{"id":66621,"date":"2015-11-23T12:00:06","date_gmt":"2015-11-23T12:00:06","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.transcend.org\/tms\/?p=66621"},"modified":"2015-11-18T11:19:28","modified_gmt":"2015-11-18T11:19:28","slug":"here-come-the-paris-truthers-paranoia-the-american-right-and-the-missing-complexity-from-our-terrorism-debate","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.transcend.org\/tms\/2015\/11\/here-come-the-paris-truthers-paranoia-the-american-right-and-the-missing-complexity-from-our-terrorism-debate\/","title":{"rendered":"Here Come the Paris Truthers: Paranoia, the American Right, and the Missing Complexity from Our Terrorism Debate"},"content":{"rendered":"

ISIS is the monster the West had a hand in creating. Now we’re talking about it in all the wrong ways imaginable.<\/em><\/p>\n

\"The<\/a>

The Tokyo Skytree, the tallest tower in Japan, is illuminated with the colors of the French tricolor.(Credit: AP)<\/p><\/div>\n

\u201cIf you close your eyes\/Then you will see\/That it\u2019s easier without complexity.\u201d<\/em> \u2013Eagles of Death Metal<\/p>\n

15 Nov 2015 – <\/em>There\u2019s no complexity in the ISIS statement<\/a>: Paris is \u201cthe capital of prostitution and vice, the lead carrier of the cross in Europe.\u201d The suicide bombers and gunmen were believers and martyrs; their victims were Crusaders and pagans and disbelievers who reaped what they had sown. The equation balances perfectly.<\/p>\n

There\u2019s no complexity in President Obama\u2019s first statement: the attack is not just on the people of France but \u201con all of humanity and the universal values that we share\u201d; which are \u201cthe timeless values of human progress.\u201d There\u2019s no complexity in President Hollande\u2019s statement<\/a>: the attacks are a \u201chorror\u2026.There is dread, but in the face of this dread, there is a nation that knows how to defend itself, that knows how to mobilise its forces and, once again, will defeat the terrorists.\u201d<\/p>\n

And of course there\u2019s no complexity on the U.S. right: obviously the perpetrators were the refugees who are fleeing from ISIS. \u201cHow\u2019s that Syrian refugee resettlement look now?\u201d Rep. Jeff Duncan (R), of South Carolina tweeted<\/a>. \u201cThere are those out there,\u201d Ben Carson declared<\/a>, \u201cwho have a thirst for innocent blood.\u201d The answer, he said, is for America to \u201celiminate them\u2026destroy them completely.\u201d Paris was targeted, Newt Gingrich opined<\/a>, because of its tight gun control laws. \u201cImagine a theater,\u201d he tweeted, \u201cwith 10 or 15 citizens with concealed carry permits. We live in an age when evil men have to be killed by good people.\u201d<\/p>\n

Kevin Barrett, the conspiracist editor of Veterans Today, knows<\/a> exactly what happened Friday: it\u2019s another false flag, its perpetrators all of the usual suspects: \u201cAuthoritarian insiders. Zionists. Militarists. Islamophobes. New World Order-Out-Of-Chaos freaks.\u201d The date alone gives it away, he says: \u201cIt happened on Friday the 13th (commemorating the massacre of the proto-illuminati Templars) in the 11th month, in Paris\u2019s 11th district. It\u2019s going to be remembered as \u201811\/13\u2019 or \u2018Friday the 13th.\u2019 Illuminati numerology or coincidence?\u201d Barrett knows why it happened too\u2014it\u2019s all about him and his false flag theories: \u201cIf I were a truly paranoid conspiracy theorist, or conspiracy intellectual, or whatever,\u201d he wrote, \u201cI would think somebody staged these new attacks just as I was leaving Paris and planning to return one month later because\u2026well, because they\u2019re afraid that my book We Are NOT Charlie Hebdo<\/em> is picking up steam and threatening to expose the state-sponsored crimes of last January.\u201d<\/p>\n

France was a colonial power in the Middle East and Africa for a century; it has boots on the ground in West Africa and its war planes have been bombing ISIS strongholds in Iraq and Syria. As shocking and terrible as Friday\u2019s\u00a0attacks were, there really is no mystery as to why they happened; they did not come out of the blue. Just as Israeli realpolitik helped lay the groundwork for Hamas, ISIS, as we now know<\/a>, is a monster that the West had a hand in creating.<\/p>\n

Everyone and no one is innocent in wartime, and once the shooting starts, there is no such thing as moral clarity. It would be so much easier if that were not the case.<\/p>\n

_______________________________<\/p>\n

Arthur Goldwag is the author, most recently, of<\/em> The New Hate: A History of Fear and Loathing on the Populist Right.<\/p>\n

Go to Original \u2013 salon.com<\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

France was a colonial power in the Middle East and Africa for a century; it has boots on the ground in West Africa and its war planes have been bombing ISIS strongholds in Iraq and Syria. As shocking and terrible as Friday\u2019s attacks were, there really is no mystery as to why they happened; they did not come out of the blue. Just as Israeli realpolitik helped lay the groundwork for Hamas, ISIS, as we now know, is a monster that the West had a hand in creating.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":4,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[50],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-66621","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-analysis"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.transcend.org\/tms\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/66621","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.transcend.org\/tms\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.transcend.org\/tms\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.transcend.org\/tms\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/4"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.transcend.org\/tms\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=66621"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.transcend.org\/tms\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/66621\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.transcend.org\/tms\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=66621"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.transcend.org\/tms\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=66621"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.transcend.org\/tms\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=66621"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}