Friday, May 11, 2012

Islamophobia.— The new "red scare"

A course at a military academy that taught US officers to prepare for “total war” with Islam does not represent an isolated incident, campaigners have warned.

The Pentagon moved swiftly to distance itself from revelations that officers in a defense department class were taught that “Hiroshima”-style tactics would be needed to combat the threat from Islam.“It was totally objectionable, against our values and it wasn’t academically sound,” said General Martin Dempsey, chairman of the joint chiefs of staff.

The class in question was canceled in April and Dempsey noted the instructor responsible for the course, army lieutenant colonel Matthew A Dooley, is “no longer in a teaching status”. Dooley, however, is still employed at the Joint Forces Staff College in Norfolk, Virginia.
 Linda Sarsour, executive director at the Arab American Association of New York, said the course is merely the latest example in a proliferation of anti-Muslim teaching materials in law-enforcement agencies. “It’s part of a much larger problem,” Sarsour said, pointing to similar controversies involving the FBI and the New York police department.
Read it at Raw Story
Anti-Islam teachings ‘widespread’ in U.S. law enforcement
By Ryan Devereaux | The Guardian (UK)

Islam is the latest iteration of the "red scare." America needs an enemy and now that "atheistic Communism" is history, it is Islam and China in the crosshairs. Well, you need some excuse to keep the military-industrial-governmental complex going at the extraordinary level it is being funded at, as well as an excuse to create a police state to control "insurgency and terrorism."

2 comments:

Matt Franko said...

Ralph,

Something is attracting them to the west. Or else they wouldn't be here.

Resp,

Tom Hickey said...

@ ecks why


Add up all the dead bodies and I'd say Christianity is still way ahead. And there are some pretty gruesome reports in the Hebrew scriptures about genocide, which are being justified on the same basis today.

The sentiment in the post goes to show the thinking that has led there and continues to do so, and so does the sentiment expressed in your offensive comment.

Is all this an argument against religion? I don't think so. I was having dinner with an Afghan Sufi sheik some time ago, and he was saying that all this terrorism (Islamofascism" to the West) and war on terror ("Crusaderism" to the East) has nothing to do with real religion, which is spirituality and is the same for all people but expressed differently in terms of language, culture and geography. He said that the the Islamist view of Islam is politics pure and simple, harnessing emotional fervor with religious misunderstanding for political advantage.