It's not that I don't see the real legitimate dangers of religious fundamentalist violence. I'm an atheist and libertarian socialist who abhors all illegitimate heirarchies-state or based in irrational superstitions/traditions. Islamic fundamentist whackos would kill me just the same and view my beliefs with the same threat as the state and capitalists.,so I have no illusions that the "enemies of my enemies" are my allies or i would be spared as a critic of the empire i live in. Sure there are armed psychos willing to kill Americans,that threat has always existed for all countries and much of it is blowback for our empire's foreign policies,but there will always be moral monsters in and out of governments that believe in killing innocent people to acheive their goals. Their motivations can be real/imagined greivences, religious fanaticism, economic,nationalist,or secular. If I could wish religion away right now,not much of that would change,there just wouldn't be any victims of religious magical thinking blowing shit up. Ireland was as much about religion as it was history, culture, land, colonialism, nationalism,sovereignty,and resistence to oppression. There were secular Marxist/communist IRA factions as well as Catholic. So,removing religion from the equation would not change what the English government did to Ireland over the centuries. How easily it is forgotten that colonialism was tried out on the Irish before being turned on India and Africa. The Orientalism best typified by the White Man's Burden was a tool of that colonization by the European empires.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=yH2T6a_2gBo
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=boBzrqF4vmo&feature=related
Is it no surprise that the American empire(and it's proxy Israel) which has inherited much of the territories of the now defunct empires would simply recycle the same memes to reinvent a neo-neo colonialism for the post Cold War power re-allignment? The War on Terror is the new name for the Cold War apparatus that will continue the military-industrial complex that formed it. Something had to be created to justify not dismantling the bloated defense dept. to correctly spend that money on domesctic social programs. The "Peace Dividend" had to be off the table forever.9/11(which I don't believe was an inside job) was the best thing that could happen for the propaganda effort. This was proven under the eight years of W and is being cemented with the current imperator,Our Bomber. If our government was so scared of terroist threats that would destroy our civilization,they would not ignore some http://trueslant.com/allisonkilkenny/page/3/ and only hype the ones that point to Muslims.
http://trueslant.com/allisonkilkenny/2010/05/27/us-to-focus-on-non-white-homegrown-extremists/
The Manichaean Necessary Lie known as the Clash of Civilizations posited by the imperialist intellectual Samuel P. Huntington. is well adapted to be swallowed by Christian/Jewish fundamentalist and secular conservatives/liberals that unifies a collective superior 'Us" to fight off the hoards of "Them".
:
Noam Chomsky on The "Clash of Civilizations"http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qT64TNho59I&feature=related
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8ObJF6KbWEU&feature=related
Professor Olivier Roy compares/likens the current Malthusian anti-Muslim paranoia of Europe verbalized in language of "the Clash of Civilzations" to the current anti-immigrant hysteria here in America. The Muslim immigrant workforce there are the "Mexicans" of Europe. Fundamentalist political Islam is a reacti...on/result of a modern(not primitive) crisis in that culture,not a primitive traditionalist reaction to advanced Western society. The "Clash" concept is the imperialist 'White man's Burden' of the 21st century. That serves Western imperialists and Al-Qaeda.http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Olivier_Roy
Given that's how the racial backgrounds of the migrant labor classes on each continent and the rise of fascist parties using the same anti-immigrant(or Jew or Gypsy) skapegoating while economics causes state of panic. Here we have the fascist laws in Arizona.
I guess what has me thinking about this more lately has been the continuity of the PNAC imperial plan for transforming the Middle East under Obama, and the recent "activism" of atheists lately like the Boobquake and Everybody Draw Mohammed Day was in reaction to a recent South Park cartoon addressing the tabbo on visual representations of the prophet receiving veiled threats from an American radical muslim website founded by an ex-Israeli settler turned convert to political Islam who in all appearances is a COINTELPRO agent provacateur. This immature faux activism of overpriveleged imperial citizens reeks of David Horowitzian islamofascism propaganda and I was dissappointed to see otherwise intelligent and skeptical atheists,liberals,progressives,humanists and others jumping on this bandwagon shared by Christian fundamentalists,Zionists, bigots,racists,and neocons. the pervasiveness of the War on Terror propaganda is playing out the same way as the Cold War.
YouTube is full of racist demagogues embraced for their "daring" atheism in criticising islam, as is the case with bigoted cranky Brit Pat Condell. Jon responds quite appropriately to the scam he is trying to pull using atheism as a cover. Chomsky also puts it best. I recently made similar arguements on Facebook:
As an atheist, I'd like to ask atheists why fall for the fraudulent "Clash of Civilzations" and "War on Terror" propaganda? Why recycle Orientalism in our criticism of religious terrorism? Where is the criticism of the theocratic fanaticism of Zionism/Israeli? Israel has hundreds of nuclear weapons and believes their s...overeignty and real estate comes from "God". The ethnic cleansing of the Palestinans is hardly brought up in the laundry list of crimes of the religious. America has thousands of nukes and is the greatest exporter of military violence/terrorism around the world and we are supposed to be worried about the nationless religious terrorists hiding in caves? As citizens of the American empire,we can affect the violence of our country and our client state Israel. We can do something when our leaders choose religious fanaticism as a guiding principle. Where is the consistency in critical thinking?
These videos made the points I am trying to verbalize politely quite well and I mostly agree:
Why I Refuse to Draw Muhammad
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=z2Wnq2F-bU8
As a libertarian socialist,humanist,anti-racist and atheist--I concur. All that effort could have been channelled into something productive that actually helped people with real problems in their lives. What was accomplished?Catharsis for overprivileged Westerners and a platform for bigotry that serves empire? Epic fail. Catharsis for people here adding insult to injury to our victims that are caught between our military and local fanatics/oppressive regimes. Kind of like teasing the surviving ants being killed by our nation-the bully kid with a magnifying glass. More censorship in the Middle East has been a result of this "free speech" action. Reminds me of the Teabaggers. People in this country can get worked up by astroturfers and truthers to get mobilized to protest windmills or organize boob quakes but "nobody" is in the streets protesting the continued endless wars,BP,the banks,foreclosures,healthcare,forming unions etc.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=TJh5rGL-la4
I think there could have been a better way to actually do what the claims of the event was that would have served free expression better and stuck one to religious terrorists.
My distaste at this quixotic intermingling of beleifs unified by common irrational Islamophobia is best illustrated with my disgust for imperialist cheerleaders turned darlings of the new American atheism movement: intellectual frauds Christopher Hitchens and Ayaan Hirsi Ali. Phoney iconoclasts that are really suck ups to authority and power. Ali is a real pathological piece of work. A good house negro. Like Hitchens,she is a model foreigner lapdog to American imperialism and a darling of the neocons.http://www.aei.org/scholar/117
This sophist neocon slimeball's fraud can't be exposed soon enough. No Christian fundamentalists trying to impose theocracy in America? Muslims aren't being perscuted and desciriminated against here? No such thing as Islamophobia?She pathologically can't be honest. She lied about her persecution and abuse in her native ...country to abuse asylum rules. She is the worst kind of opportunist. She traded one religion for neoconservatism. She can't even back up her propaganda. She's read Alexis de Tocqueville. lol Typical neocon hack. Her last appearance on Bill Maher was a joke. Another Dinesh D'Souza/Michelle Malkin/Jon Mcwhorter giving cover to bigots.I had no idea Ali was with the imperialist revisionist "historian" and fellow Clash-worshipper Niall Ferguson. lol Two of a kind. Their spawn will make Henry Kissinger look like Gandhi. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Niall_Ferguson http://nymag.com/daily/intel/2010/02/and_you_thought_dating_was_har.html
Her establishment-funded propaganda attack on Malalai Joya--- a true freedom fighter unlike herself, belittles someone who has risked her life for freedom from local warlords and American imperialist occupation. For all the criticizing of the lack of rights of women in the region that is didactly proclaimed by neocons, when an independant woman wants to excercise her freedom of self determination for her people,she must shut up,stop resisting, and accept the "help" of her American saviors. You will be celebrated if you speak out against Islamic cultural repression,but don't you dare bring up what America is doing in you country. Ali,whose main beef with Islam is the "submission", is telling this Muslim woman to submit to America.This is Ali's purpose as a cheerleader for empire and I wonder how many atheists who fawn over her will get sucked into doing the same.
Zeno
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