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=> 'Intelligence' and Islamophobia - PowerPointed and neoconned

'Intelligence' and Islamophobia - PowerPointed and neoconned
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‘Intelligence’ and Islamophobia – PowerPointed and neoconned
by Paul Mutter on July 29, 2011

http://mondoweiss.net/2011/07/intelligence-and-islamophobia-powerpointed-and-neoconned.html

A barely legible 2009 FBI PowerPoint on “Islam” has come down the Freedom of Information Act (FOIA) line at a very unfortunate time following the right-wing terrorist attacks in Norway. But it is very much part of that tragedy. The 62-slide PowerPoint presentation, which the FBI states that it is no longer in use, is for training interrogators to interview Muslim suspects. A few slides in, and one shudders what to think it has been replaced by, though.
A slide titled “Islam 101” presents – as fact – that Islam "transforms country's culture into 7th century Arabian ways."
The same slide also acknowledges (unironically, given the quality of the presentation), that Islam is “hard for Westerners to understand.” But at least Westerners think factually - the "Arabic mind is swayed more by words than ideas, and more by ideas than facts," reads another slide. The Western mind, presumably, is analytical, unlike the "Arabic" one (the report wavers between distinguishing between Arabs and Muslims - this one of the points where it blurs them together).
Analytical information is what this report lacks most. “Muslims,” the report notes midway through, after dispensing with a great deal of basic statistics, “are fundamentally and inalienably spiritual while the West is purely materialistic” (not that this stops politicians, commentators or right-wing terrorists from depicting an mythical alliance between Islam and "the Left" (aka "liberals") as a major threat to Western civilization).
The content of the PowerPoint is not unlike that of the Islamophobic blogosphere: the ethnic and cultural-religious smears could easily have come from a site like Atlas Shrugs, The Gates of Vienna or Jihad Watch. And it is really symptomatic of how mainstream Islamophobia has become today that such hate speech can be interchanged with statements in "intelligence" training materials. Opportunistic “Islam” experts have ingratiated themselves in the U.S. political establishment and our ostensibly objective intelligence agencies, from the FBI to the U.S. Army.
Surely, when attempting to understand a real, but specific, threat, American officials should be trained to view over a billion people as inscrutable and medieval time bombs just waiting to overrun the West. The Gates of Vienna, for instance, actively invokes this scenario – it proclaims that it’s struggle against “Islamization” is a continuation of an age-old war for civilization; Atlas Shrugs reguraly suggests that "willful stupidity" in the U.S. towards Muslims - and, by extension, multiculturalism - will result in submission to "Islamic supremacism" - not unlike the ultranationalist British National Party in the UK.
Hard to understand, perhaps, but not hard to make money, power and fame from by bashing it. "The Great Fear," Max Blumenthal notes, geared up during the lead-in to the 2003 Iraq War. The neoconservatives in the White House and Department of Defense had their grand hope of not only settling the score with Saddam and doing good by oil (“60% of the earth’s oil reserves [are] in or near [the] Arabian Peninsula,,” notes the PowerPoint) but also bringing a Pax Americana to the Middle East. This group of like-minded men and women first came together during the 1970s to urge a more hardline stance for Israel and against communism, these neocons now railed against the "Islamofascist" bogeyman. Having their teeth in the first Gulf War and saw the second as a grand opportunity to orient U.S. foreign policy towards their ideological bent.
And what better way to achieve consensus on such a controversial project than by demonizing the enemy’s civilization? We’re not at war with Islam, then-President George W. Bush noted, but Islamophobes seemed to either miss or ignore that message. And so the anti-Muslim machine – a very diverse machine – took the security jitters and anti-Islamic sentiments resulting from 9/11 and turned them into a still-politically potent force. Republican Congressman Peter King's hearings on "Muslim (and only Muslim) radicalization" in the U.S. are one of this year's most notable developments, but it is not the only demonstration of the potency of Islamophobia in U.S. politics.
Republican presidential hopeful Michele Bachmann's foreign policy advisers include the neoconservative Frank Gaffney, who routinely rails against the "Islamofascist" threat to the U.S. and Israel (he sometimes conflates "the threat" with President Obama). Gaffney is no obscure ivory tower intellectual, though. During the Bush administration, Gaffney was an outspoken champion of the argument that Osama bin Laden and Saddam Hussein were both involved in the 9/11 attacks. That a serious presidential contender can bring such an individual onto her campaign demonstrates just how mainstream Islamophobia is today. Gaffney is part of the conservative camp that includes Daniel Pipes, founder of Campus Watch, the self-appointed watchdog of Middle Eastern affairs in U.S. academia, and David Horowitz, among others. These intellectuals' work carried weight with Bush Administration officials such as Dick Cheney, Donald Rumsfeld, Paul Wolfowitz and Richard Perle.
In such a climate, intellectuals, politicians, journalists, nonprofit groups and intelligence analysts – most of whom are self-taught on "Islam" – have been raking in millions of dollars from their work outlining the supposed “Islamic” threat to America. Other outlets have noted that these “experts” have even been hired by the federal government to do training and consultative work.
The Washington Monthly has outlined how “counterterrorism trainers for hire” have ingratiated themselves with state and local law enforcement across the U.S. – offering helpful advice to police on how to deal with Muslim suspects by employing “legal harassment," a profiling tactic that assumes Muslims are guilty until proven innocent – one trainer described in the Monthly suggested that U.S. police raid convenience stores owned by Muslims (which, according to the trainer, all launder money for terrorists) under the cover of health code violations.
Even less “intelligence” is needed to be a politician with a similar opinion on the Islamic Question – though most are careful to present “the fight against Islam” in non-violent terms (“war” and “fight” are metaphors, they shouldn’t be taken literally – a clarification that, as in other debates, often only becomes clear following a literal bloodbath). “Anti-Islamization” Dutch politician Geert Wilders, for instance, affirms that “the global anti-Islamic movement” has always been a campaign to be won through “the power of the ballot box and the wisdom of the voter. Not bombs and guns.” In the U.S., the specter of “Sovietization” has been superseded (but not replaced) by the specter of “Sharia Law” replacing the Constitution. Bills have come up through multiple state legislatures to “preempt” the “Islamization of America.” Thankfully, America’s awakened bloggers and legislators won’t let that happen here (although there is still no consensus on what century the bill’s sponsors would like to take the U.S. back to).
It’s perfectly acceptable to draw broad conclusions like these in the mainstream media, too: The Washington Post ran an op-ed that immediately placed blame for the July 2011 Norway attacks on Islamists – and went on to reiterate the need to boost defense spending in light of the omnipresent “jihadist” threat. When it became apparent that Muslims were not behind the attack, the Post did not apologize for the inaccuracies – and the editorialist in question, Jennifer Rubin, simply reiterated her original argument by stating that while she was wrong on the particulars, “There is no shortage of threats. There is no shortage of evil. Democratic governments have many demands on tax dollars, but none is more important than defending the lives and security of our citizenry.” (Rubin also distinguished Breivik as a “lone-wolf” in contrast to “organized jihadists,” implying that the latter is the greater, omnipresent threat).
Not very subtle, but Islamophobia and neoconservativism rarely are.
In the blogosphere, sites like Atlas Shrugs, Jihad Watch and The Gates of Vienna are just some of the better-known outlets pandering Islamophobia as breaking news and informed commentary. There are thousands of similar blogs and organizations in the U.S. and the EU - and mainstream media is airing these views as part of a "balanced" commentary on "Islam." U.S. commentators are increasingly linking up with their European counterparts (who for years have been encroaching on the margins of respectability – electorally and rhetorically – in the EU over Muslim immigration).
Speaking of imagined conspiracies (like Hezbollah laundering money through the local 7-11) and polemicists, Robert Spencer, now infamous because of Anders Breivik’s liberal citations of Jihad Watch posts in his manifesto, gets 2 nods in the “Recommended Reading” slide of the FBI presentation – 2 of his books, out of only 8 books in total, the FBI thought necessary to include here on this list are his.
Given the focus these sites give to culture in the Muslim world, it is not surprising that so much of the “jihadist” discussion in the PowerPoint is juxtaposed with (unrelated) aspects of Islamic culture. A photo of a Muslim circumcision ceremony is presented following a slide that reads “Things to use/consider for successful interviews/interrogations with individuals from the M.E.” [Middle East]. Presumably, knowing that Muslims practice circumcision is a crucial component of U.S. security. Also: that they have prayer beads.
One can only guess at how many terror plots have been foiled now that we are armed with this knowledge.
It also helps to portray entire nations – millions of people – as targets who are as much front-line combatants in “the struggle” as soldiers are. But, of course, this kind of total war-mass civilian casualty conceptualization is only a metaphor when Westerners use it.
This PowerPoint offers much insight into the sort of thinking that has made Islamophobia an acceptable aspect of Western political “discourse.” Throughout history, Americans have castigated particular groups as subhuman. Blacks = apes, Japanese = spies, Jews = swindlers, Latinos = illegals. Now, the bogeyman is “the Muslim” (and/or “the Arab”).
For instance, that the Muslim inclination to terrorism can be determined by a sliding scale. Phrenologists rejoice. There is a helpful scale of tolerance on one slide to help determine whether one’s interrogation subject is a mild-mannered “Shaffii” (rated as most tolerant) or a sinister, suicide-bombing “Salafi Jihadi” (rated as least tolerant, with a helpful snapshot of a bearded man wearing a skullcap for profiling purposes!).
The irony is that in casting hundreds of millions of people as potential oppressors and villains, the Islamophobes are aping the “Islamists” they claim to be the vanguard against. Ayman Al-Zawahiri and Anders Breivik have much in common, as the American right is arguing, though for very different reasons than they suggest – they make an operational link; I’m making a philosophical one.
Actual advocates of Islamist terrorism and the Islamophobic commentators that Breivik latched on to too have a lot in common. Some commentators have distinguished Breivik's actions from Al Qaeda's because of their "political" character, but this is a nonissue. All terrorist actions - and the ideologies that motivate them - are political actions. The tools of bigotry, incitement to violence and fear mongering are nonsectarian - they serve a calculated purpose, which is to mobilize people to gain legitimacy. Such support legitimizes heinous actions - and Islamophobic speech is helping legitimize any and all measures against "Quislings" who don't see that "Islam" is "the enemy" (just as anti-Semitic speech after 1917 has often lumped together Jews and Communists).
How is this done? The PowerPoint shows the way. On its sole “Recommended Reading” slide, the Quran is also included, as is Islamist godfather Sayyid Qutb’s seminal anti-Western screed, Milestones – which is basically like saying an FBI agent could get a good understanding of Christianity just from reading the Bible and former KKK leader David Duke’s Jewish Supremacism (or that Judaism can be understood by a reading of the Torah and The Protocols of the Elders of Zion).
The above is the general formula one sees by the detractors of any ideology: pick a main text, and then take an extreme “derivative” of it and paint to that extremism as the norm. It’s very effective – for one thing, it’s not mentally taxing – and it makes someone who is appreciably (or not appreciably) different easier to hate. Islamophobia plays on conformation biases and self-pity – as Antiwar Radio’s Justin Raimondo suggests, just go look at the Book of “Rebuilding America’s Defenses” from the neoconservative bible Project for a New American Century, for a relevant example – one especially relevant because of the imagining of the West against the rest (but specifically the "Muslim" rest). Blending together a visibly outsider (Muslims) with a populist fervor (anti-elitism) into a political package is a surefire way to win at the polls – or at least make a statement people won’t soon forget.
One can only hope that the FBI is getting better intelligence these days from its PowerPoints. It certainly isn't getting it from most media outlets.
But hope, and facts, are sadly overrated in the face of fear. Which is exactly what extremists - no matter what creed they subscribe to - want.
{ 7 comments… read them below or add one }

DICKERSON3870 July 29, 2011 at 4:00 pm
RE: “Islamophobia plays on conformation biases and self-pity…”
MY QUESTION: Conformation biases or confirmation biases?
Confirmation bias – link to en.wikipedia.org
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mudder July 29, 2011 at 4:29 pm
As’ad AbuKhalil is always good for a quip: “Among the books the FBI recommend to learn about Islam is none other than Raphael Patai’s The Arab Mind. You have to admit this: the US really works hard to maintain and expand its ignorance.”
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Mndwss July 29, 2011 at 4:50 pm
Yesterday most norwegian newspapers printed an article from NTB (Norwegian News Agency) about a statement from the european version of FBI (Europol).
Europol: Militant islamists is more dangerous to europe than right wing extremists.
link to aftenposten.no
A europol report says that 1 ! terrorist incident in europe in 2009 was conducted by Islamists.
The rest (293!!!!!!) was by non muslims.
0,34% is the biggest threat.
link to walt.foreignpolicy.com
Media and police in europe is not very different from the US version.
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Mndwss July 29, 2011 at 5:48 pm
Victims of Islamophobia :
link to vg.no
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annie July 29, 2011 at 7:29 pm
devastating. those faces, lives, beauty and cut short
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muzz al atesta July 29, 2011 at 6:06 pm
dropping knowledge like a bomb. excellent summary imho.
i’d just like to add to the gallery the one & only infamous Elliott “El Mozote” Abrams, who of all people Brand Obama recently thought would be an interesting guy to talk to about Middle East Policy and invited over to his place.
Abrams accepted and then pulled out.
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mudder July 29, 2011 at 8:50 pm
Since you mention Atlas Shrugged, you may want to know about the big story harpy Geller’s archnemisis Charles Johnson has found at LGF: link to littlegreenfootballs.com



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