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American Newspaper Calls To "Burn Out" The Palestinians
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Israel's army
committed atrocities against the Palestinians.
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WASHINGTON, April 14 – (IslamOnline) An article in the
fundamentalist-oriented pro-Likud daily newspaper, The Wall Street Journal, has called for burning out Palestinians and accused them of being responsible for the Middle East violence.
The commentary, written by Reuel Marc Gerecht, appeared in the Journal April 8, entitled "They live to die." The essence of the article is that the martyr operations carried out in Israel by Palestinians stem from an incurable religious fanaticism, with which it is impossible to negotiate.
This fanaticism (Gerecht uses the Arabic term istishhad, or martyrdom) can only be "burned out" of the Palestinians by "carnage," that is, by war and mass killings, the commentary said.
Yet, Sheikh Faisal Mawlawi told IslamOnline: “Islam asks aggressors to stop their aggression first. In case the aggressor refuses to do this, we, Muslims are to fight him till he stops his aggression.”
“As for peace, a Muslim should accept peace only when the enemy stops his aggression. It is not possible in any way to resort to peace, while the enemy is still keeping on his aggression. This will be no more than surrender,” he said
However, the American Administration still reiterates that it is the Palestinians who should stop violence first. This is unreasonable indeed! Israel refuses to stop its acts of aggression and end occupation. Still, the Americans want Palestinians to stand hands tied, while their honor is being violated and their houses being destroyed and their wives and children being slaughtered in cold blood
The article in The Wall Street Journal prompted some angry calls from some U.S. activists and peace-activists, but the same newspapers and conservative politicians that accuse Palestinian Muslims of terrorism and enticing violence, found no "enticement" in the article.
Joseph Kay of the World Socialist news site said that the article was a political justification for an all-out assault on the Palestinian population-foreign policy by means of expulsion and extermination.
"Change a few words and one has a document strikingly reminiscent of Nazi propaganda," said Kay. "There are certain articles that find their way into the American media that deserve to be noted simply for what they reveal about the character of the American ruling elite," he said.
"Something extremely rotten is festering in the summit of American society. More and more, a fascistic tendency is rearing its ugly head, particularly on the editorial pages of the Wall Street Journal." Gerecht starts from the assumption that the fault for the current violence in the Middle East lies entirely with the Palestinians. Israel's actions are wholly justified as an appropriate response to martyr operations, he argued.
At one point he denounces the Bush administration, and particularly the State Department (that is, Colin Powell), for even admitting the obvious truth that "Israel's military response to terrorism actually provokes further terrorism."
The real cause for the current crisis in the Middle East- believed by man to be the ongoing oppression of the Palestinian population by Israel and its backers in Washington-is swept aside and ignored on the pages of the radical New York newspaper. This paves the way for Gerecht to construct an explanation for the violence based on religious and psychological proclivities of Muslim people.
"Martyrdom- istishhad -is an old and esteemed idea in Islam." This martyrdom concept has created men who have "eagerly slaughtered themselves" in the name of religion. This religious sensibility must be taken into account, or else "American policy in the region will run aground on secular illusions," said the commentary.
The point of this line, Kay argued back, of reasoning is to create a civilizational antagonism between the Arab world and the "West" that can not be resolved by rational means. "The idea of jihad against Israel has extraordinary appeal even to secularized Muslims, who can feel the shame of Islam's long slide from glory and superiority over the West as acutely as any practicing Muslim," said the Journal's commentary.
"This is a mode of thinking that has become more and more popular within American intellectual and political circles, ever since Samuel Huntington first set them out systematically in his book ‘The Clash of Civilizations’," said Kay.
Gerecht is an establishment figure, a frequent contributor to the New York Times, Foreign Affairs and other publications, in addition to the Wall Street Journal. He has been featured on NPR, CNN and other radio and television stations as an expert on Middle Eastern affairs.
Currently, he is a fellow at the prominent right-wing American Enterprise Institute (AEI) and for over a decade he served as a Middle Eastern specialist for the Central Intelligence Agency.
In 2001, he became the director of the Middle Eastern Initiative at the Project for a New American Century, a right-wing cabal known as the NeoCons that includes Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld, Vice President Dick Cheney, Deputy Defense Secretary Paul Wolfowitz and Bush's new special envoy to Afghanistan, Zalmay Khalilzad.
According to Kay, the writer has over the past decade consistently voiced the orientation of his extremely militaristic and reckless section of the American ruling class. Kay says that Gerecht was one of the early champions of the Northern Alliance, the tribal grouping that the American government relied on for much of its campaign in Afghanistan. He has called for the overthrow of Saddam Hussein as well as the Islamic fundamentalist government in Iran.
In 1998, he advocated a policy of assassination, writing, "In the war against terrorism-against those who are killing Americans- the U.S. must be willing to kill terrorist chiefs." The Bush administration has wholly embraced these policies, said Kay.
"More and more, the United States seeks to dominate the world by direct military control, by brute force, by new and more barbaric forms of colonialism," said Kay. "Gerecht and his co-thinkers are developing the political ideology, steeped in racism and chauvinism, to justify such methods."
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