Jim W. Dean, Associate Editor of Veterans Today, will join me on Truth Jihad Radio this Monday, August 29th, 1-2 pm The topic: Is the alternative media getting Libya wrong?
Every day, the monopoly corporate media and the foundation-funded pseudo-alternative media are losing market share to internet- and satellite-based genuinely alternative media. (The litmus test for whether an outlet is genuinely alternative or not is 9/11 truth: If it’s pro-9/11-truth, it’s genuinely alternative; if it isn’t, it isn’t.)
Just about all of the genuinely alternative media, with the lone exception of the editorial team at Veteran’s Today, favors Qaddafi’s regime over the Libyan insurgents. Jim W. Dean and Gordon Duff, the editors at Veteran’s Today, are even blasting their own writers for favoring Qaddafi. Many are asking: What’s with Duff & Dean? Jonathan Azaziah has resigned from Veteran’s Today in protest, Cynthia McKinney is being hit with nasty rumors about accepting hospitality from Qaddafi, and Franklin Lamb is getting insults from VT’s editors along with his injury from a sniper bullet.
With due respect to Azaziah, Lamb, Tarpley, McKinney, the folks at GlobalResearch and the rest of my frequent radio guests: My professional opinion as a Ph.D. North Africa guy is that Duff and Dean may be right on this one.
The conventional alternative wisdom (now there’s an oxymoron) views the situation from a Western-based, manichean perspective: NATO’s intervention in Libya, like the invasions of Iraq and Afghanistan, is another war of aggression by the evil empire. Qaddafi must therefore be a good guy trying to protect his nation’s resources from the banksters and their NATO hired goons.
From the standpoint of the people of the Middle East and North Africa, however, things look a bit different. As Richard W. Bulliet explains in The Case for Islamo-Christian Civilization, the past 200 years have witnessed, in the Islamic world, a titanic struggle between the forces of Islam and the forces of tyranny (zulm): “…The impulse of rulers to maximize their power to the point of tyranny, zulm, appeared as a natural concomitant of government. All that restrained rulers from acting as tyrants was Islamic law, sharia. Since the law was based on divine rather than human principles, no ruler could change it to serve his own interests.” (p.62)
Bulliet describes how the past two centuries have witnessed the rise of unbearable tyranny in the Muslim Middle East, mainly due to the destruction of traditional Islamic restraints on power by secularist dictators indebted to or otherwise controlled by Western imperial interests. During those centuries, real Muslims have been speaking truth to power in the name of Islam, and they have been getting tortured and murdered by secular (or pseudo-religious hypocrite) dictators for their trouble.
The revolutions in the Muslim Middle East and North Africa aim to overthrow secular tyranny, and restore the role of religion as the biggest “check and balance” against oppression. A 2007 poll by WorldPublicOpinion.org reveals the clear will of the majority of Muslims in Muslim-majority countries:
On average, about three out of four (Muslims polled) agree with seeking to “require Islamic countries to impose a strict application of sharia,” and to “keep Western values out of Islamic countries.” Two-thirds would even like to “unify all Islamic counties into a single Islamic state or caliphate.” (source)
Clearly, the Arab revolutions will be Islamic revolutions or they will be no revolutions at all.
And this is what the alt.media folks don’t understand. The vast majority of them are leftists with a strong secularist orientation. Like their parents and grandparents who apologized for Stalin and Mao, these grown-up red diaper babies instinctively apologize for a seemingly leftist, secularist dictator like Qaddafi – no matter how brutal, no matter how unpopular among his people, no matter how far out on a limb on the wrong side of history.
My good friend Webster Tarpley, a brilliant and erudite man, is a fundamentalist true-believer in the religion of secularism and material progress. Like the rest of his generation – with a few commendable exceptions like Eric Walberg – Tarpley has been very slow to realize that the secular utopian dream is dead, and that Islam is the real alternative to bankster tyranny. Listen to Webster’s latest rant:
Belhadj is a “monster” because he’s a friend of Bin Laden, a noble soul innocent of 9/11 who died in 2001? And fighting against a monstrously criminal invasion of a sovereign Muslim nation makes Belhadj an “infamous killer”?
The alt.media attempt to smear some of the Libyan rebels as “al-Qaeda” is disgustingly hypocritical. These folks know that al-Qaeda didn’t do 9/11, 7/7, Bali, Madrid, Mumbai. Al-Qaeda did however help save Afghanistan from the Soviet army. It helped stop the Bosnian genocide. And it has been struggling to liberate Muslims from foreign occupation in several theaters of war. In the long run, al-Qaeda (the real thing, not the infiltrators) is an obvious ally of the US, as it was in 1970s Afghanistan, and as it will be again when the US reverses the 9/11 coup d’état and shakes off Zionist control.
So let’s back up and define our terms. “Al-Qaeda” is just a loose term for a whole lot of disparate folks: sincere defenders of the faith, CIA drug smugglers, Mossad infiltrators…the whole nine yards. To the extent that there is a real al-Qaeda, and there is, it consists of people seeking to develop a military deterrent against the ongoing genocidal assault on Islam, and who hope to use that deterrent to help the world’s Muslim majority win freedom from oppression, exploitation and occupation, and ultimately achieve a re-united Ummah. This is a noble endeavor, and those participating in it should be recognized as idealistic heroes even by their opponents…and especially by their anti-imperialist allies in the Euro-American alternative media!
Sure, some al-Qaeda heroes are shrill, small-minded, or even downright stupid. The minority who are anti-Shia and anti-Iran are complete and utter idiots, at least on the all-important question of pan-Islamic unity. But then, most heroes are also idiots, one way or another.
Take the heroes of the alternative media – please! These folks need to recognize that the people of the Arab and Muslim Middle East are sick of tyranny, sick of dictators, sick of “socialist” rhetoric like Qaddafi’s masking just another torture-based plutocracy, not all that different from those of the Gulf sheiks he despises.
This is the moment for the people of the Middle East to overthrow their dictators – all of them, from the pseudo-religious royals in Morocco and the Gulf to the pseudo-socialist seculars in Libya and Syria. It’s time for the rest of the Middle East to leapfrog ahead of Turkey and Iran, and form democratic Islamic republics that will pave the way for a re-united ummah with the power to wipe usury from the face of the earth.
And it’s time for alt.media journalists and other Western observers to recognize that this is what the Muslim majority really wants, then drop the paternalistic secularist claptrap, stop defending dead-end dictators, and get the hell out of the way.
Salaam,
eid mubarak… Well VT might have it only partialy right, Al Qaeddafi a sefarad is replace by other sefarad clans in lyba led by Abdeljalil, coming form the libyan government with no legitimity at all… so we muslim can not fight for Israel, whether alongside Al Qaeddafi who killed our family during the civil wars, or even the puppets of Benghazi… we believe so the fact prove that we are the real target, they don't us in power in Algeria and North Africa, cause if in power, the western israeli front will fall. I have the same comment on Syria, we can not fight alongside the Sykes Picot dictator puppets, working with israel in secrecy, look at the alawites in the Turkish army, in Jordan, in Morocco, nor the infiltrated 'brotherhood'… puppets … once again american and european will die massively in libya for the sake of israel…
we are heading towards an energeitc embarguo de facto Kevin… the worst is to come ofr our families unfortunatley, this is just the beginning
It seems to me that Libya like most other conflicts is getting boxed into the good guys vs. bad guy framework once again. I've heard reports that support for Qaddafi was as high as 80% and certainly this "rebellion" has very little popular support.
Qaddafi was no savior and surely the Libyan people deserve better but this revolution does not appear to be a reflection of popular will or a move towards an Islamic caliphate or sharia law, even though those elements may have been exploited. Qaddafi held the many tribes within Libya's borders together and was quite popular for most of his regime. He was viewed, correctly, as having overthrown a western installed puppet monarch.
Bottom line, Libya is a nice piece of cake that the imperialists want. Qaddafi was in the way, now he's gone. Watch what happens.
It was hard to tell what the Libyan people wanted when support for Qaddafi was enforced by torturers and death squads. But one safe assumption is that they don't want NATO occupation. I suspect they'll be making themselves heard.
Generally as freedom and democracy increases, state policy moves towards supporting the interests of the common people – which in the Middle East includes a rejection of Zionism and imperialism, and a move away from secularism toward Islam. See: http://www.worldpublicopinion.org/pipa/articles/brmiddleeastnafricara/346.php
Islam got there by revolution. Turkey has been moving gradually but decisively in this direction for a decade or two, and Egypt is just embarking. In the long run, the people of the region are becoming more educated, more aware, more literate (especially in Modern Standard Arabic and religious Arabic), more Islamic, and more assertive. The days of imperial rule, no matter how indirect, are numbered.
Its an interesting point, and I hope you're right. My fear is that Libya will now descend into chaos leading to increased western military presence and exploitation by the big financial centers. What if Libya is just a more subtle power grab like Iraq disguised to look like an Egyptian style people's revolution? Its hard to say for sure but I doubt NATO and America would spend billions of dollars toppling the Libyan government without expecting something in return.
It is heartening to see the Muslim world rejecting the various oppressive governments and the "alternative media" people can't seem to wrap their heads around the fact this doesn't mean that the Islamic world is embracing Western style democracy and its crass popular culture and cut-throat capitalism. At the same time I'm not sure what is happening in Libya is a part of this movement. Its hard to tell, especially with the amount of lies and deception broadcast as news these days.
My understanding is that Libya isn't a monolithic Muslim country and contains a lot of tribal loyalty and a variety of cultures and beliefs, if we can pit the various factions against each other they'll be too busy fighting to stop us from siphoning off all their wealth.
Love your radio show and blog, its hard to find good discussions of these issues.