Democrats Are Feigning Outrage At Islamophobia They Helped Create
By Caitlin Johnstone
December 07, 2017 "Information Clearing House" - Days after America’s reality TV president sparked outrage by sharing three violent and misleading anti-Muslim videos by the far-right ultranationalist group Britain First, the US Supreme Court has lifted two injunctions that had been placed by lower courts on the president’s controversial immigration ban. And boy howdy are Democrats pretending to be upset about it.
This is going to be another one of those times where I focus on attacking Democrats for something the Republicans do at least as much, and I make no apologies for that. When you come home to find the babysitter and the baby passed out drunk, you don’t get equally mad at both of them. Democrats present themselves as the party on the American left, which means they’re supposed to be the grownups in the room when it comes to things like peace and social justice, but they’ve been anything but. The GOP has been a party of racist warmongers for a long time and we all know that already — it’s the Democrats who have hijacked and corrupted the space that is supposed to be meant for putting up a robust resistance to those things.
This is heartbreaking. 34,000 Americans die each year from gun violence, tens of millions more lack adequate healthcare, but Trump is brazenly and irrationally framing Muslims as the greatest threat to our security. We are losing our soul in real time. #MuslimBan https://t.co/YJVet2XuBs
Democrats, in general, do not care about the Muslim community. They care about feeling good about themselves, and they care about opposing Republicans, but if they actually cared about Muslim Americans they wouldn’t continually support politicians whose agendas necessitate the war propaganda which has created the frenzied Islamophobia that America is now steeped in.
I will keep saying this and saying this until I am blue in the face: people do not take seriously enough the influence of propaganda upon their lives. Americans are saturated in war propaganda in far more ways than they realize, from the news media they consume to the Pentagon-funded national anthem ceremonies at football games. The consent-manufacturing machine is so entrenched and brazen that earlier this year CNN’s Alisyn Camerota staged a fake, scripted interview with a seven year-old girl to promote US military interventionism. It’s got all the subtlety of a Ben Garrison cartoon.
These things have an effect. To deny that they have an effect is to deny that advertising, a half-trillion dollar industry, has an effect. And the lion’s share of what these relentless war propagandists have been advertising since the turn of the century is military interventionism in Muslim majority countries.
WednesdayWisdom The three Muslim videos @POTUS retweeted today (one of which apparently was not Muslim) are exhibits 101, 102 & 103 in showing the intent behind his Muslim ban is not based on country, but based on religion. That would be illegal.
— @tedlieu
Islamophobia and other forms of bigotry are acts of cowardice, not strength. To the people from communities who feel that they are under attack for their religion or their skin color - New York has your back. You are always welcome here.
Is it any wonder then that America is Islamophobic? America hates Muslims because it needs to. If the propaganda machine didn’t make Americans fear them, it wouldn’t make sense to be constantly killing them.
|
Never Miss Another Story |
Think about it: how can you sell 323 million people on the idea that the US military needs to have its rapey fingers sunk deep in the Middle East at all times or else Muslim terrorists will come and kill them without promoting an irrational fear of Islam? If they let the idea occur to the American public that occasional acts of Islamic terrorism happen because America is invading their land and slaughtering their loved ones, there would be immediate widespread demand to get the hell out of there. This would be difficult for the Pentagon and intelligence agencies that really run America to deal with.
In order to manufacture support for the military presence it uses to secure resources and important strategic locations, the US power establishment must necessarily convince the citizenry that if they weren’t over there invading and bombing, the terrorists would fly or swim all the way over to America to attack them in their homes, because “they hate us for our freedom” or some nonsense. This notion is so thoroughly propagandized into American consciousness that I routinely encounter people who argue that Muslims would definitely keep attacking the west even if the west left them the fuck alone. There is no fact-based reason to believe this whatsoever, but because America is saturated in these propaganda narratives, they believe it. And they fear Islam as a result.
The president is retweeting the Islamophobic rants of a British fascist leader who has been convicted of harassing a Muslim woman in a hijab and who advocates violence against Muslims: https://t.co/kgjTAb7voM
— @MaxBoot
Democrats put very little inertia on the two full-scale ground invasions that George W Bush inflicted upon two Muslim-majority countries in his first term, and once they had one of their own in office they forgot about war altogether. They said nothing as Obama continued and expanded all of Bush’s wars, decimating Libya, burning Syria and raping Yemen along the way all in the name of fighting terrorism. Hundreds of thousands of charred, shredded corpses to keep the world safe from terror, yee-haw!
And Democrats supported it. They support it even now by ignoring Trump’s continuation and expansion of the warmongering policies of his predecessors to focus on fairy tales about Russia and secret Nazism instead. All the policies which necessitate their nation marinating in Islamophobic war propaganda, they supported. The bigotry they condemn is their own creation.
It is impossible to have a country whose economy depends on fossil fuels and keeping the entire Middle East at gunpoint without normalizing Islamophobia. It is impossible to have a country whose foreign policy is built around dominating resources and creating instability overseas to prevent potential future rivals from attaining superpower status. When your entire system of rule depends on marinating your home country in Islamophobia, you get a nation which quickly forgets that its president just retweeted deceitful anti-Muslim videos from Britain First.
If you don’t want this anymore, you’ll have to stop supporting the system which creates it. Both Democrats and Republicans play right along with the warmongering agendas of America’s unelected government, so if you want to live in a nation that isn’t steeped in blood and fear it’s time to stop playing along with those parties and force them to either evolve or die. Until then, we’ll all know your outrage song and dance is pure show.
Caitlin Johnstone: Hey you, thanks for reading! My work is entirely reader-funded so if you enjoyed this piece please consider sharing it around, liking me on Facebook, following me on Twitter, and maybe throwing some money into my hat on Patreon or Paypal.
This article was originally published by Medium -
====
Join the Discussion
It is not necessary for ICH readers to register before placing a comment. This website encourages readers to use the "Report" link found at the base of each comment. When a predetermined number of ICH readers click on the "Report" link, the comment will be automatically sent to "moderation". This would appear to be the most logical way to allow open comments, where you the reader/supporter, can determine what is acceptable speech. Please don't use the report feature simply because you disagree with the author point of view. Treat others with respect, remembering that "A man convinced against his will, is of the same opinion still."- Benjamin Franklin. Please read our Comment Policy before posting -
|
|
