US imperialism has vested interest in spreading Islamophobia

In another instance of promoting Islamophobia in the United States, the US military has been offering a course which teaches the trainees that their enemy is Islam in general.

The course, titled “Perspectives on Islam and Islamic Radicalism,” was offered five times a year since 2004, with about 20 students have taken part in the course each time – meaning roughly 800 students have taken the course over the years – before it was removed in late April after protests.

Press TV has conducted an interview with Ralph Schoenman, an author and commentator, from Berkeley, to further discuss the issue. The following is an approximate transcription of the interview.

Press TV: First of all, I’d like to get your opinion on the institutionalization of Islamophobic teaching techniques that are being employed all across the US.

Schoenman: It’s rooted in the false flag operation of 9/11 itself. The underlying politics are very straightforward. The rationale for US imperialism, for its wars and predation had been at the time that the Soviet Union was still in existence — the supposed danger of international communist terrors and subversion, the menace of the Soviet Union that was a rationale for maintaining hegemony over subject peoples in the colonial world of Africa, Asia and Latin America, and in sustaining a permanent military and projecting US power over the planet.

With the collapse of the Soviet Union, the entire rationale for the hundreds of billions of dollars that are allocated to the Pentagon and to the military, which is the largest factor in the entire capitalist economy, had been removed.

So the putative rationale for the constant preparation for war, for the maintenance of huge missile capacity and nuclear capacity in preparing for a nuclear war and for war generally had been removed.

Consequently, the ideological rationale for imperialism became something else, namely the war on terror. It was in some respects borrowed, as it were, from the Mossad. There was an important document published by a man named Odei Gino (spelling not verified by interviewee) who was a Mossad operative which had to do with the prospects for Israel in the 1980s.

This document put forward the proposition that the fundamental task was to break up the various Islamic countries into their ethnic and religious components, ad seriatim. This was first projected as targeting Lebanon, Iraq, Syria, Iran, Egypt, Saudi Arabia and so on.

Essentially, US imperialism, which is the primary sponsor of the Israeli state, incorporated that notion of the necessity to demonize Islam and to create a rationale for permanent war in the region, and adapted it as the whole rationale for US capitalism and imperialism itself in its military projects.

It did not begin with 9/11 as such. I should put out that, in 1993, the World Trade Center was attacked, and this was immediately attributed in 1993 to the blind Egyptian cleric, Sheikh Omar Abdel-Rahman, and presented as a terrorist act motivated by Islam.

In fact, the entire plan for the 1993 bombing of the World Trade Center and for what to be known as the Landmark Plot, namely a plot to blow up the United Nations’ building, the George Washington bridge, the Lincoln tunnel, the Holland tunnel, the Statue of Liberty, to assassinate the then Secretary General of the United Nations, Boutros Boutros-Ghali, and to assassinate the then senator from New York, Alfonse D’Amato, all these things called the Landmark Plot, were imputed to the blind Egyptian Sheikh Omar Abdel-Rahman.

In reality, I’d written an article at the time called “Who bombed the World Trade Center”, evidence points to the Federal Bureau of Investigation and the Mossad.

Press TV: Would you say that such hostile policies toward Islam and Muslim countries are a fundamental part of the US “defense strategy?”

Schoenman: It’s the entire … rationale for imperialism; for perpetual war on the peoples of the region; to seize their oil; to destroy their sovereignty; to break up the nations into ethnic and religious components.

A model of what has been done in Iraq; a model of what is taking place in Afghanistan; a model for what is projected in Iran; a model for what has transpired in Lebanon – That’s the ideological content of imperialism at the moment.

So, concomitant to that is the state propaganda of course reflected in the military. You’re talking specifically about Lieutenant Colonel Mathew Dooley who had a course in North Virginia for the Joint Forces Staff College of the Army Chiefs of Staff in which the entire rationale for these wars was being inculcated.

And that is the root of this particularly Islamophobia as it’s been described and specifically preparing these officers for a project of obliterating Mecca and Medina and of utilizing nuclear weapons in the expansion and US control of the oil rich region of the Arab East, of Central Asia and so on.

Press TV: To be fair, this course that is being taught by lieutenant Colonel Mathew Dooley has been suspended following an uproar; but you think it’s not enough?

Schoenman: All Dooley is a mouthpiece, I mean, he is simply implementing an overall ideological mantra. Right as we speak you’re well aware that the CIA and the entire apparatus of rule in the US is claiming that there was this underwear bomb plot that was discovered – they had done this once before.

And immediately it was disclosed that the supposed perpetrator was in fact a Central Intelligence Agency operative. So now they maintain that ‘Oh, he was a double spy, so you see, actually he cleverly entrapped the terrorist.’

This is not what has been exposed. What the data shows is that this was a US operation from the beginning to the end – As all of these fake false flag operations are.

These so-called terrorist acts including the young man from Nigeria who was supposedly going to ignite his underwear on an airplane if you recall – the absurdity of this is that when he approached the airplane, he had no visa to come to the US; he had approached the airplane to get on, he couldn’t get on, he didn’t even have a passport with him and he said, oh, do you need one? He was quickly escorted on by an undisclosed figure who waved off the airport security people and escorted this fellow on the plane.

These are government ops. They are designed to create hysteria; a mindset, in the public that there is a menace to the population that can only be met by this constant predation upon the peoples of the region by US military force, by US imperialism itself.

So what has been discussed here tonight with respect to the Islamophobia that has been taught by Dooley is in fact the ideological rationale for US military policy, for US foreign policy and for the power of the US rulers themselves.