إحذروا من اليمين الأمريكي (Beware, The Neoconservative American Right)

باحث ألماني: أيديولوجية اليمين الأميركي لا تختلف عن طالبان

قال باحث ألماني إنه لا توجد فروق كبيرة بين اليمين المحافظ في الولايات المتحدة وحركة طالبان التي حكمت أفغانستان إلى أن أطاحت بها واشنطن في أعقاب هجمات سبتمبر 2001.

ويرى محمد كاليش أن لدى مجموعة من الأصوليين المسيحيين في الولايات المتحدة تأثيرا اجتماعيا وسياسيا حتى إنهم تركوا بصماتهم على السياسة الأميركية.

وأشار إلى أن حركة طالبان التي وصفها بالمتطرفة ما كان لها أن تحكم أفغانستان لولا الدعم الأميركي.

والفرق الوحيد الذي حدده الباحث بين طالبان واليمين المحافظ في دراسة نشرتها مجلة (فكر وفن) هو أن "أعضاء طالبان بسطاء في حين يظل الآخرون أصوليين متطرفين يستخدمون العنف ويرون في الحروب وسائل تحقق لهم السياسات التي ينشدونها ويعتقدون بأن لهم أن ينصبوا من أنفسهم سلطة تنزل القصاص الديني على المخالفين لتعاليمهم داخل الولايات المتحدة".

وفي حين نوه كاليش بخصائص إيجابية في الولايات المتحدة التي قال إنها تفتح صدرها لمنتقديها السياسيين أشار إلى وجود ما اعتبره ازدواجية حيث يتم الإعلاء من شأن الحرية وسيادة القانون في دولة "أسست على أجساد المواطنين الأصليين سلالة الهنود الحمر لا يزالون حتى يومنا هذا يعانون من مصائب التمييز".

This article, translated from Reuters, speaks of the chilling similarities between the Taliban of Afghanistan and the Neoconservative American right. The report filed in this claims that the Taliban would not have existed if it weren't for American support, and this is in reference to the American intervention in Afghanistan, whose main goals were driving the Soviet forces out and installing Bin Laden's goons into power. Story continues as follows.

ويرى كاليش أن أميركا دأبت على استغلال أزمات العالم الإسلامي لتعزيز مصالحها مشددا على أنها لاتزال تدعم كل دكتاتور يخدم هذه المصالح.

وفي الشأن العراقي قال الباحث إن الرئيس العراقي السابق صدام حسين حظي بدعم قوي من أميركا التي لم تحتج على استهانته بحقوق الإنسان ولم تغير موقفها منه إلا بعد اتخاذه موقفا مناوئا لمصالحها.

ويضيف كاليش أن عراقيين رحبوا "بتحرير" العراق من دكتاتورية صدام لكن هناك عراقيين آخرين ومعهم "كافة المسلمين" يدركون حقيقة أهداف واشنطن التي تمهد لحرب جديدة تستهدف إيران.

من جهة ثانية وصف كاليش الرئيس الإيراني محمود أحمدي نجاد بأنه "مهووس مضطرب الفكر" مشيرا إلى عجز كبير برصيد النظام الإيراني من الديمقراطية وحقوق الإنسان غير أنه يستدرك قائلا "إن رصيده في هذا المجال أكبر من رصيد حليف الغرب الأمين (السعودية)"

وأضاف أن الولايات المتحدة "سعيدة جدا" بوصول أحمدي نجاد إلى الحكم، فهو يمنحها الذرائع لتوجيه ضربة عسكرية لإيران.

This report also claims that the American right has itself used Middle Eastern governments for its own ends, and supported dictatorships such as that in Egypt and Iraq in order to satisfy its interest. It wasn't until Saddam's Gulf War that the U.S. engineered propaganda in order to drive support for an all-out war on Iraq.

What really got me was the last part: the American right was "very glad" of Ahmadinejad's rise to power. This, of course, means that they have the excuse to invade Iran, as Ahmadinejad was obviously anti-interventionist and anti-imperialist.

وقال كاليش إن في الغرب قوى تريد أن يظل الشرق الأوسط بؤرة توترات وترحب بأن يتخذ الإسلام "صورة العدو المزعوم الذي صارت بأمس الحاجة إليه بعد انهيار المعسكر الشيوعي".

ويضيف أن ألمانيا تتبع الخطى الأميركية وتوشك على التضحية بالمثل السياسية العليا، ولو حدث هذا "فستتعرى كلية عندئذ النوايا الحقيقية للحرب التي يشنها الغرب ضد الإرهاب وستبدو هذه الحرب على أنها في جوهرها ليست سوى حرب من أجل تأمين الحصول على الموارد الطبيعية والحفاظ على مستوى الرفاهية في الغرب".

ونوهت مجلة (فكر وفن) التي أوردت أفكار كاليش الأستاذ بجامعة مونستر بأن هذه الأفكار تعبر عن وجهة نظر كاليش كألماني مسلم.

The first part almost caught me off-guard, but was actually a repeat of another favorite right-wing buzz phrase, comparing Islam to a threat such as Communism, which is still alive today.

However, the real threat to world peace, contrary to what the bellicose rightwingers argue, is themselves. Richard Rapaport wrote an excellent, and amusing, article on what he refers to as the "American Taliban".

TWO DAYS after the September 11 cataclysm, the Rev. Jerry Falwell laid down his own prophetic interpretation of the attacks, revealing more than he might have liked about his low view of the state of American life.

Appearing on Pat Robertson's "700 Club" television show, Falwell blamed the excesses of American liberalism as exemplified by the ACLU, NOW, and pro- choice, feminist and gay groups in general, for the growing distance between God and America. Falwell argued that humanists working to "secularize America" had provoked a disenchanted deity into retracting some sort of heavenly anti- terrorist shield, thus enabling "the enemies of America to give us probably what we deserved."

During the broadcast, host Robertson, a 1992 and 1996 Republican presidential candidate, nervously concurred with Falwell's analysis. But recognizing a brewing public relations debacle that could eclipse Falwell's 1999 jeremiad against PBS's innocuous Teletubbies, Robertson and Falwell quickly began issuing clarifications and apologies for bad timing -- if not necessarily for the underlying belief.

Several weeks later, in early October, a similar hell-and-brimstone call for religious redemption coursed over the airwaves. It announced, among other things, that "no one can deny the great sins of polytheism and (its goal) to share with God in His sole right of sovereignty and making of the law." Unlike the Revs. Falwell and Robertson, a besieged Osama bin Laden saw no public relations' advantage in retracting any part of his Oct. 6 video declaration of war against the West.

The quasi-pseudo-religious style of such people give me the comical impression of old fat evangelicals wearing turbans colored with patterns from the American flag. However, what Jerry Fallwell said on the "700 Club" is actually reminiscient to Bin Laden's speeches on the "secularization" of the Middle East and how it has become subservient to the American power. Fallwell simply argues that America has succumbed to "liberal" ideals that are in nature secular. While I may not be a secularist, I am not an extremist either, so you can see where I lie.

Anyways, moving on.

The shared reasoning of America's and Islam's best known purveyors of fundamentalist thought was ironic, scary and hardly coincidental. The message of fundamentalism; Christian, Muslim, Jewish, Hindu or what-have-you, is remarkably unified. It is paternalistic, sternly moralistic, anti-feminist and a reaction against the secularism and commercialism that is a signature of the modern world. There could not have been a better metaphor for the violently clashing views of the secular and the fundamental worlds than the fiery fall of New York's World Trade Center twin towers.

But the September 11 attacks also revealed a difficult conundrum for the Bush administration, the most conservative presidency in history, now forced to deal with the contradiction of fighting the fundamentalist mullahs abroad while supporting the fundamentalist Moral Majority at home. So far, however, it has proven to be a largely untroubled straddle. How is one to justify the deep satisfaction in the de-veiling of Afghan women at the same time as advocating that the abortion rights of American women disappear behind the veil of federal edict?

So far, with liberal Democrats more or less asleep in exposing this blitz, the White House has gotten away with it by playing a clever game of political "good cop/bad cop." It is a routine that has elevated first lady Laura Bush into the public face of secular humanism, at least in terms of the good news of the liberation of Afghan women from Taliban repression and support for the widows and orphans of the World Trade Center attack.

And while the president stays above the fray in his role as commander-in- chief, the nitty-gritty of the American fundamentalist agenda is being brought alive by the current attorney general, John Ashcroft. Ashcroft, President Bush's "bad cop" and his administration's gift to the Christian right. Military tribunals, racial profiling, violations of attorney-client secrecy and prolonged unreported detention aside (although the Bush administration's assault on civil liberties can hardly be considered an aside), Ashcroft is the spearhead of the effort to use America's state of constitutional distraction to further the issues of greatest concern to homeland-based fundamentalists. Among these are the attempt to roll back abortion rights, bar human embryo stem-cell research, challenge Oregon's assisted-suicide law, attack California's medical-marijuana initiative and other laws that are seen as furthering the liberal, secularist agenda.

The most striking feature about the Bush administration's double-barreled assault on civil liberties and lifestyle is the post-attack Republican conversion to robust federalism. So much for the state's rights agenda that has been a supposed matter of faith in the modern GOP. The Bush administration has discovered the wonders of such once feverishly protested "liberal" means to power, such as presidential decree and federal intervention, which were used to great effect in areas such as civil rights and environmental protection.

Now, those same tools against which Republicans have fulminated for years, and against which Bush campaigned, are driving the administration's attempts to win such "sanctity of life" issues as medical research on human embryos. This issue is well understood by American fundamentalists as a Trojan Horse maneuver, such as the ban on so-called partial-birth abortions, through which to achieve the most deeply held fundamentalist desire; an end to legal abortion as guaranteed American women by Roe vs. Wade.

The Bush administration should be congratulated on its nearly flawless intervention in Afghanistan. But nothing less than loud protests will do in the face of the embrace of the American fundamentalist agenda at home under the protective cover of fighting fundamentalism abroad.

The final irony is that like the Taliban in Afghanistan, the Bush administration is very much a minority government. Handsomely outvoted in the popular vote and the barest possible winner in the electoral count, Bush should be very careful about mistaking popular support for the war against terrorism as a mandate to institute the agenda of Falwell, Robertson and their allies, members of what can, without blinking, be called "the American Taliban. "

The article itself starkly contrasts the rightwing machine with the Taliban and other extremists, pointing out their opposition to new biological research fields, including stem cell research. There is also their vehement anti-abortion stance, with not even minor exceptions included.

However, is this fundamentalism, or just radicalism as in the case of the Taliban? Many secularists argue that religion is a plague and that it is by definition radical. On the other hand, religion argues that secularism is indeed corruptive. Focusing on the American right, we can see that they have imposed laws that ban civil liberties including that of privacy as part of the "Patriot Act", which is a buzzword used to cover up what in reality is martial law. Martial law is by definition strict, and akin to the strict practice of Shariah Law on part of the Taliban, though they do not follow it correctly (in fact, far from it).

Whatever their agenda, it is definitely a dominative one: exploiting the MidEast and fighting for "freedom" abroad, while, as in the words of some American guy (I wish I could remember his name), "leaving it at home". Either way, I urge you to stay up to date on the policies and actions of the rightwing machine. Whenever they come up with another lie, be prepared to defend yourself with the truth, and hopefully we can bring the justice that will heal the wrongs that they of the Neoconservative Americna right have done unto this world.

Salaam, from
Saracen