In the last year of his life, Martin Luther King Jr. questioned U.S. military interventions against progressive movements in the Third World by invoking a JFK quote: "Those who make peaceful revolution impossible will make violent revolution inevitable."
Were he alive to witness the last three decades of U.S. foreign policy, King might update that quote by noting: "Those who make secular revolution impossible will make extreme Islamist revolution inevitable."
For decades beginning during the Cold War, U.S. policy in the Islamic world has been aimed at suppressing secular reformist and leftist movements. Beginning with the CIA-engineered coup against a secular democratic reform government in Iran in 1953 (it was about oil), Washington has propped up dictators, coaching these regimes in the black arts of torture and mayhem against secular liberals and the left.
In these dictatorships, often the only places where people had freedom to meet and organize were mosques -- and out of these mosques sometimes grew extreme Islamist movements. The Shah's torture state in Iran was brilliant at cleansing and murdering the left - a process that helped the rise of the Khomeini movement and ultimately Iran's Islamic Republic.
Growing out of what M.L. King called Washington's "irrational, obsessive anti-communism," U.S. foreign policy also backed extreme Islamists over secular movements or government that were either Soviet-allied or feared to be.
In Afghanistan, beginning before the Soviet invasion and evolving into the biggest CIA covert operation of the 1980s, the U.S. armed and trained native mujahedeen fighters -- some of whom went on to form the Taliban. To aid the mujahedeen, the U.S. recruited and brought to Afghanistan religious fanatics from the Arab world -- some of whom went on to form Al Qaeda. (Like these Washington geniuses, Israeli intelligence -- in a divide-and-conquer scheme aimed at combating secular leftist Palestinians -- covertly funded Islamist militants in the occupied territories who we now know as Hamas.)
Most of this is not obscure history.
Except in U.S. mainstream media.
One of the mantras on U.S. television news all day Friday was: Be fearful of the democratic uprisings against U.S. allies in Egypt (and Tunisia and elsewhere). After all, we were told by Fox News and CNN and Chris Matthews on MSNBC, it could end up as bad as when "our ally" in Iran was overthrown and the extremists came to power in 1979.
Such talk comes easy in U.S. media where Egyptian victims of rape and torture in Mubarak's jails are never seen. Where it's rarely emphasized that weapons of repression used against Egyptian demonstrators are paid for by U.S. taxpayers. Where Mubarak is almost always called "president" and almost never "dictator" (unlike the elected president of Venezuela).
When U.S. media glibly talk about the Egyptian and Tunisian "presidents" being valued "allies in the war on terror," it's no surprise they offer no details about the prisoners the U.S. has renditioned to these "pro-Western" countries for torture.
The truth is that no one knows how these uprisings will end.
But revolution of some kind, as King said, seems inevitable. Washington's corrupt Arab dictators will come down as surely (yet more organically) as that statue of Saddam, another former U.S.-ally.
If Washington took its heel off the Arab people and ended its embrace of the dictators, that could help secularists and democrats win hearts and minds against extreme Islamists.
Democracy is a great idea. Too bad it plays almost no role in U.S. foreign policy.
Jeff Cohen is the director of the Park Center for Independent Media at Ithaca College, founder of the media watch group FAIR, and boardmember of the new online action group RootsAction.org.
Follow Jeff Cohen on Twitter: www.twitter.com/jeffcot
What is a fundamentalist; a person who believs in fundament e.g. not lying, not decieving not raping not murdering innocent and so on.
We are man of character and i am proud to be fundamentalist i.e. the rules and regulations laid down down by Islam we practice.
We will serve the nation not steal their wealth and run away to america, All the looters have their wealth in america and they will support them, is natural.
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Hugo's last election was about as clean as Hosni's.
2004 was a different matter. There was nothing stolen in Ohio.
Rubbish. Venezuela's elections have been monitored by international observes, Egypt's have not. Also, Mubarak got more votes during the so called free election than during the ones he openly admitted to faking.
IN other words: "Hooray for STALIN!!!!!!! How many people did Mao kill? Pol Pot?
Also, Egypt is socialist. So are Syria, Libya, Yemen, Algeria....ALL the 'Stans....Pakistan always CLAIMED to be Socialist. Saudi Arabia is more or less socialists, when it comes to it's citizens at least (poor foreigners are treated as slaves). Most of the Muslim world is more or less socialistic.
Truer words have never been spoken, my friend. F&F
As Bob Marley sang, "what goes around, it comes around."
The best reason and rational for not voting extremist ideologues into office.
Also, why Fox News is to be avoided.