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Part 2
©
By Nafeez Mosaddeq Ahmed
In
the first part of this article, we reviewed in detail the
principal structural and institutional characteristics of the mass
media, and concluded that these characteristics entail that the mass
media is intrinsically subservient to elite interests. This is
basically due to the fact that the mass media is ultimately an
ideological institution framed by, and rooted in, the wider matrix
of corporate elite power in society. As a consequence, the mass
media largely propagates news and information in a manner that is
distorted – and sometimes fabricated – in accordance with corporate
elite interests and the ideological requirements legitimising those
interests.
In this part, we intend to briefly examine how the mass media
pandered to elite interests in reporting the September 11th terrorist
attacks, thus leading to the propagation of highly distorted, and
sometimes fabricated, news and information. This will thus provide a
clear example of how the mass media usually operates, not as an
impartial provider of untainted facts, but rather as a highly
partial provider of ideological legitimacy to elite interests and
policies.
America as Victim
Many opinion-makers deride the idea that the September 11th terrorist
attacks could have been somehow linked to American foreign policy.
To seek such connections may be seen as adding insult to injury, or
unpatriotic. At the same time, it is clear that such an outrage
could not appear simply out of the blue. We have the explanation of
George W. Bush, that it was an attack on freedom by terrorists who
hate freedom. While this makes an excellent formula for a speech to
elementary schoolers, little evidence can be found to support such a
simple theory.
In reality, the September 11th attacks
on the World Trade Centre and the Pentagon constituted an atrocious,
and indeed predictable, backlash rooted in decades if not centuries
of oppression. To avert future acts of terrorism such as this, it is
essential to understand the causes of this backlash in the West’s
ongoing terrorisation and repression of the majority of the world’s
population.
But this is exactly what the mass media has refused to do. On the
contrary, in the immediate aftermath of the attacks, many mainstream
commentators labelled Black Tuesday as the worst act of terrorism
in history.1 For
example, Ambassador L. Paul Bremer III, head of the US National
Commission on Terrorism, declared that “this is a different order of
magnitude... This is not only the worst terrorist attack in American
history, it is the worst terrorist attack in history, period.”2
There is no doubt that what occurred on
September 11th 2001
was certainly the worst act of terrorism to be committed against the
United States. But this sort of irresponsible commentary has served
well to present a distorted ahistorical portrayal of the attacks,
the result of which is that the United States is presented as an
innocent victim of terrorism. Few mainstream commentators have
paused to remind the public that, in reality, the United States
itself has carried out and supported some of the worst acts of
terrorism. The 11th September
attacks, horrendous as they were, can barely be compared to the
scale of atrocities carried out, for instance, by US-backed
terrorists in
South America
to secure US interests, resulting in the mass murder of hundreds and
thousands of innocent civilians. The internationally acclaimed
American political analyst Dr. Michael Parenti provides a
particularly acute overview:
Since World War II, the US government has given more than $200
billion in military aid to train, equip, and subsidize more than 2.3
million troops and internal security forces in more than eighty
countries, the purpose being not to defend them from outside
invasions but to protect ruling oligarchs and multinational
corporate investors from the dangers of domestic anti-capitalist
insurgency. Among the recipients have been some of the most
notorious military autocracies in history, countries that have
tortured, killed or otherwise maltreated large numbers of their
citizens because of their dissenting political views… US leaders
profess a dedication to democracy. Yet over the past five decades,
democratically elected reformist governments… were overthrown by
pro-capitalist militaries that were funded and aided by the US
national security state.3
The ahistorical portrayal of the
United States as a victim of terrorism has served well to justify a
permanent posture of aggression as the defining characteristic of US
foreign policy. Absolving the US government of any responsibility
for its rich record of terrorist atrocities against civilians and
governments of the Third World, the US elite is empowered to launch
a new crusade in order, supposedly, to wipe out international
terrorism.
Gaping Holes in the Official 9-11 Narrative
Despite a total lack of evidence that would stand up in a court of
law, media and academic commentators prompted by Western government
hints immediately speculated about the involvement of “Islamic
fanatics”. It was not long before, Osama Bin Laden was labelled the
chief culprit. The inconsistencies and vacuous nature of the
evidence presented by the Bush administration and its allies to
support its claims has, however, been largely ignored by the mass
media. But in a rare and insightful piece published by the London
Guardian, British journalist George Monbiot highlights the
ridiculous nature of the proof of Bin Laden’s guilt:
Like almost everyone
on earth, I want to believe that the attack on New York was the
work of a single despot and his obedient commando. But the more
evidence US intelligence presents to this effect, the less
credible the story becomes.
First there was the
car. A man had informed the police, we were told, that he’d had a
furious argument with some suspicious-looking Muslims in the
parking lot at Boston airport. He led investigators to the car, in
which they found a copy of the Qur’an and a flight manual in
Arabic, showing that these were the fundamentalists who had
hijacked one of the planes. Now flying an airliner is not one of
those things you learn in the back of a car on the way to the
airport. Either you know how to do it or you don’t. Leaving the
Qu’ran unattended, a Muslim friend tells me, is considered sinful.
And if you were about to perpetrate one of the biggest terrorist
outrages the world has ever seen, would you draw attention to
yourself by arguing over a parking place?
Then there was the
passport. The security services claim that a passport belonging to
one of the hijackers was extracted from the rubble of the World
Trade Centre. This definitive identification might help them to
track the rest of the network. We are being asked to believe that
a paper document from the cockpit of the first plane – the
epicentre of an inferno which vapourised steel – survived the
fireball and fell to the ground almost intact.
When presented with
material like this, I can’t help suspecting that intelligence
agents have assembled the theory first, then sought the facts
required to fit it… The West, in the name of civilisation, was
insisting that Bin Laden was guilty, and it would find the
evidence later.
For these reasons and many others (such as the initial false
certainties about the Oklahoma bombing and the Sudanese medicine
factory, and the identification of live innocents as dead
terrorists), I think we have some cause to regard the new evidence
against Bin Laden with a measure of scepticism… [I]f the West starts
chasing the wrong man across the Hindu Kush while the real
terrorists are planning their next atrocity, this hardly guarantees
our security.4
It is worth noting that although one of the hijacker’s passports, as
Monbiot reports, allegedly survived the WTC inferno – consisting of
fire and heat over a 1,000 degrees Fahrenheit – according to FBI
officials, all the Black Boxes were in contrast totally destroyed
and rendered unusable. The Black Boxes, constituting a Flight Data
Recorder and a Cockpit Voice Recorder in each plane, are
specifically designed to withstand massive explosions. According to
ABC News:
Although investigators look for an entire black box, sometimes the
only parts of the device that survive are the recorder’s
crash-survivable memory units (CSMU). The CSMU is almost
indestructible. It is housed within a stainless-steel shell that
contains titanium or aluminium and a high-temperature insulation
of dry silica material.
It is designed to withstand heat of up to 2,000 degrees Fahrenheit
for one hour, salt water for at least 30 days, immersion in a
variety of liquids such as jet fuel and lubricants, and an impact of
3,400 G’s. By comparison, astronauts are typically exposed to up to
six Gs during a shuttle takeoff.5
Each plane has two separate Black Boxes designed to be
indestructible in the event of crashes, which in total means that
there were eight Black Boxes – since there were four planes in total
used in the attacks on US targets. Yet the FBI is asking us to
believe that while all eight Black Boxes were completely and utterly
destroyed in the crashes, a mere paper passport survived to be
discovered a few blocks away.6 CNN
reported that: “The searchers found several clues, he said, but
would not elaborate. Last week, a passport belonging to one of the
hijackers was found in the vicinity of Vesey Street, near the World
Trade Centre. ‘It was a significant piece of evidence for us,’ Mawn
said.”7 “In
New York, several blocks from the ruins of the World Trade Centre, a
passport authorities said belonged to one of the hijackers was
discovered a few days ago, according to city Police Commissioner
Bernard Kerik.”8 Not
only then did a passport survive a plane crash that was allegedly so
intense it obliterated the virtually indestructible Black Box, the
same passport is also supposed to have flown down a few blocks from
the WTC. It is true that due to the sudden shattering of the windows
in the WTC, all paper materials in the building were immediately
ejected out before incineration. Yet a passport in the pocket of a
hijacker sitting within a plane that explodes will naturally undergo
the same process as the hijacker and the plane he is sitting in,
along with the other passengers: absolute cremation.9
This is only one anomaly out of many that have been ignored, leaving
the official story accepted uncritically as unquestionable fact, by
the vast majority of mainstream media outlets.10 The
timely release of tapes depicting Bin Laden apparently admitting
involvement in 9-11, served as a convenient propaganda exercise in
buttressing the official narrative, while pushing its inherent
incoherence down the memory hole. As usual with government claims in
war-time, the mass media simply assumed that the tapes released by
the Defense Department were genuine. But there is certainly
reasonable room for doubt.
Sean Broughton, director of the London-based production company
Smoke and Mirrors and one of Britain’s leading experts on visual
effects, has stated that it would be relatively easy for a skilled
professional to fake a video of Bin Laden. He admitted that to fool
top experts would, however, be difficult, although he added that:
“There are perhaps 20 people in America who would be good enough to
fool everybody.” Another expert, Bob Crabtree, editor of the
magazine Computer Video, has gone further, stating that it
was impossible to judge whether or not the video was a fake without
more details of its source: “The US seems simply to have asked the
world to trust them that it is genuine.”11 Dr.
Peter French, a forensic expert specialising in audio, speech, and
language, similarly confirms that using digital technology, “it’s
possible to edit or fabricate in ways that completely defy forensic
detection.”12 Canadian
foreign correspondent Eric Margolis, who believes that Al-Qaeda was
responsible for the 9-11 attacks, nevertheless expresses scepticism
with respect to the of authenticity the Bin Laden tape, commenting
in the Toronto Sun: “… two other Arabic experts say the
tape’s audio quality is so poor that almost nothing bin Laden says
on it can be verified…
To my ears, well accustomed to Arabic, half of bin Laden’s words
were inaudible. The translation was sometimes out of sync with the
action on screen. Bin Laden’s statements looked cut up and edited.
Cynics suggest the tape was a forgery made by Russian intelligence
or the US government, with incriminating statements spliced into an
otherwise boring exchange of pleasantries between bin Laden and a
visiting admirer. This is possible. In 1990, the US used retouched
satellite photos to convince the Saudis that Iraq was about to
invade – which it was not.13
Indeed, even if one assumes that the tape is genuine, whether it
really does provide “smoking gun” proof of Bin Laden’s culpability
in the 9-11 attacks is extremely unclear. Richard Thomas, Director
of Public Policy at the British law firm Clifford Chance argues
that: “The tape which we have so far seen doesn’t actually contain
hard evidence that Mr. bin Laden was the person who organized the
attacks. He simply talks about his reaction to the attacks as they
took place. And again, that wouldn’t be hard evidence that he was
the organizing mind behind these dreadful attacks.”14
The
Function of Terrorism in US Policy
The vacuous nature of much of the evidence presented by Bush & Co.
for Bin Laden’s guilt – which then justified the US invasion of
Afghanistan – indicates that finding the terrorists responsible for
the 9-11 attacks was not an integral US objective. Indeed, the
absence of decisive proof of Bin Laden’s involvement suggests that
fighting against terrorism has never been the real concern behind
the subsequent militarisation of US foreign policy. It seems that
there is, rather, another more dubious agenda. Whether or not Bin
Laden is actually guilty or not, in this respect, is besides the
point – obviously, the Bush administration was not interested in the
facts, but instead was more keen to hastily find a suitable
scapegoat which would provide an ample pretext for a permanently
aggressive US military posture.
In this respect, the scattered continued existence of Al-Qaeda plays
a functional role within world order, at least for the next few
years. The London Guardian noted this functional role played
by Osama bin Laden within the matrix of US foreign policy objectives
in an 18th September
report:
If Osama bin Laden did not exist, it would be necessary to invent
him. For the past four years, his name has been invoked whenever a
US president has sought to increase the defence budget or wriggle
out of arms control treaties. He has been used to justify even
President Bush’s missile defence programme, though neither he nor
his associates are known to possess anything approaching ballistic
missile technology. Now he has become the personification of evil
required to launch a crusade for good: the face behind the faceless
terror... [H]is usefulness to western governments lies in his power
to terrify. When billions of pounds of military spending are at
stake, rogue states and terrorist warlords become assets precisely
because they are liabilities.15
To consolidate and expand US hegemony, and to fully counter its
Russian, Chinese and European rivals, a massive threat is required
to establish domestic consensus on the unrelentingly interventionist
character of US foreign policy in the new and unlimited “war on
terror.” The bogeyman of Osama Bin Laden’s international terrorist
network thus plays, in the view of the Bush administration, a
functional role within the matrix of US plans to increasingly
subject the world order to its military, political, strategic, and
economic influence.
US officials have spoken of the need to indiscriminately target
states where terrorists are suspected to reside or with a record of
being implicated in terrorist acts, rather than merely focus
specifically on the perpetrators of this particular crime.
Speculation by innumerable esteemed personalities including US
officials, academics and journalists about the role of Osama Bin
Laden and his legendary terror network has also been exploited to
fuel a more general anti-Muslim suspicion and hostility. The
hysteria harks back to the 1998 bombing of Sudan when the US
destroyed a pharmaceutical factory, killing an unknown number of
civilians, on the pretext that it was actually one of Bin Laden’s
chemical weapons factories. Not long after this event it was
revealed that the factory produced essential medicines for the
Sudanese people – not to mention much of Africa – and had nothing to
do with Bin Laden. The US also blocked an inquiry by the UN into the
bombing which would have disclosed the exact number of civilian
casualties.16
The reaction of the United States speaks volumes about the real
nature of the new programme targeting the entire Muslim world.
Former spokesman for the US State Department James Rubin outlined
the future vision on BBC 2’s Newsnight: “We lead. We go around the
world and we make people be counted whether they’re on our side, or
on the side of the terrorists.”17 The
US solution it seems is to categorise “people” around the world into
two types: those who support US and Western terrorism around the
world whether they know it or not and who are thus “on our side”;
and those who do not, who will inevitably be labelled those “on the
side of the terrorists”. And accordingly those who are not “on our
side” will be targeted indiscriminately. This simplistic division of
the world into “us” and “them” – firstly, the crusaders against
terrorism and secondly, the terrorists themselves – collectively
demonises all those who do not support American foreign policy in
the post-9-11 period and reduces them to an alien “otherness” who
must be indiscriminately destroyed. This US government attempt at
legitimisation of a policy with unnervingly fascist – if not
genocidal – overtones, has been widely parroted by the mass media.
For example, on the same day as the WTC and Pentagon terrorist
attacks, a former US Secretary of State was paraded on CNN,
advocating that the US adopt the very same policy of terrorism
utilised by the 9-11 terrorists: “There is only one way to begin to
deal with people like this, and that is you have to kill some of
them even if they are not immediately directly involved in this
thing.”18
The next day, the New York Post echoed CNN’s sentiments: “The
response to this unimaginable 21st-century Pearl Harbor should be as
simple as it is swift – kill the bastards. A gunshot between the
eyes, blow them to smithereens, poison them if you have to. As for
cities or countries that host these worms, bomb them into basketball
courts.”19 The
Post was in agreement with the New York Daily News,
which was even more detailed in advocating the same fanatical
terrorist strategy pursued by Al-Qaeda: “This is no time to be
precious about locating the exact individuals directly involved in
this particular terrorist attack.... We should invade their
countries, kill their leaders and convert them to Christianity. We
weren’t punctilious about locating and punishing only Hitler and his
top officers. We carpet-bombed German cities; we killed civilians.
That’s war. And this is war.”20
New
Threats for an Endless War
But the policy of worldwide mass murder and pillage must be dressed
up as a global humanitarian crusade against terrorism in order to
ensure public support for the policy. And this means manufacturing a
suitable pretext for the policy. This procedure is deeply entrenched
in the structures of the foreign policy making establishment. For
instance, a mid-1941 memo from the War and Peace Studies Project of
the Council on Foreign Relations during the Second World War – whose
participants included top government planners and members of the
foreign policy establishment – recognised that a formulation of a
statement of war aims for propaganda purposes is very different from
a formulation of one defining the true national interest…
If war aims are stated, which seem to be concerned solely with
Anglo-American imperialism, they will offer little to people in the
rest of the world... Such aims would also strengthen the most
reactionary elements in the United States and the British Empire.
The interests of other peoples should be stressed, not only those of
Europe, but also of Asia, Africa and Latin America. This would have
a better propaganda effect.21
Today, this effect is achieved through dressing up military
operations either as humanitarian interventions or as a war for
self-defence. The maintenance of insanely high levels of military
spending, in order to support the unlimited militarisation of US
foreign policy, has thus entailed the manufacturing of new threats
by which to justify such spending. In the current world order, the
Soviet/Communist “threat” has become defunct. One of the major new
ideological constructions being highlighted as an alleged threat to
national security, and thus being utilised as a pretext on which to
maintain massive investment in the military, is ‘Islamic
fundamentalism’. This phenomenon can be found within the Middle
East, Africa, Asia, and Europe.22 The
current crisis has permitted the US to exaggerate the alleged threat
of “Islamic terrorism” beyond all proportion to suit its drive
towards military escalation to secure strategic and economic
interests. Professor of International Law at the University of
Illinois College of Law, Francis Boyle, comments:
According to the facts in the public record so far, this was not an
act of war and NATO Article 5 does not apply. President Bush has
automatically escalated this national tragedy into something it is
not in order to justify a massive military attack abroad and an
apparent crackdown on civil liberties at home. We see shades of the
Tonkin Gulf Resolution, which the Johnson administration used to
provide dubious legal cover for massive escalation of the Vietnam
War.23
On this basis, it is evident that in the near future, on the pretext
of targeting scattered terrorist cells connected to Al-Qaeda,
various countries around the world that are of strategic value to
the United States will fall victim to Bush’s ‘new war’ for US
hegemony. The escalating and contrived ‘clash of civilisations’ that
may result from this cynical US policy, and the corresponding chaos
and destruction, bear ominous implications for the future of
humanity.
Indeed, the new pretexts are already being conjured up. President
Bush Jr. virtually declared war on any country deemed by the US to
be a threat, in his State of the Union address on Tuesday, 29th January
2002. Bush warned of “thousands of dangerous killers, schooled in
the methods of murder, often supported by outlaw regimes,” and
openly threatened an attack on Iran, Iraq and North Korea in
particular. Both the US government and media have made concerted
efforts to allege some sort of connection between Al-Qaeda and the
countries of Iran and Iraq. “By seeking weapons of mass destruction,
these regimes pose a grave and growing danger. States like these and
their terrorist allies constitute an axis of evil, arming to
threaten the peace of the world.” Bush added that: “The United
States of America will not permit the world’s most dangerous regimes
to threaten us with the world’s most destructive weapons.”
It is no coincidence that the Middle East and Central Asia together
hold over two-thirds of the world’s reserves of oil and natural gas.
After Saudi Arabia, Iran and Iraq are respectively the second and
third largest oil-producers in the region. Both Iran and Iraq, in
accordance with their local interests, are fundamentally opposed to
the US drive to secure unimpeded access to regional resources. The
former, for instance, has been attempting to secure its own
interests in Afghanistan and Central Asia, thus coming into direct
conflict with regional US interests, whereas the latter has for a
decade now been tolerated only because the US has been unable to
replace Saddam Hussein’s regime with a viable alternative.24 In
light of the results of the apparently successful ‘test case’
provided by the war on Afghanistan – which has opened up Central
Asian resources to US corporate clutches – the US seems intent on
attempting a replay in Iraq by eliminating Saddam, and enlisting the
opposition to establish a compliant new regime. Similar plans may be
in the pipeline for Iran. As for North Korea, this country borders
China, and is thus strategically located in terms of longstanding US
policy planning. China has long been viewed by US policy planners as
its principal rival in north and east Asia. The military network
being installed by the United States in the wake of 11th September
systematically encircles China – Uzbekistan, Tajikistan, Kyrgyzstan,
Pakistan, India, the Philippines, and now Korea.
The Guardian has also commented on these developments and
their military-strategic context: “Every twist in the war on
terrorism seems to leave a new Pentagon outpost in the Asia-Pacific
region, from the former USSR to the Philippines. One of the lasting
consequences of the war could be what amounts to a military
encirclement of China.” In explanation, the London daily cites the
Pentagon’s Quadrennial Defense Review warning of the danger
that “a military competitor with a formidable resource base will
emerge in the region.” The journal recommended a US policy that
“places a premium on securing additional access and infrastructure
agreements.”25 The
expansion of the misnamed ‘war on terror’ is thus specifically
tailored to target regions of strategic and economic interest to the
United States, and thus to consolidate unrivalled US hegemony in
these regions – many of which are predominantly Muslim.
The
Manufacture of Enemies
There is an important context to the sudden discovery of such grave
enemies to the United States. US arms trade expert and Senior Fellow
at the World Policy Institute William Hartung points out that the
massive injections of public funds into military spending are not a
result of genuine threats to US security, but rather because “the
arms industry has launched a concerted lobbying campaign aimed at
increasing military spending and arms exports… These initiatives are
driven by profit and pork barrel politics, not by the objective
assessment of how to best defend the United States in a post-cold
war period.”26
It should be noted that during this period, while US military
spending rocketed steadily on the pretext of the necessity of
defending the nation against international terrorism, acts of
terrorism against the US were in fact on the decrease since
the beginning of the 1990s. In particular, the number of terrorist
attacks perpetrated by Muslims against the US has also decreased –
and are minute compared to the number of terrorist attacks committed
by other national, ethnic and religious groups.27
The new threat of ‘Islamic terror’ exemplified in the September 11th attacks
thus plays a particularly important role within world order,
permitting the United States to justify strategies by which to
enforce US hegemony within the Middle East, as well as in Africa and
Asia. The major reason that Western institutions have taken it upon
themselves to subtly demonise Islam in this respect, is inseparable
from the structure of the global politico-economic order – in fact
it is a logical consequence of that order and its relations to the
Muslim people throughout the world.28
Thanks to the efforts of media and academic commentators, it is
commonly believed that there exists a vast, and in many ways
unbridgeable, Islam-West divide, in which Islam at some significant
level constitutes a fundamental danger to Western civilisation.
Harvard political scientist Professor Samuel Huntington is
well-known for articulating this belief in the form of an
academically acceptable theory of international relations. His
‘clash of civilisations’ thesis is a particularly stark example of
how Western academia attempt to justify the concept of an
unfathomable Islam-West divide and a new inevitable Cold War with
Islam.29 Tim
Hames, a leading politician in the Republican Party who is very
close to the Bush administration, claimed only one day after the
attacks that Huntington’s thesis was dominating the US political
scene.30 Huntington
has most recently presented a crass summary of his already rather
crass opinions in an article titled ‘The Age of Muslim Wars’ for
Newsweek magazine. The article’s introductory synopsis asserts
that:
Contemporary global politics is the age of Muslim wars. Muslims
fight each other and fight non-Muslims far more often than do
peoples of other civilizations. Muslim wars have replaced the cold
war as the principal form of international conflict. These wars
include wars of terrorism, guerrilla wars, civil wars and interstate
conflicts. These instances of Muslim violence could congeal into one
major clash of civilizations between Islam and the West or between
Islam and the Rest.31
This is not the place to discuss in detail the myriad of logical
leaps, shoddy presumptions, and lack of supportive data that hounds
Huntington’s thesis, but we should point out some essential facts
that in themselves point to the holes in the thinking behind the
whole ‘clash of civilisations’ project as such. We may note, for
instance, Professor Huntington’s extraordinary ignorance of the
“civilizations” he purports to discuss – he seems quite unaware of
the abundant scholarly literature disproving the redundant thesis of
the inherently aggressive nature of Muslims. On page 256 of his
study, The Clash of Civilizations, for example, he asserts
that: “Muslims have problems living with their neighbours… The
evidence is overwhelming.” The “overwhelming evidence” he reviews,
however, appears to manifest only poor and prejudiced scholarship.
Huntington performs an exceedingly shallow analysis of several cases
of conflicts involving Muslims – many of which were in fact
deliberately engineered by the United States – presents them in a
historical and political vacuum, and then generalises the
conclusions without warrant. The 20th century
conflicts relating to Iraq, Iran, Afghanistan, Bosnia, Kosovo,
Macedonia, Chechnya, Indonesia, Sudan, Palestine, and so on, are in
fact directly related to US foreign policy, which has in all these
cases escalated and supported various actors in the respective
conflicts to secure economic and strategic interests. In the
interests of extending and consolidating global US hegemony, US
policy has systematically manipulated communities, played them off
against one another, generated wars and capitalised on the results.32 Huntington’s
examples, in other words, in reality demonstrate the extent to which
US foreign policy has contributed to conflict and war – and has
often manipulated Muslim groups and hijacked Islamic symbols to the
same end.
The fact that history is full of wars does not indicate that they
were the result of differences in religions or cultures between
civilizations. Rather, a scientific historical analysis demonstrates
that the causes were power politics and aspirations for hegemony, a
fact deliberately played down by Huntington. Wars have always been
ultimately instigated by a handful of people in positions of power,
who pit one nation against another in order to secure their own
geostrategic and hegemonic objectives.
Indeed, directly contradicting Huntington’s emphasis of the alleged
potential rivalry from Islamic civilization is an authoritative
study by the US Commission on National Security/21st Century,
which records how the unique adaptability of Islamic to modernity is
the very factor ensuring that such a confrontation will not occur as
a simple result of civilizational dichotomies.33 Other
Middle East specialists concur that “like their secular
counterparts, on most issues many [Islamic-oriented political
actors] would operate on the basis of national interests and
demonstrate a flexibility that reflects acceptance of the realities
of a globally interdependent world.”34
It is certainly a shame that the esteemed Harvard scholar has to
resort to regurgitating chauvinistic myths to support his untenable
position. There is, however, a deeper context and pattern to this
act of regurgitation by anti-Muslim academics such as Huntington.
The background has been noted by political scientist Nadia Weiss in
the monthly Zurich-based journal Current Concerns: “As soon
as one delves into Huntington’s background, the first thing one
notices is that one of his chief political allies is none other than
Zbigniew Brzezinski, America’s chief geostrategist and author of
‘The Grand Chessboard’…
Zbigniew Brzezinski
is well known as the creator of the American strategy to achieve
hegemony, which lies at the heart of American foreign policy. That
battle for global hegemony is going to be fought in Eurasia.
Therefore America needs access to geopolitically important
countries like Ukraine, Turkey, Iran and the countries in the
Caucasus. Both the expansion of the EU to the East and the
expansion of NATO in the same direction are part of this strategy.
In reading
Huntington, one often has the impression of reading Brzezinski.
Huntington, for example, writes that the maintenance of American
hegemony is just as important for the entire world as it is for
the United States. The world needs a superpower, and America is
the only one left that can assume this role, and that is also
necessary for American interests. In this context the American
dominance in the world economy is crucial: ‘America is now being
challenged by Japan, and in the future she will probably be
challenged by Europe as well.’
Brzezinski and Huntington are pursuing the same political plan: They
want the world to be ruled by one power and they want to be part of
that power ruling the world. It is no coincidence that Brzezinski
sings the praise of Huntington’s book calling it ‘a monumental work
which will revolutionize our view of foreign affairs.’ At another
point he characterizes Huntington as the ‘democratic Machiavelli’.35
All of this is merely the latest stage in a historic pattern,
according to J. A. Progler – Assistant Professor of Social Studies
at the School of Education in the City University of New York,
Brooklyn College – who notes that the demonisation of Islam and
Muslims is rooted in a long record of self-serving Western
encounters with Islam and Muslims:
The long history of
encounters between Western civilization and Islam has produced a
tradition of portraying, in largely negative and self-serving
ways, the Islamic religion and Muslim cultures. There is a lot of
literature cataloguing (and sometimes correcting) these
stereotypes… Images of the Other are prevalent in Western
civilization, and have become firmly ensconced in the discourse of
colonization and conquest, whoever the victims may be. Some images
are rooted in Greek notions of barbarians, others born of the
Middle Ages. They have been carried through the Reconquista and
Inquisition, picked up during the age of colonial expansion,
developed by Orientalists in the 19th and early 20th century, and
continue on into the age of mass media and globalized political
economy. But images don’t exist in a vacuum. They have uses…
Western
image-makers, including religious authorities, political
establishments, and corporate-media conglomerates, conceptualize
for their consumers images of Muslims and/or Arabs in sometimes
amusing and other times cruel or tragic ways. Upon closer
examination, these images seem to serve essential purposes
throughout the history of Western civilization. At times these
purposes are benign, at others quite sinister. Often, there are
tragic consequences for Muslims resulting from the socio-political
climate fostered by images…
If Arabs and Muslims are extremists in anything, I believe that it
is in the patience and tolerance they have shown toward persistent
Western interventions until very recently. Islamic movements have
much more important characteristics than intolerance and violence. A
central concept is social justice.36
Beyond Images: Challenge Media Lies
The victims of the system of global apartheid – in which the Western
powers control the world’s resources while the majority of the
population toils under regimes of extreme oppression and deprivation
propped up by the international community – are becoming
increasingly intolerant of the inhumane conditions in which they are
forced to attempt to survive. If we are to genuinely stop such acts
of terror from being repeated, then we must dismantle the unjust
system that creates such inhumane conditions from which individuals
arise with so little hope that they feel compelled to use violence.
A US response calculated to label and target everyone not “on our
side” indiscriminately – parroted and trumpeted by a
corporate-dominated media which is institutionally dependent upon
the elite agenda and based on the same elite strategic principles
and economic interests – will only exacerbate the systematic
injustices of world order and create conditions conducive to a
spiral of violence and war, from which no one will benefit. It is
our responsibility to challenge media lies, and thereby challenge
the ideological base of legitimacy that the media grants the
unaccountable activities of the self-interested corporate elite. In
doing so, we are challenging the very foundations of US/Western
imperial policy throughout the world.
Footnotes:
1. See for instance Wattie, Chris, ‘U.S. vows revenge’, National
Post, 12 September 2001; Luxton, Peter, ‘Amid the Chaos, What’s
Next for the Market’, Business Week, 11 September 2001; Gee,
Marcus, The Globe and Mail, cited in ‘What the world’s press
says’, The Guardian, 14 December 2001,
http://media.guardian.co.uk/attack/story/0,1301,618880,00.html;
National Geographic,
www.nationalgeographic.com/traveler/related.html.
2. Editor’s Note, ‘A Different Order of Magnitude’, Security
Management, October 2001,
www.securitymanagement.com/library/001128.html.
3. Parenti, Michael, Against Empire, City Light Books, 1995.
See Chapter 3 ‘Intervention: Whose gain? Whose pain?’.
4. Monbiot, George, ‘Collateral Repair: How to Win the War with
Peace’, The Guardian, 25 September 2001.
5. ABC News report,
http://abcnews.go.com/sections/scitech/TechTV/techtv_blackboxes010917.html.
6. It is worth noting that United Airlines flight 93 crashed into a
field in Pennsylvania, without any explosion or impact into a
building, thus escaping the same inferno that engulfed the WTC.
Amazingly, both its Black Boxes are supposed to have been destroyed
or unusable.
7. CNN report,
http://asia.cnn.com/2001/US/09/17/inv.investigation.terrorism/index.html.
8. CNN,
http://asia.cnn.com/2001/US/09/16/gen.america.under.attack/index.html.
9. See Zaman, Shibli, ‘FBI’s Investigation of the WTC Tragedy
Exposed’, Houston Tx, 18 September 2001,
Shibli@Zaman.Net.
10. U.S. investigative journalist William Thomas has analysed a
whole host of inconsistencies in the official story of 9-11 in his
recently released book, All Fall Down: The Politics of Mass
Persuasion,
www3.bc.sympatico.ca/Willthomas/AFD/AFD.htm.
11. Morris, Stephen, ‘U.S. urged to detail origin of tape’, The
Guardian, 15 December 2001,
www.guardian.co.uk/september11/story/0,11209,619188,00.html.
12. BBC News, ‘Could the Bin Laden video be a fake?’, 14 December
2001,
http://news.bbc.co.uk/hi/english/world/newsid_1711000/1711288.stm.
13. Margolis, Eric, ‘Is the Gun Smoking? “Experts” Disagree on bin
Laden Home Video’, Toronto Sun, 17 December 2001.
14. Knox, Kathleen, ‘Afghanistan: Would Bin Laden Videotape Be
Admissible In Court?’, Radio Free Europe/Liberty, 19 December 2001,
www.rferl.org/nca/features/2001/12/19122001091511.asp.
15. Monbiot, George, ‘The need for dissent,’ The Guardian,
18 Sept. 2001.
16. For extensive discussion of the US bombing of Al-Shifa in the
context of US relations with Sudan, see Ahmed, Nafeez M., ‘United
States Terrorism in the Sudan: The Bombing of Al-Shifa and its
Strategic Role in US-Sudan Relations,’ Media Monitors Network, 22
October 2001,
www.mediamonitors.net/mosaddeq16.html.
17. BBC 2, Newsnight, London, 11 September 2001.
18. Former Secretary of State Lawrence Eagleburger, CNN, 11
September 2001.
19. Dunleavy, Steve, New York Post, 12 September 2001.
20. Coulter, Ann, New York Daily News, 12 September 2001.
21. Shoup, Laurence H., ‘Shaping the Postwar World’, Insurgent
Sociologist, Vol. 5, No. 3, Spring 1975.
22. For discussion see Said, Edward, Covering Islam: How the
Media and the Experts Determine How We See the Rest of the World,
Vintage, London, 1997.
23. IPA News Release, ‘Another Gulf of Tonkin Resolution? Because We
Embrace Freedom?’, Institute for Public Accuracy, Washington DC, 13
September 2001,
www.accuracy.org.
24. See Ahmed, Nafeez M., ‘The 1991 Gulf Massacre: The Historical
and Strategic Context of Western Terrorism in the Gulf,’ Media
Monitors Network, Los Angeles, CA, 2 October 2001,
www.mediamonitors.net/mosaddeq14.html.
25. The Guardian, 29th January 2002.
26. Hartung, William, Milwaukee Sentinel & Journal, 11
January 1999.
27. A skillful online dissection of the myth of Islamic terrorism
supported by the media and academia, see the cutting edge web-site
of the University of Colorado’s Religious Studies Deparment
established by Kevin Choi, True Lies: The Construction of
“Islamic” Terrorism in Politics and Academia,
www.colorado.edu/ReligiousStudies/TheStrip/features/truelies/title.htm.
Also see Masud, Enver, ‘Islamic Fundamentalism $500 Billion Bogey:
Welfare `reform` expected to save $55 billion in six years’, The
Wisdom Fund (TWF), 2 August 1996; Enver, ‘Facts Belie Hype About
`Islamic Terrorism`’, TWF, 31 December 1999.
28. For some insight into what is meant by this, see especially
Said, Edward, Orientalism, Random House, New York, 1979; also
see Said, Covering Islam, Pantheon, New York.
29. Huntington, Samuel, Clash of Civilizations: Remaking of World
Order, Simon & Schuster, New York, 1996.
30. The Times, 12 September 2001.
31. Huntington, Samuel P., ‘The Age of Muslim Wars’, Newsweek,
January 2002,
www.msnbc.com/news/672440.asp.
32. These policies and the countries in which they have operated
have been discussed extensively by this author in thousands of pages
worth of documentation, contained in successive research papers.
These are available online at the author’s homepage, hosted by the
Los Angeles-based Media Monitors Network,
http://nafeez.mediamonitors.net.
33. U.S. Commission on National Security/21st Century, New World
Coming: Supporting Research and Analysis, No. 88. A National
Security Strategy for a New Century, December 1999 version.
34. See for example Esposito, John L., ‘The Islamic Factor’, in
Marr, Phebe ed., Egypt at the Crossroads: Domestic Stability and
Regional Role, National Defense University Press, Washington, DC
1999, p. 61-62.
35. Weiss, Nadia, ‘The Islamic World Targeted by the West? Clash of,
or Dialogue Between, Civilizations?’, Current Concerns, No. 11/12,
November 2001-January 2002,
www.currentconcerns.ch/archive/20011103.php.
36. Progler, J. A., ‘The Utility of Islamic Imagery in the West: An
American Case Study’, Winter 1997, Al-Tawhid: A Journal of
Islamic Thought & Culture, Vol. XIV, No. 4.
_________________________________________________________________________________
Nafeez Mosaddeq Ahmed is a
political analyst and human rights activist, specialising in Western
foreign policy and its impact on human rights. He is Executive
Director of the Institute for Policy Research & Development (IPRD),
an independent, interdisciplinary, non-profit think tank based in
Brighton, UK. The IPRD conducts research and analysis of local and
global society for the promotion of human rights, justice and peace.
For further information, visit
www.globalresearch.org. Also see
www.thewaronfreedom.com for Nafeez’s new book on September 11. |
