It’s Not the Koran, It’s
Us
The corporate media chorus willfully ignores
that U.S. actions, not Islam, fuel jihadism.
By Leonard C. Goodman
January 01, 2015 "ICH"
- "In
These Times" - For
a brief time after the 9/11 terror attacks,
Americans could be heard asking the
reasonable question: Why do these men from
Middle Eastern countries (back then, mostly
Saudis) hate us so much that they would give
their own lives to cause us pain? Within a
few weeks, the official explanation became:
They hate us for our freedom, end of story.
When you follow the money, it
is easy to understand why the government
avoided any honest discussion of the causes
of terrorism. By one estimate, U.S.
taxpayers have squandered $10 trillion over
four decades to protect the flow of oil on
behalf of multinational corporations. The
result is an empire of U.S. military bases
which have garrisoned the Greater Middle
East. In the Persian Gulf alone, the United
States has bases in every country save Iran.
These bases support repressive, undemocratic
regimes, and act as staging grounds to
launch wars, interventions and drone
strikes. And they generate tremendous
profits for defense contractors.
The existence of these
bases helps generate radicalism,
anti-American sentiment and terrorist
attacks. The drone attacks have incited even
more hatred for us, which should come as
little surprise. The U.S. uses drones to
incinerate suspected militants (and anyone
else in the vicinity) on secret evidence,
but only if they are living in Muslim
nations like Pakistan, Yemen, Iraq or
Somalia. We don’t fly killer drones over
dangerous neighborhoods in Detroit or
Chicago, or in Iguala, Mexico, where 43
students were recently massacred by gang
members aided by corrupt police.
The fact that our
misguided foreign policy creates terrorism
is almost never discussed in polite society.
There is of course no justification for a
terror attack on innocents. But if our
leaders truly cared as much about protecting
Americans from terror as they do about
protecting corporate profits, they would
have an honest discussion of what’s
prompting the violence.
The truth is that nearly
every terror attack or threat to America by
an Islamic extremist can be directly linked
to “blowback” from our ventures in the
Middle East. Osama bin Laden cited the
presence of U.S. troops on Saudi holy land
as a motivation for the 9/11 attacks.
Dzhokhar Tsarnaev said the Boston marathon
bombing was “retribution for the U.S. crimes
against Muslims in places like Iraq and
Afghanistan.” Faisal Shahzad said his
attempted bombing in Times Square was
“retaliation for U.S. drone attacks” in
Pakistan, which he had personally witnessed.
The underwear bomber, Umar Farouk
Abdulmutallab, said that his attempt to blow
up a U.S. airliner bound for Detroit was
revenge for U.S. attacks on Muslims. Last
month in Chicago, a teenager was arrested
attempting to travel to Syria to join ISIS.
He explained in a letter to his parents that
he was upset that he was obligated to pay
taxes that would be used to kill his Muslim
brothers and sisters overseas. But when the
Chicago Tribune told the story, it left this
fact out, instead reporting that the teen
had complained about the immorality of
Western society.
The truth about what is
radicalizing Muslims to hate the West is
rarely discussed in the mainstream press or
in political debate. Instead, we are told by
corporate-funded terror experts like the
Brookings Institution’s William McCants and
the Aspen Institute’s Frances Townsend that
Islam is the origin of radical ideology.
Anti-American jihadis supposedly learn to
hate by reading the Koran and going to
mosques. So one-sided is the discussion that
even Bill Maher, a prominent liberal, has
publicly described Islam as the “one
religion in the world that kills you when
you disagree with them.”
With the launch of our
latest multi-billion-dollar war in Iraq and
Syria, the United States has now bombed at
least 13 countries in the Greater Middle
East since 1980. A UN report suggests that
Washington’s latest air campaign against
ISIS has led foreign militants to join the
movement on “an unprecedented scale.” This
time, the terror experts haven’t bothered to
pretend that we have a coherent plan or any
chance of improving the dire situation in
those countries. Still, they agree that ISIS
militants’ anti-U.S. hatred originates with
their Islamic faith and is unrelated to any
U.S. actions.
As the novelist Upton
Sinclair once observed: It is difficult to
get a man to understand something when his
job depends on not understanding it.
Leonard Goodman is a
Chicago criminal defense lawyer and Adjunct
Professor of Law at DePaul University.
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