Will Islamophobes Be Allowed to Obtain Their Ultimate Goal?
by Dr. Abdul Cader Asmal
The year 2000 was a seminal point in the manufacture of the threat of
Islamophobia. In that
year warning bells were sounded at the increasing mischaracterisation of
Muslims as
‘Islamists’. For it became evident that once Muslims were stigmatized as
“Islamists” their
struggle from tyranny, no matter how just, lost its legitimacy; their
victimization by any and
all means became legitimate; and as an “Islamist” threat to accepted
hegemony that had to be
crushed at all cost, the silence of the media was assured (The Muslim
Observer, 1/00).
The term “Islamist” was not one used by Muslims to define themselves;
rather it was one created
by or delivered to the media with a deliberate vagueness to include
Muslims of every shade of
the spectrum - from political activists, religious radicals , freedom
fighters, terrorists,
even common criminals, to any practicing Muslim. The diabolic brilliance
of the term was that
it ****fted the focus of any malfeasance directly from the adherent ( the
Muslim ) to the
religion ( Islam sic ‘Islamist’ ). This blurred the distinction between
“Muslim” and
“Islamist” so that inevitably every Muslim was an “Islamist”!
Consequently, every Muslim
struggle from oppression, were it in Russia or Kashmir, China or Kosova,
Algeria or Turkey,
became an “Islamist” threat , creating a pretext for previously inimical
foes to become strange
bedfellows against the new-found common enemy.
When Islam was chosen to replace the “evil empire” as a threat to world
order, the “Islamist”
had to be invented to replace the communist as the bogeyman of the new
millennium. For more
than 50 years communists were the supreme symbols of hate and fear, and
targets of subversion,
overthrow or subjugation. It was now the turn of the “Islamists” to be
set-up to inherit their
mantle. From the media perspective at that time the term ‘Islamist’ with
its deceptive
simplicity seemed a more user friendly expression that appeared as less of
a pejorative slur
against Muslims than the more blatantly racist expression of ‘Islamic
terrorism’ then in common
use.
For its part instead of repudiating this odious designation of their
religion the Muslim
community allowed itself to be defined by the nefarious agenda of others.
The events of 911
provided a carte blanche to the latter to demonize Islam and Muslims with
total impunity so
that in the neocon-contrived so-called global war on terror the refrain
rapidly transformed
from ‘our enemies are Muslim’ to ‘Muslims are our enemies’ and that the
root of the problem is
not just a band of heretic Muslims sic ‘Islamists’ but Islam itself. Such
a view was reinforced
by the fatuous re****t of the 911 Commission which made it a point to
single out ‘Islamist’ (
which it surely knew would be indiscriminately interchanged with ‘Islamic’
) terrorism as
though terrorism by other religious or nationalistic groups had intrinsic
redeeming features.
However, when the president of this country stooped to the level of
referring to the heretical
cult of Binladenism as an example of “Islamofascism” he set a new standard
for religious
denigration making Islamophobia analogous to communism as the new symbol
of hate and fear and a
ready target of subversion, overthrow and subjugation. Perhaps the most
preposterous exhibition
of raw bigotry was spewed by key McCain endorser the Rev Rod Parsley that
‘America was founded
in part with the intention of seeing this false religion destroyed, and I
believe that
September 11 2001 was a generational call to arms that we can no longer
ignore’. The utter
contempt with which so many in the ‘enlightened West’ ( in itself a
nebulous term of monumental
hubris designed to isolate not just Muslims but Islam from a selective
club that on the whims
of the proponents might from time to time include or exclude Asia, members
of the ex-Soviet
Union, Africa and South America) have become programmed to view Islam, is
as frightening as is
the selective global amnesia they have displayed to Islam’s magnificent
contributions to the
scientific and cultural advancement of today’s civilization.
In fact so effective has the Islamophobic propaganda been that whenever
Muslims sic ‘Islamists’
are insulted, humiliated or terrorized, the term ‘Islamic’ or ‘Islamist’
is now almost
redundant. Whether ghettoized Gazans are slowly strangulated, the Iraqis
systematically
dismembered, or the Iranians threatened with instant ‘obliteration’ ( by
none other than she
who would be president) there is little concern, let alone outrage in the
‘West’ because it is
only the ‘Islamists’ getting their just retribution. With the prospect
that before the next
election the Cheney-led neocon cabal will launch an unprovoked cataclysmic
pre-emptive assault
against the ‘axis of evil’ beginning with Syria, Lebanon and then Iran, (
Margolis,Toronto Sun
4/27/08), the silence of the US media is deafening. This is in stark
contrast to the recent
supersaturation of the airwaves about the mere riots, as tragic as they
were, in Tibet and Myanmar.
The concoction of the term ‘Islamist’ to characterize Muslims helped set
the stage for the
global hysterical phenomenon of Islamophobia which Muslims foresee as a
cover for the
systematic deracination of Islam propagated in the name of spreading the
message of democracy
by the neocon cabal in Wa****ngton. Notwithstanding their concerns about a
‘crusade’ against
Islam masquerading as the spread of enlightenment , in a recent review by
Esposito ( Who Speaks
for Islam, 2008), the overwhelming majority of Muslims polled showed no
animosity to the richly
diverse and non-monolithic ‘West’, in the same voice as they condemned the
‘Islamist’
extremists for their anti-Islamic actions. That Muslims have denounced
terrorism in all its
forms loudly unequivocally and repeatedly has been do***ented exhaustively
in ‘The American
Muslim” by Sheila Musaji who has also meticulously catalogued the ugliness
of Islamophobia in
its various guises. Whether the overwhelmingly majority of decent peoples
in the ‘West’, not to
sideline the vast populations of our planet who have been marginalized by
this invidious
dichotomy of ‘Islam versus the ‘West’ debate, will remain silent or
intimidated and allow the
course preordained by the neocons to attain their ultimate goal - the
colonisation of he Muslim
world with a predatory devastation of its infrastructure and rapacious
exploitation of its
resources, or will denounce Islamophobia for the neo-anti-Semitism that it
is, remains to be
seen. As an integral part of both Islam and the West and our common
humanity, for me
‘neoconism’ is no more representative of the West than ‘Binladenism’ is of
Islam. They are both
hideous caricatures of the truths, the values and the principles of
justice that both America
and Islam share with the rest of the world.
The recent directive by the State Department ( The Guardian,UK, 4/25/08)
for government
officials to display restraint in the use of the inflammatory and
derogatory expressions such
as ‘jihadists’ and ‘Islamic terrorists’ when referring to Muslim
extremists, is an act of
excruciating irony for the majority of Muslims who have been protesting
such vile depictions of
Islam ab initio - it is a directive they view as issued less to mollify
the ‘moderate’ Muslims
but more as an exercise in pragmatism that such terminology serves only to
the aggrandize the
extremists thereby frustrating the Islamophobes’ ultimate Machiavellian
goal to eviscerate
Islam before the neocons run out of time.
Abdul Cader Asmal 5/2/08
** Posted from http://www.teranews.com
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