Fear Extreme Islamists in the Arab World? Blame Washington!

In the last year of his life, Martin Luther King Jr. questioned US 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 US 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, US 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.

In a pattern growing out of what King called Washington's "irrational, obsessive anti-communism," US 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 US armed and trained native mujahedeen fighters - some of whom went on to form the Taliban. To aid the mujahedeen, the US 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.)

This is hardly obscure history.

Except in US mainstream media.

One of the mantras on US television news all day Friday was: Be fearful of the democratic uprisings against US 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 US 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 US taxpayers. Where Mubarak is almost always called "president" and almost never "dictator" (unlike the elected president of Venezuela).

When the US media talks about the Egyptian and Tunisian "presidents" being valued "allies in the war on terror," it's no surprise that they offer no details about the prisoners the US 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 US 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 US foreign policy.

Egypt: U.S. Puppet Regime On Verge of Collapse

In an interview with NPR, Joe Biden stumbles his way through soft ball questions about Egypt and the dictator Hosni Mubarak, who Biden identifies as a personal friend. In the process, Biden reveals the U.S. attitude toward dictators and client states.
“Mubarak has been an ally of ours in a number of things,” said Biden. “And he’s been very responsible on, relative to geopolitical interest in the region, the Middle East peace efforts; the actions Egypt has taken relative to normalizing relationship with — with Israel. … I would not refer to him as a dictator.”
Remarkably, Biden is considered the go-to man in the Obama administration on foreign policy. The vice president has been famously and consistently called a foreign policy expert by the Washington establishment. In fact, President Obama admitted during his campaign for president that he relied on Biden’s foreign policy advice while both men were in the Senate.
Mubarak’s knuckle-dragging dictatorship is so crucial to the foreign policy of the United States, it is the number two recipient of money (it receives around $2 billion per year). Only Israel receives more.
Egypt under Mubarak uses its billions in U.S. military aid to detain, beat and torture dissenters, opposition politicians and journalists; many have died in custody, Thousands of political prisoners and pro-democracy activists are held in overcrowded, disease-ridden prisons, without charges or trials. Press restrictions, including newspaper shutdowns, are widespread.
This sort of behavior is not the exception but the rule. Egypt has faced repeated criticism from human rights activists and others for decades.
Biden told NPR the U.S. government encourages Egypt to embrace democracy, but this is at best a sick joke.
In 2005, after similar gentle nudging from the Bush administration, Mubarak allowed opposition candidates to run against him, including Ayman Nour. After Nour won a paltry 7 percent of the vote (according to the Egyptian government), he was arrested on politically motivated charges of forgery and sentenced him to five years in prison, thus sending a strong message to anybody who would dare challenge Mubarak.
Since Tuesday, Egypt has witnessed widespread protests against poverty and corruption, and calls for democratic changes. Authorities suspended Internet and cell phone service, according to news reports and mobile operators, in an attempt to block media coverage and communications between protesters. Security forces today continued violent physical attacks on journalists. Mubarak’s thugs have targeted the BBC, Al-Jazeera, CNN, and French journalists working for Le Figaro, Journal du Dimanche, Sipa Photo Agency, and Paris Match.
Beating up journalists and confiscating their equipment, however, will not prevent the regime’s collapse, which now appears imminent.
Even the globalists gathered in Davos, Switzerland, are issuing hollow calls for Egypt to guarantee the freedoms of its residents and eschew violence in order to avoid the fall of Biden’s friend in Cairo.
Prior to the threat posed against Mubarak’s authoritarian rule financed mainly by the U.S. tax payer, Ban Ki-moon and the globalists did not complain much about the despot’s treatment of journalists and the political opposition in his country. Now that the linchpin of globalist control in the Middle East is about the fall, they are calling for reform.
Even Secretary of State Clinton was obliged to offer mild rebuke of Mubarak and his thugs. She suggested Mubarak open “a dialogue between the government and people of Egypt.”
Mubarak’s dialogue was heard this evening in Cairo. He did not answer with words, but with bullets.

Does the Constitution Have Any Binding Power?

Now that Republicans have a majority in Congress, they are pretending to be constitutionalists. In order to demonstrate this, they will theatrically read aloud the Constitution from the floor of the House next week. “And then they will require that every new bill contain a statement by the lawmaker who wrote it citing the constitutional authority to enact the proposed legislation,” reports The Washington Post.
Establishment Republicans, of course, have the same amount of contempt for the Constitution as establishment Democrats. As dedicated worshipers of state power over the individual, establishment Republicans and their ideological twins the establishment Democrats hate the founding principles of this country.
Conservatives regard civil liberties as coddling devices for criminals and terrorists. They see the First Amendment as a foolish protection for sedition. The conservative assault on the US Constitution is deeply entrenched. Today’s conservatives are so poorly informed that they cannot understand that to lose the Constitution is to lose the country. While so-called conservatives pay lip-service to the Constitution, so-called progressives actively trash it and cosign the founding document to irrelevance.
A columnist for the Washington Post says the Constitution has “no binding power on anything” and is confusing – for liberals and other advocates of state power over the individual – because it is over a hundred years old.
Nancy Pelosi and the formerly ruling Democrats also believe the Constitution is irrelevant. “Madam Speaker, where specifically does the Constitution grant Congress the authority to enact an individual health insurance mandate?” a reporter for CNN asked Speaker Pelosi as Democrats prepared to shove Obamacare down the throats of the American people. Pelosi responded: “Are you serious? Are you serious?”
In August, Illinois Democrat Phil Hare told his constituents that he does not give a whit about the Constitution. “I don’t worry about the Constitution on this to be honest,” Hare said in response to a question about the constitutionality of Obamacare.
Hare also demonstrated his contemptible ignorance by saying that the Constitution guarantees each of us “life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness.” In fact, that line is in the Declaration of Independence, not the Constitution.
We’ve now arrived at the point where a sitting Congressman can openly state that he doesn’t care what the Constitution says, a sentiment obviously held by a majority of members since Congress continues to putatively enact ‘laws’ in the utter absence of express constitutional text. For the establishment political class, the Constitution is completely irrelevant.
Even the soon to be leader of the House, John Boehner, is largely clueless about the Constitution. He, like Phil Hare, has mistakenly attributed a line from the Declaration of Independence to the Constitution. Obama did the same, but then he was reading from a teleprompter.
Good 'Ol George W. Bush was reported to have said, "Stop throwing the Constitution in my face. It's just a goddamned piece of paper!"
Dismissive remarks about the Constitution are shared by a large number of politicos and other worshipers of state power in the District of Criminals. If the establishment political class is going to successfully strip us of our natural and god-given rights, they have to support the idea that the Constitution is irrelevant and nothing more than a quaint piece of goddamn paper.