It’s racism, stupid: US Senator Lindsey Graham take note

In the wake of the Charleston, South Carolina massacre that left nine black Americans slain at the hands of a radicalised white supremacist, a new report by the research centre New America finds that since 9/11, anti-government, white supremacist, right-wing extremists have killed nearly twice as many Americans as Muslim extremists.

Despite the media’s obsession with ISIS, despite the cottage industry of anti-Islam books that emerged in the years after 9/11, despite Fox News chanting “radical Islam” 24/7 like it were some kind of hypnotic mantra, and despite the Department of Homeland Security’s comical and now forsaken colour-coded threat metric, which served no purpose other than to keep Americans in a perpetual state of anxiety over potential Muslim terrorists, it is now clear that the threat of Muslim violence has been so over-exaggerated that Americans are 10 times as likely to be crushed by their own furniture each year, and nearly 15 more times as likely to be struck by lightning.

This is good news for Americans who get up from the sofa and lock the front door whenever CNN says “ISIS”. This is even better news for Muslim Americans who, over the course of the past 14 years, have been subjected to near-apartheid level harassment, surveillance and public scrutiny.

This is very bad news for those who have profited from the biggest transfer of public wealth to the private sector in America’s history: the military and homeland-security-industrial complexes. After all, now that it’s clear that white, right-wing males pose the greatest domestic terror threat to America, it’s a hard sell to have drones fly over Texas.

In Pay Any Price, investigative journalist James Risen reveals how greed and power have combined to drain the US Treasury of $4 trillion over the course of the past decade. The chief beneficiaries being a “web of intelligence agencies, and their contractors; companies that mostly provide secret services rather than large weapons systems and equipment,” notes Risen. “These contractors are hired to help Washington determine the scale and scope of the terrorist threat; they make no money if they determine that the threat is overblown, or, God forbid, if the war on terror ever comes to an end.”

These contractors hire former congressional insiders, retired CIA and military servicemen and women to be their lobbyists. With political campaign donations more or less spread evenly between both major political parties, politicians and government bureaucrats “dream up new counterterrorism programmes in order to spend the money”.

But if the “threat” disappears, if the public no longer feels threatened, the money disappears, too. And you can be sure those vested in the homeland-security-industrial complex will never, ever allow that reality to happen.

Cue the senior Republican senator from South Carolina, and candidate for the 2016 US presidential election – Lindsey Graham.

On Wednesday, just one day after the New America report into domestic terrorism, Lindsey Graham took to the Senate floor to honour the victim’s of last week’s shooting massacre at Charleston’s historic African-American church.

“I don’t know how you could sit in a church and pray with them for an hour and shoot them. That’s Mideast hate. That’s something I didn’t think we had here but apparently we do,” said Graham.

Wait, what?

Can you see what he did there, right? Through a feat of mental gymnastics that would’ve made Machiavelli blush, Graham, in one fell swoop, found a way to blame the murder of nine African Americans at the hand of a white supremacist on, well, you guessed it: Muslims.

The homeland-security-industrial complex stood and gave thunderous applause from the metaphorical peanut gallery.

Muslims, Muslims, Muslims, Muslims. Soon Muslims will be blamed even for the weather. As our calendars move further away from September 11, 2001, Americans will move further away from their irrational fear of Muslims. This is the $70 billion per year homeland-security-industrial complex’s worst nightmare. Their very existence is dependent on Americans fearing Muslims. The existence of more than “1,200 government organisations and nearly 2,000 private companies working on counterterrorism, homeland security, and intelligence programmes” is at stake.

Equally, a dissipated fear of Muslims threatens to end the military-industrial complex’s modern-day gold rush. In America, “a permanent national security elite rotates among senior government posts, contracting companies, think tanks, and television commentary,” notes Risen. “Opportunities that would disappear if America were suddenly at peace. To most of America, war has become not only tolerable but profitable, and so there is no longer any great incentive to end it.”

The more it becomes obvious to everyday Americans that the threat from Muslim extremism has been wildly exaggerated, the louder and more dense will charges against Islam and the Middle East be put forth by paid lobbyists and political shills of the $70 billion homeland-security-industrial complex.

Notwithstanding the fact that the 2016 presidential election cycle is now approaching full swing, which means Republican Party candidates will be competing to see who can say the most derogatory things about Muslims in an effort to secure cash from the party’s number one benefactor and staunch pro-Israel lobby backer - Sheldon Adelson.

Lindsey Graham’s effort to tie the Charleston massacre to Middle East culture is not only an appeal to Adelson’s swimming pool-sized wallet but also a reminder to the military and counterterrorism community he’s still their guy – remembering he’s already one of the biggest recipients of defence contractor donations.

Muslims as the great external enemy is not a new song, but it’s a song that promises to remain on the charts for some time, no matter what some fancy new data proves.

The effort to paint Arabs and Muslims as dangerous aliens or religious fanatics goes back to the late 1960s when Arab-Americans formed political activist groups, such as the Organisation of Arab Students, to protest US efforts to arm and support Israeli military aggression in the Middle East. “These were immediately the target of pro-Israel lobby, which portrayed Arab activists as spies and foreign radicals,” writes Arun Kundnani in The Muslims Are Coming. “In 1972, the Nixon administration issued a set of directives known as Operation Boulder that enabled the FBI and CIA to coordinate with the pro-Israel lobby, subjecting nonviolent Arab-American political activists to surveillance and harassment.

Such surveillance continued into the 1980s, as media coverage of the Iranian revolution and conflict in the Middle East gave rise to new stereotypes of Arabs as dangerous fanatics. In 1985, the Los Angeles Times leaked a FBI and Immigration and Naturalisation Service plan “for the roundup of up to 5,000 foreign nationals suspected of links to ‘terrorism’ - ie, support for the Palestinian cause and their incarceration in camps in Louisiana”.

It was during the 1980s that the military-industrial complex together with the Israel lobby devised a propaganda war that trumpeted the threat of Islamic terrorism. A fight against terrorism as ideological cover for state violence directed at those resisting US and Israeli power, whether they happened to be terrorists or not; a selective use of the term "terrorism" to exclude all those state and non-state actors using violence to achieve our political ends (such as the Contras in Nicaragua); and a suturing of Israel and the US as defenders of "western values" against "Islamic fanaticism". 

"The message worked perfectly for the US television news audiences,” writes Kundnani. “Much of the groundwork for this approach was laid by Benjamin Netanyahu, then the Israeli permanent representative to the United Nations, through a conference organised in Washington, DC, in 1984. In a subsequent collection of articles edited by Netanyahu – entitled Terrorism: How the West Can Win – a number of contributors argued that terrorist violence was endemic to Islam.”

Juan Cole, who is a prolific commentator on the Middle East and professor of history at the University of Michigan, notes how it is evident that Dylan Roof, the Charleston gunman, was influenced by the European Islamophobic network. “The Muslim-hatred of the Geert Wilders and Marine Le Pens in Europe, for which Daniel Pipes and Pamela Geller and the whole Islamophobic network are cheerleaders and enablers, was a key influence on Dylan Roof, according to his manifesto. These same hatemongers helped whip Norwegian white supremacist and terrorist Anders Brevik into a homicidal fever pitch in July 2011, when he killed 77 Norwegians for allegedly being soft on Muslims,” writes Cole.

These Islamophobic networks provide the political cover for Western-led wars in the Middle East. Western-led wars and Western-sold weapons to brutal Middle East dictatorships is what fosters Western-targeted terrorism. In turn, Western-targeted terrorist acts foster the expansion of the homeland-industrial-complex. Scapegoating Muslims provides the political cover for Western-led wars in the Middle East.

Wash. Spin. Repeat.

So, no Mister Graham, Charleston is not representative of “Mid East hate” but rather is symptomatic of an array of influences that encourage and endorse white supremacy and are often funded by the same special interests (homeland-security-industrial complex) that fund your political campaigns.

- CJ Werleman is the author of Crucifying America, God Hates You. Hate Him Back, Koran Curious, and is the host of Foreign Object. Follow him on twitter: @cjwerleman