Bush and Islam: Words versus Deeds


by Nicola Nasser
 
Global Research, September 28, 2006 
 


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The wide gap between U.S. President George W. Bush?s words and deeds 
vis-à-vis Islam and Muslims doomed to failure his speech at the United 
Nations on September 19, which could neither appease Muslims nor pacify 
the ever growing Islamophobia.

Hardly a week had passed since his speech, that Winston Churchill - 
author, journalist, former Member of Parliament and grandson of the 
former British prime minister - was speaking at an American university 
to condemn ?Radical Islam? as posing to Western civilization a threat 
similar to that of the Nazis and the Soviets. (1)

President Bush has denied that the West is engaged in a war against 
Islam as a ?false propaganda,? but confirmed his country?s 
determination to carry on with its ?war on terror? and its ?great 
ideological struggle? at the start of the 21st century exclusively 
against Muslims and Muslim countries.

?My country desires peace,? Bush told world leaders at the opening of 
the 61st session of the UN General Assembly, adding: ?Extremists in 
your midst spread propaganda claiming that the West is engaged in a war 
against Islam. This propaganda is false... We respect Islam.? (2)

Bush is also on record as saying that ?Islam is a religion of peace? 
and praising Islam's ?commitment to religious freedom,? statements that 
were criticized by the popular U.S. televangelist Pat Robertson.

These rare expressions of respect for Islam would have been welcomed 
by Muslims were they not swept to utter oblivion in the collective 
memory of the American public by his incessantly flowing anti-Muslim 
terminology: Islamic radicalism, Islamic fascism, Islamic extremism and 
extremists, Islamic or Islamist terrorism and terrorists, radical 
Islamists or Islamist and Islamic radicals, etc.

His September 19 speech was almost exclusively confined to the Middle 
East, an overwhelmingly Muslim region. The absence of even a reference 
to the North Korean pillar of his so-called ?axis of evil? was 
revealing enough that his WWIII (3) ?on terror? has shrunk to focus 
exclusively on the Muslim Middle East.

?At the start of the 21st century, it is clear that the world is 
engaged in a great ideological struggle, between extremists who use 
terror as a weapon to create fear, and moderate people who work for 
peace,? he said, defining the battle lines of his WWIII.

Four days earlier he identified those extremists as being ?Islamic,? 
who ?want to impose? their ?ideology throughout the broader Middle 
East.? Earlier, on August 10, CNN quoted Bush as saying that, ?this 
nation is at war with Islamic fascists.?

He also defined a modern Anglo-Saxon white man?s mission in the 21st 
century as ?our obligation to defend civilization and liberty, to 
support the forces of freedom and moderation throughout the Middle 
East.? (4)

How can mainstream Muslims perceive Bush or the United States as 
respecting Islam when their overwhelming propaganda machine is 
producing this torrential flow of anti-Muslim terminology and their 
overpowering war machine is disintegrating Muslim societies to pre-
state age, allegedly to defend the freedom of American people. How 
could a leader secure his people?s freedom when he deprives other 
peoples of their freedoms!

Jim Lobe is a respected reporter of the Asia Times; in a recent 
article I misquoted him as attributing to Bush?s co-ideologist, Newt 
Gingrich, the term ?WWIII on Islam.? Lobe rightly felt highly indignant 
that his credibility was compromised by my misquotation. Gingrich did 
not literary say it by the word, but he and Bush said it in each and 
every other word.

Bush's ?strategies are not wrong, but they are failing,? in part 
because ?they do not define the scale of the emerging World War III, 
between the West and the forces of Islam,? Gingrich said. (5)

Bush?s attempt to verbally separate between Islam and Muslims in his 
propaganda to justify his pre-emptive American militaristic and 
hegemonic foreign policy is hopeless and doomed to failure.

Five years after U.S. President George W. Bush launched his global war 
on terrorism, this war has boiled down to a war on Islam: One cannot 
target all those Muslims, their countries and their Islamic syllabus 
without targeting their religion.

His global war on terrorism targets ?Islamic terrorism? almost 
exclusively. ?Till recently, of the 36 organisations on the U.S. State 
Department's banned list, 24 were Muslim. The rest were Basque and 
Irish separatists and leftist groups. There were no Christian, Buddhist 
or Hindu groups. The State Department also lists 26 countries whose 
nationals represent an ?elevated security risk? to the U.S. Barring 
North Korea, all are Muslim-majority countries.? (6)

Bush?s religious terminology is shooting his unreligious war in the 
legs, antagonizing not only the mainstream Muslims but also the non-
Muslim large Christian minority in the midst of their ethnic 
compatriots because this minority feels threatened by his inciting anti-
Muslim propaganda, which creates an explosive antagonistic environment 
that plays in the hands of the same extremists whom he uses as a 
scapegoat for his unjust pre-emptive wars.

?Ignorance? of the Middle East and its people is a false thesis that 
sometimes is cited as a justification for Bush?s militarist polices and 
verbal anti-Muslim blunders. But Bush, whose country has been bleeding 
the region?s oil wealth for a century, could not be credited even with 
the benefit of ignorance.

All the anti-Islamist terminology cannot blur the fact that the issue 
is oil. There's no question that controlling the oil and the profits 
from oil is a U.S. top priority in the Middle East, particularly as 
Washington is not only bracing for a future competition with China and 
India for that resource, but also is already in fierce race with Europe 
and Japan to take hold of the strategic asset, which is getting more 
precious and more expensive by the day, because whoever sets hands on 
it will decide who is the future leader of the globalized world 
economy; hence the U.S. war on Afghanistan in the vicinity of the 
central Asian oil reservoir and on Iraq in the heart of the Middle East 
oil reserves huge depot.

In his most blatant self-contradiction Bush declared: ?Freedom, by its 
nature, cannot be imposed, it must be chosen.?

However he did not hesitate to arrogantly dictate to world leaders and 
whipping Muslims into line in his U.N. speech: The world ?must,? the 
United Nations ?must,? the nations gathered ?in this chamber (U.N. 
General Assembly) must?, the Muslim world ?must,? the ?leaders? of 
Iraqis ?must,? the Syrian government ?must;? and to the Hamas-led 
Palestinian government he had an outright order: ?Serve the interests 
of the Palestinian people. Abandon terror, recognize Israel's right to 
exist, honor agreements, and work for peace.?

Bush accuses Islamists of forcing their version of things on others 
while he unsheathes his sword out and high to dictate a 21st century 
white man mission to convert Muslims to a version of Islam that serves 
U.S. interests.

No wonder the National Intelligence Estimate concluded that the 
?pervasive anti-U.S. sentiment among most Muslims,? is a ?movement that 
is likely to grow more quickly than the West's ability to counter it 
over the next five years.? (7)

And Bush still can't come to grips with the question of ?Why they hate 
us.? Bush's line: ?They hate us because of our freedoms.?

No Mr. President, they hate you because your administration and its 
predecessors have been for decades depriving them of their liberty, 
freedoms, resources and elected governments, in a historic trend that 
extends from removing an elected leader in Iran in the 1950s because of 
his nationalizing the oil and replacing him by the Shah, a brutal 
dictator, to suffocating the Palestinian people to squeeze out the 
elected Hamas-led government from power in 2006.

Bush?s scare tactics aimed at American public should not blur the 
divide in Bush?s WWIII. The battle lines should be redrawn to be 
between U.S. and Israeli militarism and military occupation and 
expansion and the liberation movements that were led by nationalists or 
Pan-Arabists in the 20th century and now are led by Islamists.

Bush absurdly, unconvincingly and arrogantly postured as the liberator 
of the Muslim and Arab masses, promoting the U.S. Democracy as a 
campaign of changing Muslim and Arab regimes, by military force if 
needed.

However, Muslims and especially Arabs are very well aware that the end 
of the Cold War and the collapse of the former USSR have made Islam a 
useful scapegoat for tightening the US grip on the unipolar world. 
Books by the Orientalist Bernard Lewis and Samuel Huntington's The 
Clash of Civilizations became popular in the west because they promoted 
the idea that Islam was the main threat to Western ?civilization.?

They are also aware that this war to establish total and lasting U.S. 
global hegemony, a sort of modern-day Roman Empire, is spearheaded in 
the heartland of Muslims and Islam, the Arab world, where all the 
regimes are targeted sooner or later; it makes no difference whether 
they are Islamic, Islamist, secular, liberal, or Pan-Arab regimes, 
monarchies or republics.

Nicola Nasser is a veteran Arab journalist in Kuwait, Jordan, UAE and 
Palestine. He is based in Ramallah, West Bank of the Israeli-occupied 
Palestinian territories.

Notes

(1) Winston Churchill at the Union University on September 26. 
Reported by the Baptist Press BP on Sept. 27, 2006. 
(2) President Bush?s speech at the 61st session of the UN General 
Assembly on September 19, 2006. 
(3)?WWIII? is a term used by the former Republican Speaker of the 
House of Representatives Newt Gingrich in a recent speech at the neo-
conservative American Enterprise Institute (AEI); he was quoted by Jim 
Lobe, Asia Times on September 14, 2006. 
(4) Bush's news conference at the White House on Friday, September 15, 
2006. 
(5) Jim Lobe, Asia Times on September 14, 2006. 
(6) Praful Bidwai, Inter Press Service, September 7, 2006. Reported by 
http://www.snpx.com  
(7) The Washington Post on September 27, 2006.
 
		

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