunder of the Palestinian people and their homeland? More recently: why is the world so de-sensitized to the sufferings of the Palestinian people so graphically and inhumanly portrayed by the photos posted on the internet regarding the treatment of blindfolded Palestinian prisoners, with an Israeli woman soldier posing nearby triumphantly in a state of utter satisfaction with her work.

To further compound the humiliation of the Palestinian people, Rabbi Ovadia Yosef, spiritual leader of Israel’s powerful ultra-orthodox political movement, Shas, a constiutuent of Prime Minister Banjamin Netanyahu’s coalition government, has declared the Palestinians “evil people who should perish from this earth.” He has called upon God to “strike them with a plague…these evil-doers and Israel-haters.”

Rabbi Yosef is a former chief rabbi of Israel. Such hatred spewed by a man of God, and that too by a representative of the Jewish people who historically suffered so much persecution, including holocaust, is beyond comprehension.

Prime Minister Netanyahu, who will be in Washington for negotiations with the Palestinians, refused to condemn the Rabbi’s remarks invoking God’s wrath on the Palestinians, although he did say that it didn’t reflect his government’s views. The point, though, is that with such extreme and incendiary views held by the spiritual leader of an important segment of the Israeli government, what hope is there for any satisfactory outcome of the talks in Washington.

Rabbi Yosef is not the only one holding such views in Israel. Take the case of Effi Eitam, a former cabinet minister, war hero, and Netanyahu’s special emissary. He reportedly said in 2006, “We’ll have to expel the overwhelming majority of West Bank Arabs [Palestinians] from here [West Bank] and remove Israeli Arabs from [our] political system.”

Israel’s foreign minister, Avigdor Leiberman is, pushing measures to strip Palestinians, living in Israel, of their citizenship for all sorts of supposed infractions.

In other words, many Israelis regard Palestinians as sub-human and hence not deserving of human rights. The sad thing is that the Jews were also caricatured in Europe and the United States as people who somehow lacked values and qualities of the majority Christian populations, and were not entitled to full rights.

Against this backdrop, it is hard to comprehend the hatred and inhumanity of Rabi Yosef and others in Israel. One would expect that Israelis, of all the people, should know better, as their ancestors suffered the kind of cruelty they are now hurling at the Palestinians.

The question then is: why is Israel getting away with it? The answer simply is that Israel is coddled and protected by the United States and its European allies. As an instance, while the United States and allies are set against nuclear proliferation, targeting North Korea and Iran, Israel’s nuclear arsenal somehow never features in any such discussion and sanctions. As a victim of holocaust, Israel is treated as a special state, not subject to normal international rules and conventions. As a result, it has never felt the kind of pressure to conform to international norms that other states might feel obliged to do.

Therefore, there is no reason for Israel to be conciliatory and accommodative of Palestinian aspirations, as it goes into a new round of talks with the Palestinians. The Israeli side insists on negotiations without pre-conditions. Which means that they are not going to entertain the Palestinians’ basic demand for a state based on the 1967 borders, before the Israelis annexed West Bank and other Palestinian territories. They are, in effect, asking the Palestinians to accept a formal surrender of their homeland in favor, at best, of a few local councils under Israeli supervision and control. The Israelis simply want their mythical (Biblical) state of Judea and Samaria.

In his article in a recent issue of the New York Review of Books, Peter Beinart says that, “…Netanyahu not only rejects the idea of a Palestinian state, he denies that there is such a thing as a Palestinian…” Indeed, according to Netanyahu, Israel has already made big concessions by abandoning its claim to Jordan that should be part of the Jewish state. With such strong views about Israel’s territoriality, it is difficult o believe that Netanyahu will suddenly turn into a believer on the way to Washington.

Peter Beinart’s long-term prognosis is equally, if not more, frightening because of, “…an ultra-Orthodox population that is increasing dramatically, a settler movement that is growing more radical and more entrenched in the Israeli bureaucracy and army, and a Russian immigrant community that is particularly prone to anti-Arab racism.”

While one wishes the Washington Israeli-Palestinian negotiations all the success, but the realities on the ground do point in the other direction.

Note: This article was first published in Daily Times