Does the West really care about development?

A great opinion piece. People of the developing world always forget that the developed Global North didn't "develop" without hampering the development of the Global South. Large & intelligent populations of the Global South were seen as dangerous for the Global North's ambitions of developing themselves & keep ruling the world.

As I have blogged earlier, Global North developed by mass murdering, looting, & effectively disabling the development of the Global South by constant interference through military & political means. They wanted an easy & cheap access to human & mineral resources of the Global South, which could only be achieved by effectively controlling the region through any means, necessary.

Those means included interfering in political matters to install their own strongmen, abuse human rights at their own will, create such conditions of non-development & violence in the Global South, just so people of those countries have to move out of those countries, & their human labour is used in the development of the Global North, instead of developing their own countries in the Global South.

Corruption & human rights abuses in the Global South were done with the full consent & acknowledgement of the leaders of the Global North. But, as we should already know that Global North is a hypocritical world; they cry the crocodile tears, decrying the corruption & human rights abuses in the Global South, but then turn around & approve those activities as long as they are helping them achieve their own objectives of looting their resources of the Global South.

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https://www.theguardian.com/global-development-professionals-network/2016/mar/05/does-west-care-development

When it comes to international affairs, western politicians love to celebrate their devotion to development. In her flagship speech on development as secretary of state, Hillary Clinton offered stories about US aid transforming the lives of poor people in Indonesia, Nicaragua and South Africa. Laurent Fabius, the minister of foreign affairs for France, recently hailed his country’s commitment to development in the former colonies of west Africa. And at last year’s UN sustainable development goals summit, David Cameron spoke proudly about Britain’s record of providing “stability and security” to poor countries.

But this narrative of western benevolence only works by relying on our collective amnesia. For a slightly less fairytale-like version of the west’s relationship with development, we need to rewind to the decades following the second world war.

After the end of European colonialism in Africa and Asia, and with the brief cessation of US intervention in Latin America, developing countries were growing incomes and reducing poverty at a rapid pace. Beginning in the 1950s, countries like Guatemala, Indonesia, and Iran drew on the Keynesian model of mixed economy that had been working so well in the west. They made strategic use of land reforms to help peasant farmers, labour laws to boost workers’ wages, tariffs to protect local businesses, and resource nationalisation to help fund public housing, healthcare, and education.

This approach – known as “developmentalism” – was built on the twin values of economic independence and social justice. It wasn’t perfect, but it worked quite well. According to economist Robert Pollin, developmentalist policies sustained high per capita income growth rates of 3.2% for at least 20 years – higher than at any other time during the whole 20th century. As a result, the gap between the west and the rest began to narrow for the first time in history. It was nothing short of a miracle.

One might think western states would be thrilled at this success, but they were not amused. The new policies meant that multinational companies no longer had the easy access to the cheap labour, raw materials and consumer markets to which they had become accustomed during the colonial era.

Western powers – specifically the US, Britain and France – were not willing to let this continue. Instead of supporting the developmentalist movement, they set out on a decades-long campaign to topple the elected governments that were leading it and to install strongmen friendly to their interests – a long and bloody history that has been almost entirely erased from our collective memory.

It began with Iran in 1953. The democratically-elected prime minister, Mohammad Mosaddegh, was rolling out a wide range of pro-poor reforms, part of which included wresting control of the country’s oil reserves from the Anglo-Iranian Oil Company (now BP). Britain rejected this move, and responded swiftly. With the help of the CIA, Churchill deposed Mosaddegh in a coup d’etat and replaced him with an absolute monarch, Mohammed Riza Pahlevi, who reversed Mosaddegh’s reforms and went on to rule Iran with western support for 26 years.

The following year, the US did the very same thing in Guatemala. Jacobo Arbenz – the country’s second democratically-elected president – was redistributing unused portions of large private estates to landless Mayan peasants, with full compensation for the owners. But the American-based United Fruit Company took issue with this policy, and pushed Eisenhower to topple Arbenz. After the coup, Guatemala was ruled by US-backed dictatorships for 42 years, which presided over the massacre of more than 200,000 Mayans and one of the highest poverty rates in Latin America.

Brazil, too, was hit by a US-backed coup; they deposed President Goulart for his land reforms, corporate taxes, and other pro-poor policies that western companies disliked, and replaced him with a military dictatorship that lasted 21 years. President Sukarno of Indonesia was ousted for similar policies and replaced by a dictator, who – with British and US support – killed more than one million peasants, workers, and activists in one of the worst mass murders of the century, and went on to rule for 31 years. And then of course there was Chile: the US helped depose President Allende, the soft-spoken doctor who promised better wages, fairer rents, and social services for the poor, and replaced him with a dictator whose economic policies plunged some 45% of Chileans into poverty.

Some regions never even got a shot at developmentalism, western intervention was so swift. In Uganda, Britain raised the murderous Idi Amin to power, who crushed the progressive Common Man’s Charter before it could be implemented. In the Congo, Patrice Lumumba, the country’s first elected leader, was assassinated by Belgium and the CIA when it became clear he would restrict foreign control over resource-rich Katanga province. Western powers installed Mobutu Sese Seko in his place, a cartoonishly corrupt dictator who commanded the country for nearly forty years with billions of dollars in US aid. Under Mobutu’s reign, per capita income collapsed by 2.2% each year; ordinary Congolese suffered poverty worse than that which they had known under Belgian colonial rule.

In west Africa, France refused to cede control over the region’s resources after the end of colonialism. Working through the secretive Françafrique network, they rigged the first elections in Cameroon and handpicked the president after poisoning his main opponent. In Gabon, they installed the dictatorship of Omar Bongo and kept him in power for 41 years in exchange for access to the country’s oil.

We could rehearse many, many more examples, all the way up to the recent western-backed coups in Haiti. It is tempting to see this as nothing but a list of crimes – albeit one that casts serious doubts on the west’s claims to promoting democracy and human rights abroad. But it is more than that. It reflects an organised effort on the part of western powers to destroy the developmentalist movement that flowered in the global south after colonialism. They simply would not tolerate development if it restricted their access to resources and markets.

The legacy of this history is that there is now greater inequality between the west and the rest than there was at the end of colonialism. And a soul-scorching 4.2 billion people remain in poverty today. No one has been brought to justice for the coups and assassinations that destroyed the global south’s most promising attempt at development and crushed popular dreams of independence. Probably no one ever will. But we need to acknowledge that they happened, and stop pretending that the US, France and Britain are benevolent champions of the poor.

From football to property and beyond, inequality is the mother of all crises

Inequality does indeed affect us all, both physically & mentally. It's foolish to say that the poor people are happier than wealthy people. No, poor people are not happy because they have to work that much more to earn just enough to fill theirs & their children's stomachs. Then, there are education costs, housing costs, utilities, healthcare costs, & now, even the clean, drinking water costs money. Add the social exclusivity of poor people & their families due to their poverty & the life of the poor person is just hellish.

To develop & provide sustainable resources to everyone equally, the wealthy & the poor, every country needs to invest in its infrastructure & economic policies. Although, the writer of this opinion post takes a simplistic view that if Netherlands can increase taxes, & also spread its tax net, to help out the vulnerable sections of its own populations, then everyone else can, it is pretty much impossible to do that without proper practice of faith & religion.

How will religion help in alleviating poverty & instituting equality among the populace? Netherlands is a small Scandinavian country with a much smaller population than many developing countries, like Pakistan, India, Brazil, Argentina, Nigeria, Kenya, Thailand etc. It is also a pretty much a homogeneous population, very much unlike many other developing countries around the world. Still, it's impossible to eradicate inequality because the rich control the political policy-making machine.

This eradication, or at least, alleviation of inequality, can only happen through ethical people in governments & policy-making area. Increasing taxes or spreading the tax net far & wide may help in increasing the government coffers but won't help much if that money is once again ends up in the pockets of rich executives & wealthy citizens of the country, or politicians loot that money. So, how does the general public ensure that government is full of good, ethical people? And even after identifying such honest people, can the general public act rationally enough to bring them to power & stick by them, while, they increase taxes on rich people, & use those taxes to upgrade the horrible situation the general public is living in? Remember, all this will take time, whereas, the general public will want to see substantial major changes as soon as possible.

Only ethics can help there, & ethics comes through religion. Ethical & religious people will need to become leaders & consider government coffers public money & hence, need to be spent on them.

Besides ethics & religion, huge changes in electoral policies need to be implemented. These kind of substantial changes to alleviate poverty & inequality need a good & long time frame, like a decade or more, easily. But, in most democracies, even when they are stable, a government & leader has about a few years, anywhere from 8 to 10 years to finish his / her work. Of course, that has to be done, if & when, opposition parties are silent & happy with what the government is doing (then, what's the point of the opposition party?). But, these fundamental economic & social changes can easily take couple of decades to meaningfully show any changes in the system.

So, inequality indeed adversely affects a major portion of the general populace, but alleviating or eradicating inequality requires a lot more work than simply changing the tax system (even that is huge work in itself).

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https://www.theguardian.com/global-development/2016/feb/08/football-property-prices-beyond-inequality-mother-of-all-crises-tax-lilianne-ploumen

Inequality affects all of us. I live in Amsterdam, where house prices are now rising so sharply that ordinary, hard-working people don’t get a look-in. In London, it’s been like that for years. Whole neighbourhoods are unaffordable. Century-old football clubs have become the playthings of billionaires.

And the trend continues. More and more of the world’s wealth is in the hands of fewer and fewer people. I believe that tolerating this growing inequality will go down in history as humanity’s biggest mistake since communism.

People are essentially social animals. They can inspire each other, but they can also frustrate and discourage each other. And that’s what gross inequality does. It unravels the very fabric of our societies. It robs people of decent jobs and decent pay. And it robs them of their sense of purpose and self-worth.

In developing countries, the gap between rich and poor is far bigger. And it isn’t merely a technical issue, it is the result of political choices. Inequality is truly the mother of all crises. Whether it is conflict, climate change, economic stagnation or migration flows, inequality is always a major underlying cause.

Last autumn, the UN adopted new global goals. One of the main targets is to eradicate extreme poverty by 2030. To achieve that, economic growth must stay at the level it had for the past 10 years and its benefits must be far bigger than average for the poorest 40%.

The challenge we face is summed up in the slogan: “Leave no one behind”. The smartest policy here is to invest in the poorest of the poor. If we don’t, there is no way we will defeat extreme poverty by 2030. Which means we won’t generate the economic growth needed to achieve the other global goals. And we won’t reach our climate goals either.

“Leave no one behind” is also a moral imperative. In the past 25 years, globalisation has helped the world make spectacular progress on poverty. But at the same time we’ve allowed large groups to lag behind, and an even larger group to fall by the wayside completely. One of the main causes is exclusion. Whether it is on the basis of gender, religion, disability or sexual orientation, entire groups are being left out.

The mantra that no one should be left behind offers hope of a much-needed correction. It means managing globalisation properly. It means ending the unbridled power of elites. If realised, it would mean everyone could finally benefit from – and participate in – global development.

We know how to make this happen. Last year, we analysed Dutch policy to see how we could contribute more to inclusive development. It resulted in a plan of action worth €350m (£269m) that we are now putting into practice.

The plan consists of 20 measures across two areas. The first involves generating work and income for African women and young people with poor future prospects. The second consists of 10 measures to prompt robust political dialogue with developing countries on inclusive growth and development.

That dialogue is crucial, because resistance to change is often strongest precisely where change is needed most. In many poor countries, elites cling stubbornly to wealth and power until conflict, death and destruction are inevitable.

But the most powerful weapon against inequality is tax. Governments have to fight tax avoidance and tax evasion. My country has initiated the renegotiation of 23 tax treaties. We’ve proposed anti-abuse provisions to ensure that the Netherlands is no longer an attractive option for companies that want to avoid taxes. And we now forgo tax exemptions on goods and services provided under official development assistance.

At the same time, we need to broaden the tax base in the developing countries, which often rely on consumption taxes that make the poor pay a higher proportion of their income in tax than the rich. These countries need a progressive tax regime. And for that they need assistance in administering and collecting more complex forms of taxation, such as income and wealth taxes.

Taxation is not a popular subject for politicians. But it deserves far more attention. A recent study, by Jan-Emmanuel De Neve and Nattavudh Powdthavee, brings further proof that higher taxation equals more happiness.

For many developing countries, the tax burden is still 10-15% of gross domestic product. According to the UN, they’ll have to raise collection to about 20% just to be able to finance their share of the global goals. In Scandinavia, the average tax burden is more than 45%. I wish the same for every country! Provided the money is spent well, of course.

So we have our work cut out. To the super rich, I say: trickle-down is dead. To the elites and the kleptocrats in poor countries, I say: there’s a limit to how high you can build the gates around your communities. The time has come to pay. Make sure the payment is in taxes.

World Bank & IMF Polices Behind the Inadequate Health Infrastructure to Quell Ebola

Another interview where it is being reiterated that IMF & World Bank, the international financial institutions, are essentially, tools of the developed countries to keep the developing countries from ever developing. I have blogged about this several times before this post.

IMF & the World Bank are the instruments of the West, to keep the development goal, out of reach, from developing countries in Latin America, Asia, & Africa. These institutions provide billions in loans to countries with known corrupt leaders & then impose harsh restrictions, like austerity measures, to recover those loans. The corruption of the political leaders are well known. Those austerity measures tie the hands of the successive governments, regardless of how much they are well-intentioned, behind their backs, & the developing countries fail to develop.

These countries are instructed to privatize everything, increase prices & taxes for the local citizenry, but decrease their taxes & royalties from natural wealth, & let the international corporations loot the developing countries of their natural wealth. Of course, then, is it any wonder that developed countries keep developing further & amassing huge wealth, whereas, the developing countries stay at the bottom of the pile. If, by any chance, the leaders of the developing countries resist following the demands of the IMF, World Bank, of the political leaders of the developed countries, then political assassinations & interference, & ultimately, war, is imposed on those developing countries.

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https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=nghGovphphw

SHARMINI PERIES, EXEC. PRODUCER, TRNN: … do you think this is an adequate response on the part of the World Bank?

NII AKUETTEH, FMR. DIRECTOR AT AFRICA ACTION: I don't think so … the World Bank and the IMF have contributed to the weak health systems in Africa … . So, therefore, so to speak, they contributed to the problem; therefore they need to own up to their mistakes and they need to do more to help rescue these countries.

PERIES: What do you mean by that? What role has IMF and the World Bank played in West Africa in the past?

AKUETTEH: Oh, well, you know, two phrases. One is structural adjustment programs. Anybody who's been studying Africa since independence knows that especially since the '80s, when Ronald Reagan got into power in the United States and the World Bank and the IMF actually made themselves the economic stewards of economic policy in Africa, structural adjustment, otherwise called austerity measures, they have imposed these policies on the African countries regardless of what the people want, regardless of what the leaders wanted. So structural adjustment is one of those phrases. And the governments were told, were forced, that in order to get a good mark from the World Bank and the IMF, you have to keep government small, you have to slash government officials' pay; after you have slashed the number of government officials, you have to privatize everything and you have to force people to pay, and especially to pay for health care and to pay out of pocket for education.

So I think, though structural adjustment went on for decades and they devastated the African economies, the other phrase that I wanted to throw in is IMF riots. This actually came from Africa, where every time the IMF would impose economic conditions, ordinary people in the street were so hit hard that they would riot. And so it actually created a new phrase in the English language and in economic writing: IMF riots.

PERIES: So, Nii, explain more, in the sense that, yes, of course the IMF would have these horrendous austerity policies and neoliberal economic policies and force governments to shrink their bureaucratic and civil service, all these things in the past were set up in order to service their people. But why are they forced to come to these kinds of agreements with the World Bank and the IMF?

AKUETTEH: I think that's a great question, because on the surface of it, a government, a country can simply say, sorry, your conditions are too harsh, we don't have to deal with you. After all, the United States doesn't take the advice of the World Bank and the IMF. A number of big countries don't. But for African countries, number one, they are economically small and weak. Secondly, having just gotten out of colonialism--I know this is about 50 years ago, but when you are trying to restructure economic systems that was built over more than a century, it is not easy. And so they are tied into the global economy. They are tied into their former colonial masters. That is especially France and the U.K. And they are tied to the United States.

Now, those three countries, the United States, the U.K., and France, play a major role in the World Bank and the IMF. And therefore the World Bank and the IMF actually act as policeman and gatekeepers for the entire global economy if you are an African country, because the rest of the global economy says to you, we will deal with you only if the World Bank and the IMF says you are well behaved. And the World Bank and the IMF will say you are well behaved only if you agree to their conditions. And therefore it's almost impossible for an African country to say, listen, I don't want to do this anymore.

You know, everybody who reads the news, Africa news, and especially U.S.-Africa, will know that the West doesn't much care for Robert Mugabe. Usually you will be told that it's because he is internally repressive and other things. But I happen to think that one major factor also is that for about ten years after Zimbabwe became independent, Robert Mugabe followed the dictates of the World Bank and the IMF very closely. And after about ten years he said, no, this is not working no more. For instance, they made Zimbabwe sell its stock of maize, and say it's uneconomical to hold it; sell it, buy it when you need it. But that was bad economic advice, because when they wanted to buy it, they had to pay more. And so I am saying that countries that defy the IMF and the World Bank get punished by the larger global economy, and therefore it's not been very easy for those countries to reject what the World Bank and the IMF recommend, because they were doing it on behalf of the global economy.

PERIES: But these economies are very resource-rich. I mean, places like Sierra Leone have diamonds and gold, and West Africa is considered one of the natural resource rich regions of the world. The World Bank adopting these policies is really opening the doors and the gates to a flood of corporations coming in to do business in the region and reap the resources out of the region and leave very little behind. Can you sort of describe those complex relationships between the World Bank, the IMF, the local governments, the corporations that have left--the conditions that they have left in the region that is now unable to cope with … a grave epidemic of Ebola in the region?

AKUETTEH: I think that question is fantastic. I mean, because the reason that the World Bank and the IMF do what they do, the reason that they squeeze the African countries and say to them, you do what we tell you, never mind what your own people might want, never mind what your own leaders might want, the IMF and the World Bank, there's a method to their madness. And I believe said the method, the reason they do what they do, is actually to make it safe and hospitable for international corporations to go in and plunder Africa's wealth. It is as simple as that.

Now, it's been going on for years. The IMF and the World Bank are creatures created after the Second World War. They're Bretton Woods institutions. So, after the Second World War, with the U.K. and Western Europe being weakened, they were created to help stand up again in the global economy. So they took over what has been done, which is plundering Africa's wealth, leaving very little for the Africans … . That question goes to why this is done. The World Bank and the IMF would tell the African countries, keep governments small; you can't afford--. I mean, when I was in school, our governments were being told, listen--I'm from Ghana--you are a small country, the United States doesn't invest this much into education, so why should you? You shouldn't invest in education; let parents pay for it, when most parents are poor and when education is an investment. So they want to keep governments small. They want the people of the country to get as little as possible from the wealth--the bottom line is because they want the Western corporations to continue taking the wealth from out of Africa.

This is precisely why they do it. Even as recently as in Liberia, when Ms. Johnson Sirleaf--whom I know well because she was my boss at a certain point-- when she became president, she got a lot of kudos from the West because she is well known in the West and it was great that a woman had been in elected president in Africa. But behind the scenes, she was told that, listen, you will get a lot of corporations investing if you don't insist that they clean up the environment, if you don't push hard for labor protections, if you don't insist on high taxes, so all the things that the World Bank and the IMF says.

I'm saying your question is great because it goes to the heart of it: it's designed to make it easier for Western corporations to plunder Africa. It's as simple as that.

Islamophobia & a Challenge to Bill Maher - Deepa Kumar on RAI (Part 1/5)

A great series of interviews with Deepa Kumar. She puts the right perspective on how US has always been interfering with the development & politics of developing countries, especially, Islamic countries. The whole interview can easily be summarized in the last line of interview, "the people of the Middle East and North Africa are just like everybody else. They want economic rights. They want political rights and so on. And if the U.S. just stopped interfering, we would see a flowering of a different kind of society."

Islamophobia is perpetuating lies that Islam is a backward religion because it doesn't give rights, for instance, to women. However, the problems of giving or not giving rights to women is more a cultural / political one than religious one. As Ms. Kumar says that by merely focusing on these topics & then equating these "to a problem of Islam as opposed to a problem of politics" perpetuate the notion that "all Muslims are backward, which is the very essence of Islamophobia."

Then, fundamentalism exists in every religion, & heck, even in atheism. Atheists are some of the most fundamentalist people in this world. Every religion has its die-hard followers; there are fundamentalist Muslims, Jews, Christians, Hindus, Buddhist etc. We can see how fundamentalist Buddhist killed, & still killing, poor Rohingya Muslims in Myanmar. We can see how die-hard Hindus (BJP is a very fundamentalist Hindu political party) killing Muslims in India over the issue of beef. Fundamentalist Christians / right wing militias roam free in US & have killed ethnic & racial minorities (African-Americans, South Asians etc.). Their actions are not attributed to their religions & no one asks other non-fundamentalist Christians, Buddhist or Hindus to absolve / distance themselves from the actions of their fundamentalist brethren in religion.

One thing which Paul Jay refers to, which I would really like to highlight is that how the whole world has been focusing on the barbarism of ISIS in Iraq & Syria. What about the barbarism of US when it dropped atomic bombs on Hiroshima & Nagasaki, when, as the details are coming forth now, that they were not even needed to end WW2. If one starts to scrutinize American actions all over the world, we see that barbarism of ISIS is nothing compared to what America has done all over the world.

Now, the negative stereotypes of Muslims & Islam has been around since the birth of Islam in 600 AD. They have been perpetuating these stereotypes since the Crusades when the Pope wanted to unite all Christians under the flag of Crusades & paint all Muslims as one evil group of people who have been worshipping the bad or wrong God. The sad & unfortunate part is that even Muslims now are starting to believe in these stereotypes & think that Islam is the main reason which has been keeping Muslims & Muslim societies from developing. US & its Western allies also have their hands in this that they don't want Islamic societies to develop.

Islamic societies / countries have always been ready to develop (while living within the boundaries created by Quran & Prophet's tradition), either scientifically, politically, culturally, but alien forces (US & other Western powers) have always interfered in that development. The West / Global North want dictatorships in Middle East because it serves their own purpose. So, blaming the religion of Islam or thinking that Muslims are so backward in their thoughts that this is all they can come up with, is completely wrong. At the end of the day, a Muslim anywhere in the world is just like anyone else; he / she wants to live peacefully, enjoy his / her life here, peacefully earn a living, & then die a satisfied / happy person.

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 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xKbw4dkGQGM

PAUL JAY, SENIOR EDITOR, TRNN: So what's wrong with what Bill Maher said? Bill Maher is saying that there's a great denial of rights in much of the Muslim world, not just Islamic State, but Saudi Arabia and so on, and there isn't a lot of loud critique about it. And certainly the American left spends a lot more time critiquing the domestic right. So doesn't he have a point?

DEEPA KUMAR, ASSOC. PROF. MEDIA STUDIES AND MIDEAST STUDIES, RUTGERS UNIV.: Well, what Bill Maher said is a perfect example of what I call liberal Islamophobia, which is to take up liberal themes, such as human rights, women's rights, the rights of gays and lesbians, the right to free speech, and so on and makes a case of the so-called Muslim world, like it is one big monolith in which these rights are uniformly denied to people, and then proceeds to equate, in essence, the politics of ISIS with the politics of the 1.5 billion people who practice Islam, when in fact you actually look at Muslim majority countries, which is the term that I prefer, they vary widely in terms of, for instance, the status of women. In Bangladesh, for instance, we've had two women heads of state voted into power, Khaleda Zia and Sheikh Hasina. But in Saudi Arabia, women aren't allowed to drive.

And so of course there are these kinds of examples from Muslim majority countries like Saudi Arabia, like Iran, where women's rights are restricted. But by focusing just on those and somehow equating this to a problem of Islam as opposed to a problem of politics, he winds up perpetuating this notion that all Muslims are backward, which is the very essence of Islamophobia.

JAY: He does something else, too. He ascribes, essentially, fundamentalism about the Quran, and then all believers in Islam are somehow also fundamentalists.

KUMAR: Right.

JAY: But he doesn't do that for Christianity, because there's just as much craziness in the Bible as there is in the Quran, I think. ...

KUMAR: No, you know, any religious text, whether it's the Quran or the Bible and so on, can be interpreted in multiple ways. There are progressive interpretations of it and then there are reactionary interpretations of it. ...

Imagine if for every act of terror committed by a Christian fundamentalist, a far-right militia person like Wade Michael Page, who went to Oak Creek, Wisconsin, and shot a gun at a Sikh temple and killed people and so on, now imagine if we were to generalize from Wade Michael Page to all of Christiandom, to all of the United States, and say, now everybody else should denounce this man and distance themselves from him; otherwise, you're all culpable. Now, that's completely ridiculous, and of course that would be ridiculous if we talk about Christians in the West, but apparently it's completely acceptable when it comes to talking about Muslims. And so even President Obama said moderate Muslims should separate themselves from ISIS and from other groups and so on. Why? In what way, shape, or form are regular Muslims responsible for fundamentalism any more than regular Christians are responsible for Christian fundamentalism or regular Jews for Jewish fundamentalists? You get the idea. We see those people as being the extreme wing of a particular religious interpretation.
...

JAY: ... There is nothing the Islamic State has done that compares to the barbaric activity that the United States has done in Iraq and on and on, going right back to the atomic bombing of Japan. So if we're talking scale here, the Islamic State is a whisper of what the United States has done.

That being said, one does not need to hold back on describing IS as a barbaric, brutal force that the people of the region on the whole, you would think, will despise, just as much as most Afghans despise the Taliban.

KUMAR: Absolutely. I completely agree with that. ... in my book, actually, I have a pretty strong critique of the parties of political Islam, and I don't think we should be soft on that. There was a tendency back in the 1970s, when Foucault goes to Iran and so on, to see--particularly in France there was a tendency to somehow see the Islamists as being progressive and painting with progressive colors the Iranian Revolution and so forth. But I don't think that tendency exists anymore. I think, if anything, one of the first few pieces that I wrote on this topic is about the left and their attitudes towards political Islam, is how ignorant the left was in terms of, actually, Islamophobia and in terms of sort of equating the Islamists with all of Islam and all of Muslims and so forth. So I think that there is, in the United States especially, a sort of blind spot around Islamophobia and a lack of a nuanced analysis of who these groups are, why they come to power, and what the historic conditions are for their rise.

JAY: It seems to me where he is--one is this part of where he extends this to anyone who believes in Islam and tries to make Islam itself and come up with some quotes from the Quran that are particularly backward is one thing. But the second thing, which is this idea that he talks about our society having liberal values and free speech and this and that, you can argue what that's becoming and with this national surveillance state and so on, but it's still true. I mean, compared to a lot of societies, ... we can have this conversation, and we're not going to walk out and get arrested.

That being said, it's at home you have those things. The United States has 50, 60 years of supporting the worst kind of dictatorships everywhere, and particularly in the Middle East, whether it's supporting the Saudis and so on and so on. There's no support for these kind of values when it conflicts with American interests abroad.

KUMAR: Right. ... the narrative that gets constructed in the West and that Bill Maher and people like that are echoing is the clash of civilizations rhetoric, which was coined by Bernard Lewis and then popularized by Samuel Huntington, which is the idea that in the post-Cold War period, conflict would no longer be political, it will be cultural, and that there were seven or eight civilizations, each with their own unique cultures--the West and the Islamic world and so on--and that they are bound to conflict with each other.

... there are any number of problems. It's ahistorical, it's just wrong, and so on. But the problem I have with it, one problem, at least, is that it negates the fact that the rights that people do have in this country, whether you're talking about workers' rights, the rights of African Americans to vote, the right of women to vote, this didn't happen automatically because some benevolent president decided. It's people's movements, it's women fighting for 100 years and their male allies that caused suffrage, right? And, therefore, somehow to assume the liberal mantle as being the natural inheritance of what it means to be the West, starting from Greece to the present, and seeing the East, particularly Muslim majority countries, as being mired in barbarism, this is the classic language of colonialism, which whether Bill Maher knows it or not, that is what he's echoing. And, in fact, even in the East, in Iran, in Egypt, you've had Feminist movements, you've had women's rights movements, which we barely ever hear of.

JAY: Well, the roots of this go right back to the early days of the Catholic Church and the fighting against--the Crusades, and then the Ottoman Empire. I mean, it wasn't about liberal values then. It was about the true god, and they got the bad god, and we're going to fight it out. But it's kind of--the roots of it go very deep.

KUMAR: Absolutely, which is why my book is called Islamophobia and the Politics of Empire and it starts with the Crusades, because every empire needs an enemy. And at least one of the motivations for the Crusades was to create this ideal Muslim enemy, which could then motivate people to go out and fight wars. But it was always--there was always a very contradictory notion of how to look at the East, because even while the Crusades are going on, you have the most horrific stereotypes of Muslims and all the rest of it.

In al-Andalus, which is the name given to Muslim rule in the Iberian Peninsula--Spain and Portugal--you see the most advanced civilization. Remember, Europe is in the dark ages at this time, right, and here in al-Andalus you have street lighting, you have developments in science, medicine, and so on. In that region, Europeans had a very positive idea of Muslims and what they developed because they had actual contact with them. So, typically this idea of a Muslim enemy works when people have never met anybody from the Middle East or North Africa or have never traveled. And then the stereotypes can work, just as it's working in the case of ISIS and scaring people to death.

JAY: But I think one of the things that always gets missed in this conversation in the mainstream media is that these are class societies we're talking about, the Muslim societies, Arab societies. And in many of them, the classes that are in power are barbaric and they are backward and they do call up the worst of whatever you can call up in Islam, the same way you can find in Christian fanatical regimes in Latin America and other times.

KUMAR: Absolutely.
...

JAY: I think part of it is ... like, if you're in any of the Muslim countries and you see what American policy in the Middle East has been, you are going to--unless you're in the elite and you somehow benefit from it, but even amongst the elites I think there's going to be resentment ... . The thing is: what else is there to have some sympathy for than the Islamist opposition? Why? Because the American policy and the Israeli policy destroyed the secular opposition.

KUMAR: That's right. And this has been happening through the course of the Cold War, when it was clear that the secular nationalists, whether you're talking about Gamal Abdel Nasser in Egypt or you're talking about Mohammad Mosaddegh in Iran, when it was discovered that they couldn't be co-opted to serve the U.S.'s interests in the region, the key policy from 1958 on with the Eisenhower doctrine was to create an Islamic bulwark to act as a counter to secular nationalism. And you read some of the accounts of what the CIA is doing, and they're putting poison into Nasser's cigarettes, they're trying to put poison into his chocolates, some of these sorts of awful things that you think happen only in the movies. But at a very systemic level what they're doing is funding and sponsoring all sorts of radical Islamist groups, all the way from Iran and across the region.

JAY: Well, and most importantly it starts with Roosevelt, the deal with the Sauds. I mean, the Saudis are the heart of all of this. And this was the deal, that the Saudis would use the defense of Mecca to be the force to spread Wahhabism throughout the region, and all this extremism is part of American policy.

KUMAR: Absolutely. In fact, the language that they used in the State Department is that they wanted the Saudi monarch to be an Islamic Pope and to use the legitimacy of being the guardians of Mecca and Medina to actually push people away from secularism. So absolutely. And Saudi Arabia had a very systematic program of Islamization, whether it was distributing Qurans for free, whether it was giving tons of petrodollars for setting up madrasas all over. Not just in the Middle East, but even in Pakistan they set up schools and colleges and send their preachers there and so forth. And the end result is the mujahideen, is al-Qaeda.

And, I mean, I think that's really important to bring up, because there's a tendency to somehow think of the parties of political Islam as being the sort of logical outcome of this region -- this is all that Muslims can produce. But if you don't talk about how left secular alternatives were systematically crushed by the U.S., by Saudi Arabia, by Israel, and so on, then you don't get a sense that these are people just like anybody else who have a range of politics.

JAY: And not only left-secular; they destroyed in Afghanistan a more normal capitalist development. They had a king that was a modernizer. They wanted to have a more modern capitalism. And they threw it all out the window to suck Russia into a war and then arming all the jihadists and, village elders who didn't know anything, give them rocket launchers, and they become the new powerbrokers. And then you wonder where the Taliban comes from.

KUMAR: Right. In fact, every single reformist and pro-democratic movement that has come into being in the Middle East and North Africa, the U.S. has always been on the wrong side of it, even in Saudi Arabia. There was a modest movement called the Free Princes Movement, where they wanted a constitutional monarchy. Would the U.S. have any of it? Absolutely not. They immediately dispatched forces to make sure these forces are marginalized. There was a workers movement in the Shia eastern region trying to form unions, but Aramco, at that time American-owned, would have none of it. And so they got rid of that. So every step towards creating rights for a whole group of people, from workers to women and so on and so forth, the U.S. is always been on the wrong side, including after the Arab Spring of 2011, right? So you look at the role that the U.S. is played: support the dictators till the very last second, and then back to counterrevolutionaries, whether it's Egypt and the military or it's giving the green light to Saudi Arabia to crush the resistance in Bahrain, what have you.

And so I think that framework is important, because then you start to see that the people of the Middle East and North Africa are just like everybody else. They want economic rights. They want political rights and so on. And if the U.S. just stopped interfering, we would see a flowering of a different kind of society.