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:
Al Qaeda Commander of NATO’s Bloody Reign of Terror in Tripoli is the Monster Abdel Hakim Belhadj, aka Abdel Hakim al-Hasadi, Friend of Osama Bin Laden, former US POW, and Infamous Killer of US Soldiers in Afghanistan
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.
Labels: alternative media, arab spring, builliet, franklin lamb, gaddafi, Gordon Duff, Islamic Revolution, jim dean, libya, NATO, qaddafi, Tarpley, ummah, Veterans Today