China and terror

Economics professor M. Shahid Alam of Northeastern University draws an interesting parallel between Chinese resistance during the Second Opium War and modern-day Islamic “terrorists”. His historical point of reference is an article written by Friedrich Engels, co-author with Karl Marx of the Communist Manifesto. (Counterpunch: “Islam Now, China Then”)

Muslims are accused of insanity, brutal indiscriminate violence and suicide attacks against innocent civilians. Well, argues Alam, “a little history is connecting Islam today to China in the middle of the nineteenth century”. In May 1857 during the Second Opium War, Engels had an article published in the New York Daily Tribune. The Chinese, he describes, were fighting back with every possible means at their disposal against the colonial invaders, poisoning the bread of Europeans in Hong Kong, massacring crews and passengers on trading vessels, coolies fighting till the end in a show of “fanaticism”.

“European statesmen and newspapers fulminated endlessly about Chinese barbarity, calling their attacks “cowardly, barbarous, atrocious”. The Europeans too called for more wars, endless wars, till China could be subdued, totally.” Engels quickly unearthed the root cause of this barbarism: the source of this “universal outbreak of all Chinese against all foreigners was the piratical policy of the British government.” The Chinese could not match the military power of the Western countries, so they used asymmetrical warfare, targeting the West's weak points – just like today's Islamic “terrorists” are doing. The Muslims are also waging a popular war “for dignity and sovereignty”. Ultimately the West didn't succeed in splintering China into a hundred fiefdoms. Today, China is a peaceful, rising power. The West today is indeed still succeeding in splintering the Muslim world into a hundred fiefdoms – and the Muslim peoples are fighting back, with everything they have, including terror.

How to win the war on terror? Eliminate the root cause: the foreign policy of American imperialism and its followers.

Shahid Alam has also published a new book: “Challenging the New Orientalism: Dissenting Essays on the "War Against Islam".

They hate injustice

Why do 'they' hate 'us'? Why do 'they' – the Jihadis, the Arabs, the Muslims – hate 'us' – God-fearing Americans who want to bring freedom and democracy to every corner of the world?

“The Blair-Bush message: terror is simply the product of an evil ideology”. (The Guardian: Denial of the link with Iraq is delusional and dangerous) It's 'us' against 'them', freedom and democracy against Islamo-fascism... Bush, Blair and all the commentators who claim that “they hate us because of our freedoms” are the real fascists who want to whip up an anti-terror war to break-down what's left of precisely those freedoms in the West. What is fascism? It is one of the most brutal stages of capitalism, where the bourgeoisie sheds all its false pretenses of democracy and freedom to impose the dictatorship of bureaucrat-capitalism and crush any resistance by the working class. Look at Hitler. Now look at Osama bin Laden. There is much wrong with the guy, but he is not a fascist, not even an islamo-fascist. He is hiding in a corner of a medieval society dreaming about a kaliphate. Nothing fascist about that.

Why is this so called Islamo-fascist ideology flourishing now? Do 'they' attack 'us' because of our lifestyles? Then why doesn't Al-Qaeda attack Amsterdam or Stockholm? Why didn't they attack Britain before the invasion of Afghanistan and Iraq?

The simple reason is that they don't attack 'us' because of our freedoms or lifestyles, but because of what the Western powers have done and are still doing in the Middle East: invading and oppressing peoples. 'We' are not bringing 'freedom' and 'democracy' to the Middle East, but only oppression, killings and exploitation. And so 'they' hate 'us'. Rightly so!

“A society can live with kufr (non-believers) but not with injustice,” dismissed Pakistani chief justice Iftikhar Chaudhry was quoted on the Counterpunch website (Counterpunch: Pakistan's New Jihad by Ayesha Ijaz Khan)

They can live with non-believers – they don't kill us because we are not Muslims; they kill us because we bring injustice upon them. Stop the injustice, and the war on terror will be won, by 'us' and by 'them' – together.