I Refuse To Read 9/11 Memorial Coverage

If you're reading this right now you are doing something that I have refused to do: read any coverage or analysis of 9/11. I am boycotting the wall to wall coverage - the pull-out specials in the newspapers, the live coverage of ceremonies at ground zero (I assume there are ceremonies but I haven't been reading the coverage so I can't be sure). I'm even ignoring the critical coverage that is buried underneath all of the jingoism, mourning, and replaying of buildings billowing smoke. After all, what else can be said about 9/11? We know there has been several wars since then - putatively because of 9/11 but, in fact, argued for, threatened and planned for prior to the event. Way back when, everybody was quoting the founding documents of the Project for a New American Century, which advocated war against Iraq (a secular government with no ties - and significant animosity - towards radical Islamism). When we memorialize 9/11 as the reason for those wars we're participating in that lie.

Ah, but there I go, trying to analyze it. The truth is, it's pointless because the event has been drained of any rationality. It has become an endlessly repeated image of those burning towers and the necessary repetition of appropriate regret for the loss of life. There is literally nothing to say that won't be banal and commonplace to those who accept your particular viewpoint of the significance of the day - and which won't be utter blasphemy to those who don't.

Not many would say that I try to avoid thinking about world events and politics. Something happens somewhere in the world and I try to dig up the historical roots and uncover the social forces at play. It's a bit of an obsession at times. But this one event I will let pass - not because it's so special that I need to look away from the horror. 35,000 children die every day from preventable causes. Preventable causes. 6 million Jews died in the Holocaust. Anywhere from hundreds of thousands to 1.2 million died in Iraq as a result of the war - not counting the US enforced sanctions for a decade prior to the war. Nor do I want to ignore 9/11 because it isn't important. Certainly to the 3,000 people killed, their friends and family, 9/11 was a calamitous event. But, just as obviously, it was calamitous to the people who have been killed in wars, the societies destroyed, by wars supposedly in retribution for 9/11 [re: supposedly - see Project for a New American Century above].

No, the reason I won't read about 9/11 - not a word: I caught myself reading Chomsky on the al Jazeera website and forced myself to stop - is because we have lived it for ten years. We have seen it all - and if we happen to live in Iraq, Afghanistan, Palestine (yes, they got blamed too - we rarely miss a chance to kick the Palestinians around), Pakistan we felt the self-righteous fury of its manufactured response. We have seen this extended to our civil liberties - eroded significantly, almost without protest. We have seen it in a more bellicose form of rhetoric from politicians and media figures and a greater ease of military response to every crisis - we now slip on our fatigues to go and bomb "evil-doers" as easily as we put on our Wellingtons when the rain comes. We all know what 9/11 means and I don't need a special edition of the New York Times or, God help me, Glenn Beck to explain it.

We don't need more memorials. They're building a "Freedom Tower" in New York with 104 floors of skyline-dominating memorial. All you have to do is say "9/11" and every person in the western world, and probably most of the eastern, southern and northern world, can't help but have the iconic image pop into their mind - even if they try to think of the CIA coup against Salvador Allende on September 11, 1973. Even in countries that have suffered much greater tragedies, which is most countries, it was probably on the front page at some point in the last week. Making this event the obsession of the entire planet is somehow deeply pathological, like a monomania as we try to find the right emotional response to an event we're expected to have an emotional response towards. Meanwhile the house is burning down. I hate that I even remembered "where I was when I heard about it" several times today; once at a film festival bbq where we were expected to stop noshing and shmoozing to pay our respects for the dead. No: no more memorials. Talk to me about 9/11 when, instead of verbiage and symbols - and guns and bombs and F-35 fighter jets that cost a ba-zillion dollars - the memorial that is being offered is a plan to eliminate poverty at home and abroad, to stop supporting dictatorships that are convenient and bombing ones that aren't (especially the democratic ones that we call dictatorships because we don't like how people voted). In the meantime, stop trying to prove how profoundly on top of the meaning of the event you are in order to sell newspapers (how much extra has the New York Times made selling it's coverage - like to the T.O. Star?) or get people to tune in. It's like Christmas Day when no matter which channel you turn to you get people singing Christmas carols or delivering sermons. Just. Stop. Already.

Egypt, Revolution & Islamism

Secular protesters retake Tahrir Square after Islamist's depart. They chant
for a secular state and against the military leadership.

While outside commentators have repeatedly suggested that Egypt's revolution has stalled or gone backwards, it seems more accurate to suggest that the revolution is maturing as it continues to develop. Revolutions are periods in which politics speeds up and processes that previously took decades - in terms of changes in consciousness, institutions and social conditions - now happen over night. There is an inevitable back and forth as new forces surge forward, while older established institutions may push back or, for a time, drive the revolutionary wave in order to better control it. A prime example of this was the support by the Supreme Council of the Armed Forces (SCAF) during the phase of the revolution leading up to the overthrow of Mubarak. With the explosion of protests and strikes sweeping Egypt, the generals - all of them Mubarak appointees, some of them lifelong friends - recognized that the only way to control the revolution was to force the resignation of Mubarak, declare their support for the revolution and use their prestige to try to undermine any further developments. Since that time they have combined verbal support for the revolution, along with limited concessions, with continued repression of activists, the outlawing of strikes and support for counter-revolutionary forces.

Nonetheless, the revolution has continued to advance, though it faces new challenges and serious dangers at each new phase in the struggle. Friday's Islamist dominated protest in Tahrir Square, including the forcible exclusion of secular parties, even though an agreement had been struck prior to the protest declaring it a "Friday of Unity & the People's Will", was a clear demonstration that the revolution has entered what might be considered its third phase.

In the first phase of the revolution, there was a spontaneous outburst of popular anger against Mubarak. All classes and ideologies came together with one clear purpose: to overthrow Mubarak. Under the general slogans of democracy and an end to the dictatorship very disparate groups could work together. In the case of the Muslim Brotherhood's leadership, it was very much against their instincts and often kicking and screaming that they were dragged into the revolutionary wave. This was an intense but relatively short phase that ended with the overthrow of Mubarak and a period of euphoria and support for the military, most clear exemplified by the slogan "the people and the army are one hand." The truth was that the army was itself not "one hand" but was divided between the lower ranks and the upper, with the danger that the conscript army might split or go over to the revolution wholesale, leading to its collapse. But because the SCAF came out quickly in favour of the revolution, they maintained and built their prestige amongst the population.

However, once Mubarak was gone, a new phase opened up. The central protests continued but these became less important than the local struggles. Strikes erupted in large numbers and there was an explosion of different forms of civil disobedience as local committees, newly formed independent unions and peasant organizations pressed their specific demands. As this excellent overview of "act two" of the revolution describes it, local struggles exploded. It is worth quoting at length:

The workers' movement has advanced since the strikes of early February which played a key role in convincing military leaders to remove Mubarak. Every area of industry has been affected, with numerous actions organised by workplace and union groups on pressing issues: wages, contracts, pensions, conditions, union rights, welfare provision, and bullying and corrupt managements....

According to activists in Cairo, during February there were 500 separate industrial actions, while in March the level dropped to 200. But in April the level rose again and in May there were new developments including the first nationwide doctors' strike. This demanded radical reform of the health service in the name of social justice. The doctors' syndicate, formerly a mainly conservative professional association, has been deeply affected by the mood of the mass of the population. It organised for indefinite strike action to secure improved wages and an increase in government spending on health from 3.5 percent to 15 percent of the national budget....

In the countryside there have been over 100,000 "encroachments" on private property since the revolution began. These are mainly actions by peasants attempting to retrieve land seized by landowning families of the colonial era who have benefited from a law imposed in 1997 allowing former landowners rights to land distributed to fallaheen (cultivators) under reforms of the 1950s and 1960s...

A new development is the establishment of independent peasant unions which support collective action including retrieval of land. In May a conference held in the village of Kamshish, a historic centre of peasant struggles, founded a new Union of Egyptian Farmers. Among its aims is the building of a national co-operative movement run by farmers at grassroots level.

In cities and villages across the country neighbourhood action groups have proliferated. As Popular Committees to Defend the Revolution they were formed initially to protect local communities from gangs of plainclothes police like those which battled activists in Tahrir Square in February. The committees have since led campaigns to purge corrupt officials, to reform public services including education, health, water supply and sewerage, and to tackle local issues such as control of traffic. Their national coordinating body met for the first time in Tahrir Square in April.

But while struggle was rising based upon "local" issues, the military rulers were applying growing pressure on the movements through the arrests of activists who were then sent to military tribunals. They increased their propaganda, accusing worker activists of acting against the interests of the revolution. Meanwhile police and former regime figures who were charged with murdering activists during the revolution or engaging in corrupt practices to enrich themselves, were set to be tried by civilian courts. Except that those trials rarely happened and the accused were given lax bail terms. By the time there was a renewed explosion of protest in Tahrir in June and July, only one former regime figure had been found guilty - and he was out of the country. It made it inevitable that the local and economic issues would begin to re-converge around questions of the direction of the revolution.

These battles also put pressure on the Muslim Brotherhood - the largest opposition force in the country. Composed of disparate social forces from big bourgeois to students and independent businessmen as well as the urban poor, the Brotherhood has a history of fracturing at key historical moments. Inevitably the different social forces are pulled in different directions under the pressure of polarizing events. In this case, the youth wing were drawn strongly to the revolution and worked side by side with secular and leftist activists. By June the Brotherhood leadership expelled some leading youth activists who were involved with the revolution's youth committee, which had been central to the early mobilizations that brought down Mubarak. There were also splits, including by some leading members who disagreed with the Brotherhood's strategies on the revolution, on the nature of their planned participation in the electoral process, on how radically to challenge SCAF, etc.

Faced with this pressure the Brotherhood's leadership seems to have responded in a couple of ways. Firstly, it now uses the rhetoric of the revolution, which is necessary to have any credibility in post-Mubarak Egypt. At the same time it has worked with the SCAF to try and corral the revolutionary movement into the least profound forms of democratic change. It has opposed attacks on SCAF and has backed SCAF's opposition to strikes and demonstrations, as discussed on this article.

In relation to the social deepening of the revolution with the great wave of strikes which were triggered by the uprising, the Brotherhood took the same position as the government and the Military Council, demanding "a return to work to save the Egyptian economy. The Muslim Brotherhood calls on all sections of the Egyptian people to keep the wheels of production and development turning. Demonstrations for sectional demands, albeit a fundamental right, are detrimental to production and damage the economy, particularly as the revolution is linked to keeping the motor of the economy turning. Citizens must feel that their sacrifices in the search for a dignified life were not just empty talk, so that the Egyptian people can prove that they are capable of a further achievement beyond the revolution, in other words, to lift Egypt out of its economic crisis."

It seems clear that these attempts to play the same game as the military in supporting the revolution all the better to strangle it, the Brotherhood has had as little success as the military. While strikes declined in March after the great explosion in February, they rose again in April and there continue to be more independent unions established every week. And, of course, the movement once again took up the demands of the overall revolution - for the resignation and prosecution of regime figures, especially Mubarak; for an end to military trials of civilians; for a raising of the minimum wage, etc. This reinvigoration came from the fact that the movement had built in strength and depth through its success in the local arena and because the military resisted implementing the demands of the revolution so completely that their betrayal was now apparent. The Brotherhood responded by backing some of the demands - though insisting that calls for the overthrow of the SCAF were removed from any protest in which it took part. But with Friday's Islamist hijacked protest, it seems clear that the Brotherhood has decided that a more forceful hand is needed to put a lid on the further deepening of the revolution.

What is interesting is that the Brotherhood's leadership doesn't feel confident to use their own organization as the direct battering ram to attack the secular and leftist leaders of the revolution. They instead used the Salafists - fundamentalists - as the battering ram to test the strength and resolve of the revolution in what can only be a first battle. It should be noted that the Salafists are not simply the Islamist arm of the revolution - as Khomeini's party was in Iran. They are counter-revolutionary. From the same article quoted above:

Salafists are currently the Islamic wing of the "baltagiyya"(the counter-revolutionary thugs who attacked protesters in Tahrir Square) and their relationship to the security apparatus of the former regime is much more important than their relations with the Muslim Brotherhood. Since 2006 the Mubarak regime allowed the creation of Salafist satellite channels, which have been airing their poisonous views since that time, broadcasting a permanent stream of reactionary anti-Christian, anti-woman propaganda, as well as agitating against Muslims who do not share their views, in an attempt to drag the masses back to the Middle Ages.

The protest itself was originally going to be a protest for the implementation of Sharia and the use of the Koran as the constitution of Egypt. It was directly posed as an attack on secularism. But a deal was struck at the last minute with secular activists to instead make it a "Friday of Unity & the People's Will", focusing on the demands of ending repression, speeding up the trials of regime figures, raising the minimum wage, etc. But early in the morning, the Salafists showed up and hung banners calling for Islam to be placed above the constitution, for the implementation of Sharia - obviously not popular with either secularists or Coptic Christians - and other religiously conservative slogans. The Salafists also excluded secular spokespeople from the stage and harassed them in the tent city sit-in in the centre of the square. While the Brotherhood's spokesperson distanced them from the actions of the Salafists, it is clear that the Salafists only acted with such confidence because of the tacit backing of the Brotherhood leadership. What is also clear, however, is that the Brotherhood couldn't use their own "troops" because they are profoundly split with many in their youth wing, in particular, seeing the secular activists as their comrades, as this account of the events by Egyptian journalist Hossam el-Hamalawy makes clear:

To be fair, some young Muslim Brotherhood organizers tried to intervene and control the situation, but they failed. The ones who mainly broke the agreement were the Salafis. Over hours and hours, till Friday 7pm, Tens of thousands of Islamists were chanting for Sharia, the Quran as a constitution, intimidated secular activists and non-veiled women...

While leaders of the Islamist forces are knee-deep in their opportunism and clientalism to SCAF, I continue to be hopeful that the Islamist youth, those who defied their leaders and took part in the uprising shoulder to shoulder with their leftist and liberal brothers and sisters, would break the ranks and join us.

This fragmenting of the base of the Muslim Brotherhood as a result of the radicalization and broadening of the base of the revolution will be a key dynamic in this next phase of the revolution. So too, it now seems clear, will be their increasingly open and bellicose relationship with the counter-revolution - both in their support of the SCAF but also in supporting the reactionary foot soldiers of the Salafis. So, it's inspiring and important to note that immediately after the departure of the Salafis and conservative Islamists on Friday, the Square filled with protesters demanding a civil and secular state. They also raised slogans against the SCAF - in contrast to the Salafis who chanted in support of the SCAF - ironic given that the army was used to crush the Islamists in the 80s and 90s. This reconquest of the Square was absent in western news coverage, which was filled with the Iran bogeyman - the threat that Egypt could go the way of Iran in the 1970s.

However, there is no Ayatollah Khomeini in Egypt and political developments are nowhere near similar to Iran at the point where the Islamists had gained the upper hand. It seems - at this point - unlikely that the Islamists can replicate the local struggles that are actually winning material gains for the Egyptian people and so while some big central demonstrations, as happened Friday, can be intimidating, it is rather more ephemeral than the explosion of workers' unions, peasant unions, and neighbourhood committees to defend and deepen the revolution. This is a revolution that has nowhere near run its course.

Norway: Terrible Side-Effect of Islamophobia

The horror, tragedy and seeming madness of the killing spree in Norway are almost impossible to imagine. There is a temptation to focus on the mourning and solidarity with people in Norway and to resist analysis as something cold and foreign to the human dimension of the tragedy. But, of course, Anders Breivik has ensured that any discussion of the events are infused with politics, since that was his motive. But, even more so, the wide reach of mainstream media analysis has also put politics front and centre. And, perhaps more than anything, now is the time to understand why this happened as a prelude to ensuring it never happens anywhere else.

In many ways, the initial response of the media and its associated punditry was proof enough of the origins of the ultimately demented and violent ideology that motivated Breivik. With no evidence other than an M.O. that looked nothing like other types of Islamist terrorism, the media was abuzz with claims that it was likely to be Islamists who were behind the dual attack. Even now that it has become clear that Breivik is a fascist and virulent Islamophobe, the attempt to associate his acts somehow with al Qaeda or "jihadism" continue to permeate significant sections of the coverage. This, of course, was no different than what happened after the Oklahoma bombing when every TV news blowhard and politician was pointing the finger at Muslims, leading to attacks in the streets. When it was discovered that, in fact, it was a white Christian man, there were no threats of pogroms, no Christians fired from their jobs, no deportations or no-fly lists, no commentaries and blog posts about the need for Christians to disassociate themselves from terrorism. He was just a "lone nut."

In the case of Anders Breivik it has been more difficult to call him a lone nut. His wide-ranging political associations with the far right in Europe, from the English Defence League and Stop The Islamification of Europe to the medieval militarism of the "Knights Templar" and various anti-Muslim and fascist blog sites, make it clear that he was part of a community of co-thinkers. Thankfully this has led to a public call to face up to the fact that the growth in anti-immigrant parties and movements in Europe demands a response.

But the trouble is, the far right has gotten encouragement and received support from mainstream political parties. Parties from the social democratic left to the ultra-conservative right have contributed to the sense of a "clash of cultures" and a "crusade" against "backward and violent Islam" with the War on Terror that has specifically targeted Muslim countries and Muslim leaders. Certainly the Taliban and Saddam Hussein had little to recommend them - but they had little to do with 9/11. Saddam Hussein was leader of a secular party - the Ba'athist Party - and had never even flirted with Islamism. The Taliban nominally ruled over Afghanistan, which was a base for al Qaeda but only a few years earlier al Qaeda was a CIA asset in the war against the Soviets. And the Americans didn't seem so troubled by the fact that al Qaeda had a training camp in Afghanistan that it prevented politicians and oil executives from entering negotiations with the Taliban for a pipeline across the south of the country. Besides, there were more and better organized Islamists in Pakistan - hell, they basically ran the country through the ISI, which worked closely with the USA during and after the war against the Soviets in Afghanistan.

Notwithstanding the lack of any internal logic related to Islam, the Muslim world had the misfortune of being concentrated in areas of special strategic interest to the American empire. And not being sufficiently subordinate and useful to that empire, they became the target of attack. The use of Islamophobia to provide an ideological underpinning was an extension of the defeat in Iran, where a secular, American backed dictator - the Shah - was overthrown in 1979 by a coalition that was led by Islamists. If the political leadership had been Zoroastrian, then America would have demonized them, because by definition, anybody who fights America the Good is therefore evil. The fact that America the demonization of Islam was an utterly convenient and hypocritical tool of the American government was made clear by the fact that as they were ramping up the anti-Muslim rhetoric in the wake of the "hostage crisis" in Iran, they were starting to ramp up support, including military aid, to Islamist guerillas in Afghanistan.

The Soviets are now long gone and the Islamists no longer serve much purpose to the Americans, except in a couple of important outputs - notably Saudi Arabia and Bahrain. They are now the enemy and the full force of American propaganda has been levelled against them. By now we're all familiar with this particular narrative - Muslims are backward medievalists, they hate and oppress women, they are violent as represented by the concept of jihad, etc. Of course, none of these qualities has ever bothered America or Europe when it served their purposes - Contra guerillas in Nicaragua raped and tortured women; the motivation for numerous American backed death squads in Latin America was grounded in a particular reading of Christianity that was backwards and obviously cruelly violent. But the imprimatur of the US State Dept, along with the active support of most European capitals and a stereotype promoted through the news, analysis, TV and film entertainment, etc. made sure that this view of Islam was widely disseminated and accepted.

In politics there is always a connection between one action and the next, a continuous chain of causality that usually contains its own profound ironies. Islamophobia and a muscular imperialism throughout the Muslim world is no different. The support for repressive, kleptocratic dictators - both secular and sectarian - and the wars of against non-compliant nations like Iraq and Afghanistan, have driven large numbers of Muslims to Europe's and North America's shores to escape the impact of our policies. But with the demonization and stereotypes already in place - as well as an abiding anger against western imperialism by a significant minority in the region, which a vanishingly tiny minority turned into a justification for terrorism - the stage was set for an attack on immigration and multiculturalism, which couldn't avoid being seen as too permissive of "backward" cultural practices of the sort ascribed to Muslims.

In the first instance, the source of this backlash against immigrants was from mainstream politicians and news media, who whipped up campaigns against Muslims. In some parts of Europe - notably France and Belgium - this has included outright bans on head scarves and the like in order to "protect" vulnerable Muslim women from the prey of repressive Muslim men. Of course, white women aren't protected from becoming prey to predatory plastic surgeons who impose unhealthy and invasive breast augmentation at a rate of close on 300,000 per year in the USA, not to mention the social coercion that makes women feel un-womanly if they don't wear short skirts, diet, wear torture implements known as high heel shoes, and spend thousands of dollars to paint their faces. This has never been about protecting women but about "bringing home" the wars that we are fighting abroad and in using already widely accepted characterizations to redirect the public anger experienced by millions whose lives are getting worse under neo-liberalism and a capitalist economy in crisis, onto easy and vulnerable scapegoats.

Maine Tea Party: condemned by their own words

This backdrop is important to understand because it is simply not true that the arrival of immigrants a priori leads to a right wing immigrant backlash - but that is now the dominant discourse being peddled. The article in the New York Times linked to at the bottom of this post makes precisely this matter-of-fact, common sense claim:

Immigration from Muslim countries to Scandinavia and the rest of Europe has set off a deep political debate across the continent and strengthened a number of right-wing anti-immigrant parties.

Canada, at 5.6 migrants per 1,000 population has had much higher rates of immigration than Norway at 1.7 migrants per 1,000 population. This is not to say that there's no racism in Canada or no Islamophobia - there most certainly is. But immigration is central to our economic growth and is accepted as such by every major political party and major media outlet. There has been no sustained campaign against multiculturalism in most of Canada - though Quebec experienced some controversy about "reasonable accommodation" and Harper tried to make an issue out of full face veils at election booths. Not surprisingly, Canada has no significant far-right presence and there are no fascist parties of which I'm aware.

But in Europe - and America, which has combined Islamophobia with hysteria around illegal Latino immigration - the sustained and aggressive mainstream campaign leads some to draw the full logical and horrifying conclusions: that the nation must be protected from an "invasion" by dangerous outsiders and a war on "indigenous" values. In Norway, it had dramatically tragic results. However, the rot is deep and widespread - much deeper than Breivik. Just take a look at the front page of the Maine Tea Party website, which celebrates Breivik as "Man of the Year, 2011". The Tea Party has taken over a significant portion of the Republican Party. And it is only one component that included the Minutemen Project, vigilantes who "patrol" America's borders - whose politics are reflected in anti-immigrant laws in places like Arizona. The truly horrifying lesson from this is that unless the mainstream bigotry of Islamophobia is challenged, this will not be the last such tragedy. Western imperialism created Islamism, in large measure, by destroying all alternative avenues for political expression in the Middle East and the Muslim world. It has no created fascist violence at home by demonizing all Muslims as Islamists and Islamism as a particularly notorious ideology - ignoring the wide spectrum of beliefs and policies that guide various Islamist parties. As British socialist blogger Richard Seymour wrote in an excellent dissection of this whole phenomenon on his blog:

The Islamophobia that has been energetically disseminated by the belligerents of the 'war on terror', the view seriously entertained by many that Europe's Muslim minority constitutes a threat meriting legal supervision and restriction at the very least, has provided the intellectual and moral basis for the mass murder of Norwegian children. No one who is not prepared to countenance this can have anything morally serious or even creditable to say about this slaughter. And anyone who starts from the idea of blaming Islam is placing themselves in a contemptible affinity with the perpetrator.

Killings in Norway Spotlight Anti-Muslim Thought in U.S. - NYTimes.com

Fort Hood Allegations Build On Racist Mythology

THIS MORNING I READ THAT SOME ANONYMOUS SPOOK told ABC news that the CIA knew Hasan was trying to contact al Qaeda (do they have a mailing address?). However, they did nothing about it, told no one, refuse to officially say anything and really only decided to send out an anonymous and widespread rumour now, when it is useful for propaganda purposes. Now, either the CIA are thoroughly incompetent or this is simply an attempt to massage the message in order to get the best spin for the purposes of the war effort. With Italy offering two dozen CIA agents an extended tour in an Italian jail for kidnapping and delivering a "Muslim suspect" to a third country for torture you will excuse me if I think that the timing is convenient for the CIA.
Of course, this whole dissection is a totally absurd case of politically motivated character assassination as a means to avoid the more troubling political implications of his action. Let's unpack some of this racist nonsense for a moment, shall we. What does it mean that he was trying to contact al Qaeda? The article never says and nobody is accountable for this anonymous rumour. So there is no way to verify any of its claims. Did he go to an Islamist website? Did he order an al Qaeda decoder ring in the mail? My guess is that this is nothing but spin based on something very flimsy, else there would be more than an abstract suggestion.
Then there is the article that claims Hasan visited a local strip club to have lap dances. Hasan is becoming, like Osama bin Laden, an Emmanuel Goldstein. Goldstein was the invented boogeyman used to frighten the population into line with the policies of Big Brother in the book 1984. Everyone will now have seen him - at the corner store, at strip clubs, at the mosque, in the cafeteria. And every story will take incidental events that were apropos of nothing and inflate them out of all proportion to create an image appropriate to a secondary figure in the anti-Islamic demonology of America. If he said he opposed the war and thought it was a war against Islam - the second belief being one that is regularly promoted by conservative figures - this is proof that he is a supporter of al Qaeda. The logical corollary that is being implied in all this is, of course, that all Muslims support al Qaeda. Not only is this untrue but because the western media has so thoroughly de-intellectualized al Qaeda - a product of US guns and money during the Afghan war against Soviet occupation - that there's no way to understand the organization or sympathy for it except in the terms of good vs evil. Bush put it clearly in his address to Congress following 9/11:

"Americans are asking, why do they hate us? They hate what they see right here in this chamber -- a democratically elected government. Their leaders are self-appointed. They hate our freedoms -- our freedom of religion, our freedom of speech, our freedom to vote and assemble and disagree with each other. They want to overthrow existing governments in many Muslim countries, such as Egypt, Saudi Arabia, and Jordan. They want to drive Israel out of the Middle East. They want to drive Christians and Jews out of vast regions of Asia and Africa. These terrorists kill not merely to end lives, but to disrupt and end a way of life. With every atrocity, they hope that America grows fearful, retreating from the world and forsaking our friends. They stand against us, because we stand in their way."

In a psychopathological passive-aggressive projection the United States, the world's most powerful empire, with bases in dozens of countries around the world, with a military budget higher than the rest of the world's countries combined, has become a victim of envy. It is not that the US "overthrows existing government in many Muslim countries", including democratically elected ones, unlike those used without irony in the Bush speech. It is not that the US military and government has consistently opposed the very freedoms listed by Bush in almost every country in the developing world. It is simply that a small, despised and underground movement, hidden in mountains and caves - like western fantasies about some Ali Baba - is an evil force trying to destroy our way of life. This logic must lead to racism for the simple reason that once you eliminate all the real world complexities of cause and effect, of history and political decisions, all you have left are mystical explanations about some evil character within Islam. Sure, there's some good Muslims - but they are only good insofar as they "moderate" their Islam, they become, in the words of Pat Robertson, "Islam lite". As for the rest:

"Ladies and gentlemen, we have to recognize that Islam is not a religion. It is a worldwide political movement meant on domination of the world. And it is meant to subjugate all people under Islamic law."

And Hasan has gone from being a real world man, deeply troubled and socially isolated, not least for being a Muslim in an army rife with Islamophobia, to being a "terrorist". We can now use him to scare the children, mobilize the troops for a renewed effort to defend our way of life and publicly lynch him to purge ourselves of the fears that have weakened the national resolve. We will sleep better again knowing that these wars aren't destroying the minds and bodies of the soldiers sent to prosecute them. Any that develop psychological disorders will simply have "gone native", "become increasingly radical", gone over to the dark side. We will be safe once again in our ignorance, until the next act of mass murder forces us to revise our mythology and add a new demon to the pantheon.