It’s one hysterical headline after another lately: “The Rise of the Refugee Crisis,” “A Swarm of People Coming Across Mediterranean,” “Terrorists Inbound? Taking Refugees Could Open Doors to Jihadists.”
This is a false narrative that, like many of today’s headlines, is primarily focused on creating divisive nontroversies for people to bicker over.
Perhaps we in the west are fearful of another population doing to us, what we have done to indigenous populations around the world for centuries, overrunning territories with immigrants from a distant land. While this present wave of immigrants aren’t killing their way into a manifest destiny, the west’s condemnation of them feels a lot like the pot calling the kettle black. Our brand of classical propaganda is the predictable behavior of a bully, or an abusive spouse; we blame the other for our belief that they are thinking of doing to us what we have in reality done to everyone else. Hence we can better understand the west’s hyper-vigilance against immigration as a projection of our inner most intentions. We in the west have figured out a clever profit model scheme; we invade indigenous territories, steal the resources, enslave the population, and then enact oppressive edicts necessary to forever cripple those populations from ever retaliating against us. As of late, the strategy is one of absolute intolerance, galvanizing citizen hatred of immigrants by proclaiming them “terrorists.”
Terrorism – it’s the boogie man for adults. A very clever word hypnotically repeated for decades; the social manipulation of society through the generation of fear and division. But what exactly is there to be afraid of? Do you know anyone whose life has ever been threatened by a terrorist, or is the concept of terrorism an existential threat that you’ve only ever seen on the television screen? I personally know more people who have been struck by lightning, and that’s not hyperbole – it’s literally true. I can name two people I know who have been struck by lightning, but I can’t name a single person killed by these terrorists that our media have us scurrying around in fear about. More people die from peanut allergies than from terrorist attacks. Nevertheless, our culture places a hysterical emphasis on the potential threat of terrorist events, especially as derived from Muslim populations. We’re told over and over again, that terrorism is an ideology inherent in the peaceful religion of Islam. We’re directed by people who have never read the holy Qur’an to a chapter that does not exist pertaining to 71 virgins. Meanwhile various demographics of modern western society hold George Washington and Che Guevara and Guy Fox up as cult heroes, but Islamic radicals they were not. Nevertheless, the establishments they were attacking labelled them as terrorists, because it’s a word used by established regimes to enact intolerance and make pariahs of insurgents when politics necessitate the tactic of character assassination. Hence it is not a stretch of the imagination to understand that terrorism is not an ideology. What tyrannical regimes refer to as terrorism is a political technique used to motivate revolution.
And though your chances of dying from spontaneous combustion are notably higher than dying in a terrorist attack, the threat from terrorists that are specifically Muslim, has itself been wildly exaggerated. In fact, a report compiled by America’s very own Federal Bureau of Investigation illustrates that only 6% of all terrorist attacks are carried out by Muslims – six percent! Compare that to the 24% by extreme left-wing groups or the 42% by Latinos. And this 6% does not include 9/11, as we have illustrated in previous episodes, the FBI didn’t even list 9/11 among Osama binLaden’s crimes, the DOJ never charged a single person with the crime of 9/11, and there is overwhelming evidence that the official 9/11 story is a blatant work of fiction to authorize the doctrines and funds needed for a new level of imperial mobilization. Perhaps we just need to adjust our definition of terrorist. Ever since the 9/11 false flag event imprinted the emotional flashback of Muslim extremism in the memory banks of the west, many Americans seem easily bamboozled by the kind of hate speech misinformation and racist headlines spewing from the five-headed American media monster that characterizes the west’s War of Terror.
Yet, implicitly and explicitly, Americans continue to live in irrational mortal fear of radical Islam, a fear that motivates intolerance and hatred, propagated and inflamed by right wing Islamophobes in our media. If one follows the cable news networks, it feels like McCarthy’s hysterical red scare all over again, only this time it’s coming from a religion that seems to be spreading like wildfire over the earth, backing the vulnerable lady liberty into a frightening corner of doom, darkness and despotism, overshadowed by the star and crescent. It has even become axiomatic in some circles to chant: “Not all Muslims are terrorists, but ya know what, nearly all terrorists are Muslims.”
But the data simply does not support such racist bigotry. On the FBI’s official website there exists a chronological list of all terrorist attacks committed on U.S. soil by group.
According to this data, there were more Jewish acts of terrorism within the United States than Islamic (7% vs 6% respectively). Yet notice the disparity in media coverage between the two. If a terrorist attack does not fit the “Islam-is-the-perennial-and-existential-threat-of-our-times” narrative, it is simply ignored, which in a circuitous manner reinforces and thus “proves” the preconceived narrative. It is to such an extent that the average American cannot remember any Jewish or Latino terrorist or terrorist organization. Why should we when we’ve never even heard of the Jewish Defense League or the Ejercito Popular Boricua Macheteros? For the same reason, we rarely if ever hear about the School of the Americas at Fort Benning, Georgia, which provides US resources to train foreign insurgents in the so-called art of brutality (coincidentally, burgeoning public awareness and subsequent bad publicity of this school of assassins prompted the military to alter its name to WHISC: Western Hemisphere Instituted for Security Cooperation). For the same reason, most of us are completely unaware of the true purpose of US Special Operations Forces, whose primary responsibility is training foreign commandos overseas – commandos who just happen to pose some kind of existential threat later on down the line. Perhaps this is why the US government is upset at Russia for bombing CIA-trained militants in Syria; perhaps this is why John McCain, in regards to the Russian air strikes in Syria, suggested that, “We might do what we did in Afghanistan many years ago to give those guys the ability to shoot down those [Russian] planes, that equipment is available.” He is of course publicly announcing the intention of gifting stinger missiles to Syrian Jihadists while comparing this situation to Charlie Wilson’s War, despite the fact that Charlie’s campaign was covert. Like the insurgents in Syria, Charlie Wilson’s efforts were responsible for arming the militants our government and media would later declare “evil terrorists” hiding out in Afghanistan that needed to be “smoked out”. Arming and funding fringe terror groups as an excuse to justify full scale military invasion is a favourite strategy of the American Empire for gaining monopolistic control over resources, whether they be opium in Afghanistan or oil in Iraq.
Could American Empire’s meddling in world affairs be the reason that so many refugees are fleeing the Middle East? This so-called immigrant crisis didn’t begin until after NATO governments armed and funded jihadist rebels in Syria and Libya, many of whom went on to join ISIS – an organization funded and equipped by western interests. If western institutions keep destabilizing secular governments in the Middle East and trying to replace them with jihadists, the wave of legitimate migrants trying to escape that turmoil will be never ending.
In front of the cameras, our leaders actually have the gumption to act surprised that their intentional destabilization of those countries might result in waves of desperate refugees who have no home to return to, while fleeing to more stable sectors of the world. This despite the fact that the illegal settlement of Palestine is wholly supported by America and her allies, and that 1 in 7 illegal settlements constructed in Palestine are settled by Americans, and we have the temerity to complain about illegal immigration while we occupy stolen lands of the Native American peoples that our grandparents annihilated. But I digress.
Collectively, western Islamophobes ignore the history that is all around them, and distort evidence that even a child could recognize. The reality is that all Terrorists are Muslims – except the 94% that Aren’t. Meanwhile, the associated press, Reuters, CNN, MSNBC, Fox, and their corporate owned friends are all working hard to make us feel mortal terror every time they print column inches or broadcast televised minutes of anti-Islamic fearmongering. Its in our faces every single day.
We’re not saying that Islamic terrorism is not a matter of concern, just as we’re not saying peanut allergies are not a concern, but like gluten intolerance, it’s grossly exaggerated. In the words of Cenk Uygur: “You’re at a ten when you need to be at a four.”
So if you weren’t utterly amazed to learn that you’re more likely to die from peanut allergies than from terrorism, and learning that only 6% of what few terrorist acts actually do occur are carried out by Muslims didn’t knock your socks off, you’ll be elated to learn that the vast majority of terror plots that we hear about are cooked up by our very own FBI. That’s right. In the past decade 22 terrorist plots against the US have been foiled, and 14 of them were actually created by the FBI before they were thwarted by the same organization that manufactured them.
To maintain the trend towards fascism in this country, it was necessary to deceive Americans into believing that since 9/11 we have been under continuous threat of attack by terrorists. But because this proclamation is pure fiction, our intrepid government have actually manufactured terrorist threats that did not legitimately exist.
In a New York Times article entitled Terrorist Plots Hatched by the FBI, David K. Shipler explains that the FBI is not finding terrorists, so much as grooming individuals who are upset with government to become “terrorists” in what they term as “sting operations”.
Shipler writes:
THE United States has been narrowly saved from lethal terrorist plots in recent years — or so it has seemed. A would-be suicide bomber was intercepted on his way to the Capitol; a scheme to bomb synagogues and shoot Stinger missiles at military aircraft was developed by men in Newburgh, N.Y.; and a fanciful idea to fly explosive-laden model planes into the Pentagon and the Capitol was hatched in Massachusetts.
But all these dramas were facilitated by the F.B.I., whose undercover agents and informers posed as terrorists offering a dummy missile, fake C-4 explosives, a disarmed suicide vest and rudimentary training. Suspects naïvely played their parts until they were arrested.
When an Oregon college student, Mohamed Osman Mohamud, thought of using a car bomb to attack a festive Christmas-tree lighting ceremony in Portland, the F.B.I. provided a van loaded with six 55-gallon drums of “inert material,” harmless blasting caps, a detonator cord and a gallon of diesel fuel to make the van smell flammable. An undercover F.B.I. agent even did the driving, with Mr. Mohamud in the passenger seat. To trigger the bomb the student punched a number into a cellphone and got no boom, only a bust.
This is legal, but is it legitimate? Without the F.B.I., would the culprits commit violence on their own? Is cultivating potential terrorists the best use of the manpower designed to find the real ones? Judging by their official answers, the F.B.I. and the Justice Department are sure of themselves — too sure, perhaps.
Carefully orchestrated sting operations usually hold up in court. Defendants invariably claim entrapment and almost always lose, because the law requires that they show no predisposition to commit the crime, even when induced by government agents. To underscore their predisposition, many suspects are “warned about the seriousness of their plots and given opportunities to back out,” said Dean Boyd, a Justice Department spokesman. But not always, recorded conversations show. Sometimes they are coaxed to continue.
Undercover operations, long practiced by the F.B.I., have become a mainstay of counterterrorism, and they have changed in response to the post-9/11 focus on prevention. “Prior to 9/11 it would be very unusual for the F.B.I. to present a crime opportunity that wasn’t in the scope of the activities that a person was already involved in,” said Mike German of the American Civil Liberties Union, a lawyer and former F.B.I. agent who infiltrated white supremacist groups. An alleged drug dealer would be set up to sell drugs to an undercover agent, an arms trafficker to sell weapons. That still happens routinely, but less so in counterterrorism, and for good reason.
“There isn’t a business of terrorism in the United States, thank God,” a former federal prosecutor, David Raskin, explained.
“You’re not going to be able to go to a street corner and find somebody who’s already blown something up,” he said. Therefore, the usual goal is not “to find somebody who’s already engaged in terrorism but find somebody who would jump at the opportunity if a real terrorist showed up in town.”
And that’s the gray area. Who is susceptible? Anyone who plays along with the agents, apparently. Once the snare is set, law enforcement sees no choice. “Ignoring such threats is not an option,” Mr. Boyd argued, “given the possibility that the suspect could act alone at any time or find someone else willing to help him.”
Typically, the stings initially target suspects for pure speech — comments to an informer outside a mosque, angry postings on Web sites, e-mails with radicals overseas — then woo them into relationships with informers, who are often convicted felons working in exchange for leniency, or with F.B.I. agents posing as members of Al Qaeda or other groups.
Some targets have previous involvement in more than idle talk, but others seem ambivalent, incompetent and adrift, like hapless wannabes looking for a cause that the informer or undercover agent skillfully helps them find. Take the Stinger missile defendant James Cromitie, a low-level drug dealer with a criminal record that included no violence or hate crime. “He was searching for answers within his Islamic faith,” said his lawyer, Clinton W. Calhoun III, who has appealed his conviction. “And this informant, I think, twisted that search in a really pretty awful way, sort of misdirected Cromitie in his search and turned him towards violence.”
THE informer, Shahed Hussain, had been charged with fraud, but avoided prison and deportation by working undercover in another investigation. He was being paid by the F.B.I. to pose as a wealthy Pakistani with ties to Jaish-e-Mohammed, a terrorist group that Mr. Cromitie apparently had never heard of before they met by chance in the parking lot of a mosque.
“Brother, did you ever try to do anything for the cause of Islam?” Mr. Hussain asked at one point.
“O.K., brother,” Mr. Cromitie replied warily, “where you going with this, brother?”
Two days later, the informer told him, “Allah has more work for you to do,” and added, “Revelation is going to come in your dreams that you have to do this thing, O.K.?” About 15 minutes later, Mr. Hussain proposed the idea of using missiles, saying he could get them in a container from China. Mr. Cromitie laughed.
Reading hundreds of pages of transcripts of the recorded conversations is like looking at the inkblots of a Rorschach test. Patterns of willingness and hesitation overlap and merge. “I don’t want anyone to get hurt,” Mr. Cromitie said, and then explained that he meant women and children. It took 11 months of meandering discussion and a promise of $250,000 to lead him, with three co-conspirators he recruited, to plant fake bombs at two Riverdale synagogues.
“Only the government could have made a ‘terrorist’ out of Mr. Cromitie, whose buffoonery is positively Shakespearean in its scope,” said Judge Colleen McMahon, sentencing him to 25 years. She branded it a “fantasy terror operation” but called his attempt “beyond despicable” and rejected his claim of entrapment.
The judge’s statement was unusual, but Mr. Cromitie’s characteristics were not. His incompetence and ambivalence could be found among other aspiring terrorists whose grandiose plans were nurtured by law enforcement. They included men who wanted to attack fuel lines at Kennedy International Airport; destroy the Sears Tower in Chicago; carry out a suicide bombing near Tampa Bay, Fla., and bomb subways in New York and Washington. Of the 22 most frightening plans for attacks since 9/11 on American soil, 14 were developed in sting operations.
Based on the false belief that we’re being persistently attacked, Americans tend to accept and even welcome our government’s disregard for civil liberties among a growing police state here at home, as well as unprecedented invasions of foreign countries.
Staging events and playing the victim to coax formerly unwilling masses to go to war and give up their rights is a standard operation in the play books of powerful regimes. An analysis of history reveals how major events such as the USS Maine, Lusitania, Pearl Harbor, Gulf of Tonkin, Murrah Building, 9/11, Boston Bombing, and even Sandy Hook were all staged events executed by mercenaries in coordination with intelligence agencies to continuously scare tax dollars out of Americans, provide Carte Blanche for global military dominance, serve as a convenient excuse to remove all civil liberties, and cloak fascism in a red-white-and-blue façade. But the technique can only work as long as the people are unaware of its application. As James Corbett pronounced:
Those who have studied history know that nothing invigorates and empowers an authoritarian regime more than a spectacular act of violence, some sudden and senseless loss of life that allows the autocrat to stand on the smoking rubble and identify himself as the hero. It is at moments like this that the public—still in shock from the horror of the tragedy that has just unfolded before them—can be led into the most ruthless despotism: despotism that now bears the mantle of “security.”
Acts of terror and violence never benefit the average man or woman. They only ever benefit those in positions of power.
This is why Nero fiddled while Rome burned: it gave him a chance to throw the Christians to the lions and rebuild the capital of the Roman Empire in his own image.
This is why Hearst and the warmongers of the emerging American Empire were delighted by the destruction of the U.S.S. Maine in Havana Harbor: it gave them the excuse they needed in order to rouse the public into supporting the Spanish-American War.
This is why Israel attacked the U.S.S. Liberty in 1967 during the Six Day War, strafing and torpedoing it relentlessly for hours in a vain attempt to send it to the bottom: the Israelis believed that the loss of the Liberty could be blamed on Egypt and draw the Americans into war.
This is why there are hundreds of documented examples of governments staging attacks in order to blame them on their political enemies. In every civilization, in every culture, in every historical period, authoritarians have known that spectacular acts of violence help to further consolidate their own power and control. And sadly, throughout history there have been all too many willing to allow attacks to occur, to pretend that attacks have occurred or even to attack their own population in order to further their political agenda.
To think that such staged provocations and false flag attacks no longer occur would be as unrealistic as believing that human nature itself has changed, that powerful people no longer seek to increase their power, that influence is never used for deceit or manipulation, that lies are no longer told to satisfy greed or slake the thirst for control. It is to believe that our society is immuned from those things that we have seen in every other society in every other era. In short, it is a dangerous delusion.
The people are once again learning the power of this delusion. They are learning the extent to which they have been lied to. They are once again studying their history.
Americans are learning that there were multiple bombs found, dismantled and taken out of the Alfred P. Murrah building on April 19, 1995. They are learning that Timothy McVeigh had written a letter to his sister in which he claimed to be in the Special Forces for the U.S. Army. They are learning the bombing was being directed by FBI informants, just as the 1993 World Trade Center bombing was. They are learning about 9/11 and the Gulf of Tonkin and Operation Northwoods and their own Army Counterinsurgency Manuals that teach officers how to commit false flag attacks to blame on their enemies.
In short, the people are learning the truth.
And now we see the same build-up to a false flag event taking place that we saw in 1995. At that time the U.S. had a corporate media desperate to fling mud at anyone concerned by the actions of their government, and it had a government that was desperately unpopular in the face of growing dissatisfaction. Today we see the exact same factors at play.
If anything, the situation today is worse than it was in the run-up to the Oklahoma City Bombing, with media consolidation meaning that groups of concerned citizens like the Oath Keepers are being attacked by the controlled minions on both the left and the right. And now it is not just the militia that is being demonized by the establishment: it is veterans and gun owners, third party supporters and libertarians, anti-war protestors and human rights campaigners, people who are upset with the government giving trillions to the banks that have engineered our current financial crisis in the first place. In short, everyone is now a potential terrorist, according to the governmental and media agencies that deign to limit our range of acceptable opinion and control dissent.
Even the word ‘terrorist’ means something more than it did back in 1995, after the false flag anthrax attack allowed the passage of the Patriot Act, after the boogey of Al-CIAda gave the NSA the opportunity to announce that they were collecting everyone’s emails and everyone’s telephone calls, after the former Homeland Security Secretary came out and admitted that the Bush administration had made up terror threats in order to scare the people into supporting the government, now we know what the real definition of terrorism is. It is governments scaring their own populations into line.
So here’s the rub – you are more likely to die of peanut allergies than you are of even being injured as a result of a terrorist attack, of what few terrorist attacks do occur only 6% of them are carried out by Muslims, and just about every one of the plots you hear about on the news were created by the corporate entity masquerading as our government. Having said that, we would do well to question every corporate news story purporting that a terrorist bombing or mass shooting taken place, because as with 9/11, an examination of the facts and evidence quickly reveals that it’s not crazy to question whether news stories on the television are real – it’s actually crazy not to. The media engages in theater on the movie screen, and no matter how many times Anderson Cooper’s nose disappears in front of a green-screen, no matter how many times FOX is caught making up stories like “No-Go Zones” in Europe, no matter how many times the news is later revealed to be a complete fabrication, the American people tend to fall for it every time when it’s “breaking news.”
So don’t feed the fears. Question the legitimacy of every major news story you see. And when the story is really big, ask yourself what the media might be distracting your attention away from.
Gabrielle Lafayette is a journalist, writer, and executive producer for the Outer Limits Radio Show.
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