Hollywood and Atheists are to Blame?

A "culture war" in America between religion and atheism is the underlying cause of the war on terror, political commentator Dinesh D'Souza told a crowd of about 150 people Wednesday night at Harris Hall.

…um… no… that would be completely wrong.

I’m not a political science expert (or even a novice) and my education on the subject is formed from watching the Discovery and the History Channel. And I don’t think a topic as involved as Western and Middle Eastern politics could be nicely summed up in a blog post, much less a once sentence sound bite.

But here are some of my opinions as to why there’s a “war on terror”:

In 1953, the United States decided to overthrow the democratically elected prime minister in Iran because we didn’t like him nationalizing the Anglo-Iranian Oil Company. In his place we put in a more U.S. friendly monarch, the Shah.

Surprisingly the Iranians weren’t too fond of our puppet leader, or us, and starting listening to an active critic of the Shah and the US; Ayatollah Ruhollah Khomeini. They had a revolution. Since we kept messing in their business, they took the US Embassy hostage. We froze Iranian assets (and have to this day, not released them.)

Saddam Hussein decided to take advantage of the disorder and started the Iran-Iraq War. Iran pushed back and then sought to expand the Iranian Revolution (or Islamic Revolution) into Iraq. The US backed Saddam Hussein (and sold some weapons to Iran as well, what the hey.) Eventually there was a UN mediated truce.

Thanks to our medaling, there is now a government in Iran devoted to eliminating outside influences.

In 1979, as a part of our Cold War strategy, we began having a war by proxy with the Soviet Union in Afghanistan. When we “won” in Afghanistan, we lost interest in the country leaving it’s war ravaged corpse for the warlords to fight over.

Many Muslims from other countries volunteered to assist various mujahideen groups in Afghanistan, and gained significant experience in guerrilla warfare. Organized religious students formed into an armed movement, were backed by Pakistan, funded by the U.S, defeated most of the militias and took control of Afghanistan. “Students” by the way is the English translation of the Pashto word “Taliban”.

One of the mujahideen groups was al-Qaeda, formed by bin Laden. They fought against the Soviets and then Bin Laden went from being a hero of jihad in Saudi Arabia to being an enemy of the Saudi monarchy for his opposition to non-Muslim troops in Saudi Arabia (that would be the U.S. during the first Gulf War.) Bin Laden hates the U.S., socialism, communism, democracy, Israel, and pretty much anything outside of his particular code of Islam (including music.) He believes in an all out war against everything he hates and any innocents that are killed (there’s probably no such thing as an innocent infidel in his book) are justified martyrs in the jihad. I don’t believe we’re responsible for the creation of a monster like Bin Laden, but we are responsible or at least complicit, for creating an environment in which he could thrive.

Oh, and an “Atheist” to Bin Laden would be everyone not his particular brand of Muslim.

In one of the Bin Laden videos, he says,

“It has become clear that the West in general and America in particular have an unspeakable hatred for Islam. We have witnessed the true crimes of those who call themselves humanists and claim to be defenders of freedom. Those who lived under continuous US raids for the past months are aware of it. How many villages have been destroyed and how many millions have been pushed out in the freezing cold? These men, women and children who have been damned and now live under tents in Pakistan, have committed no sin. They are innocent. But on a mere suspicion, the United States has launched this fierce campaign.”

I don’t know about you, but if I’m living in poverty, in a country that’s being ripped apart by war, hearing about villages that are getting bombed by those U.S. devils, I’m going to think this Bin Laden guy is right. And if I live in a country that has a history of the those U.S. devils interfering with my government because they want my country’s oil and they start making air-strikes against my country, I’m not going to think I’m being liberated. The U.S. practically pushes people into terrorist training camps.

This entry has gone on way longer than I expected to and I didn’t even get into our debacle in Iraq. But really it’s all just the same shit in a different country. We mess around in other people’s business, piss people off, kill people, meddle in their governments, destroy people’s lives, and then wonder why nobody likes us. We need to learn to mind our own damn business.

The Weather Underground

The Weathermen were a militant group of white college student anti-war activists who had the motto “Bring the War Home”. They sympathized with the Black Panther party and other liberation movements going on around the world. As they saw it, the world was on the brink of revolution and either you were a member of the revolution fighting oppression or you were an oppressor. Peaceful protests and sit-ins were doing nothing to end the Vietnam war or other crimes being perpetrated by the U.S. Government. When their movement changed from protest and activism to violence and terrorism, they initially sought to target and kill placid whites to wake them up. However a miswired bomb killed three of their group and the remaining members decided that the violence against civilians was the wrong tact to take. Of the twenty something bombings the group carried out, the only deaths were those three.

I was struck by the documentary, The Weather Underground, that the world described sounded very much like the world that we’re living in today. I felt sympathy for their frustration in being unable to bring about change in a world where the US was involved in the murder of civilians and the destruction of Civil Liberties. The interviews with the now much older and wiser members of the Weather Underground showed people who felt passionate about injustice yet conflicted, guilty, yet still defensive about the paths they took. As one member put it, at the time he was frustrated about what to do with all his feelings about the war and the atrocities being perpetrated and is still frustrated to this day. They didn’t and don’t know what the right answer should be.

They show us a window into how easily one can slip from being one of the good guys to one of the bad. These were white, privileged, college educated, idealistic kids who were two steps away from becoming Al-Qaeda-esque terrorists. They weren’t blowing things up because God or Allah told them to. Their frustration wasn’t motivated by poverty. They saw themselves as revolutionaries fighting for just causes. Some would say they were terrorists because they went beyond civil disobedience to outright violence. One of the members later joined another group that ended up killing police officers during a Brinks robbery gone bad and is now serving a life sentence in jail. While he feels culpable for the deaths of the officers, he also feels he’s a political prisoner who shouldn’t be in jail.

If we look at our history though, weren’t we the terrorists at one time? Weren’t we the insurrectionists? I don’t know what the right answer is about the current conflicts going on in the world, but I do know we’re stuck in the middle of the wrong one.