Islamophobia

When the news of the plans to burn more than 200 copies of the Qu’ran reached international headlines, any sane person wondered if US society had gone crazy. The incendiary plan came weeks after international debates about the plans by a group to build an Islamic community centre in New York City. Conservatives in the United States distorted the true story and there were wild claims that there were plans for the building of a mosque at Ground Zero in New York. Ground Zero is the name of the site of the fall of the Twin Towers in New York City on September 11, 2001. It is my view that the decision to burn the holy book during the period of the commemoration of the events of September 11 was a calculated effort to maximise the propaganda effort to heighten the scourges of racism and islamophopbia in the United States and in those societies in western Europe allied to conservative forces in the USA. As a propaganda tool, this announced plan to burn the Qu’ran achieved its most important goal, that is, to promote the ideas of war and hatred. It was for this reason that the timing of the Qu’ran burning was to coincide with the end of the Muslim holy month of Ramadan.

Racism and anti-Islamic propaganda had been refined to serve the purposes of the US military–industrial complex. The divisions in the military over whether they were in a war against Islam or in a war against terrorists had been accentuated by the belief of some sections of the military that the commander in chief was in fact a Muslim, and therefore not an authentic citizen of the USA. For two decades US rulers had used the threat of Islamic fundamentalism as a justification for keeping a high military, economic and political profile in the Middle East while supporting the extremists in Israel. The troops and private contractors from the US military machine who had been pumped up by the association of Islam and fascism (so called Islamofascism) had to hear a credible voice from the neo-conservative establishment. Pastor Terry Jones was given wide publicity and the conservative sources of news were now caught in the contradiction of promoting racism and hatred of Islam in a way that made US forces in Afghanistan and Pakistan vulnerable to popular outrages. The most challenging aspect of this new period of hate was the spinelessness of liberals. In a period of the most serious capitalist depression since 1930, the scenario planners for the capitalist class had decided that a division between white and black workers was to be supplemented by divisions between Christians and the followers of Islam.