Saving democracy from the extremists

Saving democracy from the extremists

By Junaid Cheema

We are a nation built on immigration, a nation of second chances. Our history is decorated by contributions of the brave who left their homelands to make Australia home. We are a people of community, of equal rights and believers in a fair go. We honour the rule of law, and honour any security statement promising to protect our democracy.

The Prime Ministers’s security statement promised to clamp down on those “who incite religious or racial hatred” and those who participate in “blatantly spreading discord and division”. Such hate speech disrupts the community, spreads Xenophobia, and is no doubt a threat to our democracy. No true Australian should feel targeted by this, after all we believe in a fair go and trust the rule of law will be applied with equity, but will it?

Hours before the security statement The Australian published an article titled “Its absurd to deny Jihadist act in the name of Islam” concluding extremism is inherent to Islam. The publication had a very un-Australian affect on the readers – comments flooded the paper’s social media site vilifying Muslims, promoting hate and creating divisions amongst Australians.

A few days earlier another major news outlet published an article titled “Face reality the west is at war with Islam”. Vilification, hate and polarisation followed – an en vogue trend which seems to associate everything Islamic with everything anti-western and thereby everything un-Australian. This is a recurring theme in which the popular narrative is starting to promote hate, disenfranchising people and sowing the seeds of discord in society.

Some now pose proudly as bigots, is the day far off when we will pose proudly as hypocrites? What does this mean for our values our democracy? Is hate speech free-speech when the targets are a particular group?

Inconvenient facts have very little appetite in this ‘West vs Islam’ narrative. Respected sources such as Spielberg International cite, self proclaimed Islamists kill 8 times more Muslims than non muslims, making muslims the greatest ‘victims’ of terror.

Nonetheless Muslims remain convicted of ‘playing the victim’. Perhaps raw figures from Europol and the FBI database,concluding well over 90% of terror attacks on western soil have nothing to do with Islam, also seem irrelevant. Nonetheless there is an extremist reality and even one Australian death from terrorism is one too many and we cannot pretend there isn’t a problem. Non-violent extremism, leads to violent extremism and there is no place for that in Australia.

Associating ISIS with Islam and making Islam the anti-thesis of the West and Australia, is also non-violent extremism.

Terrorism expert Max Abrahams from Northeastern University will tell you those who join groups like ISIS “would fail the most basic test on Islam”. By associating ISIS with Islam, we play into the hands of the terrorists, doing their marketing for them and pushing the uninformed to their cause. Perhaps ISIS adherents cry ‘God is great’ before they murder, but didn’t Nazis engrave ‘God is with us’ on their belts before they murdered? Did this make the Nazis Christians? Then why would invoking God make ISIS Muslims?

Its well known that homegrown terrorists are the most disenfranchised of society. John Horgan, a psychologist and professor at the University of Massachusetts Lowell’s Centrefor Terrorism, said fighters are driven to ISIS by the “need to belong to something special.. they want to find something meaningful in their life”.

Doesn’t associating ISIS with Islam and labelling Islam as the antithesis of the West devoid young Muslims of meaning in Australia and push the disenfranchised to the terrorist cause? Can preachers of hate only be Muslim? As believers in a fair go, we must apply the law with equity.

The war on terror has raged for well over a decade, with no end in sight. Millions of lives have been destroyed, and our way of life has changed. The freedoms we fought so bravely to protect are freedoms we are handing over to fear. Xenophobia is uncharacteristic of a nation forged by brave immigrants, it is uncharacteristic of the true Australian.

Demagogues for centuries have known that appealing to the passions and prejudices of the masses secures a following, but history tells us it doesn’t secure a nation. The first democracy was destroyed by those who exploited the fears of the masses, locking the Athenians into an un winnable conflict.

As citizens sworn to protect our democracy, its time to realise our democracy is too precious too follow that path of destruction.

— Junaid Cheema is an IT Executive, writer and community worker. He has written a number of articles for political journals introducing new paradigms provoking thought and passion. Junaid also volunteers his time on the board of a Victorian based not for profit, promoting foster care for disadvantaged children.

The Becking of Gabrielle Giffords

At Talk to Action, the veteran watcher of white supremacist and anti-semitic groups Chip Berlet writes, The Becking of Rep. Gabrielle Giffords. An excerpt:

From a moral viewpoint Rep. Gabrielle Giffords is the victim of demagogues such as Glenn Beck and his allies at Fox News and in the Tea Party Movement. This is not about legal liability but about moral culpability. This is about a nation that has lost its moral compass.Some of us progressive writers have been warning about this dangerous trend for several years. This includes my colleagues Fred Clarkson, David Neiwert, Sara Robinson, John Amato, Adele Stan, and others. We blame right-wing demagogues like Glenn Beck and Ann Coulter and a culture that tolerates their vicious targeting of scapegoats.  Now the shootings have created a new word floating across cyberspace: “becking.” To be “becked” is to be held up as such an evil and destructive person that someone, somewhere, will interpret it as a call to eliminate that problem through violence. I made similar assertions after the murder of Dr. Tiller in a post at Religion Dispatches, “Who Will Rid Me of This Troublesome Doctor?”: Bill O’Reilly, King Henry II, and George Tiller” Here is what I wrote then: On the day Dr. Tiller died, May 31, 2009, Gabrielle Winant on Salon traced O’Reilly’s relentless campaign against the murdered doctor. Winant wrote that some of O’Reilly’s characterizations of Tiller replicated “ancient conservative, paranoid stories: a decadent, permissive and callous elite tolerates moral monstrosities that every common-sense citizen just knows to be awful. Conspiring against our folk wisdom, O’Reilly says, the sophisticates have shielded Tiller from the appropriate, legal consequences for his deeds.” So, concludes Winant: “O’Reilly didn’t tell anyone to do anything violent, but he did put Tiller in the public eye, and help make him the focus of a movement with a history of violence against exactly these kinds of targets.” The analysts at Media Matters for America have been forcefully arguing the case against the “Emerging Culture of Paranoia” and the role of “Right-Wing Media” in fostering a toxic climate in which violence is more likely. Media Matters’ Eric Boehlert, who suggested after the Tiller murder that “O’Reilly and Fox News will have more right-wing vigilantism to explain,” selected some of O’Reilly’s most egregious statements demonizing Dr. Tiller. … Hannah Arendt described the process of demagoguery leading to violence as it occurs in totalitarian regimes ranging from Hitler to Stalin. The demagogue frames the target, but leaves off a direct call for violence. But the message is clear. Unstable people often act first. Political ideologues, however, can be mobilized as the process continues to act as a group. Sara Robinson and I have been tracking the number of political murders since the inauguration of President Barack Obama. [See link below]. The people who “becked” Rep. Gabrielle Giffords began with a premise of dualism or Manicheaism, and then constructed a frame that uses demonization, scapegoating, and conspiracism to divide the world into a good ‘us’ and a bad ‘them’. … Following the shooting of Rep. Giffords we once again heard calls for civility and pundits pointing out that hateful rhetoric is aimed at Republicans and conservatives by Democrats and their lefty allies. This is true, and I do object to liberals who hurl buckets of mud as we on the left are being buried in an avalanche of shit from right-wing demagogues with national television and radio programs, websites, and newspaper columns. The comparison is true in the manipulated facts yet false in the claim of equivalence. Peter Daou writes about the bogus equivalency between right/left extremism in his post Gabriel Giffords and the rightwing hate machine.”The targeting of political scapegoats in our nation today is overwhelmingly coming from the Political Right. To claim otherwise is a lie easily debunked by even a modicum of research. A big lie. … We who must speak out are not faced with death here in our nation this week. We are faced with our visage in a moral mirror looking back at our conscience which is telling us that we must speak out against the crescendo of totalitarian demagoguery. We must oppose the becking of our society. How many more must die before we wake up and put a stop to this terrible trend?

^{Another important read on this subject is the 18-month-old Tragedy At The Holocaust Museum: Stand Up To Terrorism by Sara Robinson.}

^{See also Marta Evry’s The “Becking” Of America: How Right-Wing Media and Politicians Incite Violence at Venice for Change.}

The Christian Reconstructionist Roots of ‘End the Fed’

At Religion Dispatches, Julie Ingersoll has an excellent post on the extreme fundamentalist sect known as “Christian Reconstructionism” and its influence on the modern libertarian movement’s call to destroy the Federal Reserve: Better Dead Than ‘Fed’: Behind Palin’s Dig at ‘Unbiblical’ Fed.

While Ron Paul’s anti-Fed crusade is widely thought of as economic libertarianism, the roots of this combat lie in a theocratic reading of the Bible, arising out of the nexus between Paul (and now his son, Senator-elect Rand Paul), Howard Phillips and his Constitution Party, and Gary North and the Christian Reconstructionists.

For decades, the elder Paul, Phillips, and North have shared the libertarian economic philosophy of the Austrian School, which advocates a strict free market approach to an economy they portray in terms of individual choices and agreements rather than systemic forces. With respect to the Federal Reserve System in particular, they have argued against its fractional reserve banking, and its manipulation of interest rates to control economic ups and downs.

North, the architect of Christian Reconstructionist economic theory, and controversial libertarian economist Lew Rockwell both worked on Ron Paul’s congressional staff in the late 1970s. That collaboration continues today, even after reports during the 2008 presidential campaign that Rockwell had ghostwritten racist and anti-gay statements in Ron Paul’s conspiracy-minded newsletter in the 1980s and ’90s. They continue to collaborate through the Ludwig von Mises Institute, founded by Rockwell and the anti-“statist,” anti-New Deal economist Murray Rothbard, who believed Joseph McCarthy was “the most smeared man in American politics” in the 20th century.

Their work is also found at LewRockwell.com, where North currently writes, often in support of Paul. In promoting their libertarian economic views, Rothbard and Rockwell have, according to the libertarian Reason magazine, “championed an open strategy of exploiting racial and class resentment to build a coalition with populist ‘paleoconservatives.’”

While each of these figures comes to the table from different places, they come together in agreement on Rothbard’s anti-statism, which dovetails with North’s views. For North, the Bible limits the legitimate functions of civil government to punishing “evildoers” and providing for defense. Reconstructionist theocracy, based on the Reconstructionists’ reading of the Bible, gives coercive authority to families and churches to organize other aspects of life. In this view—one that also meshes with Tea Party rhetoric—the Fed’s control of monetary policy is a prime example of federal government “tyranny.”

North argues that the Federal Reserve is unbiblical because it usurps power not legitimately held by civil government (because God didn’t grant it) and it promotes inflation, which he says is nothing more than theft from those who are not in debt in favor of those who are.

Read the whole thing…