May 6, 2006 

Also published in Counterpunch and Muslims Weekly

It was the potshot heard round the world that touched off a counter-crusade. Packaged in western free speech cliches, and marketed as innocent satire, the newspaper Jylland-Posten's depiction of the Prophet Muhammad as a terrorist/suicide bomber with a ticking bomb for a turban was "provocation-entrapment" propaganda. Dual-use entertainment, in this case frivolous caricature, is an unexamined aspect of "full spectrum information dominance." The US Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld's "Information Operations Roadmap" mandates that 'information warfare' utilize all cultural venues to further its agenda- news, posters, books, movies, art, internet, and music etc.

Can comedy be far behind? At recent CIA training sessions in Dubai, Iranian opposition agent provocateurs were taught the importance of mockery and ridicule when used to discredit and 'demythologize' an enemy or incite against it. Even populist actions like grafitti "could embolden the student movement and provoke a general government crackdown, which could then be used as a pretext to 'spark' a mass uprising that appeared to be spontaneous." (Asia Times, Mar 14, 06). Such provocation tactics operated in the cartoon intifada, as well as in US Embassy-coordinated "color revolutions".

The Institute of World Politics recently confirmed the "ridicule Arabs" policy in it's Public Diplomacy White Paper No. 7 called "Ridicule: An instrument in the war on terrorism."   It urges the exploitation of Muslim cultural shame and humiliation as a "devastatingly powerful weapon" that is "like a gun" which would deliver a "fate worse than death" to the Muslim adversary.  The policy paper specifically cites the powerful effects of ridicule from the Muhammad cartoons.  Those involved with the Institute of World Policy are neocons such as the US State Department's Paula Dobriansky, the Office of Special Plan's Douglas Feith, Francis Fukuyama and former CIA directors George Tenet and James Schlesinger.

As a free speech crusader, Flemming Rose, Jyllands-Posten's editor behind the Muhammad cartoons (and ally/author of a Daniel Pipes profile "The Threat from Islam"), had earlier refused to publish denigrating cartoons of Jesus, fearing it would "offend readers." Jylland-Posten also rescinded sponsorship of a Holocaust cartoon contest for the same reason. Kurt Westergaard, Jylland-Posten's 'Muhammad bomb' illustrator even transcribed a Koranic verse onto Muhammad's turban to reinforce his message. Westergaard later admitted to The Herald of Glasgow, Scotland that "terrorism" which he said got "spiritual ammunition" from Islam was the inspiration for that message.

If propaganda is a weapon of war, Islam is under carpet bombing. Nazi propagandist Joseph Goebbels described the methods, which define those used today: "Concentrating the fire of all the media on one particular point- a single theme, a single enemy, a single idea- the campaign uses this concentration of all media, but progressively..."Theme: "War on Terror" Enemy: Muslims. Addressing the 2006 AIPAC "Now is the Time to Stop Iran" Conference, Israeli Ambassador to the UN, Daniel Gillerman summarized the Idea: "While it may be true- and probably is- that not all Muslims are terrorists, it also happens to be true that nearly all terrorists are Muslim." Former Iranian President Mohammad Khatami put it another way: "the West needs an enemy, and this time it is Islam. And Islamophobia becomes part of all policies of the great powers, of hegemonic powers."
                                                                     
Is Islamophobia de facto state policy? Italian prime minister Silvio Berlusconi declared in 2001 that Western civilization is superior to the Islamic World: "We should be confident of the superiority of our civilization, which consists of a value system that has given people widespread prosperity in those countries that embrace it, and guarantees respect for human rights." He added that this superiority entitled the West to "occidentalize and conquer new people." Another Italian official MP Roberto Calderoni flaunted his Muhammad cartoon T-shirt on TV, warning of a an "Islamic attack on the West." French Interior Minister Nicolas Sarkozy pronounced Muslim immigrants "gangrene" and "scum," and one Danish MP labeled Muslims "a cancer in Denmark."

In America, Illinois Congressman Mark Kirk commented: "I'm okay with discrimination against young Arab males from terrorist-producing states." Texas Congressman Sam Johnson bragged to a crowd of veterans that he had advised Bush to nuke Syria, and Colorado Congressman Tom Tancredo advocated wiping out Mecca to get even with Muslims for terrorist attacks.  Recently the Bush administration itself revealed its plans to "nuke Iran" with bunker buster bombs.

Zionist Neocon Daniel Pipes, a representative at the Congress-sponsored think tank US Institute for Peace, (who was appointed by Bush despite heavy public protest against Pipe's racism) recently diagnosed Muslims as carriers of a sinister, latent psychopathic contagion: "Individuals may appear law-abiding and reasonable, but they are part of a totalitarian movement, and as such, all must be considered potential killers... This is what I have dubbed the Sudden Jihad Syndrome, whereby normal-appearing Muslims abruptly become violent. It has the awful but legitimate consequence of casting suspicion on all Muslims. Who knows whence the next jihadi? How can one be confident a law-abiding Muslim will not suddenly erupt in a homocidal rage?"

Muslims' angry reactions to the cartoon provocation unwittingly served a goal of Pipe's Anti-Islamist Institute: "the delegitimation of the Islamists. We seek to have them shunned by the government, the media, the churches, the academy and the corporate world." For once, Israel, America and Europe were united to protect civilization's free speech virtues against "crazed, rampaging", "dirty arabs" or, as Pipes himself once remarked, "brown-skinned peoples cooking strange foods and not exactly maintaining Germanic standards of hygiene."

I asked Pipes about the systemic racism and Muslim/Arab 'terrorist' stereotypes in the US media. Pipes said: "I would strongly, strongly disagree. There is an enormous amount of media that is very, very positive about Muslims, an enormous amount. I see it everyday. There is a steady stream of media that is very positive about Muslims- steady, steady, steady. I see it everyday- all the time..." When persistently pressed to name five positive stories or Muslim role models among this plethora of good news- authors, academics, lawyers, celebrities etc. Pipes could not give a single example. But he easily supplied numerous names of prominent Arab Americans allegedly 'linked' to terrorism.

Despite disclaimers, bigoted, hideous and contemptuous anti-Muslim content continues unabated: hooded corpses in Abu Ghraib displayed by jovial "thumbs up" troops, force-fed hunger strikers at Guantanamo (who Donald Rumsfeld wisecracked were "on a diet"), refugee camps flattened, Palestinians starving, taunts of "Taliban lady boys" after US troops had set fire to Afghan bodies, ubiquitous car bombings, wedding parties crushed, mosques massacred, civilians attacked with cluster bombs and daisy cutters. Depleted uranium mutating future generations, and a thousand Iraqi pilgrims stampeded to death in an hour... In the midst of which President Bush pantomimed & joked about missing WMD's to an applauding, jeering Radio & Television Correspondents Association that call themselves a press corp. Antics befitting a noncombatant President who greeted the initial bombing of Iraq with pumped fists: "I feel good!" (BBC)  "See in my line of work you got to keep repeating things over and over and over again for the truth to sink in, to kind of catapult the propaganda." (George W Bush, 5/24/05)

This state-sponsored smirking has trickled down to spawn a climate of recreational cruelty in the US military. Reflecting anti-Muslim propaganda while perpetuating it, is the "Rumsfeld Contingent" of the armed forces. Deputy Undersecretary of Defense, Lt. Gen. William Jerry Boykin propagated hate at the grassroots level in dozens of speeches to church groups, saying that the war on terror was actually spiritual warfare, with the enemy 'Satan' being embodied by Islam. Speaking of God versus Allah he said: "Well, you know what I knew, that my God was bigger than his. I knew that my God was a real God, and his was an idol." Secretary of Defense Rumsfeld defended Boykin, so it was unsurprising that after Abu Ghraib crimes erupted Boykin found "no pattern of misconduct."

                      
Student activities center, New York University                        Sharia peaceniks organize, Damascus University                                                                               

 

ADDENDUM:  Wash Times, 5/5/06: "Danish Prime Minister Anders Fogh Rasmussen said yesterday that the furor over the cartoons of the prophet Muhammad had "strengthened our resolve for the long haul" for Danish troops to remain in Iraq.  Recent polls in Denmark show that conservative parties have benefitted from the controversy.

New York Times, 5/6/06:  Professor J. Michael Waller at the Institute of World Politics wrote a paper currently circulating at the Pentagon which advocates using ridicule against adversaries.  He said: "In Arab and Muslim societies, pride and shame are felt much more profoundly than they are in western culture" and this trait should be exploited in the War on Terror.                                                 
            Baghdad University students, pre-invasion 2003 . Girl's tan shirt says  'NYC'