(source) The standard, fear-drenched stereotype of Moslems
Perhaps a quarter of the world's population is Moslem, with adherents of that religion spanning the world with citizenship to some degree in almost all countries, their numbers spanning almost all ethnicities as well. Within Islam, as with Christianity, there are many "denominations", many variants from the most fundamentalist Wahabis to the sublime and mystical Sufis.
Yet to many in the West, particularly in America, Britain and much of Western Europe, even Australia, hate-filled stereotypical thinking has taken over. The very religion and culture of Islam that helped to civilize Spain and parts of Europe centuries ago has been demonized by Right-wing and islamophobic ideologues, religious bigots, demagogues and psychotics into a fanatical, nihilistic death cult whose followers, by the way, all look like turbaned, bearded Arab caricatures from Hollywood B-movies or Disney's Aladdin. The only thing missing are horns and a tail. Many editorial cartoons in Western newspapers and journals targeting Moslems invoke memories of Nazi caricatures of the Jews.
Moslems, in a word, have become the new Jews, the scapegoats of the West if not the world, just as the Jewish people were in European history, culminating in Hitler's Holocaust. What is doubly ironic is that many Jews, largely those influenced by the ideology and mental and emotional conditioning of Zionism, have joined in this Orwellian orgy of hatred for an entire religion.
But as modern Europe and America grew more and more wealthy and powerful militarily and economically, they grew to dominate the Moslem world more and more, even colonizing some of it, with Moslems reaching further depths of degradation with the collapse of the Ottoman Empire at the end of World war I and the carving up of their territories, which gave rise to such eventual nightmare problems as the British colonization of what became its Iraqi and Palestinian protectorates.
Meanwhile, Washington pressed with all its leverage and machinations after World War II to make the Arab states as pliable and submissive as possible to its will and dictates, forging alliances with elitist and non-democratic governments and parties that easily sacrificed the aspirations of their people for favoritism and privilege from Washington. Similar dynamics developed in various majority-Moslem countries in other parts of the world. Pakistan comes to mind most readily.
Consequently, the oft-proffered Neocon and Fundamentalist vision of reality, that we are in a "Clash of Civilizations", rings very, very hollow indeed, because for there to be such a clash, the two rivals must be independent of each other and roughly equal in power. Yet that is not the case at all. America rides roughshod diplomatically and militarily over most majority-Moslem countries, and there is, furthermore, not one Moslem country capable of any equivalency with America and the West in military power.
Not one Moslem country is capable of invading and conquering America or Europe. And a relative handful of Jihadists around the globe do not come remotely close to the old Soviet Union, Nazi or Japanese empires in terms of military power and resources, yet Western propagandists have managed, through fear and exaggeration and control of the media, to convince millions that this is so, and that, as stated earlier, these few Jihadists are representative of over a billion Moslems.
But again, how did these millions in the West, the same kind of brainwashed mass-souls whom the great philosopher and Occultist G.I.Gurdjieff claimed, in his day, were incapable of perceiving reality because they had, not consciousness, but rather lived in an hypnotic "waking sleep", get to this point?
To quote from Wikipedia regarding Gurdjieff, "Man lives his life in sleep, and in sleep he dies." As a result of this condition each person perceives things from a completely subjective perspective. Gurdjieff stated that maleficent events such as wars and so on could not possibly take place if people were more awake. He asserted that people in their typical state function as unconscious automatons, but that one can "wake up" and become a different sort of human being altogether." (source) This has obviously not happened yet.
But just what are the actual mechanisms that have been at play to lead the West to scapegoat and demonize the Moslem world? We owe it to the Real News Network for having just launched a series of interviews by Jay Paul with two scholars who explore just that, to quote their credentials from Real News:
Sener Akturk, a political scientist and fellow at the Davis Center for Russian and Eurasian Studies, lectures at the Department of Government, both at Harvard University,
and Mujeeb Khan, affiliated with the doctoral program in political science at the University of California Berkeley. He wrote a chapter in the book The New Crusades: Constructing the Muslim Enemy.
Here then, are four interviews entitled "How Western anti-Muslim bigotry became respectable":
Interview One:
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