The Bush Doctrine is Islamophobic

The Bush Doctrine resembles earlier witch hunts like the Spanish Inquisition, the Third Reich, and the McCarthy era. In all three, a category of people is labelled as an evil, dangerous enemy in order to mobilize popular support for the elite’s ambitions to power. Institutions are created to isolate, scapegoat, and eliminate the target group. Those institutions also transform the entire society to become more doctinare, rigid, and authoritarian. Those who challenge the status quo are punished or killed. Free thought is outlawed. Inequality rises. Arbitrary decree replaces systems of justice.

Islamophobia is usually considered an attitudinal prejudice, similar to racism or anti-Semitism, as in this definition of Islamophobia:

Islamophobia refers to the fear and/or hatred of Islam, Muslims or Islamic culture. Islamophobia can be characterized by the belief that all or most Muslims are religious fanatics, have violent tendencies toward non-Muslims, and reject …equality, tolerance, and democracy. It is viewed as a new form of racism whereby Muslims …are…constructed as a race. A set of negative assumptions are made of the entire group to the detriment of members of that group.

However, Bush’s Islamophobia systematically institutionalizes and actively promotes discriminatory assaults on Muslims and Muslim countries (By contrast, racism and anti-Semitism are at least formally illegal and generally condemned in the media, courts, and schools). The ‘‘war on terror’’ incorporates structures – laws, prisons, intelligence agencies, surveillance infrastructure, military and corporate contracts, bombs, etc. – which target Muslims and Arabs in particular.

Islamophobia is as central to the Bush Doctrine as anti-Semitism was to the Spanish Inquisition or the Third Reich. Both oppressions function to whip up fear, contempt, and genocidal rage against a whole people. Without this bogey-man, Bush’s “war on terror” would be exposed for what it is—a brutal, greedy grab for world conquest. As Norman Solomon, executive director of the Institute for Public Accuracy, recently pointed out, “There’s a lot of anti-Muslim bigotry. Some of it is based on religious chauvinism from Christians and Jews. Some of it is racist….[But]…Ultimately… public hostility toward Islam in the United States [and its allies] today is mostly a matter of geopolitics and U.S. nationalism” (Deen, 2005).

U.S. invasions of Afghanistan and Iraq were justified by Islamophobic assertions that their leaders are Muslim fanatics who threaten American security. Portrayed as primitive, anti-feminist, terrorists, people labelled “Taliban” are hunted down like vermin. Those who are not bombed or shot are detained in horrendous conditions. In November, 2001, for example, CIA and U.S. Special Forces watched approvingly as 4,500 Afghani men were stuffed into truck containers where they either suffocated or were shot (Herman, 2004). Afghani and Iraqi people who presume to resist U.S. occupation (or simply to drive too quickly toward U.S. check points) are presumed to be “terrorists” and are summarily killed. The Afghan and Iraqi wars have left both countries devastated. Their people subsist under semi-permanent, military occupation, without basic infrastructure or humanitarian aid, while oil rigs and natural gas pipelines are protected.

Dick Cheney defends torture as a legitimate interrogation tool (Priest & Wright, 2005), including specific attacks on Muslims, such as wiping prisoners with menstrual blood, forcing them to eat pork, threatening them with dogs (viewed as unclean by Muslims), and flushing Qur’ans down toilets (Human Rights Watch, 2005). To bypass Geneva Conventions against mistreating and torturing prisoners, the U.S. calls non-citizen Muslim detainees “enemy combatants” or more recently “unprivileged belligerants”. And under the neologism of “extraordinary rendition”, Muslem citizens are sent off to countries like Egypt, Syria, and Jordan with which have been contracted to torture them (Johnston, 2005).

Almost 100,000 Muslim men worldwide are being detained without charges “in secretive American-run jails and interrogation centres similar to the notorious Abu Ghraib Prison” under conditions which violate the Universal Declaration of Human Rights, the Geneva Conventions on the Treatment of Prisoners, and U.N. Standard Minimum Rules for the Treatment of Prisoners (Buncombe & Sengupta 2004; Siddiqui, 2004, p. A23).

Muslims and Arabs living in the West have also been targeted for official discriminatory treatment. After the U.S. Department of Justice passed a regulation allowing indefinite detention on September 20, 2001, nearly 1,200 Arabs and Muslims were secretly arrested and detained without charges (Coke, 2003, p.95; (Martin, 2003, p. 75). The U.S. National Security Entry-Exit Registration System (NSEERS) “call-in” program required male visitors from 24 Arab and Muslim countries and North Korea to register with INS offices. Even though no “terrorists” were found, over 13,000 of the 80,000 men who registered were threatened with deportation, and many were “detained in harsh conditions” (Zogby, 2005, p. 4). Overwhelmingly, the airline “no fly” lists are composed of Muslims.

Partially taken from the article ISLAMOPHOBIA AND THE ‘‘WAR ON TERROR’’: THE CONTINUING PRETEXT FOR U.S. IMPERIAL CONQUEST by Diana Ralph, Ph.D.