January 2, 2012
The esteemed
Editor/Publisher of The Planetary Movement, Michael Carmichael, recently
circulated the following statement on the rapidly developing GOP
program of political Islamophobia:
“GOP=NSDAP. In their remarks before the Republican Jewish Coalition,
Newt Gingrich, Rick Santorum and Rick Perry called for the global
censorship of Islam and war against Iran and her allies, in effect, a
third world war focused on the Middle East and targeting Muslims.
“All the people of our planet, but especially those living in the United
States and the Middle East as well as all Islamic nations, need to
understand that the American Republican Party (GOP) is the most powerful
Islamophobic organization in world history.
“From this unique perspective, the American Republican Party/GOP equates
with the National Socialist German Workers Party (National
Sozialistische Deutsche Arbeiter Partei - NSDAP) aka the Nazi Party, the
political party of Adolf Hitler.
“In the 21st century, Islamophobia is emerging as the most dangerous
threat to international security on our planet, just as anti-Semitism
became the greatest threat to international security in the last
century.
“When the Republican/GOP seizes power in the USA, it is a virtual
certainty that they will launch a military misadventure that will be
tantamount to a global war against Islam.”
I sent my good friend Michael the following reply (much expanded here).
You made some excellent remarks. But actually, Republican Islamophobia is
far more dangerous for the people of the world than was Hitler's
anti-Semitism. Indeed it is the case that the Nazis did adopt the
political anti-Semitism that was first developed in Austria in the 1880s
to their own purposes.
Religious anti-Semitism has of course existed since the early days of
the Catholic Church when it was organized around the “The Jews Killed
Christ” doctrine and was used for the purposes of religious persecution.
But political anti-Semitism, that is the use of anti-Semitism for
partisan political purposes in elections in parliamentary democracies,
is a modern invention. And in the beginning, that is just how the Nazis
used it until they took power, in part because of the appeal of their
doctrines to Catholics and right-wing Protestants in Germany. Once in
power, they moved fairly quickly of course to turn their rhetoric into
policy, and we all know the eventual outcome of that development.
However, Nazi anti-Semitism was not a cause of World War II. Neither
the Western capitalist Powers nor the Soviet Union would have gone to
war to protect the Jews. The former offered few havens to Jewish
refugees before the war and few European Jews would have sought haven in
the very under-developed Soviet Union before the war. In the West, in
fact, there were many open or covert anti-Semites who thought that
Hitler’s polices against the Jews were just fine, or at least they
didn’t object to them in becoming friends and even financial supporters
of the Nazis before 1933 and in certain cases after that date. Among
Hitler’s friends, anti-Semites or no, were George Herbert Walker
(grandfather of George Herbert Walker Bush) who started funding the Nazi
Party in 1923, Prescott Bush (who had to be threatened by Roosevelt in
February, 1942 with prosecution under the “Trading with the Enemy Act”
if he did not cease providing banking services to Hitler), the UK Prince
of Wales (whose pro-Hitler stance was much more of a reason that he
never became King of England than was his infatuation with Wallis
Simpson), Henry Ford (who traded anti-Semitic tracts with Hitler in the
1930s), and Joseph Kennedy, US Ambassador to the Court of St. James, who
turned firmly anti-Hitler only when the Battle of Britain began in the
summer of 1940. It is very well known that the Western Powers did very
little to even try to protect/rescue the Jews of Europe once the war was
underway.
Political Islamophobia is being developed by the Republican Party in the
United States just as political anti-Semitism was developed by the
Nazis, for partisan political/electoral purposes. But it far more
dangerous for the world as a whole than Nazi anti-Semitism ever was. In
the end, of course, what is now known as the Holocaust killed about
6,000,000 European Jews, slightly more than 10% of the total deaths due
to Word War II. However, Islam is the national religion in numerous
countries (Judaism was the religion in none before World War II). It is
estimated that there are somewhere between 700 million and 1.5 billion
Muslims in the World, with the “Islamic Belt” stretching almost half way
around the world from Morocco in the West to Indonesia in the East.
One of these nations already has nuclear weapons and another is trying
very hard to get them before the pre-emptive and highly destructive war
advocated by almost every current Republican candidate for the
Presidency as well as many strong voices on the Right in Israel can come
to pass.
It is this latter eventuality that strongly differentiates political
anti-Semitism from political Islamophobia. A War on Iran, much less a
War on Islam (as if there were such unified thing), if it turned nuclear
which it clearly could, could mean the end of civilization as we know
it, although I suppose that nuclear winter is one way to deal with
global warming. Even without nuclearization, such a war could kill
millions of people directly and indirectly, and lead to such
consequences as the total diplomatic and economic isolation of the
United States, the destruction of the State of Israel, and the
destruction of the oil economy as we know it.
An excellent summary of the range of possible consequences of a War on
Iran that the GOP candidates are so cavalierly endorsing by Ray
McGovern, who works with Tell the Word, a publishing arm of the
ecumenical Church of the Saviour in inner-city Washington, and who
served a total of 30 years as an Army infantry/intelligence officer and
then as a CIA intelligence analyst, and Elizabeth Murray, who served as
Deputy National Intelligence Officer for the Near East in the National
Intelligence Council, before retiring after a 27-year career in the U.S.
government, where she specialized in Middle Eastern political and media
analysis, and is a member of Veteran Intelligence Professionals for
Sanity (VIPS), can be found at:
http://www.informationclearinghouse.info/article30122.htm. See also By
Michel Chossudovsky’s “World War III: The Launching of a Preemptive
Nuclear War against Iran,”
www.globalresearch.ca/index.php?context=va&aid=28026.
Many Right-wing Christians and Jews in the United States who believe in
the Armageddon Myth support the Republican Party and engage in political
Islamophobia. Actually, if they succeed in implementing their
Islamophobically-fueled desire to make War on Iran, except for the
Rapture part they may very well succeed in making that myth into a
reality. Thus does political Islamophobia differ from political
anti-Semitism.
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American Politics 
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