June 2012 
Year 18    No.166
Focus



Anti-Islam incitement, officially


Pentagon officer advocated total war against Islam


BY HASAN ABU NIMAH

Press reports last week revealed the shocking practice of teaching anti-Islam material to US army personnel at the Pentagon. In one such report, offered by The Independent on May 12, the Pentagon has acknowledged "that an instructor at its Joint Forces (Staff) College in Virginia for military officers was until recently teaching a course advocating ‘total war’ with Islam that could require obliterating the holy cities of Mecca and Medina in Saudi Arabia without concern for civilian deaths".

The Independent report says that the details of the course were obtained by a blog on the websiteWired.com, drawn from a presentation given by the teacher, Lt Col Matthew Dooley, in July last year. In his course called ‘Perspectives on Islam and Islamic Radicalism’, Dooley taught that destroying Islamic holy sites without concern for civilian deaths would follow the precedents of the nuclear strikes in World War II on Hiroshima and Nagasaki and the bombing of Dresden and Tokyo.

The war plan which Dooley presented his trainees with was based on the need for "a direct ideological and philosophical confrontation with Islam". He said: "They hate everything you stand for and will never coexist with you unless you submit." He added that as America waged that war, it would be free to ignore provisions of the Geneva Conventions that set the rules for armed conflict as "no longer relevant", said the report.

In justifying wholesale Muslim civilian deaths in his war plan to Pentagon soldiers, Dooley said Islam had already declared war on the US. As a result, he said, the US should retaliate by waging total war rather than engaging in the current "illogical" American stance of seeking common ground with Islamic leaders around the world. He also taught: "We have now come to understand that there is no such thing as ‘moderate Islam’. It is therefore time for the United States to make our true intentions clear. This barbaric ideology will no longer be tolerated. Islam must change or we will facilitate its self-destruction."

The elective course was offered five times a year for groups of 20 officers at a time. It may therefore have been taught to as many as 800 mid-level and senior US military officers before it was closed down by the Pentagon. Dooley was described as a highly decorated officer who had served in Iraq, Bosnia and Kuwait among other places.

In the meantime, the FBI revealed that it too has recently been forced to revise some of its instruction material to excise references that could have been insulting to Islam. So it was not just the Pentagon.

Naturally, when such embarrassing news came into the open, the act was deplored by US chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, General Martin Dempsey, who said in a press conference at the Pentagon that "it was just totally objectionable, against our values and... academically irresponsible".

Such words may sound soothing and may help calm things down. But they still leave many questions unanswered. Before I start listing some of the questions, I should say that such teaching is much more than objectionable and irresponsible. This is incitement of the first order. It is the perfect prescription for realising the dream of those who based their weird interpretation of history on the fiction of a clash of civilisations in the hope that Islam will be the "modern world’s" target and enemy. This may unfortunately offer evidence that the war on terror has indeed been a war on Islam and the Muslim world and that any claim to the contrary needs meticulous revision.

Now to some questions that may never be answered but must still be highlighted.

How could a teaching course of this dangerous nature run for almost eight years – since 2004 – without being known to the high officials who now rush to denounce it and end it? How did it escape their notice for such a long time?

Is it possible to accept that the 800 educated officers who had over the years taken the course did not realise it was contradictory to US values as well as the simplest principles of civilised behaviour? Is it possible that none of them questioned the legality, let alone the morality, of destroying holy places and killing innocent civilians? And what about the claim that soldiers are routinely educated on the laws of war and the international conventions that govern the conduct of soldiers in times of war? Did no one notice the stark contradiction?

Did none of the students ever mention that something unusual was happening during that course? How could none of those officers have noted that what was taught negated the repeated claims of US President Barack Obama that neither Islam nor Muslims were the enemy and that the only enemy is the terrorist; or did they possibly believe that all Muslims were terrorists? Did the abrasive language used by Dooley not raise doubts in the minds of the trainee officers that that was not the way to spread democracy, to build institutions, to introduce civilised values and to win hearts and minds?

How alarming if there were no doubts in their minds and if the officers accepted the instruction as normal.

These are certainly not all of the questions that come to mind with respect to this stunning disclosure but may suffice for the purposes of a short article.

Let me now turn to the Arab and Muslim world and wonder how the case in question might be perceived.

There could be much shock but little surprise. Shock because this is probably the first time this part of the world realises that such hate instruction has been taking place at the main military establishment in the US. No amount of explaining or rejection is sufficient to eliminate doubt or accept innocence. And little surprise because the last 10 years have witnessed other appalling soldier practices against Muslims and Muslim holy symbols. In 2005 the eruption of the Abu Ghraib prison torture scandal shocked the whole world. So did other cases of desecration, of the Muslim holy book, the Koran, flushing it down the toilet at the Guantánamo Bay detention camp in 2005 and the burning of copies of the Koran by US soldiers at Bagram airbase in Afghanistan this year. It will be extremely difficult now to defend the claim that such acts were individual incidents committed by a few bad apples.

It is sad that the US-Muslim relationship has been unnecessarily subjected to so much harm and abuse when all the right components for an ideal relationship are firmly in place. It will take decades to repair the accumulating damage, assuming that no more shocks and harm are on the way.

(Hasan Abu Nimah is a prominent columnist. This article was published in The Jordan Times on May 15, 2012.)

Courtesy: The Jordan Times;
http://jordantimes.com

 

Anti-Islam teachings are widespread in US law enforcement

New York: 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.

Linda Sarsour, executive director of 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 is part of a much larger problem," Sarsour said, pointing to similar controversies involving the FBI and the New York Police Department (NYPD).

The course echoes a curriculum presented to FBI agents. In September 2011, FBI whistle-blowers provided Danger Room (a national security blog at Wired.com) with a trove of the agency’s training materials in which counterterrorism agents were taught that "main stream" (sic) American Muslims are likely to be terrorist sympathisers; that Prophet Muhammad was a ‘cult leader’; and that the Islamic practice of giving charity is no more than a "funding mechanism for combat".

The influence of anti-Islamic rhetoric has also found its way into municipal police departments. The New York Police Department has been the subject of increasing scrutiny amid a series of reports from the Associated Press (AP) revealing the existence of the department’s so-called "Demographics Unit" which has been used to map out ethnic communities. The unit focused on a list of 28 "ancestries of interest", all of which are predominantly Muslim. In the course of over two dozen articles, AP laid out how the NYPD – with the help of CIA advisers – infiltrated mosques, Muslim community centres and local colleges.

In January 2012 The New York Times revealed that the department had played The Third Jihad – a film which claims that American Muslims of all stripes are in the midst of an effort to seize control of the country – for 1,489 police officers. The NYPD initially denied that any officers had seen the film and said it was not involved in its production but was eventually forced to admit that police commissioner Ray Kelly participated in an interview for the film.

Sarsour said the latest revelations showed the problem was widespread. "It’s not just the department of defence. It’s not just the military. It’s anywhere from showing a movie like The Third Jihad to 1,500 New York city police officers to training FBI agents that Muslims are easily radicalised to become terrorists."

She said the Islamophobic lessons taught to US military and law enforcement personnel have further damaged national security. "There’s already a deficit of trust between the community and law enforcement." Sarsour argued that such revelations feed the narrative offered by extremist groups. "We’re basically confirming what al-Qaeda is telling Muslims across the world," she said. "Our government should be up in arms to know that this is happening, particularly at the department of defence, in a very fragile time in the Middle East."

Ryan Devereaux on guardian.co.uk, May 11, 2012

 


[ Subscribe | Contact Us | Archives | Khoj | Aman ]
[ Letter to editor  ]

Copyrights © 2002, Sabrang Communications & Publishing Pvt. Ltd.