Introduction to 'The Black Armband of History'

Peace. Tomorrow or day after insha'Allah I'll be updating my blog with the planned article 'The Black Armband of History' as a tribute to the indigenous peoples of Australia. I had been thinking about writing on this, but my encounter with some Muslims who, like the ruling elites, view the Aboriginal people with disdain or are wholly ignorant of Australia's extraordinary pre-conquest civilisation of which there is much to be proud, calls for a juxtaposition of their marginalisation with the outright destruction of the Aborginal homeland. One of the objectives of this blog is to constructively address issues of social significance (hat tip, Erik). This article comes at the wake of Pauline Hanson's xenophobic and supremacist political statements against Muslim immigrants. One of my peers counts Pauline Hanson among the three worst persons she wouldn't want to be stuck in a desert with.

To be honest, I don't like flags. I don't like people who wave their nation's flags in front of my eyes out of some war-mongering, nationalist mania or to prove their flag has brighter colours. But if there's one flag I would proudly hang in my window, it would be the Australian Aboriginal flag, which is much more sincere and artistic than the one flying atop Howard's headquarters, servile as it is to the dismantled British Empire. The Aboriginal flag illustrates the dignity and beauty of the Aboriginal peoples. Literally, it is an imprint of their struggles against what John Pilger called "one of the most intransigent and meanest political establishements."[1] But it is also what I hold to be the legitimate symbol of Australia, an Australia distinctive from the European brotherhood.

References:

1 - John Pilger, The New Rulers of the World (London: Verso, 2002), 12.

"Saddam"

Very disturbing piece of Islamophobia and racism evidence, via the excellent Islamophobia Watch:

A Muslim street warden nicknamed "Saddam" during a four-year ordeal of racist abuse has won £42,500 after an employment tribunal. Iqbal Rasheed, 59, was the target of a vindictive campaign while working for a security firm under contract for Westminster council and the Greater London Authority.

Father-of-three Mr Rasheed, of St John's Wood, told how colleagues at Chubb Security nicknamed him "Saddam", branded him a "madman who believes in God" and laughed at him when he fasted during Ramadan. He said he was once told not to clean the spray-painted word "n****r" from the side of Selfridges because it was "not offensive".

Shortly after British hostage Ken Bigley was decapitated in Iraq, Mr Rasheed said he was told by a colleague: "I hope they nuke you Iraqis now." One South African supervisor told him: "I don't make tea, I get n*****s to make it for me."

Mr Rasheed, who was born in Aden, Yemen, said he was the subject of a bullying campaign by line manager Mike Edwards and colleagues Marie Robinson and Carol Wheeler, who are mother and daughter. He told the Lite today: "From the moment I stepped in the office I could feel the tension against me. I have lived in this country since I was a child but I was made to feel like a total outsider."

I won't talk about the anti-Iraq and anti-Arab fervour, but "Saddam" is considerably tame when you consider "Sodom" as uttered by American colonialists in the Pentagon.

And, naturally, Said discusses what the Bush administration and their mouthpieces’ cultural gaffes, during the lead-up to the war on Iraq, communicate and how Arabs receive their actions. Barsamian mentions to Said how U.S. Secretary of State Colin Powell, while addressing the United Nations, repeatedly stated "Sodom" instead of "Saddam." Said responds that this is an example of demoni[s]ing and triviali[s]ing the dictator, and reducing the country of Iraq, home of what is considered the artistic capital of the Arab world, to that one man.

Commenting on news anchors "who say I-raq, I-ran … the Mooslems, and Izlum," Said tells Barsamian, "it’s all part of the same arsenal of Orientalist cliches that are designed to alienate, distance, and dehumani[s]e a people … That’s why most Arabs feel a tremendous animosity toward the U.S. media and government. The prevailing public discourse is so ignorant and at the same time so familiar in its contempt for these central things in our lives that we see it as a kind of assault on our culture and civilization." Indeed, the lack of knowledge that Americans possess regarding Arabs, the Middle East, and foreign affairs in general is all too often manifested in the media, like when the Chicago Tribune, in a recent editorial, refers to Iran as an Arab country, and in another article, defines "intifada" as "holy war."

The analysis, though not directly related, by Edward Said points to the view that Iqbal Rasheed, the man vilified and racially abused, was a lingual and cultural reduction of all Arabs to "Saddam". In my next entry, I'll insha'Allah talk about how the 'syntax' of Islam is ideologically ditched in the textual English language that supposedly indulges in an unbiased, non-political and universal discourse.

Desmond Tutu Vs Bernard Lewis

If I had to vote for my favourite personalities in the contemporary world, one of them would be the Archbishop Emeritus of Cape Town, South Africa, Desmond Tutu. Via the ever efficient Islamophobia Watch:

"I would hope that you in the media would be passionate about letting people judge for themselves, that you would be careful about some of the language that you do actually use," he said. "'Muslim terrorism' – have you ever read anywhere 'Christian terrorism'? – as if Islam propagates violence, but you have never spoken about what happened in Northern Ireland as Christian terrorism," he said.

Tutu added that understanding different religions required peoples of all faiths to understand different perspectives. "We Christians ought to get off our high horse and learn to be a great deal more humble, when you look at our history, the bloody things that we did in the name of religion," he said.

Contrast these well-informed and constructive comments by Desmond Tutu with those of the anti-Muslim and rabid Zionist so-called historian Bernard Lewis, a Barnes and Nobles dusty job. This is from his book 'The Crisis of Islam: Holy War and Unholy Terror' (p. 137), suitably titled for right-wing appetites:

Most Muslims are not fundamentalists, and most fundamentalists are not terrorists, but most presend-day terrorists are Muslims and proudly identify themselves as such.

Does that ring a bell? This was a regular Sept. 11, 2001 commentary, and you don't have to guess the origin. The vile Orientalist Bernard Lewis lays claim to most of all controversial albeit celebrated sayings in the media. It wasn't George Bush or any of his criminal henchmen who conceived the idea that Iraqis would receive their oppressors with flowers but Bernard Lewis, the big mouthpiece of intellectual dishonesty and political hubris who waved America's bombers toward Iraq. There is a definite association between Lewis and the "Western Reformation" fascists in Washington and Tel Aviv, in their genocidal campaign for world dominance.

Understandably, Muslims complain when the media speak of terrorist movements and actions as "Islamic" and ask the media why the media do not similarly identify Irish and Basque terrorists and terrorism as "Christian". The answer is simple and obvious - they do not describe themselves as such. The Muslim complaint is understable, but it should be addressed to those who make the news, not to those who report it.

Bernard Lewis himself has participated in acts of terrorism, though in a more dastardly and malacious fashion. Bravo, he wrote the damn the script for it! And he has the temerity to talk about 'Islam in Crisis: Holy War and Unholy Terror', ignorant of the fact that there is no concept of holy war in Islam. What can you expect from someone who has befriended several racist, murderous Israeli politicians; American neocons of death and destruction; coined the catastrophic Cold War propaganda phrase "the clash of civilizations" and led a nation (he isn't even an American) to war against an innocent people? I will write a detailed critique of his book. For now, I will draw your attention to the person to whom he has dedicated this Orientalist junk: Harold Rhode. Who is Harold Rhode? From a source on Juan Coles's blog:

"He considered Lewis his real mentor. Later, [I was told by someone in the know that] that Lewis helped him get a job in Richard Perle's office at the Pentagon. The rest is history....

Some writers are asking about what the connections are between various individuals and groups in the Iraq/Iran/Israel/etc. mess. Were there ever to be a serious investigation of the Israeli infiltration of the Pentagon (unlikely, of course), one would certainly have to examine Bernard Lewis's role here.

Even though Edward Said raised the issue 25 years ago, in view of recent events, it seems high time that a scholarly society promote a frank and more balanced discussion of the political agenda driving Lewis's scholarship as well as his advice to leaders as a supposed senior scholar on the Islamic world. (On the other hand, I am not aware of any reputable treatment of his non-academic side; a Google search only reveals some rather unsavory publications that question his non-academic affiliations.)"

And finally Juan Cole on Harold Rhode:

Rhode participated in the meetings in Europe with the proto-fascist Italian military intelligence organization, SISMI, and the rightwing Italian Defense Minister, along with fraudster Manuchehr Ghorbanifar, at which suspected spy Lawrence Franklin also was present.

US Soldiers Behaving Like Terrorists

Tony Jones talks to US soldier about Iraq war publication

US Soldier Joshua Key has told Tony Jones about his new book, which concludes that American soldiers were behaving like terrorists in the Iraq war, as a result of their training.

One example:

You know of course they were never called Iraqis or Muslims, they were always used in derogatory terms as hajis, habibs and so on. I would say it was definitely a form of dehumanising. I mean, if you see something - that effect all the time - they were never referred to as civilians or Iraqis or Muslims.

Another example:

When I got out of the back of my truck I heard one American soldier screaming that we had lost it. I mean, I looked to the other side and I seen American soldiers kicking the head around like a soccer ball. I got back inside of my APC, which is an armoured personnel carrier, said I wouldn't have no involvement.

May God bless the courage of Joshua Key, the Hugh Thompson of the Iraq War.

Bernard Lewis on Muslim Rage (Part 1)

Side-note: I am still travelling but I wrote this on my notepad, and decided to publish it on the blog (via a thumbdrive) when I got the chance to access the Internet.

An Introduction:

In his infamous essay The Roots of Muslim Rage, which spawned the Hitlerian science of the clash of civilizations (actually, it has an entire section devoted to it), vulgar propagandist Bernard Lewis tries to explain Muslim anti-Americanism/anti-Westernism for his already partisan readership. The late Professor Edward Said remarked that the moment you hear the word “us” as in Lewis’s “our Judeo-Christian heritage” against the Other, you want to head for the door. That would mean walking a couple of miles if we’re going to be through with this tiresome ode to Lewis’s ego embodied by labels like “America”, “Western presence”, “Western models”, “revulsion against America”, “Western civilization”, “anti-Westernism”, “anti-Americanism”, “Western paramountcy” against “House of Islam“, “Muslim lands”, “Muslim dissidents”, “Muslim hostility”, “Muslim possessions”, “Muslim masses”, “Muslim response” etc. Let me mention that not once does Lewis in the course of this whole drivel mention anything about “Western rage”, “anti-Islam and Islamophobia” (in which he shamelessly indulges throughout, evoking some very hateful moods on which hate-mongers base their arguments), and when Lewis does consider, he chooses arguments that recoil:

Some Western powers, and in a sense Western civilisation as a whole, have certainly been guilty of imperialism, but are we really to believe that in the expansion of Western Europe there was a quality of moral delinquency lacking in such earlier, relatively innocent expansions as those of the Arabs or the Mongols or the Ottomans, or in more recent expansions such as that which brought the rulers of Muscovy to the Baltic, the Black Sea, the Caspian, the Hindu Kush, and the Pacific Ocean?

Take note of how he twists the entire attempt at introspection. And just to make it clear, Islam forbids imperialism and terrorism as they go hand in hand. The Prophet Muhammad (peace be upon him) never spoke of invading another country or people. In fact, he was a persecuted refugee himself, and it was in the Year of Sadness that the Holy Prophet lost his beloved wife Khadijah, may Allah be pleased with her. The other tactic that Lewis employs is intellectual camouflage, e.g.

A new variant of the old golden-age myth placed it in the Third World, where the innocence of the non-Western Adam and Eve was ruined by the Western serpent.

If you read Lewis’s writings, even this essay, you will find that Lewis is trying to establish this himself except the other way round. In Lewis’s world, the West is holy and the East is barbaric, serpentine and full of “rage”. The very fact that Lewis is so depleted on scholarship and lofty on American foreign policy propaganda tells us where all this is coming from. In the next part, I’ll talk about how Lewis is not so strictly referring to Muslims but the Eastern race, specifically the Arabs. This is interesting given Huntington’s, the torchbearer of Lewis’s rage, characterization of the Confucian and Islamic civilizations in The Clash of Civilizations and the Remaking of the World Order. Not even a molecular effort is spared by either Lewis or Huntington to come to common terms. An example of Lewis’s rage is the Iraqi conflagration which he advanced and supported with his neocon pals like Dick Cheney aka Hordak of the She-Ra cartoon grunting from the side-lines.

And if they ask what of the Rebellion against this neo-fascism that is gripping the self-proclaimed freedom lovers and corporate crooks, say we are. We salute our brothers and sisters in humanity from Korea to Mexico and we don’t feel any clash of civilizations but clash of egos. The bigger the ego, the bigger the propaganda and the gun of the M1 tank. In the words of Bernard Lewis himself:

It should by now be clear that we are facing a mood and a movement far transcending the level of issues and policies and the governments that pursue them. This is no less than a clash of civilisations—the perhaps irrational but surely historic reaction of an ancient rival against our Judeo-Christian heritage, our secular present, and the worldwide expansion of both. It is crucially important that we on our side should not be provoked into an equally historic but also equally irrational reaction against that rival.

This is a bit of Lewis’s venom analyzed by the late Professor Edward Said in that memorable speech. Lewis must be glad to know that both his secular present and his Judeo-Christian heritage have been expanded and the Iraqi people are waiting with flowers for him and his cronies like Fuad Ajmi and Sheikh Kabbani. Just as it was predicted. And down the street, he’ll also find some WMD. After all, the lying Muslim-baiting war-mongering sanguinary drunkard Christopher Hitchens had found a correlation with Niger.

Pipes on Lewis's Madness

A while ago, I wrote on Bernard Lewis's deadly doctrines that pave the way for imperialism and contaminate already fascist politics with racism by pitting the West against the rest in a civilizational conflict. I just gave you the title of his lecture: "Bring Them Freedom or They Destroy Us".

The great American protest singer-songwriter David Rovics sums it up in the last stanza of his song "Evening News" which severely mocks corporate media for indoctrinating the populace:

Evil men are plotting
To blow up Washington, DC
'Cause they don't like freedom
And democracy
They're fans of the Dark Ages
They are all around

They're marching from the desert sand
And coming to your town

Unfortunately, this is how many people view Arabs and Muslims -- propaganda heated up by Lewis, Pipes, Spencer and Kramer etc. The question is where do we move from here, a positive attempt, and not be drowned by hate literature like The Roots of Western Rage, The American Mind and The Crisis of Judaism and Christianity. Actually, I forgot to mention -- none of these book exist. The correct list is The Roots of Muslim Rage, The Arab Mind and The Crisis of Islam. My point is that hate and racist literature by the likes of Lewis and Raphael Patai when cloaked in sophisticated Western authorship is worthy of bestselling material. How do we change this trend? Not by falsifying information against our non-Muslim brothers and sisters, but by challenging this portrayal by those select few.

Not suprisingly, Daniel Pipes, the man in question, is in full agreement with Lewis. On the same subject, allow me to inform you in case you aren't aware of an upcoming showdown between the London Mayor Ken Livingstone and Daniel Pipes scheduled for January 20th concerning the so-called clash of civilizations. Hopefully, we'll have the video up on youtube. Watch out for it.

Pipes is even behind Lewis on this Hitlerian concept. While Lewis contents himself with the war-mongering power-thumping phrase "the clash of civilizations", Pipes does a back somersault to fall flat with his nut stuck in the Orientalism sewer, and pietistically declares into the filthy foam: "not a clash of civilizations, but a clash between civilization and barbarism." While Lewis is bad, Pipes is worse. He disagrees with the atom of supposed goodness in Lewis's theory, after propagating Lewis's theory offshore and then turning it inwards he bares the fangs at Western Muslims:

There are plenty of born-free Muslims in the West who are Islamists. Take, for example, the four 7/7 bombers in London. Freedom did nothing for them.

And in his classic, insensitive tone toward the people of Iraq, Pipes delivers a terrible judgement:

The goal in war has to be to defeat one's enemies, not liberate them. The invasion of Iraq, dubbed "Operation Iraqi Freedom," suffered from this mistake. The same applies to the war on radical Islam, where we must cause our enemies to feel a sense of defeat. We must crush their will. After that bitter phase has been experienced, they are then eligible for freedom.

The only positive thing about Daniel Pipes is that he may be more truthful about American-Israeli policies and objectives than other policy-makers and propagandists. It is indeed better to say "we came to crush them" than "we came to liberate them". This, however, doesn't discount Pipes's obliqueness.

Defining/Defiling America for European Past

Hat tip to islam.about.com. Vote in their poll whether Congressman Keith Ellison, a Muslim convert, should be allowed to hold the Qur'an in the swear-in ceremony. As you might expect, this has caused immense outrage among talk-show hosts (can't tell the difference between conservative and liberal these days) and fellow Congressmen. We had just got over Dennis Prager's preposterous comments that make a subtle comparison between the Qur'an and "Hitler's Mein Kampf". Now we have Virgil Goode, another ignoramus, attacking Mr Keith Ellison:

Goode wrote that to "preserve the values and beliefs traditional to the United States," an immigration overhaul was necessary to avoid "many more Muslims elected to office demanding the use of the Quran."

CNN reports that Mr Keith Ellison replied that Mr Virgil Goode "would be wise to learn more about Islam". Quite true. But I don't want to just leave you with updates (with which you might already be familiar). What I found common in the comments of both these critics is the trumpeting of what America means: stuff like "American civilization" and "America's culture" and "what America decides". Well, I'm going to take these two at their own game.

1. The Native American culture is the true representation of the US and if we're going to have a single book or text, it is the Native American text people should be holding. David Rovics recently wrote on how "the Arizona Snowbowl Corporation is making plans to build a 14-mile pipeline from the city of Flagstaff to the nearby San Francisco Peaks. They want to expand a ski resort there, and make snow out of the wastewater. These mountains are sacred to 13 different local tribes..." No outrage against sacrilege there.

2. Christians in the US are no more "Americans" than Muslims, chiefly people of African origin. The European origin is simply an equivalent of the African origin unless one subscribes to the theory of the master race. Hence, Mr Ellison is as much as an American with Islam as his religion as the Christian Virgil Goode.

3. Do the American Christian people, the majority, value a Muslim who sincerely takes oath on his religious book and means what he says on committment or a Muslim who for-the-sake-of-it swears on the Bible and makes proclamations which he may carry out but not be committed to?

Conclusion: People like Virgil Goode and Dennis Prager need to read their history. They could start with Alex Haley's Roots and Dee Brown's Bury My Heart at Wounded Knee. The bottomline is that the days of the plantation owners and aristocrats and British imperialism in the Americas are long over.

Fighting Bernard Lewis's Liberty

I've had this on my radar screen for quite a while, but for several reasons: naturally lazy, hesitance on not having widely read Lewis and busy with other stuff, I couldn't write a critique on this intellectual aspersion of scholarship. Rather than go about doing all that, I'll leave you to make your own conclusions. I have now read some of Lewis's writings, but there is not even a mild requirement to equip oneself to tear down Lewis's mask and examine his words in this case, words that haven't been cloaked in subtlety. Instead Lewis makes no bones of the fact that now at over ninety, he can say whatever's on his mind without hints or queues. That's what you do when you're caught several times. I'll just give you Islamophobia Watcher's brief background into Lewis's train of thought. To learn more about the Orientalist, visit the Wikipedia page.

Whether he is asking What Went Wrong? or pontificating on The Crisis of Islam and The Roots of Muslim Rage, it’s all the same – the failure of what Lewis calls "Islam" to acknowledge the success and brilliance of "our Judeo-Christian heritage". The pioneer of the Hitlerian science of the clash of civilizations, much of the world torn by imperialist war and strife, owes its tragedies indirectly to Lewis and the other government-appointed or patronized heirs to the growing international class system of intellectuals like Fouad Ajmi, the proponents of sadistic war and imperialism. It doesn’t surprise some of us that his most faithful disciples are all rabid Zionists.

As he is nearing a century in years, the poison that at times spurted on to the shores is now a routine manifestation. Edward Said once noted that Lewis's "truth" came out when he was on television, but I see that it has also crept into his writings, not that it was "pure" by any chance erstwhile.

Whether he is telling Dick Cheney that the only way to discipline an Arab is to hit him with a big stick right between the eyes or promoting imperialism in Muslim countries as he did for Iraq, the mask of scholarship peels off all of a sudden. After unsuccessfully predicting that Iran would attack Israel on August 22 what Juan Cole called “Lewis’s weird interpretation of his millenarian beliefs”, it turns out Lewis had done a crazy striking earlier on July 16th, in a lecture aboard a cruise ship in the British Isles, what a place for another Lewis prophecy indeed:

Bring Them Freedom, Or They Destroy Us

I won't waste any time dwelling on the points Lewis makes here. You may understand them as bloated versions of the title itself. In my next article, I'll dissect another Neanderthal Orientalist, Daniel Pipes, who has been missing from this blog for a while, on his perspective on Lewis's dangerous trumpery. Well, not for long insha'Allah.

Edward Said: The Myth of the Clash of Civilizations

Part 2

Part 3

Part 4

Part 5

No War With Iran!

Via United for Peace:

Click here and sign Peace Action's "No War with Iran!" petition today! This petition rejects any U.S. military action against Iran and demands direct negotiations.This petition is directed to Secretary of State Condoleeza Rice; copies will go to Chairs of the Senate Foreign Relations Committee and House Committee on International Relations.

An excerpt from Juan Coles's Hitchens the Hacker; And, Hitchens the Orientalist And, "We don't Want Your Stinking War! in retrospect:

One, two, three, four! We don't want your stinking war! ....

We are not going to put Yazd behind barbed wire to liberate it, as a millenarian Christian general did to Habbaniyah in Iraq.

We are not going to imprison and torture thousands of Iranians at Evin Penitentiary in Tehran, as worthy successors to the bloodthirsty Shah and Khomeini.

We are not going to kill 200,000 Iranians with aerial bombardments of Tabriz, Isfahan, Qom, Kerman, Shiraz and Mashahd.

We are not going to let dozens of US corporations loot the American people and the Iranian people alike with no-bid "contracts", embezzlement, corruption, and graft.

We are not going to let you have a war against Iran.

So sit down and shut up, American Enterprise Institute, and Hudson Institute, and Washington Institute for Near East Policy, and American Heritage Foundation, and this institute and that institute, and cable "news", and government "spokesmen", and all the pundit-ferrets you pay millions to make business for the American military-industrial complex and Big Oil.

Yup.

Planet of the Arabs

A trailer-esque montage spectacle of Hollywood's relentless vilification and dehumanization of Arabs and Muslims. Directed by Jacqueline Salloum, http://www.jsalloum.org/. Official Selection at the 2005 SUNDANCE Film Festival. Inspired by the book "Reel Bad Arabs" by Dr. Jack Shaheen.

Note how thoroughly and deeply the Orientalist propaganda manifests itself. The clever synchronisation of skin colour, accent, religion and race. It is much worse and carlessly constructed than Spielberg's Indian Jones and the Temple of Doom for which the director/producer got slammed. The great journalist Robert Fisk wrote on 21st Oct., 2006 in the Independent, although referring to the Hollywoodized European production of O Jerusalem, loosely based on the epic by Dominique Lapierre and Larry Collins:

But it's not this routine bestialisation of Arabs and Muslims that concerns me. You only have to watch the Arab slave-trader film Ashanti, again filmed in Israel and starring Roger Moore and (of all people) Omar Sharif, to see Arabs portrayed, Nazi-style, as murderers, thieves and child molesters. Anti-Semitism against Arabs - who are, of course, also Semites - is par for the course in movies. And I have to admit that in O Jerusalem, the confusion and plotting of the Arab leadership - only King Abdullah of Jordan is an honourable man - is all too realistic, not least the arrogance of the Grand Mufti of Jerusalem, Haj Amin al-Husseini (he who shook hands with Hitler).

No, what I object to is the deliberate distortion of history, the twisting of the narrative of events to present Jews as the victims of the Israeli war of independence (6,000 dead) when in fact they were the victors, and the Arabs of Palestine - or at least that part of Palestine that became Israel in 1948 - as the cause of this war and the apparent victors (because the Jews of East Jerusalem were forced from their homes after the ceasefire) rather than the principal victims. Take, for example, the 1948 massacre at Deir Yassin, where the Stern gang murdered the Arab villagers of what is now the Jerusalem suburb of Givat Shaul, disembowelled women and threw grenades into rooms full of civilians. In O Jerusalem, the Stern gang is represented as a gang of wicked men, a kind of Jewish al-Qa'ida, hopelessly out of touch with the mainstream Israeli army of young, high-minded guerrilla fighters.

And finally I'll end with a great quote from the Danish Muslim journalist Knud Holmboe who was murdered by Italian fascists for daring to speak the truth: "In Europe one is only told that the peaceful Italians in Cyrenaica have been attacked by the bloodthirsty Arabs. Only I, who have seen it, know who the barbarians are."

Yellow Skin and Slanted Eyes

This is a very interesting bit of news, with undertones of classic Orientalism, from Haaretz which reports the words of the Israeli ambassador to Australia:

The Foreign Ministry on Friday condemned remarks by the Israeli ambassador to Australia in which he told Haaretz that the two countries are white sisters amid "the yellow race" of Asia.

"If the article is accurate, this is a grave and unacceptable remark," the Foreign Ministry said in a statement. The ministry said it will not return to business as usual if an internal examination confirms that the ambassador, Naftali Tamir, in fact made the comments attributed to him.

Tamir said that due to what he characterized as the racial similarities between Israel and Australia, the two countries should work together to enhance ties with other Asian countries.

"Israel and Australia are like sisters in Asia," Tamir said in an interview with Haaretz during a visit to Israel this week. "We are in Asia without the characteristics of Asians. We don't have yellow skin and slanted eyes. Asia is basically the yellow race. Australia and Israel are not - we are basically the white race. We are on the western side of Asia and they are on the southeastern side."

Racism in my view is the never-ending fulmination of the most evil. It is that sin coupled with extreme disobedience for which Iblis was/is punished by Allah:

And surely, We created you (your father Adam) and then gave you shape (the noble shape of a human being), then We told the angels, "Prostrate to Adam", and they prostrated, except Iblis (Satan), he refused to be of those who prostrate. (Allah) said: "What prevented you (O Iblis) that you did not prostrate, when I commanded you?" Iblis said: "I am better than him (Adam), You created me from fire, and him You created from clay." S. 7:11-12

Even though Iblis refused to obey his Creator, Allah the Lord of the Worlds, the reason he gave seems to be more convincing (if we're to take the line of racists) than theirs within the human race. I wonder what some of them would say if Allah had made them djinns among men. Whether it's Irshad Manji bad-mouthing and demonizing the Palestinians and clicking photographs with two smiling children from the same camp to show her "humanity", the little ones having no idea what she conceals in real and how she advocates their present state; or George Bush saying that Iraqis are "tolerating the violence" (655000 dead!) in their bloody war for freedom which the so-called liberators said they would get. Never mind the fact that the first place the US military captured in Baghdad was the Oil Ministry. Never mind dead bodies found drifiting in the Tigris everyday. Who are they? What are their names? Did they have families? Were they happy when they last left home? Was there a real need to go out? Did they have aspirations, dreams and a simple imagination? Did they think of the fleeting pleasure on the faces of their grandparents when they were young?

Arafat and Aid Money

Robert Spencer, who has been spearheading a campaign to dehumanize and vilify Muslims and Islam much like his neo-Nazi co-star Hugh Fitzgerald, has reported an article from the Jerusalem Post that Yasser Arafat used international aid funds to purchase weapons. His website, Jihad Watch, which serves as the breeding ground for bigotry garners a lot of participation from racist drumbeaters. My point is that it isn't a question of refutation of the charges against Yasser Arafat. They may indeeed be true. But we don't have to act like the Zionists and just degrade the Palestinians. We have to take the argument of the Zionists and turn it up. Hmmm...let's see. Since its inception through ethnic cleansing and deportation of the native Palestinians, the Zionist state of Israel has received more than 140 billion dollars. Israel is the only recipient of US aid that does not have to account for how the so-called aid money is spent. What do the Zionists do with that money? Nothing much. They just steal land, build walls of apartheid next to their nightclubs while the Palestinians starve, bulldoze buildings, murder Arab children, run their specially designed behemoths over peace activists and curse HAMAS. America's support for Israel through the so-called aid money is like funding state terrorism, something for which the United States is itself guilty of. American aid money to Israel is the very life blood of occupation.