Islamophobia, US domestic policy and FBI paranoid-xenophobia

Islamophobes Insinuate Their Way Into U.S. Intelligence
By Paul Mutter, August 1, 2011 – FPIP

A barely legible 2009 FBI PowerPoint on “Islam” has come down the FOIA line at a very unfortunate time following the July 2011 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 A few slides in, and one shudders what to think it has been replaced by, though – an email sent to intelligence officials linking to the anti-Islamic blogs Jihad Watch, Atlas Shrugs and The Gates of Vienna (which asks if there is to be “Surrender, Genocide . . . or What?” regarding Islam in Europe)?

It wouldn’t be much of a leap, given the content of the “intelligence” in the presentation – and the way that such outlets, and other 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.

Intelligence 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 or right-wing terrorists from depicting an Islamic-Marxist alliance as a major threat to Western civilization).

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 evokes this scenario – it proclaims that its struggle against “Islamization” is a continuation of an age-old war for civilization.)

But yet, it does just that. A slide titled “Islam 101” presents – as fact – that Islam “transforms country’s culture into 7th century Arabian ways.”

The same slide also acknowledges, without even a hint of irony, that Islam is “hard for Westerners to understand.”

Hard to understand, perhaps, but not hard to make money 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. What better what 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 jitters and anti-Islamic sentiments resulting from 9/11 and turned them into politically potent forces. …more