Source: Voltairnet
For about ten years now, the United States is a prisoner of its contradiction in the face of Islam. On the one hand, they think of themselves as the land of religious freedom, on the other, they use the Muslim Brotherhood to destabilize the wider Middle East, and on the other hand they are fighting against the spillover of Islamic terrorism outside this region. They have banned any research that would distinguish Islam as a religion from its manipulation for political purposes. After breaking with the terrorism of the Muslim Brotherhood, Donald Trump has decided to reopen this dossier, risking causing violence in his own country. Because in the United States the freedom to practice Islam does not imply the freedom to enter politics.
OPENING ILLUSTRATION: When Donald Trump declares: “I think Islam hates us”, refers to the Muslim religion or political ideology of the same name?
DAMASCUS (Syria) – In its new National Security Strategy, President Trump changes official terminology and refers to Muslim armed groups as “jihadist terrorists “. L’Islam: religion or ideology?
After the September 11 attacks attributed to Al Qa'ida, a violent controversy had shaken Washington: the terrorist groups were representative of Islam or not? If they were, it was agreed that all Muslims should be considered enemies of the homeland. Otherwise, a distinction could be made between Muslims “moderate” ed “extremists”.
However, the British used these same terms with another meaning: i “moderate” they are Muslims “moderately anti-imperialist”, come Hamas, which does not raise any political objections towards Israel, but he only rejects that Muslims are governed by Jews; while the “extremists” they are Muslims “extremely anti-imperialist”, come Hezbollah, which calls into question the victory of the Israeli colonial state over the Arabs.
The controversy culminated in a June conference 2006 del New York Metro InfraGard. An FBI agent and expert, William Gawthrop, he assured that it is useless to distinguish the different Muslim terrorist groups, when everyone is based on the same ideology, l’Islam. Five internal FBI documents were later leaked [1]. Intended for the training of their officers, they establish that the more you are “Islamic”, the more potentially you are “radicals”, and that the Prophet Muhammad was the leader of a violent sect. Gawthrop was based on an indisputable study of the Quran, of the Hadith and the main theological texts. He demonstrated that throughout history, theologians of the four main Sunni schools supported the war against the infidels, but not the thinkers of the Shiite school. Gawthrop was also an instructor with the Department of Defense Counterintelligence. There he had pushed to study Muhammad as a military leader.
In the 1953, President Eisenhower received a Muslim Brotherhood delegation led by Said Ramadan. The United States now supports political Islam abroad.
This controversy was not new. On the one hand, starting from 1953 and by President Eisenhower's reception of Said Ramadan, the CIA and the Department of Defense have worked abroad with supporters of political Islam, the Muslim Brotherhood. On the other side, during racial segregation, it was granted that the descendants of slaves could be Muslims, but not that they made a political claim out of it. In the 1965, the black, Muslim political leader Malcolm X was assassinated, probably with the passive help of the FBI. While he was dying on the ground, he tried to give to his secretary, shortly before dying, a message for Saïd Ramadan.
In retaliation to this point of view, a prominent American Muslim figure, Salam Al-Marayati, threatened to appeal for all cooperation with the FBI to cease [2].
Immediately, Assistant Attorney General James Cole made all of these documents inaccessible, not just at the FBI, but in all jurisdictions.
Except that the FBI documents were designed for courses in which the instructors specified at length that they did not deal with Islam as a religion, but as a political ideology [3].
The United States: country of religious freedom or Islamophobia?
It was around this time that the State Department created several structures to influence U.S. and foreign public opinion, so that the United States would not be accused of waging a war against the Muslim religion. Questo dispositivo comprendeva in particolare una cellula di una ventina di persone, who spoke several languages, called to intervene under false identities in forums to guide debates.
Whatever way to deal with the issue, the United States always returned to the same problem: already in the seventh century, the word “Islam” it is used in Arabic to designate both a religion and a political ideology, yet perfectly distinct.
In the end, in January 2008, the Department of Homeland Security issued, on the initiative of Secretary Michael Chertoff, Terminology to define terrorists (Terminology to Define the Terrorists: Recommendations from American Muslims). Then, in March 2008, the Office of the Director of National Intelligence (then led by Mike McConnell) drafted a semantic note addressed to the entire administration. These instructions were aimed at cleaning up the Bush administration – that in 2001 he spoke of a "crusade against Al Qaeda" – from any suspicion of Islamophobia and to restore the honor of the "country of religious freedom".
Bringing Barack Hussein Obama to the White House was supposed to be enough to solve the problem. But it didn't happen that way, not least because, while a third of his voters thought he was Muslim, he specified that he was a Christian from a Muslim family; il che sembrava convalidare il modello di identità degli immigrati provenienti dal Nord Europa: one can be an American by being culturally and even religiously Muslim, but a president must be a Christian. Hence the violence of the campaign financed by real estate developer Donald Trump regarding Obama's birthplace (Hawaii or British Kenya?). Right, the answer affected the constitutionality of his election, ma, most importantly, it implied whether he was born a Christian or a Muslim.
Before launching the “Arab Spring”, Barack Obama and Hillary Clinton packed their administrations with supporters of political Islam.
In the 2011, the Undersecretary of State for Propaganda (Public Diplomacy) created the Center for Strategic Counterterrorism Communications (Center for Strategic Counterterrorism Communications). In the 2016, this facility became known as the Global Engagement Center (Global Engagement Center) and expanded its expertise to the fight against Russia. Its budget was then multiplied by 13. The fact of entrusting the fight against terrorism and the rivalry with Russia to the same organization obviously did not help to clarify things. It was in this period that Washington adopted the expression UN “violent extremism” to designate the ideology of terrorists [4].
Let's go back: il 22 December 2012, the Egyptian magazine Rose El-Youssef revealed the presence of several Muslim Brotherhood leaders within the Obama administration, including Salam Al-Marayati. In particular, he represented Secretary of State Hillary Clinton and chaired the official US delegation to the OSCE Human Rights Conference. His wife, There, she was close to Hillary Clinton when she was first lady and served on the Commission on International Religious Freedom. Al-Marayati's intervention against Gawthrop, six years earlier, it was actually just a ploy by the Clintons, that they had used the Muslim Brotherhood to change the minds of the FBI and the Department of Defense.
The right to reflect
The controversy flared up in July 2017 with the presentation of an amendment to the law on military planning (NDAA) which authorizes the Department of Defense to study «the use of violent or unorthodox Muslim religious doctrines to support and justify the communication of extremists or terrorists» The text was rejected for 217 votes a 208, always in the name of protecting Islam as a religion.
President Trump has finally decided to apply the word “jihadist” to Muslim terrorists, although originally jihad was not the armed struggle against infidels, but rather an introspection and an examination of personal conscience.
Until now, le decisioni di Donald Trump sono state oggetto dei peggiori fraintendimenti. His decree suspending immigration from countries where consular delegations did not have the means to verify the honesty of candidates was interpreted as “Islamophobic” because these countries have a Muslim majority population.
His decision is a true intellectual revolution for the United States. Until now, the Department of Defense applied Admiral Arthur Cebrowski's strategy, destroying – country after country – every form of political organization in the wider Middle East, while the State Department ensured that this policy was not anti-Muslim in itself.
However, from a Middle Eastern point of view, this is not what was perceived. Because for fifteen years the United States has implemented Cebrowski's strategy [5] only in the predominantly Muslim part of the world, it was impossible for the Afghans, the Persians, the Turks and the Arabs, understand anything about US slogans. Indeed, it is this contradiction that Barack Obama faced during his speech in Cairo, in June 2009.
If you perfectly understand the objectives of US propaganda, one can only observe that they were its first victim. Effectively, the contradiction between their sweetening rhetoric and their support for the Muslim Brotherhood abroad (and not their strategy of destroying the wider Middle East) led them to ban any research on the origins of political Islam, both at home and among their allies.
However, Muhammad was a general and a ruler. This particular historical situation has allowed, since the early days of Islam, to a current of thought to try to manipulate this religion to seize power. Most Muslims were raised with Hadith, composed long after the death of the Prophet, who attribute to him military successes and particular political thought. The current Muslim Brotherhood rests on a long history of significant precedents.
In the 1965, the leader of US political Islam was assassinated with the probable help of the FBI.
For the rest, the United States will not be able to distinguish the two meanings of the word “Islam” until they have resolved the question of their identity. Donald Trump and his voters easily accept that Blacks and Hispanics are citizens of the United States, but it is unlikely that they exercise leading political functions.
Paradoxically, while it would be appropriate for Muslim intellectuals to undertake this research and thus allow their religion to be separated from its political manipulation, the United States will probably conduct this exploration alone. Even though there is a large number of Muslim researchers in the USA, it is unlikely that this country will not project its own cultural problems onto this subject of study at the risk of misinterpreting it.
NOTE
[1] The reader will find here the main documents cited in this article.
[2] “The wrong way to fight terrorism”, Salam Al-Marayati, Los Angeles Times, October 19, 2011.
[3] This video of a course held at Quantico leaves no doubt about this topic.
[4] “Action plan for the prevention of violent extremism”, by Ban Ki-moon, Voltaire Network, 24 December 2015.
[5] The Pentagon’s New Map, Thomas P. M. Barnett, Putnam Publishing Group, 2004. «The United States and its global military project», at Thierry Meyssan, Haiti Liberty (Haiti), Rete Voltaire, 24 August 2017.
Translation by Matzu Yagi.
