I don't read Michael J. Totten enough. My bad. In his most recent dispatch from Iraq he describes a trip from the peaceful and successful area of Kurdistan, down through where Saddam's Baathists made their last stands and to Kirkuk beyond its southern border. In Kirkuk , Totten describes the deadly differences between Arab neighborhoods and areas where Kurds and Turkmen live. Once upon a time it was mostly a Kurdish city:
“Can you explain the main reasons why Saddam Hussein changed the makeup of this city?” I said. “Was it for the resources, because of the Baath ideology, or both?”
I heard a loud thump somewhere off in the distance and wrote “possible explosion” in my notebook. No one else seemed to notice it, though.
“It was for ethnic reasons,” Mam Rostam said. “The proof of this is that not only Kirkuk was involved. Suleimaniya and Erbil were also involved. They wanted to remove all the Kurds from everywhere in Iraq. They just destroyed whole villages and provinces and moved people into collective towns and concentration camps. Some of the Turkmen villages around here were demolished for the same reason. The point was to make it an Arab area, and no other. Saddam Hussein intended to be the leader of the Arab nation, the whole Arab world. He didn’t want anyone other than Arabs to exist around him. That was his policy.”
Saddam Hussein wasn’t content merely to force Kurds and Turkmens out of their homes so he could move Arabs in. He also smashed their villages and neighborhoods with air strikes, artillery, chemical weapons, and napalm.
I've always been saying, whenever I bring up the obvious evil of Saddam that of course there are irreconcilable differences between American conservatives and Pan-Arab Socialists. The general reply to that is 'No WMD', which is why I don't really spend much time rehashing that debate. But in talking recently about black partisanship vis a vis Christianity and Islam, commenter Faheem left this gem.
Islam is framed in the form of racial supremacy by Arabs who have mixed Arab culture with Islam, and have sought to infuse the two as if they are one in the same and then force that down the throats of Africans. In addition, Arabs subscribe to white supremacy in that they believe they are superior to the African despite the fact the Luqman is a Black man after whom a chapter is named in the Qur’an and Bilal whom the Prophet said he heard the footsteps of entering the Kingdome of heaven before his is an African. Chancellor Williams book the Destruction of Black Civilization chronicles Arab abuses of the African in the name of Islam As well as lectures and books by John Henrik Clarke.
We have spent a lot of time discussing, led as we often are by staying one step of the MSM, sectarian violence. I've taken the time to talk about Sunni and Shia and even the divisions between them. But nobody has really made it plain, at least not to me, the dimensions of pure good old fashion racial hatred deeply embedded in Saddam's Baathist policies.
I've heard plenty of blackfolks dismiss conservatives who use the term 'Islamonazi' as overstated hype, but the evidence is everywhere. I thought I'd bring a few pieces to your attention.
From the Jamestown Foundation:
Militant Islamists' ideology is racist and anti-Semitic. Its origins date to the movement founded in 1928 called the Muslim Brotherhood. The Muslim Brotherhood's founder, Hassan al-Banna, expressed "considerable admiration for the Nazi Brownshirts."(1) Like the Nazis who wanted to kill all Jews and enslave others who did not belong to the Aryan super nation, Osama bin Laden also calls for killing all Jews, Americans, and other infidels who prevent Islamists from building a pure Islamic state with global dimensions. In a statement made on February 23, 1998, bin Laden claimed that "to kill the Americans and their allies - civilians and military - is an individual duty for every Muslim who can do it in any country in which it is possible.(2)
According to the most influential Islamist ideologue, Sayyid Qutb of Egypt, the greatness of the Arabs came from the greatness of the Arab goal, which was to liberate the world from ignorance. The message of Muhammad took the Arabs and "raised them to the position of human leadership."(3) Moreover, militant Islamists demand the total obedience of all Muslims to their ideological rule. According to Sayyid Qutb, those who do not accept the leadership of militant Islamists are false Muslims. Qutb claims that "hypocrites" who rule the Muslim world are not Muslims at all. Muslims who acknowledge Islam one day a week and ignore it on the other days, are Islam's bitter foes, no matter how loudly they chant their prayers.(4) Even those who try to unite modern ideas with Islamic dogma in the form of "Islamic democracy" or "Islamic socialism," are considered enemies of Islam. Osama bin Laden put Qutb's ideas in the form of a practical order: "We also call on the Muslim ulema, leaders, youth, and soldiers to launch a raid on Satan's US troops and the devil's supporters allying with them and to displace those who are behind them so that they may learn a lesson."(5) This same spirit of harsh criticism for "false Muslims" is apparent in most broadcasts of Al-Jazeera, Al-Arabi, and Nile news.
That squares with everything I read in The Looming Tower. Let us also not forget that Sudan's civil ware is all about the same thing. This is from a pre-OIF (1999) report of the International Council on Human Rights Policy:
Where and how does the Arab world figure in the global scheme of ethno-racial conflicts? With only 8% of world population, the Arab world has had some 25% of all the world’s armed conflicts since 1945. Most of these conflicts have been ethno-racially based. Though considered by all concerned as the principal one, the Arab-Israeli conflict (six wars and a continued Palestinian and Lebanese struggle against Israeli occupation) has claimed some 200,000 lives in fifty years. In contrast, during the same period, ethno-racial conflicts have claimed at least twelve times as many lives. The Lebanese civil war (1975-1990) alone matched the same number of casualties as all the Arab-Israeli wars. The Sudanese civil war (on and off since 1956) has claimed at least eight times as many lives as all Arab-Israeli wars. The same relative costs apply in terms of population displacement, material devastation, and financial expenditure.
I know how difficult it is for many black partisans to get behind the Bush Administration, but many are quite ready to fight divisive political battles domestically over the fate of this or that basketball player or harshly sentenced convict. That's not a battle against racism that anyone should be proud of, and it's an embarrassment to have such sorry matters define American anti-racism. The enemy of the US is radical Islam a significant portion of which is racist to the bone and deadly far beyond our own experience with Jim Crow.
Try to remember that. It is a very long war because it's that deep.
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