The demonization of AlJazeera’s purchase of Current TV continues.

Kincaid: Al Gore Introducing the US to Demonic, Islamist Forces

by Brian Tashman

Yesterday, we reported on how Accuracy In Media’s Cliff Kincaid and Rick Wiles of TruNews believe that President Obama is supporting a global Islamist movement and should be arrested.

But that’s not all.

According to Wiles, people are having strange dreams where people eat a “fake manna” that represents “Lucifer trying to replicate what God did and feeding his people,” leading to a new demonic “spiritual transformation.”

Kincaid linked those dreams back to… Al Jazeera’s purchase of Current TV, which he claims proves that Al Gore is pushing a demonic Islamist force into America.

One of my columns about this was titled, ‘Al Gore, the Future and the Global Jihad.’ Whatever he is doing, he is certainly opening us up to domination by this global force, whether it’s spiritual or not or whether it’s demonic, that the international Islamic movement is part of it, clearly he is working with them but it could be even worse than that.

He argued that Al Jazeera should not even be allowed to broadcast in the U.S. because it is a “terrorist entity” that “is not protected by our First Amendment.” He even urged Rep. Michael McCaul (R-TX) to investigate the “treasonous” acquisition.

Al Jazeera is not protected by our First Amendment because it is a terrorist entity. It is the voice of the Muslim Brotherhood, which of course spawned Al Qaeda and Hamas, among other terrorist groups. It is the voice of Al Qaeda to this day. It was the voice of Osama bin Laden who was responsible for nearly 3,000 dead on 9/11. So this is a terrorist entity and under our law you cannot engage in criminal activity involving terrorism. So we have written to Congressman Michael McCaul of Texas who is the new chairman of the House Homeland Security Committee saying let’s have a hearing into this, let’s stop this deal, at least get all the facts out on the table because we believe this deal is illegal.

…

It’s not just dirty oil money it’s blood money because this is the terror channel, this is the Al Qaeda network. I’ve told people repeatedly that this would be the equivalent during World War II of inviting the German and Japanese fascists onto American soil and giving them access to American broadcast facilities so they could undermine the war effort. Remember if you will going back in time that Axis Sally and Tokyo Rose who were American propagandists for the enemy were picked up after the war and convicted and sentenced to prison for treason. By the same token, I think this deal is treasonous and it has to be stopped but we’ve got to get the Congress of their butts.

(h/t:Razainc.)

France’s Le Pen battles Islamonazi occupation

by Belen Fernandez (AlJazeera English)

In a recent interview with Al Jazeera in which she expounds on the alleged threat France faces from radical Islam, Marine Le Pen – president of the far-right National Front party and member of the European Parliament – seeks international validation for her anti-immigrant views:

No country in the world… would accept to go through the fast and sizeable immigration of people who, without a doubt, have a different religion and culture.

It would seem, of course, that many places in the world have already gone through this very process – including, for example, certain former French colonial possessions, which were also treated to military invasions, widespread killing, torture and expropriation of resources.

Now the tables have turned, however, prompting right-wing hallucinations of an Islamic empire under construction in Europe.

According to prominent neo-conservative propaganda, the imperialist strategy rests on a number of subtle subversive manoeuvers such as “the demonisation of courageous opponents of Islamic imperialism”.

Though Le Pen refrains from referencing the empire, she does hint in her interview at possible additional tactics such as the surreptitious force-feeding of halal meat to non-Muslims:

[M]illions of French people eat halal food every day without realising it… [I]t’s a problem because it breaks our law on secularism. This is because making people who are not religious consume halal food is contributing, due to this consumption which lacks transparency, to financing a cult… If in a Muslim country[,] Muslims were made to eat consecrated bread, they would scream.

That the majority of the French population has not been screaming about the threat of unwitting ingestion of halalmeat was suggested in a March 2012 article in the British Guardian, which reported “surveys showing that [French] voters were less concerned about halal meat than they were about the weather and football”.

Undeterred, Le Pen reiterates France’s unique torment: “[T]here is no reason to ask the French to accept things that no other people in the world would accept.”

When in doubt, bring up the Nazis 

As if the halal plot weren’t bad enough, Muslims have also engaged in more visible assertions of control over French territory, prompting Le Pen’s December 2010 comparison of Muslim street prayers to the Nazi occupation of France.

Read the rest…

Ilisha has written several seminal articles for Loonwatch on the relationship between honor killings and Islamophobia that have gone a long way in debunking the prevailing narrative frame propagated by the looniverse that casts Islam as inherently supportive of “honour crimes.”

Belen Fernandez’s article on AlJazeera English is a welcome addition to this discussion which she analyzes in light of the propensity of certain Zionist organizations and individuals/Right-wingers who adopt “honour killings as a pet topic” to further their own agendas.

I will add that the adoption of such “pet topics” is not limited to only certain Zionists and Right-wingers but also seeps into the discourse of self-declared Liberals who are employed in the business of Empire.

Honour crimes and Islamophobia

by Belen Fernandez (AlJazeera English)

On December 11, the University of Rochester in western New York state will host an event ”[t]o shed sorely needed daylight on the complex issue of honour crimes in our community”.

Organised by an assistant professor from the Rochester Medical School’s Psychiatry Department, the event will consist of various discussions with “community leaders, academics, members of law enforcement agencies, legal professionals and health providers” and will feature an Arab Israeli keynote speaker from “an organisation that works to end honour killings in Israel”.

The “complex issue” requiring psychiatric attention appears even more complicated when we consider that honour crimes don’t seem to constitute an overwhelming problem in the community. Though it could be argued that this is simply because sorely needed daylight has yet to be shed on them, it is worthwhile highlighting the ease with which daylight can be manufactured.

For example, when teenager Faheem Abdul Jaleel apparently stabbed his female cousin in a Rochester suburb in June 2011, the anti-Islamic vanguard headed by the preposterously influential commentator Pamela Geller wasted no time in decrying an “attempted honour killing”, based entirely on the ethnic connotations of the perpetrator’s name.

Also in 2011, NPR reported that the Muslim community in Buffalo, New York, had been “fighting the stereotype” of honour killings since a spontaneous misdiagnosis in the press regarding the 2009 murder of a Muslim woman by her husband.

As is meanwhile quite clear from domestic violence and homicide statistics among the 99 per cent of the US population that is not Muslim, such crimes generally take place independent of Islam.

Israel’s non-criminal killing of Arabs 

By adopting honour killings as a pet topic, Zionists and other right-wing forces seek to delegitimise and even criminalise Arab and Muslim society in general.

Consider an August 2012 essay in the neo-conservative FrontPage Magazine asserting an “Arab cultural and Islamic propensity of violence toward women”.

The author characterises the fatal stabbing of a 27-year-old Palestinian woman by her husband as a “death sentence which tragically has been shared by a long and ever-expanding list of Palestinian women and girls”. He does not care to explain why it is not also tragic that an even longer expanding list of Palestinian women, girls and all other varieties of human beings happen to share the fate of obliteration by Israeli munitions. Nor does he delve into what this might indicate about Israeli cultural propensities or those of Israel’s preferred ally and automated teller machine.

Without downplaying the obvious tragedy of honour crimes, we must ask why it is that we are supposed to be horrified by the idea that “in the past two years, 25 [Palestinian] women have been subjected to honour killings” but not by the fact that 1,400 Palestinians were wiped out in three weeks during Operation Cast Lead.

FrontPage claims that, although “honour killings have long been a staple byproduct of Palestinian society”, the world’s foremost anti-Israel institution – that is, the UN, which nonetheless somehow manages never to enforce resolutions against the Jewish state – has deceitfully implicated non-Palestinians in said byproduct:

“Not surprisingly, for some, this pervasive [Palestinian] violence has been laid at the feet of the usual suspects, namely the Israelis. This scapegoating was summarily expressed in a 2011 report by the United Nations Economic and Social Council which blamed harsh economic and social conditions created by the Israeli ’siege’, an occupation which has led to high levels of poverty, unemployment and, thus, ’violence, within families’.”

The article’s allegation that “in Muslim countries throughout the Mideast, South Asia and Africa… men more often than not treat women little better than livestock” is meanwhile followed by the suggestion that “[c]hanging that dismal equation will take more than just a cultural revolution”. This seems to prescribe further state violence as a means of ending individual violence, which is itself often inextricably linked to state violence in the first place.

Islamic imperialism and mind control 

Conveniently located to one side of the article on the FrontPage website is an advertisement for another stellar example of scapegoating: A pamphlet entitled, ”Islamophobia: Thought Crime of the Totalitarian Future“.

Penned by FrontPage founder David Horowitz and co-conspirator Robert Spencer, the pamphlet promises – for a mere three-dollar donation – to explain how Islamophobia is an invention of the Muslim Brotherhood and to expose the UN’s role in the Brotherhood’s project to “destroy the American civilisation from within” by criminalising criticism of Islam.

Lest doubts remain that Islamophobia is anything but a disease afflicting the authors themselves, the summary of the essay posits a pattern of “Islamic imperialism” in the West. Apparently, the Islamic empire is being erected on the foundations of valid complaints of Western anti-Muslim discrimination rather than, say, ubiquitous military bases and the exploitation of humans and resources that characterises other better-known forms of imperialism.

The summary also denotes as a “notable opponent of Islamic terror” the late Italian journalist Oriana Fallaci, whose anti-terror efforts included vows to explode a mosque slated for construction in Tuscany and hysterics over the reckless American policy of permitting persons by the name of Mustafa and Muhammad to study chemistry and biology at university despite the threat of Muslim-waged germ warfare.

Clearly, Horowitz and Spencer’s purported attempt to contribute to “the global struggle against religious intolerance and totalitarianism” is an example of hypocrisy in the extreme. However, endeavours such as Rochester University’s symposium on honour killings can prove similarly problematic, providing as they do a venue for the incubation of racist and paranoid delusions and the targeting of a single religious group that has already been disproportionately subjected to civil rights violations by the New York Police Department.

Read the rest…

Note: I expect the predictable type of criticisms of the sentence in which Belen says, “By adopting honour killings as a pet topic, Zionists and other right-wing forces…” I will just say that it appears to me she is speaking about “right-wing” forces and not stating “all Zionists” adopt “honour killings” as a pet topic.

The gruesome situation in Myanmar is not getting better. An AlJazeera documentary goes in-depth into the history of the persecution of the Rohingya, as well as the events that spurred this years terrible violence.

“Professor William Schabas, the former president of the International Association of Genocide Scholars, says: “When you see measures preventing births, trying to deny the identity of the people, hoping to see that they really are eventually, that they no longer exist; denying their history, denying the legitimacy of their right to live where they live, these are all warning signs that mean it’s not frivolous to envisage the use of the term genocide.” (via. Frank)

The following article by Erik Bleich on the need for solid measures of Islamophobia is a good one.

He is a little too quick in explaining the development of Islamophobia as a concept that emerged by the attempt of political activists to draw attention to rhetoric and actions directed at Islam and Muslims, (I believe it was more complex).

One of the ideal measures Bleich puts forward is one that particularly resonates with us,

It is also possible to measure Islamophobia by examining unsolicited statements by politicians, civil servants, public figures, religious leaders, journalists, bloggers and others whose words are recorded for posterity.

We could undertake systematic analyses of news content about Islam and Muslims, or examine the changing nature of far-right political rhetoric vis-a-vis Muslims, or discuss the interpretation of Islam by a prominent writer such as Oriana Fallaci.

To the extent that these efforts are systematic – reviewing all major news stories, far-right rhetoric, or best-selling authors – they can convey important information about the prevalence and nature of Islamophobia at specific times and places.

Knowing Islamophobia when we see it

by Erik Bleich

Islamophobia was originally developed as a concept in the late 1990s and early 2000s by political activists to draw attention to rhetoric and actions directed at Islam and Muslims in Western liberal democracies. It still dominates public debates in response to inflammatory media portrayals or politicians’ statements about the perceived dangers of Islam in Europe or North America.

But in recent years, Islamophobia has begun an evolution from a politicised concept toward one used by scholars to study a form of racism similar to xenophobia or anti-Semitism.

Islamophobia has taken root in public, political and academic discourse because it attempts to label a social reality – that Islam and Muslims have emerged as objects of aversion, fear and hostility in contemporary liberal democracies. Under these circumstances, it is vital to make Islamophobia a meaningful concept for social scientists as well as for political actors.

That way, we can begin to measure its ebbs and flows to demonstrate not only that it is a real phenomenon, but also to understand why it rises and falls in a given time and place. Knowing what it means is a first step toward being able to fight it.

Indiscriminate negative attitudes

Islamophobia can best be understood as indiscriminate negative attitudes or emotions directed at Islam or Muslims. Because not all criticism constitutes Islamophobia, terms like indiscriminate cover instances where negative assessments are applied to all or most Muslims or aspects of Islam.

As with parallel concepts like homophobia or xenophobia, Islamophobia connotes a broader set of negative attitudes or emotions directed at individuals or groups because of their perceived membership in a category.

Viewed in this way, Islamophobia is also analogous to terms like racism, sexism, or anti-Semitism. Aversion, jealousy, suspicion, disdain, anxiety, rejection, contempt, fear, disgust, anger and hostility give a sense of the range of negative attitudes and emotions that may constitute Islamophobia.

Finally, directed at Islam or Muslims suggest that the target may be the religious doctrine or the people who follow it (or whose ancestors have followed it, or who are believed to follow it). This recognises the multidimensional nature of Islamophobia and the fact that Islam and Muslims are often inextricably intertwined in individual and public perceptions.

Beyond simply identifying its key definitional components, we also need to be able to measure Islamophobia. Most observers, scholars, activists and politicians have provided evidence of Islamophobia that suffers from a critical weakness.

Some authors rely on extremely indirect indicators of contemporary Islamophobia, such as noting its deep historical roots or identifying current socio-economic disadvantages concentrated in Muslim communities.

Others provide examples of Islamophobia that are anecdotal or symbolic, such as examples of violence directed at Muslims or the use of “Bin Laden” as a schoolyard taunt. A third type of research conflates Islamophobia with attitudes toward overlapping ethnic, national origin, or immigrant-status groups.

In these cases, contemporary histories of anti-Arab, anti-South Asian, or anti-immigrant sentiments and policies or examples of discrimination or attacks against groups that are predominantly Muslim, or composite measures that mix together responses about Islam and Muslims with those about national origin or ethnic groups stand for Islamophobia.

These approaches and observations are each useful to a degree. Yet, because they use indirect, anecdotal, or conflating measures, they are not reliable ways to analyse Islamophobia.

The ideal measures

The best indicators of Islamophobia would be through direct surveys, focus-groups, or interviews. The ideal measures involve carefully tailored questions through which respondents accurately reveal the extent of their indiscriminate negative attitudes or emotions directed at Islam or Muslims.

Of course, this ideal is hard to achieve in the real world. As most studies in parallel fields such as racism or homophobia have emphasised, the key to uncovering reliable indicators of Islamophobia lies in consistency. The more consistently negative the attitudes and emotions of respondents are to a series of questions, the more confident we can be that they are expressing Islamophobia.

Questionnaires can also aim to identify different levels of intensity of responses (aversion versus fear versus hostility) and of intensity of adherence to Islamophobic positions (an opinion versus a predisposition such as a bias).

It is important to remember that the fewer direct questions asked in surveys, focus groups, or interviews, the more difficult it is to measure Islamophobic sentiments. In particular, any arguments about Islamophobia that rely on a single survey question should be viewed with skepticism.

It is also possible to measure Islamophobia by examining unsolicited statements by politicians, civil servants, public figures, religious leaders, journalists, bloggers and others whose words are recorded for posterity.

We could undertake systematic analyses of news content about Islam and Muslims, or examine the changing nature of far-right political rhetoric vis-a-vis Muslims, or discuss the interpretation of Islam by a prominent writer such as Oriana Fallaci.

To the extent that these efforts are systematic – reviewing all major news stories, far-right rhetoric, or best-selling authors – they can convey important information about the prevalence and nature of Islamophobia at specific times and places.

At this stage of discussing Islamophobia, it is worth moving beyond politicised uses of the term and to look for a more rigorous way to understand and to measure it.

Once we have a common conceptual language and better tools for tracking Islamophobia, we can more accurately assess its trends over time, its variation over space or social groups, and its intensity relative to negative attitudes and emotions aimed at other minority groups.

Developing Islamophobia as a concrete and usable social scientific concept is not only the basis for meaningful analysis in academia, it is also the foundation for more informed public debates and for more effective policy decisions.

Erik Bleich is Professor of Political Science at Middlebury College in Vermont and the author of The Freedom to Be Racist? How the United States and Europe Struggle to Preserve Freedom and Combat Racism (Oxford University Press). This essay draws on his article “What Is Islamophobia, and How Much Is There? Theorizing and Measuring an Emerging Comparative Concept” (American Behavioral Scientist, 55, December 2011: 1581-1600).

Pepe Escobar tears apart US Empirical hegemony worldwide, specifically its immorality, hypocrisy and deadly consequences in Afghanistan:

The horror, the horror

“We must kill them. We must incinerate them. Pig after pig… cow after cow… village after village… army after army…”  – Colonel Kurtz in Francis Ford Coppola’s Apocalypse Now

Hong Kong - It started way before a lone killer, a US Army sergeant, married with two children, walked into villagesin Panjwayi, southwest of Kandahar city, and “allegedly” went on a shooting spree, leaving at least 16 civilians dead.

This was Afghanistan’s Haditha moment – as in Iraq; or My Lai – as in Vietnam.

It had been building up via the serial drone-with-Hellfire bombings of tribal wedding parties; the serial secret US Special Forces’ “night raids”; the serial “kill team” murders in 2010; the ritual urination onto dead Afghans by “our men in uniform”; and last but not least, the Quran burnings in Bagram. Mission … accomplished?

According to the latest Post-ABC News poll - conducted even before the Kandahar massacre – 55 per cent of Americans want the end of the Afghan war.

US President Barack Obama once again stressed that 10 years into a war that has cost at least $400bn, the “combat role” of NATO troops will end in 2014. According to Obama, Washington only wants to make sure “that al-Qaeda is not operating there, and that there is sufficient stability that it does not end up being a free-for-all”.

Al-Qaeda “is not operating there” for a long time; there are only a bunch of instructors “not there” but in the Waziristans, in the Pakistani tribal areas.

And forget about “stability”. The “Afghan security forces” that will be theoretically in charge by 2014, or even before, are doomed. Their illiteracy rate is a staggering 80 per cent. At least 25 per cent become deserters. Child rape is endemic. Over 50 per cent are permanently stoned on hashish, on steroids.

The level of mistrust between Afghans and Americans is cosmic. According to a 2011 study that became classified by the Pentagon after it was leaked to the Wall Street Journal - the American military essentially view Afghans as corrupt cowards while Afghans see the American military as coward bullies.

Get a Saigon 1975 moment now or in 2014, the facts on the ground will remain the same: Hindu Kush-rocking instability.

Toss the COIN and I win

Afghanistan was always a tragedy trespassed by farce. Think about NATO’s original 83 restrictions on the rules of engagement, which led, for example, to a rash of French soldiers killed in 2008 because France, pressed by the US, stopped paying protection money to the Taliban; or think about Berlin calling it not a war, but a “humanitarian mission”.

Internal battles – unlike Vietnam – became legend. Such as the COINdinistas – the counter-insurgency gang, supported by then Pentagon chief Bob Gates – invested in a “new mission” and a “new military leadership”, winning against Vice-President Joe Biden’s CT PLUS strategy, as in less soldiers on the ground doing counter-terrorism.

The winner, as everyone remembers, was rockstar General Stanley McChrystal, who insisted that the Biden plan would lead to “Chaosistan”, which happened to be the name of a classified CIA analysis.

Stanley McChrystal – a Pentagon spokesperson during the March 2003 invasion of Iraq – badly wanted to change the culture of NATO and the US Army in Afghanistan. He wanted to destroy the culture of shoot-first-and-blow-shit-up and go towards “protecting the civilian population”. In his own words, he stressed that “air-to-ground munitions” and “indirect fires” against Afghan homes were “only authorised under very limited and prescribed conditions”.

He prevailed – shielded by his rockstar status – only for a brief moment.

Meanwhile, even if on one side the State Department, the DEA and the FBI would be warning about nasty drug smugglers and assorted criminals, on the other side the CIA and the Pentagon, praising them for good intel, would always win.

And everything was fully justified by an array of reluctant warriors/liberal hawks in places such as the Center for a New American Security – crammed with “respectable” journalists.

Hamid Karzai won the Afghan elections by outright fraud. His half-brother Ahmed Wali Karzai – then provincial council chief in Kandahar – was free to keep running his massive drug business while dismissing elections (“the people in this region don’t understand it”).

Who cared if the Afghan government in Kabul was/is in fact a crime syndicate? “Loyal” local commanders – “our bastards” – increasingly got funding and even dedicated Special Forces as personal advisors to themselves and their death squads.

McChrystal, to his credit, admitted that the Soviets in the 1980s did many things right (for instance, building roads, promoting central government, education for boys and girls alike, modernising the country).

But they also did a lot of things terribly wrong, such as carpet-bombing and killing 1.5 million Afghans. If only Pentagon planners had the presence of mind to read Afgantsy: The Russians in Afghanistan 1970-89 (Profile Books), by former British ambassador Rodric Braithwaite, drawing on a wealth of Russian sources from the KGB to the Gorbachev Foundation; from the internet to a spectacular book by the late General Alexander Lyakhovsky.

You have the right to be misinformed

The Pentagon will never accept the withdrawal date of 2014: it goes full-frontal against its own Full Spectrum Dominance doctrine, which counts on scores of US bases in Afghanistan to monitor/control/harass strategic competitors – Russia and China.

The way out will be a ruse. The Pentagon will transfer its special operations to the CIA; they will become “spies”, not “troops on the ground”.

This will mean, essentially, an extension ad infinitum of the Phoenix Program in Vietnam, which carried out the targeted killing of over 20,000 “suspected” Vietcong supporters.

And that leads us to the current CIA director, media-savvy General David Petraeus and his baby – COIN field manual FM 3-24, the Pentagon’s answer to William Blake’s Marriage of Heaven and Hell as the marriage of counter-insurgency with the war on terror. And this, even after a 2008 RAND study titled How Terrorist Groups End stressed that the only way to defeat them was through a good old law enforcement operation.

Petraeus couldn’t care less. After all, his “information operations” – as in all-out media manipulation, coupled with the massive distribution of the proverbial suitcase full of US dollars – had won “his” and George W Bush’s surge in Iraq.

Proud Pashtuns were a much tougher nut to crack than Sunni sheikhs in the desert. They went so low-tech – fabricating tens of thousands of IEDs with fertiliser, wood and old munitions – that they in fact froze US technology dead in its tracks, leading to endless Pentagon newspeak reports on “vast increase in IED activity”.

Since Obama’s inauguration, the Pentagon had been playing extra-dirty to extract the exact war they wanted to carry out in Afghanistan.

They got it. Petraeus went on non-stop spin mode on “progress”. Local populations were “becoming more receptive” to US troops, even as a National Intelligence Estimate (NIE) – the cumulative knowledge of 17 US intelligence agencies – remained grim.

Petraeus did what he does best: he remixed the NIE. He never admitted that the war would be over by 2014.  He cranked up airstrikes, unleashed Apache and Kiowa attack helicopters, tripled the number of night raids by Special Forces, authorised a mini-Shock and Awe, totally levelling the town of Tarok Kolache in southern Afghanistan.

After yet another US massacre in February 2011 in Kunar Province, with 64 dead civilians, Petraeus even had the gall of accusing Afghans of burning their own children to make it look like collateral damage. Good for him. At the time, his relationship with Obama was even improving.

The Obama administration is, in fact, convinced that Obama’s surge, led by Petraeus and scheduled to finish by September, has left Afghanistan “stable”, at least in the region known as “regional command east”; that’s what Petraeus dubs “Afghan good enough”.

Most of the country is in fact “Talib good enough”, but who cares? As for burning babies, cynics might qualify it as a feature of American exceptionalism. One just has to remember the Amiriya Shelter in Baghdad on February 13, 1991, when no fewer than 408 children and their mothers were burned to death by the US.

I’ll never look into your eyes… again

How not to remember the inimitable Dennis Hopper as the psychedelic photojournalist in Apocalypse Now, talking about Colonel Kurtz/Marlon Brando: “He’s a poet-warrior in the classic sense…”

“Poet-warrior” McChrystal was convinced Afghanistan was not Vietnam; in Vietnam the US was fighting a “popular insurgency”, unlike Afghanistan (wrong: the many strands bundled under the moniker “Taliban” have become more popular in direct proportion to Karzai’s disaster, not to mention that in Vietnam the official Pentagon spin was that the Vietcong were never popular).

Generals, anyway, don’t go on Kurtz-style killing sprees. Petraeus was promoted to unleash Shadow War Inc at the CIA. After he was sacked following a profile in Rolling Stone magazine – how rockstar is that? – McChrystal ended up rehabilitated by the White House.

He taught at Yale, went into consulting, is making a fortune on the conference circuit – distilling wisdom about “leadership” and the Greater Middle East – and was made an unpaid adviser to military families by Obama.

McChrystal sees Afghanistan as stuck in “some kind of post-apocalyptic nightmare”. Conrad’s “the horror… the horror…” is perennial. The Pentagon’s key lesson from Vietnam was how to seal off the horror, how to put it in boxes, and how to, voluptuously, embrace it.

So it’s no wonder McChrystal could not possibly see that he was starring as the remixed Colonel Kurtz – while Petraeus was a more methodical, but no less deadly Captain Willard. Unlike Vietnam, though, this time there won’t be a Coppola to win the war for Hollywood. But there will be plenty of Hollow Men left at the Pentagon.

Pepe Escobar is the roving correspondent for Asia Times. His latest book is named Obama Does Globalistan(Nimble Books, 2009).

This is not new.

JDL and Far-Right Parties Find Common Ground

(AlJazeera English)

Right-wing movements previously associated with anti-Semitic and neo-Nazi ideologies are increasingly opting for a surprising tactic to garner legitimacy within mainstream politics: Forging alliances with extremist Jewish organisations under the banner of fighting “Islamisation”.

“Far-right parties are professing a new found love of Israel as a way of escaping their past anti-Semitism and racism, and to justify their prejudice towards European Muslims as not being racist,” Toby Archer, a researcher who studies far-right parties and the “counter-jihad blogosphere”, explained to Al Jazeera. “Parties like the British National Party (BNP) in the UK, Vlaams Belang in Belgium, and the National Front in France are all coming out from a neo-fascist past.”

These parties have stopped using anti-Semitic rhetoric, Archer said, which had prevented them from attracting support. It is important to distinguish between the traditional far-right, who are historically anti-Semitic, and the populist new-right, who have emerged in the last two decades and partake in an anti-Muslim discourse, he said.

The English Defence League (EDL) closely linked to the BNP, a right-wing anti-Islamic extremist group based in the UK. The EDL has gained notoriety for its aggression against British Muslims and its links with neo-Nazi groups. Last year, it moved to garner support within the Jewish community by officially opening a Jewish Division open to “represent the Jews who are fighting against Islamisation,” according to a statement.

Tommy Robinson, a spokesperson for the EDL, said one of the group’s fundamental beliefs was that as a “shining star of democracy”, Israel has the right to defend itself.

Yet a number of recent demonstrations held by the EDL have continued to be marked by anti-Semitic rhetoric, critics say. In a 2010 demonstration held in Cardiff, EDL members burnt anti-Nazi flags.

BNP leader Nick Griffin has referred to the Holocaust as “the Holohoax” and was convicted in 1998 for distributing material likely to incite racial hatred. He has voiced his support for the EDL and its members. Griffin believes that the EDL is helping politicise young people in the UK. “At least they’re trying to do something,” he said of the EDL. “It’s crude and a bit rough… but we shouldn’t condemn them for being a bit rough and ready…”

Invitation accepted

Signs of lingering anti-Semitism within the UK’s far-right have not stopped the Jewish Defence League (JDL), a group the US Federal Bureau of Investigation considers a “violent extremist organisation”, from eagerly accepting a partnership with the EDL.

In January 2011, JDL Canada organised a rally in support of the EDL. Meir Weinstein, national director of the JDL in Canada, defended its stance, saying the EDL is “taking issue with radical Islam” and supports Israel. Shortly after the rally, mainstream Jewish organisations in Canada publicly distanced themselves from the EDL.

James Clark, an activist with Stop the War Coalition in Canada, has faced the JDL at several rallies. He believes that Jewish groups are shifting towards far-right nationalists, rather than the other way around.

“The JDL has tried to move their politics to the right,” he told Al Jazeera. “They are quite a fringe organisation, but made a bit more respectable by more mainstream Zionist organisations that give them a platform; organisations who support them, but don’t feel safe saying the same thing in public.”

He added that the JDL is obsessed with Muslims and the Muslim community, and prays on the irrational fear that Canada might soon be run by Sharia Law.

The JDL also purports to have significant influence over the Canadian government, who Clark describes as “far and above the US government as Israel’s best friend”.

According to Weinstein, the JDL was able to sway the government from banning George Galloway, a pro-Palestinian British MP, from entering the country in 2009 due to his outspoken sympathies for Hamas.

For Daniel Freeman-Maloy, a Canadian activist and research student at the European Centre for Palestine Studies at Exeter University, the JDL is the product of a larger issue.

“It is important to highlight that this is not an isolated group”, he told Al Jazeera. “It is a symptom of unapologetic ethno-religious chauvinism that has been left to develop unchecked.”

Weinstein, however, sees it as a fight for survival.

“[As Jews] we want to exist, and take measures to ensure we do exist,” he said. “We take that seriously, and we will ally ourselves with anyone who will fight alongside us against that evil.”

Shaky theological convergence

While the US has been credited with having the most visible pro-Israeli rhetoric, JDL supporters in the US seem to be somewhat different than those in Canada and Europe.

In the past, the US JDL chapter has been linked to a string of bombings against Arab-American targets. It is suspected of carrying out the assassination of Alex Odeh, the regional director of the American-Arab Anti-Discrimination Committee, and the planned attack on Arab-American Congressman Darrell Issa.

Max Blumenthal, a journalist following right-wing movements, believes that the US JDL chapters no longer represent as extreme a viewpoint as they once did, but have now gone mainstream.

At a rally in November 2011, Texas Governor and Christian right representative Rick Perry was seen hugging Dov Hikind, a former leader of the JDL.

For Blumenthal, the alliance between the US right-wing and Jewish extremists is forged on a theological convergence.

“Christians who are sympathetic to the JDL mentality are Christian-Zionists”, he explained. “They are waiting for ‘the Rapture’, and part of the fulfillment is the gathering of all Jews into Biblical Israel, which means the ethnic cleansing of Palestinians.”

Ironically, part of the Rapture mythology is that all non-Christians will perish on that day, including Jews.

The fight for Israel

In Europe, the JDL appears to be expanding. They have recently opened a UK branch (French, German, Swedish, Danish and Austrian chapters are already in existence) and an all-encompassing European umbrella organisation. The JDL Europe’s membership is reported to be around 3,000, with more than 5,000 supporters.

Steven Weigang, founder and chief executive officer of the JDL Europe and the German branch, said the group is “necessary to prevent another holocaust. The anti-Semitism is growing in Europe and we can’t just stand on the side-lines.”

He reaffirmed that JDL Europe shares the views of JDL Canada and its relationship with the EDL, without addressing the EDL’s links to the BNP.

Right-wing groups are gravitating towards the JDL, rather than the other way around, but more in terms of policy towards Israel rather than sharing the same ideology, Weigang said.

“I think the Right in Europe is moving towards sharing our politics”, he said. “The Europeans feel that what is [happening] in Israel [is] on the agenda… I am not sure if they share the same visions as we do. They maybe say it, but they don’t mean it.”

In France, the JDL has always maintained an active role: It is known for accosting pro-Palestinian rallies, vandalising property, and lobbying the government whenever it perceives pro-Palestinian gestures. In September, the French chapter of the JDL called on its members with military experience to go “defend” the illegal settlements in the occupied West Bank.

Samuel Ghiles Meilhac, a historian who specialises in the French Jewish community, told Al Jazeera that there has been a distinct shift in the community from its previous alignment with the left towards the right.

While representatives of mainstream Jewish organisations are not associated with right-wing parties like the National Front at the moment, Meilhac thinks this could change. In recent years, the National Front has been pandering to Jewish voters by focusing on a “common enemy: the Islamisation of Europe”.

“Most people who are part of the Jewish mainstream in France remember the 1970s and 1980s when the National Front were making jokes about what happened in World War II,” Meilhac said. “But the question is: If the extreme right doesn’t make references to the Jews now, will there still be people in the Jewish mainstream powerful enough to reject them?”

Follow Nour Samaha on Twitter: @Samahanour

When NATO backed rebels entered Tripoli in late August, it spelled the end of the Gadaffi regime. His reported death today marks the symbolic end of the Gadaffi era. There is no shadow of a doubt that Gadaffi was a dictator, that much is clear from numerous human rights and amnesty reports.

Now marks a new beginning for Libya.

Unlike the Egyptian revolution, the Libyan uprising was tainted by Nato’s involvement; it was not a victory purely by the people, of the people and for the people. It is hoped that the forces of self-determination and true democracy will prevail over those trends that are either open to, or already have been co-opted by foreign interests.

Needless to say, the Islamophobes are already instigating the doomsday scenario. Robert Spencer says in a blog post titled, “Allahu akbar, Allahu akbar, Gaddafi has been captured”:

It is likely that the new America-backed regime will compete with the Gaddafi regime in its hatred for America and the West, and become noted for being even more anti-American than he was.

It goes without saying that one should take Spencer’s words with a heavy grain of salt, after all such pessimism on his part is born not out of a true analysis of Libya as it is today but out of a deep seated hatred for Islam and Muslims. For Spencer Muslims can only ever live under dictatorship and oppression.

Footage shows Gaddafi’s bloodied body

Footage obtained by Al Jazeera shows the body of the former Libyan leader Muammar Gaddafi following his death in Sirte.

Al Jazeera has acquired exclusive footage of the body of Muammar Gaddafi after he was killed in his hometown, Sirte.

Abdul Hafiz Ghoga, vice chairman of Libya’s National Transitional Council, confirmed that the ousted leader had been killed on October 20, 2011 near Sirte.

“We announce to the world that Muammar Gaddafi has been killed at the hands of the revolutionaries,” Ghoga told a news conference in Benghazi.

The news came shortly after the NTC captured Sirte after weeks of fighting.

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The protester's banner reads 'the veil in front of your eyes is much more dangerous than the veil on my hair'

It is not enough to ban face veils and have that law implemented on April 11, 2001 but Islam as a religion has to be criticized and debated. (hat tip: Europeans Against Islamophobia)

France’s ruling party discusses Islam

UMP members hold criticised debate about Islam’s place in secular France, days before ban on face veils is implemented.

France’s conservative ruling party has held a controversial debate on the practice of Islam, rejecting charges of bigotry and saying that airing the issue could help stem the rising popularity of the far-right.

President Nicolas Sarkozy had called for Tuesday’s discussion on Islam and secularism to address fears that some overt displays of Muslim faith - including street prayer and full-face veils - were France’s secular identity.

The UMP party were considering 26 ideas officials said were aimed at bringing France’s stringent laws decreeing the separation of church from state into step with the times.

Even before it began, the debate had been tarnished by criticism from religious leaders, a boycott by France’s largest Muslim group, and the absence of Prime Minister Francois Fillon.

“For weeks, everything possible has been done to stop this meeting taking place … but we have not yielded to those pressures … because it is the French people who asked us for it,” Francois Cope, the secretary-general of the UMP party, said.

“One less problem is one less electoral argument for Marine Le Pen,” he said.

With his popularity at record lows a year before a presidential election, Sarkozy has been accused of seeking to woo back right-wing voters increasingly drawn to the National Front party under its new leader Marine Le Pen.

Controversial proposals

The proposals discussed on Tuesday include banning the wearing of religious symbols such as Muslim headscarves or prominent Christian crosses by day-care personnel and preventing Muslim mothers from wearing headscarves when accompanying school field trips.

Another proposal would prevent parents from taking their children out of mandatory subjects including gym and biology.

The debate could lead to a legislative bill in the National Assembly, where the UMP has a majority.

Under the ban, women who wear the face-shrouding veils risk a fine, special classes and a police record.The round-table came as a new law banning garments that hide the face is to take effect on April 11.

Islam is France’s second biggest religion after Roman Catholicism. Interior Minister Claude Gueant says there are five to six million Muslims in the country.

Tuesday’s discussion brought together several ministers, chief rabbi Gilles Bernheim and representatives of other religions, but no Muslim clerics.

Muslim groups have accused the conservative UMP of stigmatising their faith.

Critics from the opposition Socialist party contend the debate is an electoral ploy aimed at appealing to voters who could be swayed by the National Front.

Jean-Francois Cope, the UMP leader, insisted on Monday that France needs clearer rules about how Muslims should adapt their religious practices to French society.

“The practice of Islam in France is not the burqa. It is not prayers in the street,” he said.

‘Easing’ social tensions

In some neighbourhoods with large Muslim immigrant communities, the lack of mosques or prayer rooms means crowds gather on sidewalks and cobblestone streets at prayer times.

Cope tried to distance himself from the National Front. “They denounce [Muslim practices]. We are making proposals” to ease social tensions, he said.

The leaders of France’s main religions have expressed concern about the debate, saying it is not the right forum for such a discussion.

“We were not for this debate in the format that was presented,” France’s chief rabbi, Gilles Bernheim, told reporters. France has western Europe’s largest Jewish population.

Singh Ranjit, of the group Sikhs of France, said, “This concerns all of us because we all have difficulties as religious minorities when it comes to the relationship we have with the authorities.”

The debate has also taken on an international dimension.

A former foreign minister of the Comoros Islands, a largely Muslim nation in the Indian Ocean, said on the sidelines of the debate that France’s influence goes beyond its geographical limits.

“Unfortunately because of what they call quarrels within France, people don’t measure the impact that France has all over the world.”

Al Jazeera English Blacked Out Across Most Of U.S.

WASHINGTON – Canadian television viewers looking for the most thorough and in-depth coverage of the uprising in Egypt have the option of tuning into Al Jazeera English, whose on-the-ground coverage of the turmoil is unmatched by any other outlet. American viewers, meanwhile, have little choice but to wait until one of the U.S. cable-company-approved networks broadcasts footage from AJE, which the company makes publicly available. What they can’t do is watch the network directly.

Other than in a handful of pockets across the U.S. – including Ohio, Vermont and Washington, D.C. – cable carriers do not give viewers the choice of watching Al Jazeera. That corporate censorship comes as American diplomats harshly criticize the Egyptian government for blocking Internet communication inside the country and as Egypt attempts to block Al Jazeera from broadcasting.

The result of the Al Jazeera English blackout in the United States has been a surge in traffic to the media outlet’s website, where footage can be seen streaming live. The last 24 hours have seen a two-and-a-half thousand percent increase in web traffic, Tony Burman, head of North American strategies for Al Jazeera English, told HuffPost. Sixty percent of that traffic, he said, has come from the United States.

Al Jazeera English launched in the fall of 2006, opening a large bureau on K Street in downtown Washington, but has made little progress in persuading cable companies to offer the channel to its customers.

The objections from the cable companies have come for both political and commercial reasons, said Burman, the former editor-in-chief of the Canadian Broadcasting Corporation. “In 2006, pre-Obama, the experience was a challenging one. Essentially this was a period when a lot of negative stereotypes were associated with Al Jazeera. The effort was a difficult one,” he said, citing the Bush administration’s public hostility to the network.

“There was reluctance from these companies to embark in a direction that would perhaps be opposed by the Bush administration. I think that’s changed. I think if anything the Obama administration has indicated to Al Jazeera that it sees us as part of the solution, not part of the problem,” Burman said.

Cable companies are also worried, said Burman, that they will lose more subscribers than they will gain by granting access to Al Jazeera. The Canadian experience, he said, should put those fears to rest. In Canada, national regulators can require cable companies to provide certain channels and Al Jazeera ran a successful campaign to encourage Canadians to push the government to intervene. There has been extremely little negative reaction over the past year as Canadians have been able to view the channel and decide for themselves. “We had a completely different process and result here in Canada — a grassroots campaign that was overwhelmingly successful,” said Avi Lewis, the former host of Al Jazeera’s Frontline USA. (He now freelances for Al Jazeera while working on a documentary project with his wife, Naomi Klein.)

Media critics have begun to push for Al Jazeera’s inclusion. “It is downright un-American to still refuse to carry it,” wrote Jeff Jarvis on Sunday. “Vital, world-changing news is occurring in the Middle East and no one-not the xenophobic or celebrity-obsessed or cut-to-the-bone American media-can bring the perspective, insight, and on-the-scene reporting Al Jazeera English can.”

Al Jazeera follows a public broadcasting model similar to the BBC, CBC and NPR and is largely funded by the government of Qatar, which Burman said takes a completely hands-off approach to content. Al Jazeera is the scourge of authoritarian governments around the Middle East, which attempt to block it. The network, however, covers much more than the Middle East, and now has more bureaus in Latin America than CNN and the BBC, said Burman. “As proud as we are of our Middle Eastern coverage, we are in other places in the world that are never, never seen on television in American homes,” he said.

Burman said that he will use the experience with the Tunisia and Egyptian uprisings in upcoming meetings with cable providers as the network continues its push. Comcast did not respond to requests for comment.

“Why in the most vibrant democracy in the world, where engagement and knowledge of the world is probably the most important, why it’s not available is one of these things that would take a PhD scholar to understand,” Burman said.

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UPDATE I: A reader emails to say that Al Jazeera programming is also being carried by the satellite channel LinkTV, which can be found on channel 9410 on Dish Network and 375 on DirecTV.

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UPDATE II: Another reader emails to say that Al Jazeera broadcasts over some of the Pacifica stations, including WBAI (New York, 5-6 AM, 99.5 FM), KPFA (Berkeley, 6-7 AM, 94.1 FM) and KPFT (Houston, 5-6 AM, 90.1 FM).