Many cry, “why do they hate us?” and so we reach, once again, the intersection between anti-Americanism and Islamophobia.
Well, when the whole world recognizes Palestine except for the USA it increases the perception that the US is opposed to justice and peace and will continue with a policy of supporting the punishment, disenfranchisement and violence perpetrated upon an occupied people.
UNITED NATIONS — U.S. Ambassador Susan Rice objected Wednesday to the Palestinians’ latest bid to capitalize on their upgraded U.N. status when their foreign minister spoke at the Security Council while seated behind a nameplate that read “State of Palestine.”
It was the first Palestinian address to the Security Council since the U.N. General Assembly voted overwhelmingly on Nov. 29 to upgrade the Palestinians from U.N. observer to non-voting member state.
Rice said that the United States does not recognize the General Assembly vote in November “as bestowing Palestinian ‘statehood’ or recognition.”
“Only direct negotiations to settle final status issues will lead to this outcome,” Rice said.
“Therefore, in our view, any reference to the ‘State of Palestine’ in the United Nations, including the use of the term ‘State of Palestine’ on the placard in the Security Council or the use of the term ‘State of Palestine’ in the invitation to this meeting or other arrangements for participation in this meeting, do not reflect acquiescence that ‘Palestine’ is a state,” she added.
Canadian Ambassador Guillermo E. Rishchynski also complained later that allowing the Palestinians to sit behind the “State of Palestine” nameplate “creates a misleading impression” and said Canada would oppose the Palestinians’ attempts to upgrade their status in symbolic ways.
The U.N. General Assembly vote to upgrade the Palestinians’ status was important because it gave sweeping international backing to their demands for sovereignty over lands Israel occupied in 1967, including east Jerusalem. But it did not actually grant independence to the 4.3 million Palestinians who live in the West Bank, east Jerusalem and the Gaza Strip.
In his speech to the Security Council, Palestinian Foreign Minister Riad Malki reiterated the Palestinian position that a two-state solution be based on the pre-1967 borders.
He also said that if Israel proceeds with plans to build settlements on a contentious tract of land east of Jerusalem, the Palestinians will file a case in the International Criminal Court.
Psy’s “Gangnam Style” made YouTube history today with 1 billion views. Another song by the rising South Korean megastar,”Hey American,” sparked controversy with blunt lyrics described by some as “anti-American.” Psy has issued an apology.
Nevertheless, let’s hope the controversy has helped cut through the thick fog of self congratulatory propaganda that has led many Americans to believe it is Muslims who “hate us for our freedom,” rather than our hypocritical, aggressive foreign policies and relentless military intervention. Welcome to the global backlash, Gangnam style.
The incongruity of it seemed to be nothing short of a betrayal. After lightheartedly dancing his way into the hearts of Americans and gaining entrance to the inner sanctum of their cherished cult of celebrity, the Korean rapper, Psy, whose song “Gangam Style” became the most watched video in the history of YouTube and made him a pop culture sensation, has been revealed to have a politically active past which places him directly at odds with the American mainstream worldview and which violently decries its most basic articles of faith. The man whom they enjoyed as an unthreatening, comically light-hearted foreigner dancing for their enjoyment was revealed to have only years earlier been a vociferous public critic of American policies and the country’s role in the world. In a 2004 performance, the rapper famous for his “invisible horse dance” denounced the United States in a song called “Hey American”:
Kill those f—ing Yankees who have been torturing Iraqi captives
Kill those f—ing Yankees who ordered them to torture
Kill their daughters, mothers, daughters-in-law and fathers
Kill them all slowly and painfully
For an American public conditioned to the type of unquestionable worship of the military embodied in the phrase “Support the Troops”, Psy’s words represent nothing less than sacrilege. This song however was not his only offence.
In a previous performance, he had come on stage to protest the presence of 37,000 US troops in South Korea and smashed a miniature American tank in protest over the killing of two South Korean schoolgirls by American forces stationed in the country.
As it turned out, the Asian pop-star whom Americans had enthusiastically embraced, arguably the first entertainer to bridge the continental divide so successfully, brought with him not just a culturally unique style of song and dance, but also a worldview which is threateningly alien to most Americans.
If even an innocuous pop singer from a country perceived as benign could espouse views the typical American would attribute to menacing terrorists such as al-Qaeda, it begs serious questions about the pervasiveness of global anti-Americanism as well as to what informs it.
A legacy of violence
While the stories of American brutality in places such as Korea are unknown or ignored by the overwhelming majority of Americans, they are less quickly forgotten by the citizens of the countries which have suffered and continue to suffer horrific atrocities at the hands of US troops.
A 2009 investigative film revisiting the massacre documented the words of one Korean survivor who recalled how US troops had indiscriminately murdered men, women and children:During the Korean War, American troops were believed to have been responsible for hundreds of instances of mass-killings of civilians, including the infamous No Gun Ri massacre in which members of the US 7th Cavalry Regiment massacred hundreds of Korean civilians under a railway underpass over the course of three days.
“Children were screaming in fear and the adults were praying for their lives… they never stopped shooting.”
Another Korean War survivor described the common American tactic of firebombing villages with napalm in a scorched-earth campaign which killed countless civilians:
“When the napalm hit our village, many people were still sleeping in their homes…. Those who survived the flames ran…. We were trying to show the American pilots that we were civilians. But they strafed us, women and children.”
The wanton disregard to Korean lives during America’s global campaign against Communism continues to extend to the present day in the form of rape and murder directed towards Korean civilians by US soldiers stationed at bases throughout the country.
In one 2011 incident, emblematic of long-documented practices by US troops in the country, a 21-year-old soldier, Kevin Flippin, broke into a Korean woman’s hotel room and raped and tortured her for several hours before robbing her of the equivalent of roughly US $5 and fleeing back to his base.
Sexual violence and murder has been a recurrent theme throughout the decades of American military presence in Korea and reflects longstanding behaviour in countless other countries across the world subject to US military basing and occupation.
Widespread American unfavourability
While the virulent undercurrent of anti-Americanism which was briefly glimpsed in the revelations surrounding Psy’s political history have their basis in incidents such as these, Korea is far from being the most anti-American country in the world.
However, a 2012 Pew Research poll showed the least favourable perceptions of the US today to be in countries within the Arab and Muslim worlds; negative views which are thought to have briefly abated upon the election of Barack Obama but which can now be seen to have returned to their historic lows during the George W Bush era.
Among countries polled the bottom echelon are exclusively countries with Muslim majority populations. Even those such as Turkey and Jordan whose governments are traditionally allied with the US showed overwhelmingly negative attitudes towards America, with the latter polling at a mere 12 per cent favourability.
Tellingly, Jordan also happens to be home to a massive population of refugees from the American invasion of Iraq, the civilian victims of a war who have been forgotten by Americans but continue to live on in desperation and misery in many countries scattered throughout the region.
While an incredible amount of research has gone into formulating complex theories to explain this widespread disdain for the US, Occam’s Razor, the logical principle that the simplest explanation is most often the correct one suggests that the American militarism which once ravaged Korea and which has now been set upon the Muslim world is the cause of this growing antipathy.
Pakistan, which polled at roughly 9 per cent favourability towards the US in a 2010 BBC World poll, once had a vibrantly pro-American polity where Jacquelyn Kennedy was mobbed in the streets with flower garlands by thousands of admirers during a state visit and where American popular culture was once widely revered and emulated.
In recent decades however, all of this has changed, as Pakistanis have been left to witness the staggering human cost of US warfare in neighbouring Afghanistan as well as to deal with the millions of refugees that conflict has sent into Pakistan.
Pakistanis themselves have also increasingly become the direct target of American violence; being gunned down in the streets by rogue CIA officers, murdered by remote operated drones and renditioned for torture at clandestine “black-sites” throughout the world.
By starting a massive war and occupation in Afghanistan which caused widespread destabilisation and social chaos in Pakistan, a country which shares deep ethnic and religious bonds with its neighbour, the US has helped turn a once reasonably benign relationship into an increasingly dangerous one which has fuelled virulent anti-Americanism even among liberal and secular Pakistanis.
The degeneration of American popularity in Pakistan is however only one illustration of a broader trend where wanton militarism has generated negative popular perceptions towards the US.
Arrogance and atrocity
For Americans who are commonly feted with reassurances of their country’s benevolent role in the world, it may come as a surprise that half of all refugees on the planet today are running from American wars.
The wanton, industrial-scale violence, which the US has unleashed upon the civilians of countries such as Iraq, Afghanistan, Pakistan, Yemen and Somalia has naturally generated a tidal wave of negative feeling within these countries which many Americans utterly fail to grasp.
Episodes such as the gang rape and murder of a 14-year-old Iraqi girl and her family by US troops are emblematic of the fundamental sadism of American policy towards the region. However, in a type of bizarre dark comedy, popularly elected American leaders continue to question the lack of gratitude among the populations upon whom they have let loose this violence.
What this appears to represent is a type of brazen ignorance and egotism which has come to represent mainstream government policy; the type of myopia under which a country can launch a full-scale war, invasion and occupation of another sovereign nation under entirely false pretences, kill hundreds of thousands in the process and create millions of refugees and still at the end sincerely ask the question “Why they do hate us?”
While the US military, whom the American public puts forth as the unquestioned heroes and proud symbols of the apex of their society, finds new and innovative ways to inflict violence upon the populations of Arab and Muslim countries – including wanton, lawless and often completely anonymous target killings, and even recently the sanctioning of killing so-called “hostile children” in Afghanistan, the popular reputation of America as a country naturally sinks to new depths among the countries in the Middle East and around the world.
An illustrative example of the essentially self-destructive arrogance of US policy in the region pertains to that of Afghanistan; where the US in 2001 categorically refused to negotiate with the Taliban when the latter expressed a desire to co-operate with the full spectrum of US objectives and hand over Osama bin Laden, on the rhetorical grounds of “refusing to talk to evil.”
Fast forward 11 years – with tens of thousands of lives lost, trillions of dollars wasted, and America is doing exactly this, negotiating with the Taliban exactly as it could have done a decade earlier were it not for flagrantly irrational government policymaking informed by a mixture of arrogance and bloodlust.
For the self-proclaimed preeminent global power to behave in such a shockingly ignorant and destructive manner and to still express wonderment over others’ negative perceptions of it speaks to a deep lack of national self-awareness and perspective which could seriously impede the country from operating an effective foreign policy in the future.
An increasingly poisoned relationship
Even among those within the Arab and Muslim worlds and beyond who admire purported American values such as secularism, free speech and free enterprise, the past decade of increasingly wanton and unrestrained violence has worked to permanently stain the reputation of a country which was at one time held in high esteem across social strata.
American policy towards the Middle East today is popularly perceived to be informed by a cruel, arrogant and fundamentally racist worldview in which subject populations are essentially lesser peoples whose suffering is an accounted-for externality of hegemonic policies.
The type of brutality which Americans inflicted upon Korea decades ago still manifests in the undercurrent of anger held by many Koreans today, so it bears asking how long it will take for negative perceptions of America in the Muslim world to dissipate.
As long as unchecked American militarism in the region continues, these negative perceptions will only escalate and the phenomena of anti-Americanism will continue to spread and damage the ability of the US to find necessary allies in a strategically-important part of the world.
Regardless, as evidence has shown even when such negative feelings are sublimated for the sake of pragmatism, they seldom truly cease to exist. When its history is written, the US will have to come to terms with the legacy of global disdain, distrust and resentment it has engendered over its time as a superpower – a history which may very likely be unkind and incongruent with the image most Americans hold of themselves and of their country.
Murtaza Hussain is a Toronto-based writer and analyst focused on issues related to Middle Eastern politics.Follow him on Twitter: @MazMHussain
Kirchick is not the first, and probably will not be the last to express such a sentiment. To buttress his point Kirchick cites the familiar Pew Poll research and celebrations on Palestinian streets after the 9/11 attacks as evidence that there is a large wellspring for terrorism, while claiming that, excepting some mad bloggers, Breivik was universally condemned in the West.
It goes without saying that Kirchick’s analysis is simplistic for more than one reason. Firstly, Breivik’s terrorism did not emerge out of nowhere, there is an anti-Muslim movement from which his thoughts were gleaned. Secondly, there are many in the anti-Muslim movement who share Breivik’s ideas about the “Muslim threat.” Thirdly, while many in the anti-Muslim movement are not willing to kill to reach their ends they do share in a radical and anti-Democratic path to “solve” the “Muslim problem.” Fourth, there is a significant group of individuals who do support aggressive and violent action to “save the West from Muslims” (see: SIOA is a Hate Group).
Fifth, the Islamist terror threat is overblown, (see: “All Terrorists are…”). Sixth, Kirchick conflates anti-Americanism and opposition to American foreign policy with those who express a willingness to join “Islamist terror.” Seventh, he is unaware or ignores the fact there is a disproportionately large amount of support and acceptance for the killing of civilians amongst non-Muslims in the West, but lets keep it brief.
Support for Breivik’s Brand of Terror vs. Islamist Terror vs. Professional State Terrorism
Breivik’s brand of terror may not elicit as much support as ‘Islamist terror,’ but that is not to say there isn’t a pool of acceptance for the murder of civilians in the West. In fact, what would Kirchick’s response be to the fact that many more non-Muslims condone and justify the murder of civilians than Muslims?
58% of Catholics and Protestants believe the targeted military killing of civilians is sometimes justified (would that be considered “Christianist” support?), while 52% of Jews and 64% of Mormons believe it is sometimes justified. That dwarfs Muslims, 21% of whom say it is sometimes justified, while 78% say it is never justified.
What would Kirchick make of the evidence that Americans and Israelis are more likely to justify the murder of civilians than Muslims in almost every country?
It would seem that Professional Terrorism of the statecraft kind dwarfs the meager in comparison threat of “Islamist terror.”
Perhaps Kirchick wrote this piece before the publication of the Gallup Poll survey and was therefore the victim of horrible timing?
Homework for James Kirchick
Kirchick would do well to read a new book from Charles Kurzman, “The Missing Martyrs.”
“The Missing Martyrs” is an accessible scholarly work that addresses the overlooked and often ignored question of: if as we are told, there is a lot of support for terrorism amongst Muslims, why out of 1.5 billion Muslims are there so few Muslim terrorists? Why does fear of the bogeyman of “terrorism” continue to haunt us when the threat from so-called “jihadists” is just not that great?
Aaron Ross in his book review for MotherJones writes,
As it turns out, there just aren’t that many Muslims determined to kill us. Backed by a veritable army of fact, figures, and anecdotes, Kurzman makes a compelling case. He calculates, for example, that global Islamist terrorists have succeeded in recruiting fewer than 1 in 15,000 Muslims over the past 25 years, and fewer than 1 in 100,000 since 2001. And according to a top counterterrorism official, Al Qaeda originally planned to hit a West Coast target, too, on 9/11 but lacked the manpower to do so.
While Arabs and Muslims continue to repudiate Al Qaeda and its allies by toppling dictators and pushing forward towards Democracy, it is high time that US journalists, analysts and think tanks stop beating the dead horse of “Islamist terror” and catch up to the changes shaking the world.
Terrorism is not confined to non-state actors alone, if this is accepted than the narrative of greater support for terrorism amongst Muslims must not only be revised but should properly be dumped in the garbage bin of history.
Having completed the book I was about to sit down and do a review, however I stumbled upon this one from MotherJones which reflects to some degree my thoughts on the book:
Immediately after last month’s terror attacks in Norway, Islamic extremism shot to the top of almost every list of suspected culprits. Among the soothsayers of creeping Shariah, there was never any doubt who was responsible. Others’ more rational, if hasty, assessments of Norway’s threat matrix pointed to the same (wrong) conclusion. For all their differences, both lines of reasoning shared a common assumption: that the sheer volume of Muslim terrorists out there made their involvement likely. Or as Stephen Colbert skewered the media’s rush to judgment: “If you’re pulling a news report completely out of your ass, it is safer to go with Muslim. That’s not prejudice. That’s probability.”
Charles Kurzman begs to differ. In his new book, The Missing Martyrs, the University of North Carolina-Chapel Hill sociology professor rejects that Muslims are especially prone to violent extremism. “If there are more than a billion Muslims in the world, many of whom supposedly hate the West and desire martyrdom,” he asks, “why don’t we see terrorist attacks everywhere, every day?”
In theory, we should. After all, there’s any number of ways a terrorist committed to murdering civilians could attack (and our gun lobby certainly isn’t making weapons harder to get a hold of). But we don’t. No Islamist terrorist attack besides 9/11 has killed more than 400 people; only a dozen have killed more than 200.
As it turns out, there just aren’t that many Muslims determined to kill us. Backed by a veritable army of fact, figures, and anecdotes, Kurzman makes a compelling case. He calculates, for example, that global Islamist terrorists have succeeded in recruiting fewer than 1 in 15,000 Muslims over the past 25 years, and fewer than 1 in 100,000 since 2001. And according to a top counterterrorism official, Al Qaeda originally planned to hit a West Coast target, too, on 9/11 but lacked the manpower to do so.
Even so, it sure seems there are a lot of Muslims committed to the West’s destruction. What else to make of the celebrations in Middle Eastern streets after 9/11? Or Pew Research Center opinion polls of multiple predominantly Muslim nations showing significant support for suicide bombings? But Kurzman warns against conflating anti-Americanism with actual willingness to engage in terrorism. In reality, he says, the young man sporting the bin Laden T-shirt in Islamabad is probably more like the American teenager in Berkeley with the Che poster on his dorm room wall than a future Al Qaeda jihadist.
Yet even if only 1 in 100,000 Muslims is a terrorist, that still leaves something like 15,000 terrorists from a global population of around 1.5 billion Muslims. Surely that’s enough to inflict serious damage? It could be—and Kurzman concedes that Islamist terrorism should be taken seriously—but in practice, several factors conspire against Al Qaeda and its allies’ aspirations of regularly striking Western targets with spectacular attacks.
For one thing, Islamist terrorists are bitterly divided between globalist groups like Al Qaeda and localists like the Taliban and Hamas. The Taliban, for instance, opposed (and still opposes) Al Qaeda’s international ambitions, so much so, Kurzman claims, that its foreign minister sent an envoy to warn American and UN officials in the summer of 2001 about a possible, albeit unspecified, attack. Meanwhile, rifts within the Muslim world about issues like democracy, liberalism, and the role of women have crippled support for global jihadists. Insistent that all streams of Islamic thought conform to their rigid doctrines (and willing to murder fellow Muslims to make the point), Al Qaeda and its affiliates have alienated millions of potential supporters, rendering themselves far easier targets for unsympathetic Middle Eastern regimes to go after.
After pressing his case with almost prosecutorial precision for the first two-thirds of the book, Kurzman’s analysis veers off the rails as he detours into an alternately banal and pedantic discussion of everything from America’s need to balance liberty with security to the lexicological origins of sociology. In a case of epically bad timing, he devotes the better part of six pages to praising recently discredited philanthropist Greg Mortenson as “a role [model] for American foreign policy.” Kurzman is unfortunate more than anything else here, but after arguing that American foreign policy doesn’t really affect Muslims’ views of the US, his sudden fawning over Mortenson’s in-vogue “hearts and minds” counterterrrorism strategy is somewhat befuddling.
Still, Kurzman’s hard-headed empirical approach to an issue so often locked in emotion-fueled back and forth makes The Missing Martyrs (or at least most of it) a must-read. Early on, he states his aim: “to reduce the panic by examining evidence about Islamist terrorism—the actual scale of it and the reasons it is not more widespread.” It’s an important goal—perhaps more so now than at any point in recent memory—and Kurzman has made a valuable contribution.
Aaron Ross is an editorial intern at Mother Jones. For more of his stories, click here. Follow him on Twitter and email tips and insights to aross [at] motherjones [dot] com.
Pamela Geller and Robert Spencer hosted a video of a young Hindu girl obviously inspired by extremists such as the fanatics who destroyed the Babri Mosque on their respective websites. (hat tip: Jack) In the video she calls for “wiping Pakistan off the map.” Does that sound familiar? Pamela Geller and Robert Spencer now have no right to complain about Ahamdinejad’s statements to “wipe Israel off the map” as it rings hollow and hypocritical as they are more than happy to entertain the destruction of a whole country when it is predominantly “Mooslim.”
This is the video that both Pamela and Robert hosted on their site:
Pamela Geller commented that: “Perhaps with an online Colb. (collaboration) we can run her for president in ’16. She gets it.”
Robert Spencer remarks: “The girl is right: do not fear. Fight back against the jihad. Fear hands the jihadis a weapon.”
One thing that Pamela and Robert don’t seem to understand or care about is that this girl’s hatred is not limited to Muslims but it extends to Christians and Americans. At 24 seconds the video translates what she says as, “Tell those clerics, Pakistanis and Jihadis that you do not fear bomb blasts and acts of terrorism,” in fact what she says is, “Tell those clerics, Pakistanis and Christians that you do not fear bomb blasts and acts of terrorism.” A mistranslation that seems to have ironically gone right over the head of the “scholar” Robert Spencer and his lunatic buddy Pamela Geller.
Commenters on Geller’s site were enthusiastic, calling the girl a “natural-born leader,” “incredible,” “amazing,” “fantastic,” while a few of the more “restrained” commenters argued that while they were all for nuking Pakistan it wouldn’t solve the problem. The video drew little heated debate and exchanges on JihadWatch with the usual commenters fawning over her calls for the destruction of Muslims, while a few critical voices accused of “taqiyyah” pointed out the fact that Spencer was a hypocrite for hosting this video.
