War on Terrorism

“France, Switzerland, Belgium, Sweden, Denmark, Great Britain and Norway ... are today in the mouth of the wolf, refusing to understand that Islam never seeks to enrich a culture or integrate into a civilization. Its final goal is to supplant them before eradicating them. How, then, can we not be afraid of the threats posed by Islamism in view of the violence, attacks and murders that have become our daily lot?”

On September 11, 2001, Americans awoke to the nightmare of a well-coordinated and devastating terrorist attack conducted on their soil. Given the unprecedented magnitude of the event, there was an especially strong need among average Americans for information to know about the identity of the perpetrator(s) of the attacks and the reasons behind them. T hey relied heavily on the media, mainly TV and the press, for information. Unprepared for such a public information crisis, the media had to rush to the American Muslim communities to get much needed answers to pressing questions about the teachings of Islam and Muslims. For the first time in American history American Muslims were given the opportunity to speak directly to Americans nationwide about themselves and their religion. This paper studies the extent to which increased media reporting on Islam and Muslims in the US after 9/11 represents a step forward in combating century-long Orientalist stereotypes and segmented narratives ...

How does a photograph become a news image? An ethnography of the labor behind international news images, Image Brokers ruptures the self-evidence of the journalistic photograph by showing the many factors determining how news audiences are shown people, events, and the world. News images, Zeynep Gürsel argues, function as formative fictions – fictional insofar as these images are constructed and culturally mediated, and formative because their public presence and circulation have real consequences in the world.

Set against the backdrop of the War on Terror and based on fieldwork conducted at photojournalism’s centers of power, Image Brokers offers an intimate look at an industry in crisis. At the turn of the 21st century, image brokers—the people who manage the distribution and restriction of news images—found the core technologies of their craft, the status of images, and their own professional standing all changing rapidly with the digitalization of the infrastructures of representation. From corporate sales meetings to wire service desks, newsrooms to photography workshops and festivals, Image Brokers investigates how news images are produced and how worldviews are reproduced in the process.

http://www.ucpress.edu/book.php?isbn=9780520286375

In order to enter symmetrical relations of force in a war, the two opposing sides need to have some balance in technology (and overall power). When such balance is not there in a war, e.g. like the Gulf War in the early 1990s, it transforms into, what Jean Baudrillard calls, a non-war. In other words, he questions the occurrence or reality of a non-war. Along the lines of Baudrillard's critique of the Gulf War, we register critique of the ongoing drone war on the Pakistan-Afghanistan borderland. We argue that the technological imbalance is even worse in this drone war. Accordingly, there is higher level of asymmetry in the relations of force, which has transfigured the nature/reality of this war. We apply and test a set of Baudrillard's concepts to explain this transfigured nature of the drone war.

During Cold War era, the US supported the armed groups in Afghanistan in terms of training and ammunition against the Soviet Union by fuelling Islamic jihadism. After failed invasion of Soviet Union, the US withdrew completely leaving the armed groups from the region and it created a threat to the whole world. The US became one of the biggest targets and victims of its own policy with 9/11 attacks, Afghanistan was one of the countries the US occupied in order to fight against terrorist organizations and to bring democracy to countries that feed and support terrorism within the framework of the Bush Doctrine. The US did not carry out this invasion alone and for the first time in its history, NATO took action within the scope of Article 5 and engaged in a collective intervention. The point reached at the end of the 20-year invasion, where humanitarian loss and economic costs are too heavy to be overcome, the US, who sat at the table with the Taliban, quickly retreated from the region by leaving everything else-once again-just as how it was while disappointing its NATO allies.

The purpose of this study is to demonstrate information about the causes and costs of wars in Africa. This work is divided into five topics; First, Introduction which provides basic knowledge about peace and history of Africa; Second, Typology of wars in Africa which explains the types of wars that exists or once was in Africa, Causes and Costs; Third topic is about Africa and War on Terror this provides a deep down knowledge about the terrorism and how Africa got involved into the war on terrorism; the fourth topic is about the Political economy and cultural ecology of war in Africa; and the final topic is about conclusion, lastly there is a reference on the bottom of the paper.

“Rivoluzionario professionista” convertito all’Islam, Carlos ha dedicato la sua vita combattendo “per la liberazione del mondo dallo sfruttamento imperialista e della Palestina dall’occupazione sionista”. Le armi gli “sono state imposte dalle circostanze, determinate dalla violenza stessa del nemico”, e il “terrorismo” è una fatalità imposta “dal rapporto di forze cui nessun resistente, musulmano o meno, può sfuggire, poiché è di fronte a un nemico potentissimo, senza freni né limiti in arroganza e ambizione di conquista”. Il terrorismo “è l’arma dei poveri”, “un’arma di prima scelta per ristabilire una parvenza di equilibrio contro la sproporzione dei mezzi di informazione, il cui monopolio assoluto è del nemico”, ovvero degli americani. In questo libro autobiografico commentato da Marco Marsili, Ilič Ramírez Sánchez ricostruisce le tappe della carriera che ne ha fatto il terrorista più famoso e ricercato nel mondo, dai primi attentati degli anni ‘70, all’amicizia con Osama Bin Laden, Saddam Hussein e Mùammar Gheddafi, fino all’arresto avvenuto in Sudan nel ’94. Carlos svela la verità sugli attentati dell’11 settembre, e spiega, con una lucida analisi, la strategia statunitense della “guerra preventiva”, motivata dalla necessità di mantenere il controllo sul prezzo del petrolio, scambiato sui mercati internazionali in dollari. Una feroce critica ai media occidentali, al capitalismo, al consumismo, all’Onu, e alla sinistra occidentale, accusata di essersi adagiata “sugli allori della borghesia convertendosi al liberalismo californiano”.

Die vorliegende Arbeit beschreibt den Zusammenhang zwischen den digitalen Erinnerungskulturen von ‚9/11‘ und der Mediengeschichte des World Wide Web im Zeitraum von 2001 bis 2016. Die darin angelegte Problemstellung behandelt das rekursive Verhältnis von Medialität und Historizität und lässt sich als Kombination von zwei Fragestellungen fassen: Welchen Einfluss hat der digitale Medienwandel – insbesondere in Form des World Wide Web – auf die Verarbeitung des Medienereignisses ‚9/11‘ in verschiedenen Erinnerungskulturen? Und welche Rolle spielen im Gegenzug das Medienereignis und die Erinnerungskultur von ‚9/11‘ für die Beobachtbarkeit des Web als historischer Medienkonstellation und für die Bedingungen der Internet- und Webhistoriographie? Bislang gibt es zu beiden Fragen lediglich punktuelle kulturwissenschaftliche Untersuchungen, die zwar einzelne Anwendungen oder bestimmte Zeitpunkte thematisieren, jedoch die strukturelle Koevolution von Medialität und Historizität nur unzureichend berücksichtigen. Die vorliegende Arbeit ist die erste medienhistoriographische Studie, die nicht nur einzelne webbasierte Erscheinungsformen des Erinnerungsortes ‚9/11‘ betrachtet, sondern ihre heterogenen Entwicklungslinien und transmedialen Verflechtungen genealogisch wie systematisch untersucht. Im Umkehrschluss besteht das Novum der Arbeit in der Ausarbeitung und Anwendung einer reflexiven Perspektive, die den Status von ‚9/11‘ als Element von webbasierten Gedächtnisformen und als Erkenntnisobjekt der Webgeschichte diskutiert.

TERRORISME Polémique de définitions et problématique des termes Préambule: Le thème de Terrorisme prend un grand soin de l'intérêt des juristes internationaux et civils puisque ce phénomène représente un grand danger sur la société à travers la perte de sécurité, la destruction du bien, la violation des tabous, le sacrilège, le meurtre, l'enlèvement de civils innocents et la menace pour la vie de beaucoup d'entre eux. En Iraq, ce thème prend une dimension plus importante à cause de la souffrance des irakiens de nombreuses formes de crimes terroristes et sous des slogans et des excuses qui ont nui la sécurité de la société en l'offrant au risque, en jetant l'effroi dans les âmes des citoyens, en causant le dommage de l'économie, le l'environnement, les bâtiments, les propriétés publiques et privés. Elles ont perturbé la vie normale dans de grandes parties du pays. Sans doute, la recherche dans la signification du terrorisme exige une étude de ses divers aspects. Cependant, notre étude sera limitée à définir sa signification comme un phénomène juridique sur les deux plans international et national dont les pays arabes et islamique ont négligé de la traiter et la lutter tôt. Cela l'a fait s'exacerber. Dans cette brève recherche, nous essayerons de chercher la signification du terrorisme dans la loi islamique (Al Charia), dans la loi internationale et nationale. Nous essayerons de distinguer le terrorisme d'autres aspects de violence permise comme des travaux de résistance, la lutte armée, et le crime de la piraterie aussi. Nous diviserons l'étude en quatre chapitres: le premier chapitre discutera la définition de terrorisme et son histoire. Le deuxième chapitre sera consacré au thème du terrorisme dans la loi nationale. Quant au troisième chapitre, nous y traiterons le thème du terrorisme dans la loi internationale. Enfin, nous avons distingué entre le terrorisme, la lutte armée, les travaux de résistance, et quelques d'autres crimes comme le crime de la piraterie. Dans cet article, nous parlerons du terrorisme. Ce mot le plus utilisé dans nous jours. Pendant les sept décennies dernières, ce mot a fait une grande polémique et de grandes différences sur le niveau international. Jusqu'à notre jour, la société internationale n'a pas arrivé à définir ce terme ancien depuis le début de l'humanité jusqu' à nos jours. Nous essayerons discuter ce thème selon le plan suivant: nous parlerons de définition de terrorisme selon quelques points de vue: juridique et linguistique. Nous faisons une comparaison entre toutes ces définitions dans certains pays et certaines langues comme l'Arabe, le Français, et l'Anglais.

On September 11, 2001, Americans awoke to the nightmare of a well-coordinated and devastating terrorist attack conducted on their soil. Given the unprecedented magnitude of the event, there was an especially strong need among average Americans for information to know about the identity of the perpetrator(s) of the attacks and the reasons behind them. They relied heavily on the media, mainly TV and the press, for information. Unprepared for such a public information crisis, the media had to rush to the American Muslim communities to get much needed answers to pressing questions about the teachings of Islam and Muslims. For the first time in American history American Muslims were given the opportunity to speak directly to Americans nationwide about themselves and their religion.
This paper studies the extent to which increased media reporting on Islam and Muslims in the US after 9/11 represents a step forward in combating century-long Orientalist stereotypes and segmented narratives about this world religion and its followers by analyzing the news and newspaper transcripts of Fox News, CNN, the New York Times, the San Francisco Chronicle and the Chicago Sun-Times covering Islam and American Muslims during the first two years of America’s war on terrorism.

Keywords: American Muslims, Orientalism, US media, September 11, war on terrorism, stereotypes.

The 9/11 attacks were used to justify an institutional revolution meant to complete a process of integration and coordination
of all the assets of US national power through a strategic communication (SC) campaign deployed on a global scale. The
“Global War on Terror” (GWOT) nurtured a narrative of crisis
associated with this unprecedented public education effort.
In order to sell its approaches, the United States government
relied on a network of “experts”: military veterans, high‐
ranking officers such as Admirals as well as professional
journalists and academics who contributed to forging a
consensus, or, as Michel Foucault would call it, a “regime of truth” that claims a certain interpretation to be right and true, while ignoring or discrediting critics and dissenting narratives.  We trace the historical precedents for the Total Diplomacy of the Twenty-First Century.

Embracing the tactic of suicide bombings first in 2003, the Taliban in Afghanistan quickly emerged as the leading terrorist group in the world that has claimed responsibility for such bombings. Over a period of more than 10 years, the group has indiscriminately carried out hundreds of suicide bombings across the country. How have the Taliban managed to operationalize one of the most notorious bombing tactics against all the existing social and cultural odds of Afghan society? To answer this question, this study, by applying qualitative thematic analysis, examined the contents of the Taliban's written and audiovisual materials on suicide bombings. Two dominant narratives, namely "Istish-haadi" [seeking martyrdom] and "love to death, " that are at the core of the Taliban's produced literature on suicide bombings, have supplied the group with dispensable human bombs. These bombers, the study concludes, are "dying to live".

Whilst a growing body of literature working at the intersection of security and visual studies recognizes the value of studying images, how these visualities are produced is less theorized, especially with respect to materialities and their capacity to compel meanings. Analysing the tours of Joint Task Force Guantanamo arranged by the US military for VIP visitors since the site opened, this article argues that the selective organisation and presentation of specific matter was image-making and therefore meaning-making. Through efforts to produce a spectacle of detention, Guantánamo was deliberately constructed as ‘safe, humane, legal, transparent’, in the process shifting the meaning of these very concepts. Guantánamo’s tours as visual and material practices were therefore used to produce meaning in the debate over the future of the site and over how best to secure the US state post-9/11. They were part of the constitution of the war’s legitimacy leading, ultimately, to certain understandings of security. Guantánamo with its ‘object lessons’ and ‘concrete messages’ is therefore a useful case study for understanding security meaning-making as produced by the interaction of linguistic, visual and material domains and their elements.

The Horn of Africa provides examples of several themes that we have seen elsewhere in the world, including the artificial creation by European powers of political boundaries that divided ethnic groups, the American policy of anti-Communism during the Cold War that exacerbated these divisions by creating proxy conflicts between the United States and the Soviet Union, and the erroneous War on Terrorism policy in the present that masks the underlying ethnic conflicts that are the reason why people resort to radical Islamist jihad.

But the region also provides some new issues as well. It wasn’t only European interference in the creation of British Somaliland, French Djibouti, Italian Somalia and the Italian occupation of Ethiopia during World War II, but also the historical conflict between Christian Ethiopia and Muslim Eritrea, Djibouti, and Somalia that were also factors behind the conflicts in the region. Furthermore, within Somalia there were conflicts between clans within the overall Somali ethnic group that were worsened by the United Nations and the United States taking sides during the Somali Civil War in the 1990s. Then, the United States took the side of Ethiopia in its invasion of Somalia in 2006.

American movies have celebrated the American military in its dealings with Somalia: first in the 2001 movie Black Hawk Down about the disastrous attempt to arrest Mohamed Aideed, the warlord leader of the Hadr Gibr clan in Mogadishu, and then in the 2013 movie Captain Phillips, starring Tom Hanks, that casted Somali immigrants from Minnesota as the Somali pirates who hijacked the American container ship Maersk Alabama in 2009. The Black Hawk Down incident, which began as an well-meaning effort of the United Nations and the United States to provide humanitarian assistance to the starving Somalis during one of the regions repeated famines, resulted in a mission creep into taken sides between the rival Darod and Hadr Gibr clans. Although there has been a problem with Somali fishermen having resorted to piracy as a last resort to alleviate the poverty in the region, the Maersk Alabama incident has created the stereotype that all Somalis are brutal terrorists.

And now with the 2016 election of Donald J. Trump as president of the United States, his anti-immigrant, anti-Muslim statements have made the matter even worse given the fact past American involvement in the region has provided fodder for the growth of the anti-American, pro-Al Qaeda al-Shabaab  that controls much of Somalia today. The fact that there is a significant Somali refugee population in Midwest has brought the conflict home as seen in the September 2016 attack on shoppers in the St. Cloud, Minnesota, shopping mall by a Somali immigrant and the November attack the same year at Ohio State University in Columbus, Ohio, by another Somali immigrant. In both cases, the attacks seemed to have been done by home-grown terrorists. The answer, my friend, is not blowing in the wind. It’s not more saber rattling or immigration restrictions, it’s getting to the underlying reasons why people are attracted to radical jihadism: one of which is anti-Muslim prejudice and the other is taking sides in complex ethnic conflicts in the name of the War on Terrorism.

Unlike past American wars, the current war on terror has not been associated with a centrally proffered narrative providing some guidance and orientation for those administering government services under state-of-war conditions. War is as much a cultural endeavor as it is a military undertaking, and the absence of a clear sensemaking narrative was detected in this study of public administrators from three agencies with varying proximity to the conflict. Q-methodology was used to explore the way individuals processed the war narratives put forth by the Bush administration and reported in the media immediately following the September 11 attacks. Though no distinct state-of-war narratives were found among the public administrators in this study, there are clear indications that latent narratives reflecting local political and organizational task environments have emerged.

آرمی پبلک اسکول پرحملے کے ایک سال بعد پاکستانی فوج نے جونغمہ تیارکیااس پرلبرل لیفٹ اورقوم پرست عناصرکی طرف سے بہت سخت ردعمل آیا۔ اس نغمہ میں 'دشمن کے  بچوں کوپڑھانے 'عزم ظاہرکیاگیاہے جس سے  یہ پیغام ملتاہے کہ فوج ایک بارپھرطالبان سے  سمجھوتہ کی طرف بڑھ رہی ہے۔ اورجنگ کوفراموش کرکے اورحساب برابرمان کراب بچے  کچے  طالبان کی سرپرستی  کرناچاہتی ہے۔ میں نے 15،16اور17دسمبرکوسوشل میڈیا پرشئرہونے والے مقبول ترین پوسٹوں میں کچھ کومنتخب کرکے یہ جاننے کی کوشش کی ہے  کہ قوم پرست، روشن خیال، لبرل اورلیفٹ کیاکہناچاہتاہے  اورپھران کے  وجوہات جاننے کی کوشش کی ہے۔

in: Die Friedens-Warte. Journal of International Peace and Organization, 3-4/2016, 90. Jg., S. 311-339. Contents of the Special Issue hier: https://www.bwv-verlag.de/digibib/bwv/apply/headline/opus/200946/volume/2015/issue/3/contribution/6118/

Bilateral Security Agreement is of great importance to both the United States of America and Afghanistan. The document was signed between the two on September 30, 2014, in Kabul providing the United States forces the legitimacy to stay in Afghanistan beyond 2014 and have some bases in Afghanistan and in return play an advisory role to the Afghan forces and raise their capacity.

The report argues that, in the post-9/11 world, managing the imagined threat of terrorism is as much, if not more, important than dealing with its real threat. This is not only due to the peculiar nature of the global War On Terror, a struggle for “hearts and minds” and for the moral high ground, but also to the relevance of perceptions within an increasingly media-saturated international environment. Starting from the analysis of the government/media interactions in a range of terrorist alerts in the UK, the report identifies a series of problem areas in successfully countering the imagined threat. They not only apply to the UK, but to the whole Euro-Atlantic context and span from defining (framing) the threat in “manageable” terms to approaching the media as a different kind of actor than normally regarded by politicians. The research suggests that, if these problems are not addressed, they could not only contribute to a heightened sense of society’s vulnerability, but also to a weakening of trust in authorities and the information they provide the public with. This would, in turn, erode our democratic institutions and ultimately raise the question of whether we can really win the war on terrorism.

In the sea of metadata that forms the choreographed space of our word today, the difference between appearing and disappearing can be determined by the difference of a phone call—what Greenwald and Scahill refer to as “death by metadata.” What lies beneath the fields of metadata, the collateral damage generated by an art of a technological society perfecting itself into science, is not only us, but the assassination of history altogether.

The failure of the American state-building project in Iraq has hit back in the form of the ever-expanding caliphate of the Islamic State, disregarding former colonial boundaries both in the territories of Iraq and Syria, as well as in its online guerrilla campaigns. Once proxies of foreign interests, sponsored and radicalized through decades of colonization, instrumentalization, and invasion, today they have turned the tables. Now that the ever-expanding security apparatus of the Coalition of the Willing clashes with the ever-expanding Islamic State, we actually begin to remember.

Terrorism has become a catchcry which has many shades of meaning. Governments in power around the world find it a useful means of labelling political opponents or, otherwise, using it for political advantage.

The paper suggests that greater use be made of more reliable and less pliable concepts such as war crimes and crimes against humanity to investigate and prosecute political violence.

There are lessons for the present to be learned from the watershed changes resulting from President Richard M. Nixon’s trip to China in 1972 and his Secretary of State Henry Kissinger’s trip to Paris in 1973 to negotiate a unilateral American withdrawal from Vietnam. It took a brilliant Nixon, who had been a strong anti-Communist as a Congressman, Senator, and then Vice President, to see that more important than anti-Communist ideology the growing strategic gulf between the Soviet Union and China created a wedge that might open the door to an American withdrawal from Vietnam. Few realize how far-seeing Nixon was in his breaking with twenty-four years of foreign policy in both Republican and Democratic administrations in which the United States supported the corrupt Nationalist government of Chiang Kai-shek on the island of Taiwan and refused to recognize the Communist regime on the mainland.

While Nixon wanted to withdraw from Vietnam ever since his election in 1968, he and his national security adviser Henry Kissinger followed a policy that the only way to bring Communist North Vietnam to the negotiating table was to bomb North Vietnam and the supply route through Laos and Cambodia known as the Ho Chi Minh Trail. This failed policy brought down the nominally neutralist regimes in Laos and Cambodia (formerly part along with Vietnam of the French colony of Indochina). In doing so, they failed to understand the cultural and historic differences between Vietnam, Cambodia, and Laos, especially the facts that throughout its history Laos had been invaded by Siam (present-day Thailand) and Vietnam and the Cambodians and the Vietnamese had been traditional enemies.

The tragedy of Richard Nixon was that despite his brave foreign policy decision to recognize Communist China, his tragic flaw, which he eventually came to realize, was that if you hate your political enemies it would destroy you. The Watergate scandal in which a minor break-in of the Democratic National Committee’s headquarters in the Watergate complex in Washington, DC, during the 1972 presidential election (which incidentally, Nixon won) became an illegal cover-up by Nixon’s top aids with Nixon’s knowledge resulted in his impeachment trial and subsequent resignation in August 1973. His successor, Vice President Gerald Ford, was hampered by a Congress dominated by anti-war Democrats, which resulted in the fall of Saigon to the North Vietnamese Communists in April 1975, the conquest of Cambodia by the Communist Khmer Rouge in the same month, and the takeover of Laos by the Communist Pathet Lao in December. But strategic interests took precedence over Communism, when Vietnam invaded Cambodia in December 1978 in an unsuccessful attempt to overthrow the government of the Khmer Rouge.

What vindicated of Nixon’s foreign policy foresight was that after the death of Mao Tse-tung in September 1976, his successor Den Xiaoping embarked upon a policy of a capitalist economy with a Communist form of government. But Deng’s government was characterized by corruption, nepotism, political repression, resulting in the Tiananmen Square protests in 1989 followed by Deng’s resignation. His successors continued his economic policies, including China’s present leader Xi Jinping. In the long run, Communism proved to be unsustainable as an economic system, and these so-called Communists countries of China and Vietnam embraced a form of Communist Capitalism. And yet, despite becoming the world’s largest economy after the United States, the Communist China continued to make the same mistakes that unregulated Capitalism made in the nineteenth century, including currency manipulation, copyright infringements, environmental pollution, and stock market speculation.

One lesson from the Cold War is that the nuclear arms race between the Soviet Union and the United States led China, initially with Soviet help before 1960, to develop a nuclear weapon in 1964. Then, the United States, Britain, and Canada supplied India with the technology intended for peaceful uses, but which enabled India to test a nuclear bomb in 1974. In response, China provided Pakistan with the technology that helped it test its own bomb in 1998. Pakistan then provided the technology that helped Communist North Korea to explode its nuclear device in 2006. Today, the United States is trying to ratify an agreement that would prevent Iran from developing a nuclear weapon over the next ten years, even though the United States acquiesced to the fact that Israel had developed a nuclear bomb in 1966, which Israel has never admitted to possessing. The only long-term solution to nuclear proliferation is that all nations, including the United States, Russia, China, and Israel, agree to destroy and ban the use of nuclear weapons. This could be enforced by United Nations sanctions against those nations that refuse to comply.

But the most important lesson for today is to understand that the mistake was not America’s unilateral withdrawal from Vietnam, but  America’s obsession with stopping the spread of Communism, which put us in the position of inheriting the cause of the French colonialism in opposition to self-determination for the Vietnamese, Cambodian, and Laotian people. In doing so, the Communists were able to become the champions of national liberation. Today, we face a similar situation. We have allowed the ideology of a War on Terrorism to put us in a situation of defending borders in Syria, Iraq, and Afghanistan created by the colonialist powers of Britain and France, which has divided peoples who don’t want to be in the same country. Like Vietnam, the problem is not that we are unilaterally withdrawing from Iraq and Afghanistan, but that we got involved in defending these artificial countries in the first place.

This paper challenges the paradigms behind the doctrine of the War of Terrorism and proposes that it be replaced by understanding the ethnic conflicts that underly these wars. Rather than seeing separatism as a destructive force, the author argues that the United States foreign policy should be based again on principle of self-determination. Two, sometimes complementary, sometimes contradictory, principes on which our country was based are self-determination and empire. Woodrow Wilson and Franklin Roosevelt were proponents of self-determination, but neither was in a position to fully implement it. Today, with the existence of the United Nations, the United States has the power to reinstitute the principle through internationally supervised plebiscites, rather than war.

On December 6, 2017, U.S. President Donald J. Trump announced that he was officially recognizing Jerusalem as the capital of Israel and beginning the process of moving the United States Embassy from Tel Aviv to Jerusalem.. Unlike previous administrations that endorsed a two-state solution, Trump stated the United States would support a two-state solution only “if agreed to by both sides.” He said this knowing that the Israeli prime minister Benjamin Netanyahu no longer wants a sovereign Palestinian state, but a continuation of the status quo.

    In July 2017 on a four-day trip to Africa, Netanyahu met with a group of evangelical Christians in Nairobi, Kenya, in which he said that Israel has “no better friends than Christians who support and love Israel.” At the end of the meeting the Christian leaders presented Netanyahu with a lion as a gift. Netanyahu’s considered it “the lion of Judah” (a reference to the Biblical symbol of the lion with the Jewish tribe of Judah). The foremost Christian Zionist in the United States was the late Southern Baptist preacher Jerry Falwell. In 1979 he  was one of the co-founders the so-called Moral Majority political action committee together with “pro-life” Catholics in opposition to the 1973 Roe v. Wade Supreme Court ruling legalizing abortion.  Falwell also served on the board of the pro-Zionist American Alliance of Jews and Christians.

    In  2006 Falwell said on his Web site, "It is apparent, in light of the rebirth of the state of Israel, that the present day events in the holy land may very well serve as a prelude or forerunner to the future battle of Armageddon and the glorious return of Jesus Christ." He was referring to the New Testament Book Revelation (or Apocalypse meaning “Disclosure” in Greek) attributed to John of Patmos (an island in the Aegean Sea) addressing the Seven churches in Asia Minor (Turkey, today).

    Judaism also has a Messianic tradition. The Messiah will be a future Jewish king  who will be a descendant of King David, the first king of Israel, and who will rule the Jewish people during the Messianic Age. He will gather the Jews back to the Land of Israel, usher in a period of peace, and build the Third Temple. The Jewish Talmud expands upon the coming of the Messiah. The Son of David will come only in a generation that it either completely righteous or completely evil. The Jewish philosopher Moses Maimonides discussed the Messiah in the Mishna Torah (his 14 volume compendium of Jewish law).  Orthodox Jews today accept the 13 Principles of Faith formulated by Maimonides. The twelfth principle is the belief in the Messiah, life after death, and the restoration of the promised land.

    In March 2016 Donald Trump gave a speech in front of the pro-Zionist American Public Affairs Committee, in which he stated, “We will move the American embassy to the eternal capital of the Jewish people, Jerusalem.” After this speech the Jewish-American casino-billionaire Sheldon Adelson and his wife Miriam donated $20 million to a political action committee supporting Trump’s campaign, and another $1.5 million to the committee that organized the Republican convention. Adelson also began to acquire newspaper in Israel and the United States. He sought to buy the Israeli newspaper Ma’ariv in 2007. When this bid was unsuccessful, a relative of his founded a free daily newspaper named Israel Hayom (Israel Today). A court in Jerusalem then approved his purchase of Ma’ariv as well as the conservative newspaper Makor Rishon. Unlike the American pro-Israel lobby group American Israel Public Affairs Committee (AIPAC) which favors a two-state solution to the Israeli-Palestinian dispute, Adelson like Israel’s extreme right-wing prime minister Benjamin Netanyahu prefers the status quo.
   
    Donald Trump named David M. Friedman, a bankruptcy lawyer and Orthodox Jews, to be his nominee as ambassador to Israel. Friedman had been an adviser to the Trump campaign, who questioned whether there should be a two-state solution to the Israeli-Palestinian conflict. Friedman also is a supporter of the settlement movement on the West Bank of the Jordan River. He has compared the American Jews in the liberal, pro-Israel but anti-settlement movement lobby group named J Street to kapos, the Jews who cooperated with the Nazis in the Holocaust death camps.

    Trump named his son-in-law Jared Kushner, the husband of his daughter Ivanka from his second marriage, to the post as senior adviser. One of his responsibilities was to negotiate a peace settlement between the Israelis and the Palestinians. Kushner was born in Livingston, New Jersey, in 1981. His father Charles Kushner was a real estate developer, whose parents were Holocaust survivors from Belarus, who came to the United States in 1949. Jared was raised as an Orthodox Jew, attending a yeshiva high school named the Frisch School.  Jared married Ivanka Trump in a Jewish ceremony. Ivanka had converted to Judaism, and the couple are what are known as Modern Orthodox Jews, who keep and kosher home and observer the Jewish Sabbath but who also embrace the secular, modern world. Most Modern Orthodox Jews are in favor the settlement movement and a single state solution with Israeli control of the West Bank.

    Kushner’s father was a major donor to Israeli causes, and he was a personal friend of Benjamin Netanyahu before Netanyahu became prime minister of Israel. Netanyahu even stayed at Kushner’s house in Livingston, New Jersey, and knew Jared as a boy. While Netanyahu is not particularly religious, the coalition that elected him prime minister in 2015 included his secular, conservative Likut Party, United Torah Judaism (a coalition that wants to maintain the status quo in Jewish Orthodoxy is the official religion of the country), Shas (the party of conservative Sephardic Jews many of whom are Modern Orthodox), Kulanu (a party founded by former Likut Party member of the Knesset, Moshe Kahlon), and the Jewish Home (a party made up primarily of Modern Orthodox Jews).

    On May 14, 2018, the United States held a celebration at the opening of its new embassy in Jerusalem. The date was chosen because it was the seventieth anniversary of the establishment of the State of Israel on May 14, 1948.  Among the speakers were  Ivanka,  Jared Kushner,  David Friedman,  and two fundamentalist Christian pastors, Robert Jeffress of the First Baptist Church in Dallas, Texas and Robert Hagee, the founder of Christians United for Israel.  Among the VIPs sitting in the front row at the opening ceremonies was the casino magnate and Trump-supporter Sheldon Adelson.

    The two pastors were odd choices. In a sermon Hagee delivered in the 1990s he suggested that Adolf Hitler was fulfilling God’s will be aiding the return of Jews to Israel according the Bible: "God says in Jeremiah 16: 'Behold, I will bring them the Jewish people again unto their land that I gave to their fathers. ... Behold, I will send for many fishers, and after will I send for many hunters . . . 'And they the hunters shall hunt them.' That would be the Jews. . . . Then God sent a hunter. A hunter is someone who comes with a gun and he forces you. Hitler was a hunter." Jeffress once said “you can’t be saved by being a Jew.” He also said that “Mormonism is a heresy from the pit of hell.” In a 2011 sermon he said that Catholicism was a “cult-like pagan religion” that “infected the early Church” and “corrupted” it demonstrating the “genius of Satan.

    Meanwhile, 60 miles to the west, Palestinians in the Gaza Strip stormed the fence separating the Gaza Strip from Israel in which more than sixty Palestinians were killed and 2,700 were injured. The President of the Palestinian National Authority Mahmoud Abbas said that now the Palestinians would no longer accept any peace deal proposed by the Trump administration.

    The most important thing to remember is that one of the reasons stated by the Sunni militant Osama bin Laden for attacking the World Trade Center in 2001 was the unconditional support of the United States for Israel, especially in regard to Israel’s occupation of the West Bank .. And one must not forget that the architect of the modern concept of the War on Terrorism (that is, a worldwide war against radical Islamist extremists) was Benjamin Netanyahu, whose own parents endorsed terrorist tactics against the British during the Palestine Mandate.

    Trump’s actions both in regard to imposing anti-Muslim immigration restrictions and embracing Netanyahu’s vision of a one-state solution under Israeli control will only incite more homegrown terrorists attacks in the United States. When Abraham Lincoln pleaded that we listen to “the better angels of our nature,” he was making a reference to the Apocalypse in which the angels of Satan battle the angels of God and the Messiah. This should give us pause when we contemplate the future of the American Empire.

Publisher: The New Yorker
Author: Raffi Khatchadourian
Date: July 6, 2009

http://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2009/07/06/the-kill-company?currentPage=all

Civilian War Casualties, Civilian War Deaths, Collateral Damage, Collateral Damage and Just War Theory, Ethics In War, Genocide, Human Rights, Iraq War, U.S. Military, US War Crimes, War Crimes, War Crimes, War on Terror