{"id":87062,"date":"2017-02-20T12:01:33","date_gmt":"2017-02-20T12:01:33","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.transcend.org\/tms\/?p=87062"},"modified":"2017-02-18T15:55:15","modified_gmt":"2017-02-18T15:55:15","slug":"why-do-so-many-americans-fear-muslims-decades-of-denial-about-americas-role-in-the-world","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.transcend.org\/tms\/2017\/02\/why-do-so-many-americans-fear-muslims-decades-of-denial-about-americas-role-in-the-world\/","title":{"rendered":"Why Do So Many Americans Fear Muslims? Decades of Denial about America\u2019s Role in the World"},"content":{"rendered":"
<\/a>

During a memorial service in Baghdad, Iraqis gather around a bomb hole in the ceiling of the Al-Amariya shelter in 2003, where more than 400 people were killed in a U.S.-led missile attack during the Gulf War. Iraqis opened a new memorial center outside the Al-Amariya shelter to mark the 12-year anniversary of the attack. Photo: David Guttenfelder\/AP<\/p><\/div>\n

18 Feb 2017 – <\/em>There\u2019s been lots\u00a0of\u00a0attention-grabbing opposition to Trump\u2019s \u201cMuslim ban\u201d executive order, from demonstrations to court orders. But polls make it clear\u00a0public opinion is\u00a0much more mixed<\/a>.\u00a0Standard phone polls show small majorities opposed, while web and automated polls find small majorities continue to support it.<\/p>\n

What surprises me about the poll results isn\u2019t that lots of Americans like the ban \u2014 but that\u00a0so many\u00a0Americans don\u2019t. Regular people have lives to lead and can\u2019t investigate complicated issues in detail. Instead they usually take their cues<\/a> from leaders they trust.\u00a0And\u00a0given what politicians across U.S. political spectrum say about terrorism, Trump\u2019s executive order\u00a0makes perfect sense.<\/em> There are literally no national-level American\u00a0politicians telling a story that would help ordinary people understand why Trump\u2019s goals\u00a0are both horrendously counterproductive and morally vile.<\/p>\n

Think of it this way:<\/p>\n

On February 13, 1991 during the first Gulf War, the U.S. dropped two laser-guided bombs on the Amiriyah public air raid shelter in Baghdad. More than\u00a0400 Iraqi civilians were incinerated or boiled alive. For years afterward visitors to a memorial there would\u00a0meet a woman with eight children who had died during the bombing<\/a>; she was living in the ruined shelter because she could not bear to be anywhere else.<\/p>\n

Now, imagine that immediately after the bombing Saddam Hussein had delivered a speech on Iraqi\u00a0TV in which he plaintively asked \u201cWhy do they hate us?\u201d \u2014\u00a0without ever mentioning the fact that Iraq was occupying Kuwait<\/em>. And even Saddam\u2019s political opponents would only mumble that \u201cthis is a complicated issue.\u201d And most Iraqis had no idea that their country had invaded Kuwait, and that there were extensive United Nation resolutions and speeches by George H.W. Bush explaining the U.S.-led coalition\u2019s rationale for attacking Iraq in response. And that the few Iraqis who suggested there might be some kind of relationship\u00a0between Hussein\u2019s invasion of Kuwait and the Amiriyah bombing were shouted down by politicians saying these Iraq-hating radicals obviously believed that America\u2019s slaughter of 400 people was\u00a0justified<\/em>.<\/p>\n

If that had happened, we\u2019d immediately recognize that Iraqi political culture was completely insane, and that it would cause them to behave in dangerously nutty ways. But that\u2019s exactly what U.S. political culture is like.<\/p>\n

<\/a>

Interiors from a building in Amiriya district, a residential area on Baghdad\u2019s western outskirts, after an Allied bombing on an air raid shelter by US bombers, Gulf War, Feb. 14 1991. Photo: Kaveh Kazemi\/Getty Images<\/p><\/div>\n

In an interview\u00a0last March<\/a>\u00a0with Anderson Cooper, Donald Trump tried to puzzle out what\u2019s behind\u00a0the terrorism directed at the U.S. \u201cI think Islam hates us,\u201d Trump learnedly opined. \u201cThere\u2019s a tremendous hatred there, we\u2019ve got to get to the bottom of it.\u201d<\/p>\n

\u201cIn Islam itself?\u201d asked Cooper. Trump responded, \u201cYou\u2019re going to have to figure that out. You\u2019ll get another Pulitzer.\u201d<\/p>\n

During Trump\u2019s speech at the CIA right after his inauguration, he expressed the same bewilderment. \u201cRadical Islamic terrorism,\u201d\u00a0pondered Trump<\/a>. \u201cThis is something nobody can even understand.\u201d<\/p>\n

John F. Kelly, now Trump\u2019s head of the Department of Homeland Security, is similarly perplexed,\u00a0saying in a 2013 speech<\/a>\u00a0that \u201cI don\u2019t know why they hate us, and I frankly don\u2019t care, but they do hate us and are driven irrationally to our destruction.\u201d<\/p>\n

Say what you want about the tenets of this worldview, but at least it\u2019s an internally consistent ethos: We\u2019re surrounded by lunatics who want to murder us for reasons that are totally inscrutable to rational people like us but \u2026 obviously have something to do with them being Muslims.<\/p>\n

Meanwhile, in private, the non-crazy members of the U.S. foreign policy establishment aren\u2019t confused\u00a0at all. They understand quite well that Islamist terrorism is almost wholly blowback from the foreign policy they\u2019ve designed.<\/p>\n

Meanwhile, in private, the non-crazy members of the U.S. foreign policy establishment aren\u2019t confused at all.<\/em><\/strong><\/p>\n

Richard Shultz, a professor at Tufts whose career has long been intertwined with the national security state,\u00a0has written<\/a>\u00a0that \u201cA very senior [Special Operations Forces] officer who had served on the Joint Staff in the 1990s told me that more than once he heard terrorist strikes characterized as \u2018a small price to pay for being a superpower.\u2019\u201d That small price, of course, is the deaths of regular Americans, and is apparently well worth it.<\/p>\n

The 9\/11 Commission report\u00a0quietly acknowledged<\/a>,\u00a0hundreds of pages in, that \u201cAmerica\u2019s policy choices have consequences. Right or wrong, it is simply a fact that American policy regarding the Israeli-Palestinian conflict and American actions in Iraq are dominant staples of popular commentary across the Arab and Muslim world.\u201d A senior official in the George W. Bush administration later put it more bluntly\u00a0to Esquire<\/a>: That without the post-Gulf War sanctions that killed hundreds of thousands of Iraqis and the stationing of U.S. troops in Saudi Arabia, \u201cbin Laden might still be redecorating mosques and boring friends with stories of his mujahideen days in the Khyber Pass.\u201d<\/p>\n

Intelligence professionals were quite aware that an invasion of Iraq would take the conditions that led to 9\/11 and make them far worse. The British Chilcot Inquiry into the Iraq war published a\u00a0February, 2003 assessment<\/a>\u00a0by British intelligence of the consequences of an invasion of Iraq, which would occur one month later. \u201cThe threat from Al Qaida will increase at the onset of any military action against Iraq,\u201d the UK\u2019s Joint Intelligence Committee told Tony Blair, and \u201cthe worldwide threat from other Islamist terrorist groups and individuals will increase significantly.\u201d<\/p>\n

The CIA had the same perspective. Michael Scheuer, who for several years ran the section of the Agency that tracked bin Laden,\u00a0wrote in 2004<\/a>\u00a0that \u201cU.S. forces and policies are completing the radicalization of the Islamic world, something Osama bin Laden has been trying to do with substantial but incomplete success since the early 1990s. As a result, I think it fair to conclude that the United States of America remains bin Laden\u2019s only indispensable ally.\u201d<\/p>\n

For its part, the Defense Department\u2019s Science Board concluded in a\u00a02004 report<\/a>\u00a0that \u201cMuslims do not \u2018hate our freedom,\u2019 but rather, they hate our policies. The overwhelming majority voice their objections to what they see as one-sided support in favor of Israel and against Palestinian rights, and the longstanding, even increasing support for what Muslims collectively see as tyrannies, most notably Egypt, Saudi Arabia, Jordan, Pakistan, and the Gulf states.\u201d<\/p>\n

<\/a>

A Palestinian woman reacts amid destroyed buildings in the northern district of Beit Hanun in the Gaza Strip during a humanitarian truce on July 26, 2014. Photo: Mohammed Abed\/AFP\/Getty Images<\/p><\/div>\n

When Barack Obama\u00a0took office, he had two choices.<\/p>\n

First, he could tell the truth: That the U.S. has acted with extraordinary brutality in the Middle East, that this had been the main motivation for most Islamist terrorism against us, and if we continued the same foreign policy Americans would be killed indefinitely\u00a0in intermittent attacks. Then we could have had an open, informed debate about whether we like our foreign policy enough to die for it.<\/p>\n

Second, Obama could continue trying to run the Middle East\u00a0without public input, but in a more rational way than the Bush administration.<\/p>\n

Obviously he went with the second choice, which demanded several different forms of political correctness.<\/p>\n

Most importantly, Obama pretended that the U.S. has never done anything truly wrong to others, and can enjoy the benefits of power without any costs. This is the most pernicious and common form of political correctness, but is never called that because the most powerful people in America love it.<\/p>\n

But Obama also engaged in something more akin to what\u2019s\u00a0generally called political correctness, by contending\u00a0that Islam has\u00a0nothing<\/em>\u00a0to do with terrorism. But it does \u2014 just not in the way that Frank Gaffney and Pamela Geller would tell you.<\/p>\n

Religion and nationalism have always been similar phenomena, and Islam sometimes functions as a form\u00a0of nationalism. And\u00a0like all nationalisms, it has a crazy, vicious right wing that\u2019s empowered by outside attacks on members of the nation. The right loves to jeer at Obama for\u00a0calling Islam<\/a>\u00a0\u201ca religion of peace,\u201d and they should \u2014 not because Islam specifically isn\u2019t a religion of peace but because there is really no such thing, just as there is no \u201cnationalism of peace.\u201d It\u2019s true religions and nationalism can\u00a0bring out the best in people, but they also bring out the worst (sometimes in the same person for the same reasons).<\/p>\n

But Obama could never say anything like that, because he knew the U.S. needs the governments of Muslim-majority countries\u00a0like Saudi Arabia and Egypt to keep the rest of the Middle East\u00a0in line.<\/p>\n

This amalgam of political correctness made it impossible for the Obama administration ever to tell a story about terrorism that made any sense. For instance, in his\u00a02009 speech in Cairo<\/a>, he declared, \u201cIt is easier to blame others than to look inward\u201d \u2014 and then went on to demonstrate that truism.<\/p>\n

His description of wrongs done by the U.S. was vague to the point of meaninglessness: \u201ctension has been fed by colonialism that denied rights and opportunities to many Muslims.\u201d Also, \u201cIraq was a war of choice that provoked strong differences in my country and around the world.\u201d<\/p>\n

Obama then explained that \u201cViolent extremists have exploited these tensions.\u201d So \u2026 19 people were motivated to fly jetliners into buildings by \u201ctensions\u201d? If that\u2019s the only story that non-Muslim Americans hear, they\u2019ll\u00a0rationally be terrified of Islam.<\/p>\n

In 2010, Obama\u2019s counterterrorism advisor, John Brennan, emitted a similar bland puree of words at a press conference when\u00a0questioned by Helen Thomas<\/a>\u00a0about Umar Farouk\u00a0Abdulmutallab, the failed\u00a0underwear bomber. Their exchange went like this:<\/p>\n

THOMAS: And what is the motivation? We never hear what you find out on why.<\/p>\n

BRENNAN: Al Qaeda is an organization that is dedicated to murder and wanton slaughter of innocents\u2026 [They] attract individuals like Mr. Abdulmutallab and use them for these types of attacks. He was motivated by a sense of religious sort of drive. Unfortunately, al Qaeda has perverted Islam, and has corrupted the concept of Islam, so that [they\u2019re] able to attract these individuals. But al Qaeda has the agenda of destruction and death.<\/p>\n

THOMAS: And you\u2019re saying it\u2019s because of religion?<\/p>\n

BRENNAN: I\u2019m saying it\u2019s because of an al Qaeda organization that uses the banner of religion in a very perverse and corrupt way.<\/p>\n

THOMAS: Why?<\/p>\n

BRENNAN: I think this is a, uh, long issue, but al Qaeda is just determined to carry out attacks here against the homeland.<\/p>\n

At his sentencing, Abdulmutallab\u00a0explained his motivation<\/a>\u00a0in less time than it took Brennan to say there wasn\u2019t\u00a0enough time to explain:<\/p>\n

[I pledged] to attack the United States in retaliation for U.S. support of Israel and in retaliation of the killing of innocent and civilian Muslim populations in Palestine, especially in the blockade of Gaza, and in retaliation for the killing of innocent and civilian Muslim populations in Yemen, Iraq, Somalia, Afghanistan and beyond, most of them women, children, and noncombatants.<\/p>\n

To be fair, there is one situation in which\u00a0American officials have lost the mushmouth and drawn a direct connection between a country killing Mideastern civilians and terrorist retaliation: when that country is Russia. William Burns, formerly Obama\u2019s Deputy Secretary of State, recently and accurately proclaimed<\/a> that \u201cRussia\u2019s bloody role in Syria makes the terrorist threat far worse.\u201d John Kirby, an Obama State Department spokesman, warned that Russia\u2019s brutalization of Syria would lead to\u00a0\u00a0\u201cattacks against Russian interests, perhaps even Russian cities.\u201d<\/p>\n

Russia\u2019s response<\/a> to our friendly observation was about the same as ours when Russia told us<\/a> before the invasion of Iraq that it would cause a \u201cwave of terror.\u201d<\/p>\n

<\/a>

Trump supporters demonstrate against a ruling by a federal judge in Seattle that grants a nationwide temporary restraining order against the presidential order to ban travel to the United States from seven Muslim-majority countries, at Tom Bradley International Terminal at Los Angeles International Airport on February 4, 2017 in Los Angeles, California. Photo: David McNew\/Getty Images<\/p><\/div>\n

That brings us back to President Trump and his executive order on immigration.<\/p>\n

Trump\u2019s story about why it\u2019s necessary is, factually speaking, garbage. But a normal human being can at least understand it and its moral: These incomprehensible foreigners are all potential psychotics, we\u2019ve got to keep them out. Under these circumstances, who cares that no one from any of these seven countries has killed any Americans yet? They\u2019re all part of a huge morass of ticking time bombs.<\/p>\n

By contrast, the Democratic, liberal perspective laid out by Obama makes no sense at all. We\u2019ve never done anything particularly bad in the Middle East, yet \u2026 some people over there want to come here and kill us because \u2026 they\u2019ve been exploited by violent extremists who\u2019ve perverted Islam and \u2026 gotta run, there\u2019s no time to explain.<\/p>\n

Regular people could\u00a0sense that anyone mouthing this kind of gibberish\u00a0was\u00a0hiding something, even if they didn\u2019t realize that Obama was trying to keep the U.S. empire running rather than concealing his secret faith in\u00a0Islam.<\/p>\n

And because a coherent\u00a0narrative always beats the complete absence of a\u00a0story, no one should be surprised that many Americans find Trump\u2019s fantasy of inexplicable Muslim hatred\u00a0persuasive. The only way to conclusively beat it will be with a coherent, complicated, true story like this:<\/p>\n

America has done hideous things to countries across the Middle East\u00a0for decades, such as bomb a civilian air raid shelter, burning the silhouette of a mother trying to protect her baby<\/a> onto its walls. It was inevitable that some people would seek revenge. This doesn\u2019t mean that their brutality is justified, any more than the slaughter at Amiriyah was justified by Saddam Hussein\u2019s invasion of Kuwait. It just means that humans are humans, violence begets violence, and Americans will always be in danger unless we change our foreign policy.<\/p>\n

We must welcome immigrants\u00a0from the Middle East\u00a0both for moral and pragmatic reasons. Morally, the U.S. invasion of Iraq is what sent the region spiraling into catastrophe; only psychopaths set someone\u2019s home on fire and then lock them inside. There are already three million Muslim American citizens. If the government keeps bombing the Middle East\u00a0while making it clear that it genuinely hates Muslims, that\u00a0will only\u00a0spur to action more troubled weirdos like\u00a0Omar Mateen \u2014 who was born in Queens, a few miles away from Donald Trump\u2019s childhood home.<\/p>\n

And we\u2019d better get started with this story soon, because it may not be true forever. Israel has done an exemplary job turning a solvable, straightforward fight over land into a religious war that may no longer have any solution. We\u2019re making similar strides in transforming a conflict that was 90 percent political, where there can be compromise, into a religious conflict where there can\u2019t.<\/p>\n

This can be seen, on the one hand, in ISIS propaganda. Bin Laden generally just talked about kicking the U.S. out of the Middle East and said things<\/a>\u00a0like, \u201cYour security is in your own hands and each state which does not harm our security will remain safe.\u201d The ISIS magazine Dabiq cheerfully tells us<\/a>\u00a0that \u201cWe hate you, first and foremost, because you are disbelievers; you reject the oneness of Allah \u2026 even if you were to stop bombing us, imprisoning us, torturing us, vilifying us, and usurping our lands, we would continue to hate you because our primary reason for hating you will not cease to exist until you embrace Islam.\u201d<\/p>\n

On the other hand, Donald Trump is president of the United States and Steve Bannon is his chief strategist. Bannon straightforwardly believes<\/a>, as he told a conference at the Vatican in 2014, that \u201cwe\u2019re in a war of immense proportions\u201d that\u2019s part of the \u201clong history of the Judeo-Christian West struggle against Islam.\u201d To win, Bannon says, we must form the \u201cchurch militant\u201d \u2013 an archaic term<\/a> for the \u201cChristian church on earth regarded as engaged in a constant warfare against its enemies, the powers of evil.\u201d<\/p>\n

So it\u2019s quite possible ISIS and the Trump administration can successfully collaborate on getting what they both want<\/a>: a totally unnecessary, civilizational war. To stop them we have to end our\u00a0truckling equivocation about terrorism, and start telling the truth while there\u2019s still time.<\/p>\n

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

What surprises me about the poll results isn\u2019t that lots of Americans like the ban \u2014 but that so many Americans don\u2019t. Regular people have lives to lead and can\u2019t investigate complicated issues in detail. Instead they usually take their cues from leaders they trust. And given what politicians across U.S. political spectrum say about terrorism, Trump\u2019s executive order makes perfect sense. There are literally no national-level American politicians telling a story that would help ordinary people understand why Trump\u2019s goals are both horrendously counterproductive and morally vile.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":4,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[65],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-87062","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-anglo-america"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.transcend.org\/tms\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/87062","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=87062"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.transcend.org\/tms\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/87062\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.transcend.org\/tms\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=87062"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.transcend.org\/tms\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=87062"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.transcend.org\/tms\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=87062"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}