Interview with Ralph Schoenman, author and commentator, from Berkeley
Essentially, US imperialism, which is the primary sponsor of the Israeli state, incorporated that notion of the necessity to demonize Islam and to create a rationale for permanent war in the region, and adopted it as the entire rationale for US capitalism and for imperialism itself in its military projects.”
In another instance of promoting Islamophobia in the United States, the US military has been offering a course which teaches the trainees that their enemy is Islam in general.
The course, titled “Perspectives on Islam and Islamic Radicalism,” was offered five times a year since 2004, with about 20 students having taken part in the course each time – meaning roughly 800 students have taken the course over the years – before it was removed in late April after protests.
Press TV has conducted an interview with Ralph Schoenman, an author and commentator, from Berkeley, to further discuss the issue. The following is an approximate transcription of the interview.
Press TV: First of all, I’d like to get your opinion on the institutionalization of Islamophobic teaching techniques that are being employed all across the US.
Schoenman: It’s rooted in the false flag operation of 9/11 itself. The underlying politics are very straightforward. The rationale for US imperialism, for its wars of predation, had been at the time that the Soviet Union was still in existence — the supposed danger of international communist terrors and subversion.
This was the constant propaganda concerning the putative menace of the Soviet Union as a rationale for maintaining U.S. hegemony over subject peoples in the over-exploited world of Africa, Asia and Latin America, as it was for sustaining a permanent, ever expanding U.S. military capacity and for projecting US ruling class power over the planet.
With the collapse of the Soviet Union, this entire rationale for the trillions of dollars allocated to the Pentagon and to the military over decades, the largest constant factor in the entire capitalist economy, had been removed.
So the putative rationale for the constant preparation for war, for the maintenance of this huge missile arsenal and ever enhanced nuclear capacity in preparing for nuclear war, and for imperial war generally, was no longer available.
Consequently, the ideological rationale for imperialism became something else, namely the “war on terror.” It was, in some respects, borrowed, as it were, from the Mossad. There was an important document published by a man named Oded Yinon an academic with ties to the Mossad, which projected a “strategy” for Israel in the1980s.
This document put forward the proposition that the fundamental task was to break up the various countries of the region into their ethnic and religious components, ad seriatim. This was first projected as targeting Lebanon, Iraq, Syria, Iran, Egypt, Saudi Arabia and so on.
Essentially, US imperialism, which is the primary sponsor of the Israeli state, incorporated that notion of the necessity to demonize Islam and to create a rationale for permanent war in the region, and adapted it as the ideological cover for US capitalism and imperialism itself in the projection of military and imperial hegemony globally.
It did not begin with 9/11 as such. I should point out that in 1993, the World Trade Center was attacked, and this was immediately attributed to the blind Egyptian cleric, Sheikh Omar Abdel-Rahman, and presented as a “terrorist act” motivated by Islam.
In fact, the entire plan for the 1993 bombing of the World Trade Center and for a concomitant “plan” known as the Landmark Plot, namely a plot to blow up the United Nations’ building, the George Washington bridge, the Lincoln tunnel, the Holland tunnel, the Statue of Liberty, to assassinate the then-Secretary General of the United Nations, Boutros Boutros-Ghali, and to assassinate the then senator from New York, Alfonse D’Amato, all these things, called the Landmark Plot, were imputed to the blind Egyptian Sheikh Omar Abdel-Rahman.
It was, in fact, organized out of the FBI office in New York through an Egyptian intelligence operative under FBI mandate named Emad Ali Salem. The organizing of the undertaking included the Mossad figure Guzie Hadas.
I’d written an article documenting this at the time called “Who bombed the World Trade Center”, evidence points to the Federal Bureau of Investigation and the Mossad.
Press TV: Would you say that such hostile policies toward Islam and Muslim countries are a fundamental part of the US “defense strategy?”
Schoenman: It’s the entire … rationale for imperialism; for perpetual war on the peoples of the region; to seize their oil; to destroy their sovereignty; to fragment nations into their ethnic and religious components.
It is a model of the wars on in Iraq, a template of what is taking place in Afghanistan and a predicate for what is projected in Iran even as it guided what Israel and the U.S. coordinated and inflicted upon Lebanon – This the ideological cover and rationale for imperialism at the moment.
Concomitant to that is the state propaganda, of course, reflected in the Joint Chief of Staffs and the indoctrination of the U.S. military. You’re addressing specifically Lieutenant Colonel Mathew Dooley who conducted a course in Norfolk, Virginia, for the Joint Forces Staff College of the Army Chiefs of Staff in which the rationale for these wars was being inculcated.
That is the root of this particular Islamophobia, as it’s been described, preparing specifically these officers for the prospect of obliterating Mecca and Medina, and for the utilization of nuclear weapons in the devastating expansion ofUS control of the oil riches of the region, particularly, but not only, of the Arab East and of Central Asia.
Press TV: To be fair, this course that is being taught by Lleutenant Colonel Mathew Dooley has been suspended following an uproar; but you think it’s not enough?
Schoenman: Dooley, after all, is but a mouthpiece, He is simply implementing, according to his instruction, an overall ideological mantra. Right as we speak, you’re well aware, that the CIA and the entire apparatus of rule in the US is claiming that there was a new “underwear bomb plot” that has been “discovered” and “thwarted”. This, by the way, is a replica of another such farcical charade that the U.S. intelligence authorities put in place rather recently.
In the current operation it has been disclosed that the supposed perpetrator was, in fact, a Central Intelligence Agency operative working with Saudi intelligence. U.S. rulers and compliant media have sought to spin this embarrassing revelation by asserting ‘Oh, he was a double spy, and that’s how we entrapped the terrorist,” acknowledging, after the fact, that the operation was, in reality an official undertaking.
This is actually what has been exposed. What the data shows is that this was a US operation from the beginning to the end – as all these fake false-flag operations are.
These so-called terrorist acts, including that of the young man from Nigeria who was supposedly going to ignite his underwear on an airplane, if you recall – the absurdity of this intelligence farce consisting in that when the young Nigerian – approached the airplane, he had no visa to come to the US; he approached the airplane to get on board but was first refused, inasmuch as, he didn’t even have a passport with him, let alone a visa! The young intelligence plant said to airline personnel: “Oh, do you need one?”
He was quickly escorted on board by an undisclosed figure in a suit who waved off airport security people and accompanied this putative “suicide bomber” on to the plane.
Every one of these so-called “terror” plots bares a similar blue print, a pattern documented and exposed over and again. Those in denial of this history suffer from what the Jesuits call “invincible ignorance,” i.e., they know but they choose not to know!
These are government ops. They are designed to create hysteria; a mindset in the public that there is a menace to our population that can only be met by this constant imperial predation upon the peoples of the region and the world by US military force, by US imperialism itself, even as our basic democratic rights are removed.
So what has been discussed here tonight, with respect to the Islamophobia taught at the Joint Chiefs of Staff War College by by Lieutenant Colonel Matthew Dooley is, in truth, the vastly orchestrated and feverish ideological rationale for US military policy, for US. foreign policy and for the power of the US ruling class itself.
It is they who are terrorizing the people of the United States and the people of the world.
