Understanding the El Paso killer’s manifesto in context

Yesterday I posted the manifesto written by Patrick Crusius to 8Chan, a website favored by white supremacists, just before he murdered or wounded dozens at a Walmart in El Paso, Texas. Some people have written comments on my blog or on FB questioning why I would give him publicity. I answered that since so much of his manifesto sounds like it could have been written by a leftist, it was incumbent on the left to explain this. So, here goes.

To start with, a mixture of nativism and leftist politics is not a new phenomenon in American history. Founded in 1844 and dissolved in 1860, the Know Nothing Party was trying to keep out Catholics, which meant the Irish basically but also some Germans. In 1854, they ran abolitionist Nathaniel Banks for president.

One of the main factors driving the anti-Catholic animus was the Pope’s counter-revolutionary attitude toward the revolutions of 1848. The Catholic church was a pillar of the old feudal state and the Know Nothing supporters feared that Catholic immigration would help tilt Washington against constitutional democracy. As you can see from James McPherson’s observation on the Know Nothing wiki page, the same kind of hysteria drove their nativism as Trump’s today.

Immigration during the first five years of the 1850s reached a level five times greater than a decade earlier. Most of the new arrivals were poor Catholic peasants or laborers from Ireland and Germany who crowded into the tenements of large cities. Crime and welfare costs soared. Cincinnati’s crime rate, for example, tripled between 1846 and 1853 and its murder rate increased sevenfold. Boston’s expenditures for poor relief rose threefold during the same period.

— James M. McPherson, Battle Cry of Freedom, p. 131

The People’s Party was formed in 1892 and dissolved in 1909. Its main leader was Tom Watson, who advocated an alliance of poor white and black farmers against the banks, the railroads and the Democratic Party that was seen as their instrument. Around 1900, he began to rail against blacks, Jews, Catholics and immigrants.

The platform of Watson’s 1892 campaign for president was a mixture of leftist and nativism. For example, it called for major benefits to the working class: “That we cordially sympathize with the efforts of organized workingmen to shorten the hours of labor, and demand a rigid enforcement of the existing eight-hour law on Government work, and ask that a penalty clause be added to the said law.”

But immediately above this plank was a typical nativist rant: “That we condemn the fallacy of protecting American labor under the present system, which opens our ports to the pauper and criminal classes of the world and crowds out our wage-earners; and we denounce the present ineffective laws against contract labor, and demand the further restriction of undesirable immigration.”

While many on the left view Trump as a throwback to this kind of xenophobia, in many ways FDR was the worst nativist of the 20^th century. He refused to allow Jews into the USA as political refugees and suspended the constitutional rights of Japanese citizens in 1941 out of a combination of war hysteria and a long-time animosity toward them as I pointed out in a CounterPunch article:

In 1923, FDR wrote an article for Asia magazine titled “Shall We Trust Japan” that sounds like it could have been written by Ann Coulter:

Hatred of foreigners is deeply embedded in the American psyche, so much so that even the “socialist” Bernie Sanders is capable of saying things like: “If you open the borders, my God, there’s a lot of poverty in this world, and you’re going to have people from all over the world. And I don’t think that’s something that we can do at this point. Can’t do it. So that is not my position.”

With such fear and hatred of immigrants today, the only thing that distinguishes Patrick Crusius from the average Trump voter was his willingness to act on his poisonous views. The soil has been fertilized by three years of Trump’s bullshit and we can expect such massacres to take place on a regular basis.

But let me turn now to the question of his leftist views that include a hatred of corporations, the two-party system and environmental degradation. Unless you haven’t been paying attention, this dynamic has been at play for nearly a decade now as I have pointed out repeatedly on this blog.

The first time it came to my attention was over the ideological bloc formed around Syria, with leftists and rightists repeating the same talking points. On the right side of my blog, you’ll see a category called Red-Brown Alliance and you’ll find fourteen articles. In addition, there’s another category somewhat redundantly called right-left convergence that will return links to another five articles, the earliest dated June 16, 2014. Finally, there are articles that are categorized both as Russia and Fascism that overlap with the prior categories. Unfortunately, WordPress doesn’t allow you to retrieve articles that have multiple categories but there are at least four. So, altogether there are at least 23.

In many ways, the May 9, 2014 article titled “National Bolshevism rides again” is a good introduction to the phenomenon of leftist/rightist convergence. In Weimar Germany, the Nazi movement began as a demagogic attack on corporations and the Jews. Since many Jews were recent immigrants from Eastern Europe fleeing economic ruin and pogroms, they were treated like Latinos are in the USA today—as scapegoats.

Even before the Nazi party was formed, there were ultra-nationalists who shared Hitler’s hatred of the Jews and the banks. Among the representatives of the Kremlin in Germany was one Karl Radek who proposed a bloc between them and the Communist Party. He urged that the Communists commemorate the death of Albert Schlageter, a member of the Freikorps—the rightwing militia that killed Rosa Luxemburg and Karl Liebknecht. In a battle against the Allied occupation of the Ruhr after WWI, Schlageter was killed and became a martyr of the right-wing, a German Timothy McVeigh so to speak. Radek stated that “…we believe that the great majority of nationalist minded masses belong not to the camp of the capitalists but to the camp of the Workers.”

Among the Communists most swayed by Karl Radek’s thinking was Ruth Fischer who gave a speech to rightwing students:

Whoever cries out against Jewish capital…is already a fighter for his class, even though he may not know it. You are against the stock market jobbers. Fine. Trample the Jewish capitalists down, hang them from the lampposts…But…how do you feel about the big capitalists, the Stinnes, Klockner?…Only in alliance with Russia, Gentlemen of the “folkish” side, can the German people expel French capitalism from the Ruhr region.

As a movement, National Bolshevism was independent of the Nazi Party even though it shared many of its precepts. Of the top Nazi leadership, it was Gregor Strasser who was most consistently hostile to big business. When Hitler decided to consolidate his rule around a more openly pro-capitalist agenda, Strasser and his cohorts were rounded up and executed during the Night of the Long Knives in 1934. Joining Strasser on the leftwing of the Nazi Party (using the term very loosely) was Joseph Goebbels who eventually peeled away from the left and became a top Nazi official.

After WWII, the National Bolsheviks and neo-Nazi groups began to crawl out of the underground and form new groups that were for the most part ignored by the left. If you want to read about their growing influence today, I strongly advise getting a hold of Anton Shekhovtsov’s “Russia and the Western Far-right: Tango Noir” that I reviewed for CounterPunch last year (https://www.counterpunch.org/2018/10/02/between-socialism-and-barbarism/). What has been happening over the past 8 years or so is a geopolitical realignment that brought together Putin’s nationalist ambitions, the far-right in Europe including Marine Le Pen and the AfD in Germany, and many on the left who supported Assad and the Donetsk separatists on an “anti-imperialist” basis.

RT.com has been key to this realignment. Early on, RT executives figured out that “Russia is good” programming would not work in the West but if you mixed “Russia is good” with “The West is Bad”, you might have a winning formula. This is commonly known as “whataboutism” and has a certain viability since it is based on the obvious reality that the West is pretty damned bad. If Assad is blowing up Syrian hospitals, then you can always feature news about Saudi Arabia doing the same thing in Yemen. (Not that you can get any news about Russian jets bombing hospitals in Idlib.)

While a bogus anti-imperialism brought the left and the right together, there has been a gradual adoption of “class struggle” rhetoric on the far right that echoes National Bolshevism and even Gregor Strasser’s hostility to banks and corporations. So much of this is cropping up nowadays, it surely must have seeped into Patrick Crusius’s brain. With a huge megaphone on Fox News, Tucker Carlson has been sounding “leftist” notes that must have endeared him to Max Blumenthal and Stephen F. Cohen who are regular guests on his show to talk about the need to avoid WWIII (i.e., back Putin’s war on the Syrian poor).

Within the last year or so, Carlson has begun to trash the rich. He shared Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez’s resistance to Amazon building a headquarters in Long Island City, saying “Why is New York, which is crumbling, I’m there a lot, you may be there now, the city’s falling apart. It smells. The subways break. It’s disgusting. Why would the city be spending $3 billion to the richest man in the world?” He has also said things like “I’m definitely against a system where really the only success stories are like 27 billionaires who hate America, which is where we are now.” And “Our leaders don’t care. We are ruled by mercenaries who feel no long-term obligation to the people they rule.”

Finally, on the question of whether Patrick Crusius is a “Green”. He wrote:

The American lifestyle affords our citizens an incredible quality of life. However, our lifestyle is destroying the environment of our country. The decimation of the environment is creating a massive burden for future generations. Corporations are heading the destruction of our environment by shamelessly overharvesting resources. This has been a problem for decades. For example, this phenomenon is brilliantly portrayed in the decades old classic “The Lorax”. Water sheds around the country, especially in agricultural areas, are being depleted. Fresh water is being polluted from farming and oil drilling operations. Consumer culture is creating thousands of tons of unnecessary plastic waste and electronic waste, and recycling to help slow this down is almost non-existent. Urban sprawl creates inefficient cities which unnecessarily destroys millions of acres of land. We even use god knows how many trees worth of paper towels just wipe water off our hands. Everything I have seen and heard in my short life has led me to believe that the average American isn’t willing to change their lifestyle, even if the changes only cause a slight inconvenience. The government is unwilling to tackle these issues beyond empty promises since they are owned by corporations.

Every word of this is true. It doesn’t matter that the words were written by a fascist killer. We are dealing with an environmental crisis that is impossible to ignore unless you are some billionaire with huge investments in Monsanto, Exxon-Mobil and Dow Chemical. Keep in mind that Edward Abbey was a great radical environmentalist who devoted his life to writing about and acting on the need to protect wildlife and nature. He was also a vicious nativist who once wrote an editorial for the NY Times in 1988 that was rejected because it was toxic. Titled “Immigration and Liberal Taboos”, it stated:

Therefore-let us close our national borders to any further mass immigration, legal or illegal, from any source, as does every other nation on earth. The means are available, it’s a simple technical-military problem. Even our Pentagon should be able to handle it. We’ve got an army somewhere on this planet, let’s bring our soldiers home and station them where they can be of some actual and immediate benefit to the taxpayers who support them.

As scary as these white racist terror attacks are, we are not on the verge of a civil war in the USA or a fascist takeover. In the Weimar Republic, there was a danger and that was the result of massive revolutionary that had openly tried to overthrow the capitalist government in 1921 and 1923. Even though it never was able to form a common front with the social democrats, it was such a powerful threat that the ruling class was not ready for it to try a third time under a more savvy leadership.

No such conditions exist in the USA today. The working class is not in motion and trying to project wildcat teacher strikes as the opening of a rebirth of trade union militancy is an over-projection. I say this as someone who was a witness to many challenges to the corporate bosses during my youth, from Ed Sadlowski’s rank-and-file steelworkers movement to the Black-led auto workers caucuses in Lordstown and elsewhere.

The main task facing us is preparatory. There certainly will be major class battles down the road and we should take advantage of the relatively open conditions to begin to pull together a radical movement that eschews sectarianism but not at the expense of militancy. In the 1920s, there was a battle to win the loyalty of industrial workers with some defecting to the Nazi party because of the ineptness of the left. To win the working class to socialism, it is necessary to raise demands that speak to its basic needs such as the right to a job and the right to clean air and water. In pursuit of winning these demands, mass action is essential. Most workers view voting as a pointless exercise. I will conclude with a recommendation to read the article by the anonymous blogger behind “Cold and Dark Stars” that appears beneath this one. Titled “The Rise of the Right Wing is not Due to the Working Class Because Workers Don’t Vote” that is right on, as we used to put it in the 1960s.

 

The manifesto of the El Paso white supremacist killer

Patrick Crusius, white supremacist murderer

From 8Chan.

The Inconvenient Truth

About Me

In general, I support the Christchurch shooter and his manifesto. This attack is a response to the Hispanic invasion of Texas. They are the instigators, not me. I am simply defending my country from cultural and ethnic replacement brought on by an invasion. Some people will think this statement is hypocritical because of the nearly complete ethnic and cultural destruction brought to the Native Americans by our European ancestors, but this just reinforces my point. The natives didn’t take the invasion of Europeans seriously, and now what’s left is just a shadow of what was. My motives for this attack are not at all personal. Actually the Hispanic community was not my target before I read The Great Replacement. This manifesto will cover the political and economic reasons behind the attack, my gear, my expectations of what response this will generate and my personal motivations and thoughts.

Political Reasons

In short, America is rotting from the inside out, and peaceful means to stop this seem to be nearly impossible. The inconvenient truth is that our leaders, both Democrat AND Republican, have been failing us for decades. They are either complacent or involved in one of the biggest betrayals of the American public in our history. The takeover of the United States government by unchecked corporations. I could write a ten page essay on all the damage these corporations have caused, but here is what is important. Due to the death of the baby boomers, the increasingly anti-immigrant rhetoric of the right and the ever increasing Hispanic population, America will soon become a one party-state. The Democrat party will own America and they know it. They have already begun the transition by pandering heavily to the Hispanic voting bloc in the 1st Democratic Debate. They intend to use open borders, free healthcare for illegals, citizenship and more to enact a political coup by importing and then legalizing millions of new voters. With policies like these, the Hispanic support for Democrats will likely become nearly unanimous in the future. The heavy Hispanic population in Texas will make us a Democrat stronghold. Losing Texas and a few other states with heavy Hispanic population to the Democrats is all it would take for them to win nearly every presidential election. Although the Republican Party is also terrible. Many factions within the Republican Party are pro-corporation. Procorporation = pro-immigration. But some factions within the Republican Party don’t prioritize corporations over our future. So the Democrats are nearly unanimous with their support of immigration while the Republicans are divided over it. At least with Republicans, the process of mass immigration and citizenship can be greatly reduced.

Economic Reasons

In short, immigration can only be detrimental to the future of America. Continued immigration will make one of the biggest issues of our time, automation, so much worse. Some sources say that in under two decades, half of American jobs will be lost to it. Of course some people will be retrained, but most will not. So it makes no sense to keep on letting millions of illegal or legal immigrants flood into the United States, and to keep the tens of millions that are already here. Invaders who also have close to the highest birthrate of all ethnicities in America. In the near future, America will have to initiate a basic universal income to prevent widespread poverty and civil unrest as people lose their jobs. Joblessness in itself is a source of civil unrest. The less dependents on a government welfare system, the better. The lower the unemployment rate, the better. Achieving ambitions social projects like universal healthcare and UBI would become far more likely to succeed if tens of millions of dependents are removed.

Even though new migrants do the dirty work, their kids typically don’t. They want to live the American Dream which is why they get college degrees and fill higher-paying skilled positions. This is why corporations lobby for even more illegal immigration even after decades of it of happening. They need to keep replenishing the low-skilled labor pool. Even as migrant children flood skilled jobs, Corporations make this worse by lobbying for even more work visas to be issued for skilled foreign workers to come here. Recently, the senate under a REPUBLICAN administration has greatly increased the number of foreign workers that will take American jobs. Remember that both Democrats and Republicans support immigration and work visas. Corporations need to keep replenishing the labor pool for both skilled and unskilled jobs to keep wages down. So Automation is a good thing as it will eliminate the need for new migrants to fill unskilled jobs. Jobs that Americans can’t survive on anyway. Automation can and would replace millions of low-skilled jobs if immigrants were deported. This source of competition for skilled labor from immigrants and visa holders around the world has made a very difficult situation even worse for natives as they compete in the skilled job market. To compete, people have to get better credentials by spending more time in college. It used to be that a high school degree was worth something. Now a bachelor’s degree is what’s recommended to be competitive in the job market. The cost of college degrees has exploded as their value has plummeted. This has led to a generation of indebted, overqualified students filling menial, low paying and unfulfilling jobs. Of course these migrants and their children have contributed to the problem, but are not the sole cause of it.

The American lifestyle affords our citizens an incredible quality of life. However, our lifestyle is destroying the environment of our country. The decimation of the environment is creating a massive burden for future generations. Corporations are heading the destruction of our environment by shamelessly overharvesting resources. This has been a problem for decades. For example, this phenomenon is brilliantly portrayed in the decades old classic “The Lorax”. Water sheds around the country, especially in agricultural areas, are being depleted. Fresh water is being polluted from farming and oil drilling operations. Consumer culture is creating thousands of tons of unnecessary plastic waste and electronic waste, and recycling to help slow this down is almost non-existent. Urban sprawl creates inefficient cities which unnecessarily destroys millions of acres of land. We even use god knows how many trees worth of paper towels just wipe water off our hands. Everything I have seen and heard in my short life has led me to believe that the average American isn’t willing to change their lifestyle, even if the changes only cause a slight inconvenience. The government is unwilling to tackle these issues beyond empty promises since they are owned by corporations. Corporations that also like immigration because more people means a bigger market for their products. I just want to say that I love the people of this country, but god damn most of y’all are just too stubborn to change your lifestyle. So the next logical step is to decrease the number of people in America using resources. If we can get rid of enough people, then our way of life can become more sustainable.

Gear

Main gun: AK47 (WASR 10) – I realized pretty quickly that this isn’t a great choice since it’s the civilian version of the ak47. It’s not designed to shoot rounds quickly, so it overheats massively after about 100 shots fired in quick succession. I’ll have to use a heat-resistant glove to get around this. 8m3 bullet: This bullet, unlike pretty much any other 7.62×39 bullet, actually fragments like a pistol hollow point when shot out of an ak47 at the cost of penetration. Penetration is still reasonable, but not nearly as high as a normal ak47 bullet. The ak47 is definitely a bad choice without this bullet design, and may still be with it.

Other gun(if I get one): Ar15 – Pretty much any variation of this gun doesn’t heat up nearly as fast as the AK47. The round of this gun isn’t designed to fragment, but instead tumbles inside a target causing lethal wounding. This gun is probably better, but I wanted to explore different options. The ar15 is probably the best gun for military applications but this isn’t a military application.

This will be a test of which is more lethal, either it’s fragmentation or tumbling.

I didn’t spend much time at all preparing for this attack. Maybe a month, probably less. I have do this before I lose my nerve. I figured that an under-prepared attack and a meh manifesto is better than no attack and no manifesto

Reaction

Statistically, millions of migrants have returned to their home countries to reunite with the family they lost contact with when they moved to America. They come here as economic immigrants, not for asylum reasons. This is an encouraging sign that the Hispanic population is willing to return to their home countries if given the right incentive. An incentive that myself and many other patriotic Americans will provide. This will remove the threat of the Hispanic voting bloc which will make up for the loss of millions of baby boomers. This will also make the elites that run corporations realize that it’s not in their interest to continue piss off Americans. Corporate America doesn’t need to be destroyed, but just shown that they are on the wrong side of history. That if they don’t bend, they will break.

Personal Reasons and Thoughts

My whole life I have been preparing for a future that currently doesn’t exist. The job of my dreams will likely be automated. Hispanics will take control of the local and state government of my beloved Texas, changing policy to better suit their needs. They will turn Texas into an instrument of a political coup which will hasten the destruction of our country. The environment is getting worse by the year. If you take nothing else from this document, remember this: INACTION IS A CHOICE. I can no longer bear the shame of inaction knowing that our founding fathers have endowed me with the rights needed to save our country from the brink destruction. Our European comrades don’t have the gun rights needed to repel the millions of invaders that plaque their country. They have no choice but to sit by and watch their countries burn.

America can only be destroyed from the inside-out. If our country falls, it will be the fault of traitors. This is why I see my actions as faultless. Because this isn’t an act of imperialism but an act of preservation. America is full of hypocrites who will blast my actions as the sole result of racism and hatred of other countries, despite the extensive evidence of all the problems these invaders cause and will cause. People who are hypocrites because they support imperialistic wars that have caused the loss of tens of thousands of American lives and untold numbers of civilian lives. The argument that mass murder is okay when it is state sanctioned is absurd. Our government has killed a whole lot more people for a whole lot less. Even if other non-immigrant targets would have a greater impact, I can’t bring myself to kill my fellow Americans. Even the Americans that seem hell-bent on destroying our country. Even if they are shameless race mixers, massive polluters, haters of our collective values, etc. One day they will see error of their ways. Either when American patriots fail to reform our country and it collapses or when we save it. But they will see the error of their ways. I promise y’all that.

I am against race mixing because it destroys genetic diversity and creates identity problems. Also because it’s completely unnecessary and selfish. 2nd and 3rd generation Hispanics form interracial unions at much higher rates than average. Yet another reason to send them back. Cultural and racial diversity is largely temporary. Cultural diversity diminishes as stronger and/or more appealing cultures overtake weaker and/or undesirable ones. Racial diversity will disappear as either race mixing or genocide will take place. But the idea of deporting or murdering all non-white Americans is horrific. Many have been here at least as long as the whites, and have done as much to build our country. The best solution to this for now would be to divide America into a confederacy of territories with at least 1 territory for each race. This physical separation would nearly eliminate race mixing and improve social unity by granting each race self-determination within their respective territory(s).

My death is likely inevitable. If I’m not killed by the police, then I’ll probably be gunned down by one of the invaders. Capture in this case if far worse than dying during the shooting because I’ll get the death penalty anyway. Worse still is that I would live knowing that my family despises me. This is why I’m not going to surrender even if I run out of ammo. If I’m captured, it will be because I was subdued somehow.

Remember: it is not cowardly to pick low hanging fruit. AKA Don’t attack heavily guarded areas to fulfill your super soldier COD fantasy. Attack low security targets. Even though you might out gun a security guard or police man, they likely beat you in armor, training and numbers. Do not throw away your life on an unnecessarily dangerous target. If a target seems too hot, live to fight another day.

My ideology has not changed for several years. My opinions on automation, immigration, and the rest predate Trump and his campaign for president. I putting this here because some people will blame the President or certain presidential candidates for the attack. This is not the case. I know that the media will probably call me a white supremacist anyway and blame Trump’s rhetoric. The media is infamous for fake news. Their reaction to this attack will likely just confirm that.

Many people think that the fight for America is already lost. They couldn’t be more wrong. This is just the beginning of the fight for America and Europe. I am honored to head the fight to reclaim my country from destruction.

Saudi Arabia, Wahhabism and terror: separating fact from fiction

John Wight channeling the Henry Jackson Society

In the aftermath of recent terrorist attacks in London, you could hardly tell the difference between what Douglas Murray, the Associate Director of the Henry Jackson Society, wrote for Rupert Murdoch’s ultraright tabloid “The Sun” and John Wight’s article in CounterPunch. Murray is the author of the 2005 Neoconservatism: Why We Need It and a brand-new book titled The Strange Death of Europe: Immigration, Identity, Islam that can best be described as even more nativist than the National Front. As for the Henry Jackson Society, this is a think-tank that became infamous for its all-out support for the invasion of Iraq in 2002. Murray’s article is patented “they hate us because of  our freedom”, a genre that blossomed fulsomely after 9/11:

At Wahhabi schools — known as madrasas — in the UK paid for by the Saudis, students are taught to hate the modern liberal West.

They are taught to despise and look down on us and our freedoms. The same message is taught at Wahhabi mosques across the world. The Saudis pay for the buildings and appoint the clerics.

Today across Europe there are thousands of such institutions of education and religion which exist because they are paid for by the Saudis.

We should have stopped the Saudis being allowed to spread their hatred here a long time ago. But a combination of greed for oil and fear of false charges of “Islamophobia” have stopped any British government to date from confronting this.

Last Wednesday we were reminded of where this disgusting ideology can lead. Perhaps now we can finally face it down. For all our sakes.

Here is John Wight doing an impeccable Douglas Murray impersonation in his June 6^th article titled “London Terror Attack: It’s Time to Confront Wahhabism and Saudi Arabia”:

It is time for an honest conversation about Wahhabism, specifically the part this Saudi-sponsored ideology plays in radicalizing young Muslims both across the Arab and Muslim world and in the West, where in the UK people are dealing with the aftermath of yet another terrorist attack in which innocent civilians were butchered and injured, this time in London.

The most concerning development in recent years, however, vis-à-vis Saudi influence in the West, is the extent to which Riyadh has been funding the building of mosques as a way of promoting its ultra-conservative and puritanical interpretation of Islam, one completely incompatible with the 21st century.

In 2015 Germany’s Foreign Minister Sigmar Gabriel came out in public and accused the Saudis of funding mosques in which extremism is regularly promoted. In an interview with the German magazine Bild am Sonntag, Mr Gabriel said, “We have to make clear to the Saudis that the time of looking away is over. Wahhabi mosques all over the world are financed by Saudi Arabia. Many Islamists who are a threat to public safety come from these communities in Germany.”

We can assume that Wight must also endorse Gabriel’s January 19, 2017 call: “Salafist mosques must be banned, communities dissolved, and the preachers should be expelled as soon as possible.” What better way for public security to be guaranteed than to dissolve communities? One can imagine both Murray and Wight leading a throng of torch-bearing Christians determined to send the riffraff back to where they came from.

You might have noticed above that Gabriel refers to Salafist and Wahhabist mosques without bothering to distinguish between the two belief systems. At the risk of sounding like a pedant, it is worth making a distinction. Wahhabism is named after an eighteenth-century preacher and activist, Muhammad ibn Abd al-Wahhab, who lived through nearly the entire 18^th century. It was similar in spirit to Hasidism for Jews and Calvinism for Christians, a literalist interpretation of sacred texts that demanded an austere lifestyle. Ironically, despite its medieval character, Wahhabism was seen as a “reform” movement in Islam that opposed the de facto sainthood of its leaders that involved pilgrimages to their tombs, etc. Long before the state of Saudi Arabia was created, the Saudi princes adopted Wahhabism as their official religion and imposed its rules on its subjects after taking power in 1932.

Salafism emerged at around the same time as Wahhabism and derives its name from advocating a return to the traditions of the “devout ancestors” (the salaf). Scholars tend to believe that Wahhabism is a subset of Salafism, just as the Lubavitchers are a sect within Hasidism. For most Salafists, their religion is just a way of living a “holy” life. If Hasidism requires men to wear black suits and side-curls to enter heaven, Salafism has its own strictures such as forbidding tobacco, alcohol, playing cards and listening to music.

In its early years, Wahhabism was just as bloodthirsty as ISIS. In 1801, the Wahhabis sacked the Shia holy city of Karbala in Iraq and acting as infidel-purging takfiri left 4,000 Shia Muslims dead. Of course, the Christians were no slouches themselves. During the Catholic Counter-Reformation, Orthodox Christians were persecuted across Eastern Europe. Polish Catholics killed up to 80,000 of their fellow Christians who did not follow the Pope. So cruel was the crusade against the infidels that the leader of the Orthodox church declared: “God perpetuate the empire of the Turks for ever and ever! For they take their impost, and enter no account of religion, be their subjects Christians or Nazarenes, Jews or Samaritians; whereas these accursed Poles were not content with taxes and tithes from the brethren of Christ…”

In the 20^th century, religious wars became far less common. Mostly, they were about defending the “nation”, an act that cost far more lives even if the justifications were based on Enlightenment or even Marxist values. When it came to Saudi Arabia going to war to defend Wahhabist values, you’ll find little evidence of that. The wars had nothing to do with eradicating tobacco and everything to do with keeping the oil wells flowing such as when Saddam invaded Kuwait in 1990. With little interest in the  Sunni faith it shared with the Iraqi rulers, some of whom have reappeared as ISIS members, Saudi Arabia supported George Bush’s war to drive Saddam out of Kuwait.

If you do a search on “Wahhabi” and “terror” in Lexis-Nexis, you will get links to 997 articles. All but 9 of them are dated after September 11^th, 2001 and of those 9, not a single one refers to Saudi-sponsored terrorism. Three do refer to Russia’s justification for its war on the Chechens but I will cover that matter in a separate post dealing with Oliver Stone’s moronic interview with Vladimir Putin.

When 15 of the 19 hijackers were revealed to be Saudi citizens, the left—especially Michael Moore—jumped to the conclusion that the royal family was behind 9/11. This conspiracy theory was not driven by a class analysis of the Saudi state and its deep tentacles in the imperialist system both economically and militarily but by a kind of amalgam between the Wahhabi beliefs of the men who carried out the attack and their patron Osama bin-Laden.

What complicates this interpretation is the fact that despite their Saudi citizenship, they were from Yemenite tribes whose territory was seized by Saudi Arabia in a 1934 war having more to do with state formation than religion. Like the Mexicans who lived in the southern part of Texas, the people of this region resented the powerful nation that had absorbed it through military conquest. Although most of the story is reported in Akbar Ahmad’s “The Thistle and the Drone” that I wrote about last year in a piece titled “Was Saudi Arabia behind 9/11?”, you can find other references that bear this analysis out such as an article that appeared in the March 3, 2002 Boston Globe. Despite the title (“Why bin Laden plot relied on Saudi hijackers”), the article makes clear that 12 of the 15 Saudis were from the southwest region of Asir that manifested “deep tribal affiliations” and suffered “economic dis-enfranchisement”. Reporter Charles M. Sennott describes life in Saudi Arabia’s hinterlands, which have very little to do with the opulence of those who ruled over it no matter the shared Wahhabi faith:

The path to understanding this culture which bore the hijackers – almost none of whom had any deep links to Islamic militant movements much before Sept. 11 – lies somewhere along this road. On maps it is ”Highway 15,” but to Saudis it is commonly known as ‘”The Road of Death.’” Stretching south from the lowlands around Mecca into Taif and the woodlands of Al Baha province, and then climbing up to the mountains of Asir, it is considered the most dangerous road in a kingdom which officials say has an extraordinarily high rate of fatal car crashes. Highway 15 alone claims hundreds of lives every year, and thus its name.

It has become known as a strip of asphalt where disaffected, middle-class Saudi youth climb into large American-manufactured Buicks and Chevrolets and race at speeds over 120 miles per hour. They say it is a way to vent their rage against the limited economic opportunities in the kingdom as well as the crushing boredom and confining strictures of life under Saudi puritanism.

Interestingly enough, the pilot of the airliner that crashed into the Pentagon was exactly the sort of Saudi youth who was trying to lift himself up out of this morass. Hani Hanjour was 29 years old when he took part in the 9/11 attack but his flying skills originally had nothing to do with jihad. He was a frustrated young Saudi who trained to become a pilot for the Saudi national airline but could not land a job. Sennott reports:

His frustration at failing to get the job he dreamed of derailed him for nearly a year, his friends said. He spent hours online at a family-owned Internet cafe. He read voraciously about piloting, and increasingly turned his attention toward religious texts and cassette tapes of militant Islamic preachers.

Al Watan, a newspaper in the Asir region, was far more probing than the mainstream press in its investigative reports on the local youth who joined the 9/11 plotters. It is to Sennott’s credit to cite Al Watan’s reporting and how bin Laden tapped into the deep-seated resentments of the Asiri tribes that were as ready to make war on Riyadh as they were on Washington, even more so:

US and Saudi officials say they believe bin Laden exploited the Saudis, paying particular attention to their tribal backgrounds, and convincing them that they would be making their tribes proud in the jihad against America. On the videotape, bin Laden pointedly boasts of the names of the tribes, repeating the name Alshehri seven times, and also the Alghamdi and Alhazmi tribes on several occasions.

Bin Laden knew that selecting these families from the southwest would send a message to the monarchy and the ”Naj’dis” – elitist families from the center of the country who savor their connections to royalty and tend to look down upon the southwest’s tribal culture as primitive. US and Saudi officials suggest that bin Laden was letting that elite know he had deep support in the southwest for his jihad against the United States. But more ominously for the palace, the sources add, bin Laden was letting it know he had support for his oft-stated desire to dethrone the House of Saud, because of what he sees as its corruption and its treasonous ties to the United States.

Not only did bin Laden disavow the Saudi rulers politically, he had built a network called al-Qaeda based on the religious and political beliefs of a man that built a movement regarded as their mortal enemy. With all the facile attempts to blame Wahhabism for the 9/11 attacks, there is overwhelming evidence that it was inspired by Sayyid Qutb, the Egyptian poet and Islamist theorist who led the Muslim Brotherhood in the 50s and 60s. Qutb was devoted to the idea that Muslims had to launch a jihad against its enemies. When he came to study in the USA in 1948, he was repelled by the churches that he saw as “entertainment centers and sexual playgrounds.” I guess he had the foresight to anticipate Jimmy Swaggart et al.

He returned to Egypt in 1951 where he joined the Brotherhood. In 1954, he and his comrades were rounded up by Nasser just as has happened under General al-Sisi more recently. Qutb spent 10 years in prison. After being released in 1964, he was rearrested in 1965 after the Muslim Brotherhood attempted to assassinate Nasser. He was tortured before being brought to trial and then hanged on August 29, 1966.

Qutb was above all political. He was for Salafist values but that was not enough. If you were a devout Muslim, you had struggle against the corrupt oil sheikhs and nationalist dictators, either Wahhabist like the Saudi royal family or secular like Nasser or al-Assad. In an article on Qutb that appeared in the October 31, 2001 Guardian, Robert Irwin described bin Laden’s attraction to Qutb’s idea of jihad:

In the context of that global programme, the destruction of the twin towers, spectacular atrocity though it was, is merely a by-blow in al-Qaida’s current campaign. Neither the US nor Israel is Bin Laden’s primary target – rather it is Bin Laden’s homeland, Saudi Arabia. The corrupt and repressive royal house, like the Mongol Ilkhanate of the 14th century, is damned as a Jahili scandal. Therefore, al-Qaida’s primary task is to liberate the holy cities of Mecca and Medina from their rule. Though the current policy of the princes of the Arabian peninsula seems to be to sit on their hands and hope that al-Qaida and its allies will pick on someone else first, it is unlikely that they will be so lucky.

As for the spate of ISIS-inspired or sanctioned terrorist attacks in Europe and the USA, there is little connection to al-Qaeda, which has not been known in recent years for the sort of atavistic attacks on civilians that occurred on 9/11. In 2014, al-Qaeda disavowed any ties to ISIS and its franchise in Syria has had numerous armed confrontations with the group, especially in Qalamoun where dozens of ISIS members were arrested or killed in May, 2015.

This leaves us with the question of ISIS’s ideological roots. It combines Qutb’s apocalyptic worldview with Salafist orthodoxy but its wanton terrorist attacks on civilians has little to do with Islamist groups in the Middle East except for Hamas that used to set off bombs in Israel restaurants and buses in an ill-conceived response to Israeli state terror.

To understand ISIS, you simply have to extrapolate its tactics in Iraq during the American occupation when suicide bombers were targeting Shia mosques on a regular basis. These methods were associated with Abu Musab al-Zarqawi, who sought to turn a war against American occupation into a Sunni-Shia war. It was his barbarian beheadings, car bombs and other forms of terror that made it impossible for anti-imperialist fighters to build a united front. It was al-Zarqawi’s ruthless occupation of Sunni cities following the same pattern as ISIS today in Mosul and Raqqa that made it possible for the American military to persuade tribal leaders to join General David Petraeus’s Anbar Awakening.

Like many of the low-lives who have stepped forward to knife people out for an evening stroll or to drive vans into their midst, al-Zarqawi had nothing in common with a figure like Sayyid Qutb. In a profile for Atlantic magazine, Mary Anne Weaver reported on his youthful days in Jordan:

Everyone I spoke with readily acknowledged that as a teenager al-Zarqawi had been a bully and a thug, a bootlegger and a heavy drinker, and even, allegedly, a pimp in Zarqa’s underworld. He was disruptive, constantly involved in brawls. When he was fifteen (according to his police record, about which I had been briefed in Amman), he participated in a robbery of a relative’s home, during which the relative was killed. Two years later, a year shy of graduation, he had dropped out of school. Then, in 1989, at the age of twenty-three, he traveled to Afghanistan.

Although al-Zarqawi left all this behind when he arrived in Afghanistan to join the jihad, there is little evidence that he ever became much of a Wahhabist except to follow the same austere strictures as everyone else. Mostly his ambition was to be a fighter and in this he  succeeded. Based on his military prowess and leadership abilities, he was able to put together one of the more formidable anti-occupation militias called al-Tawhid wa al-Jihad, or Monotheism and Jihad. This group undoubtedly spawned ISIS as should be clear from this incident reported by Weaver:

Al-Zarqawi courted chaos so that Iraq would provide him another failed state to operate in after the overthrow of the Taliban in Afghanistan. He became best known for his videotaped beheadings. One after the other they appeared on jihadist Web sites, always the same. In the background was the trademark black banner of al-Zarqawi’s newest group: al-Tawhid wa al-Jihad, or Monotheism and Jihad. In the foreground, a blindfolded hostage, kneeling and pleading for his life, was dressed in an orange jumpsuit resembling those worn by the detainees at Guantánamo Bay. Al-Zarqawi’s first victim was a Pennsylvania engineer named Nicholas Berg. In the video, five hooded men, dressed in black, stand behind Berg. After a recitation, one of the men pulls a long knife from his shirt, steps forward, and slices off Berg’s head.

What accounts for such madness? Is it Wahhabism or is it the brutality that became so universal in Iraq and Afghanistan, most of which did not take the form of beheadings but Russian and American air power that dropped high explosives on lightly armed fighters and civilians with impunity? In Spalding Gray’s “Swimming to Cambodia”, he explains Pol Pot as the logical outcome of dropping more tons of explosives in Indochina than the total dropped by the combined air forces during WWII:

This bombing went on for five years. The Supreme Court never passed any judgment on it and the military speaks with pride today that five years of the bombing of Cambodia killed 16,000 of the so-called enemy. That’s 25% killed, and there’s a military ruling that says you cannot kill more than 10% of the enemy without causing irreversible, psychological damage. So, five years of bombing…and other things that we will probably never know about in our lifetime — including, perhaps, an invisible cloud of evil that circles the Earth and lands at random in places like Iran, Beirut, Germany, Cambodia, America — set the Khmer Rouge out to carry out the worst auto-homeo genocide in modern history.

Social science might look for patterns in these sorts of genocidal spasms that coincide with an all-out war when civilized norms go by the wayside. That might explain the Khmer Rouge as well as setting off a bomb while teenaged girls are leaving an Ariana Grande concert.

Appendix:

Just about 10 years ago, CounterPunch published an article titled “The Wahhabis are Coming, the Wahhabis are Coming!” (https://www.counterpunch.org/2007/10/27/the-wahhabis-are-coming-the-wahhabis-are-coming/) that holds up rather well. It makes a rather good retort to John Wight, who has succumbed to the Islamophobia the author was diagnosing. Here are the more salient points but I urge you to read the entire article.

Although I will not suggest that this rhetoric is hegemonic, there can be no doubt that the idea of a ‘Wahhabi Conspiracy’ against the ‘West’ has, since 9/11, become lodged in the colloquial psyche of many in the US and beyond. The collective argument, however, can be reduced to three pieces of ‘evidence’:

1) Usama bin Laden and fifteen of the nineteen 9/11 highjackers were Saudi Arabians;

2) Saudi Arabia funds Wahhabi madrasas (schools), masjids (mosques) and imams (preachers) from South East Asia to Europe and North America, creating an ideologically and operationally coherent ‘network’ in which Al-Qaeda plays a leadership role; and,

3) Wahhabism is not only ‘puritanical,’ it is ‘militantly anti-Western.’ In short, Wahhabism is identified as the theology behind ‘Islamo-fascism.’

Yet, there are a number of glaring omissions in this perspective, beginning with the fact that the Wahhabi clerics of Saudi Arabia–the sole state sponsor of Wahhabism–routinely issue decrees condemning jihad against the European and North American states, while Usama bin Laden has vociferously castigated renowned clerics (including Wahhabis) as ‘slaves of apostate regimes’ like Saudi Arabia.

As well, although Saudi Arabian funds have been used to establish various religious institutions across the globe, not only are they in the minority from state to state, but the most militant madrasas, etc., are not Saudi funded or Wahhabi in intellectual orientation. For example, in Pakistan (noted by the above governmental, media and pseudo-academic sources as a breeding ground for militant Wahhabism), an International Crisis Group study conducted in 2002, found that ninety percent of the madrasas catering to one and half million students, were proponents of South Asian ‘Deobandi’ or ‘Barelvi’ thought, while the remaining ten percent could be shared between ‘Jama’at-i Islami’ (Maududian), ‘Shi’a’ and Wahhabi organizations. The handful of madrasas promoting militancy (including the Taliban Movement) are not Wahhabi, but Deobandi, and their initial funding came from the US during the Afghan-Soviet war (1979-1989), extending to textbooks produced by USAID and Ronald Reagan’s reference to their students as ‘the moral equivalent of the founding fathers [of America].’ Even a recent USAID report (2003) acknowledges that the link between madrasas and violence is ‘rare,’ and the same perspective has been forwarded to the US Congress in at least two Congress Research Services reports updated in 2004 and 2005, respectively.

The most damning indictment of the non-scholarly perspective, however, is the fact that Al-Qaeda’s leadership is well known in scholarly circles to have been largely inspired by the ideology of Sayyid Qutb (d.1966), a late leader of the Egyptian Muslim Brotherhood, while within the ‘Salafi’ fold, the Brotherhood, Wahhabism, Qutbism, Deobandism and Maududism, differ on issues as fundamental as the defensive or offensive nature of jihad, the legitimacy of ‘suicide bombings’ and civilian targets, the status of women, the legitimacy of electoral politics, nationalism, Pan-Islamism, Shi’ism and Sufism in Muslim society.

What’s wrong with the response to the Orlando massacre?

(A guest post by Jamil Khader)

Conservative right-wing and liberal leftist reactions to the catastrophic mass-shooting at Pulse, the friendly gay club in Orlando, falter around the shooter Omar Seddique Mateen’s Muslim background. While conservative pundits and populist anti-immigration politicians drum up the perpetrator’s Islamic background, liberal commentators, including members of the Muslim and LGBTQ communities, try to downplay it. The former get caught up in right-wing Islamophopbic histrionics and the latter in politically correct taboos.

Both responses, however, are misguided, since they shift the discussion to cultural issues, thereby displacing the important question of the political economy of terrorism and homosexuality. These responses thus obfuscate the ways in which these terrorist acts be it homophobic, religious fundamentalist, or white fascist supremacist, are byproducts of the dynamics of global capitalism, in which sexual violence, including homophobic violence, has become central to its hegemony around the world.

The Fascist Islamophobic Backlash

Opportunistic politicians and conservative media pundits are using this homegrown lone-wolf terrorist act to continue framing the massacre in terms of the failure of liberal multicultural ideology and integration. They are adamant about making political capital out of this tragedy, by stoking the fire of Islamophobia. They resort to hackneyed colonial Orientalist narratives of the “clash of civilizations” between allegedly distinct and homogenous cultures and the “domestic radicalization” of immigrant Muslim youth.

Political leaders in both U.S. and around the world wasted no time pointing the finger at the homophobic Muslim shooter and to pay lip service to the humanity of the LGBTQ community. At the same, these same leaders have consistently supported anti-LGBTQ legislation or exploited LGBTQ issues as well as the massacre to pinkwash their atrocious records on human rights violations.

But Mateen’s links to ISIS or any other radical Islamic terrorist group remain tenuous at best. Although IS radio claimed responsibility for the massacre, which they referred to in Islamic military terms as “ghazwah” (incursion), Mateen had actually pledged allegiance to two ideologically opposed radical Islamic terrorist groups at war with each other. While the FBI has just confirmed that prior to the attack, Mateen had no connections whatsoever with ISIS, the FBI was the only organization that tried to recruit Mateen to commit terrorist acts.

By drumming up his religious affiliation and spurious terrorist connections, right-wing politicians and conservative commentators simply displace deeper socio-economic changes that result from the contradictions of the global capitalist economy onto a whole faith, culture, or race. The anti-Semite’s Jew of yonder years has been effectively replaced by the fascist’s Muslim. This fascist rhetoric also covers up not only the FBI’s “indirect role” in inadvertently fostering a culture of domestic terrorism. More importantly, it occludes the imperial interests of Western countries and their role in supporting the same radical Islamic terrorist groups, against whom they are supposed to be waging the “war on terror.” This way they can push their hysterical campaign to consolidate an “expanded police state” in the service of the global capitalist class.

Liberal Guilt

The liberal reaction, on the other hand, understandably downplays the shooter’s Islamic background. Even if Mateen’s links to ISIS were categorically proven to be inexistent, however, it is counterproductive to suggest that the shooter’s Islamic background played no role in shaping his views. Mateen’s putative links to ISIS notwithstanding, the fact remains that this fantasy of membership in a terrorist group is what sustained his sense of reality and what gave it consistency. His actual links to ISIS or any other terrorist group are really beside the point.

Predictably, liberals also seeks to demonstrate that homophobic terrorism is democratically distributed across all faiths and cultures.  They tend to pin the Orlando massacre down on Christian fundamentalist homophobic rhetoric. This might be useful in dealing with the guilt Western liberal leftists feel about their putative Islamophobia or the Western role in fragmenting Arab and Islamic countries, but it does not help account for the deeper causes of homophobic terrorism across the globe.

Blaming the massacre on cultural discourses simply ignores the structural changes that global capitalism has introduced especially, in gender and sexual norms, around the world. A better explanation is needed of how homosexuality is rejected even among Christian fundamentalists in the West as a byproduct of (Western) liberal discourses of gender performativity or postmodern permissiveness.

This can also shed better light on homophobic terrorism as an expression of the desire of different cultures and traditions to reclaim the past and return to fictitious traditional notions of cultural and religious purity, in which homosexuality did not allegedly exist.

The liberal response also insists on using the mantra that every individual, friend or foe, has a story of suffering and victimization. By providing a personal story to criminals and perpetrators, as the Slovenian philosopher Slavoj Žižek notes, “the monstrous murderer reveals himself to be a deeply hurt and desperate individual, yearning for company and love.” Along the same lines, liberal leftist pundits insist on reconstructing Mateen’s story, giving him a human face and making it possible to identify with his tragic humanity and suffering.

According to these reports, Omar Mateen is “a simple, Americanized guy,” who was going through a cultural and sexual identity crisis. He changed his name from Omar Mir Seddique to Omar Mir Seddique Mateen and was believed to be a closeted homosexual who “chose to hide his true identity out of anger and shame.” Indeed, Mateen has been reported to patronize gay bars, use gay chat apps, and even befriend a drag queen. This also explains his history of domestic violence.

The pop psychological analysis was quick to follow. Writing for Salon, Amanda Marcotte suggests that “Mateen had some self-loathing issues going on” which “he projected onto men who lived more unapologetically queer lives.” She concludes that Mateen “was acting on his sexual resentments more than . . . some well-articulated devotion to the ISIS caliphate.”

Media reports also leave no doubt as to the toxic environment in which Mateen grew up. Mateen’s father, a self-proclaimed homophobe, has reportedly posted a Facebook comment, expressing his shock and disbelief at his son’s actions, since “God will punish those involved in homosexuality.” It is not simply that the father passed his homophobic comments on to his son, as one report suggests, but that he instilled in him a characteristically “homosexual panic” at his own unspeakable forbidden desire.

The father’s political views also seem to have influenced Mateen’s actions. His support for the Afghani Taliban and his resistance to Western imperial intervention in his home country must have trickled down to his son. In a facebook post, Mateen had lashed out on Russia and the US for bombing IS and killing innocent women and children. In the midst of the killing spree, moreover, an eyewitness reported that Mateen told police negotiators on the phone he “wouldn’t stop his assault until America stopped bombing his country.” Nothing can explain this homophobic terrorism better than his alleged anti-colonial sentiments, but the real ideology, whether religious or nationalist, underpinning such anticolonialism is not clear.

Imperial designs were also intermixed with multicultural politics. As a fellow security guard stated in an interview with Newsday, Mateen hated everybody—“blacks, Jews, gays, a lot of politicians, our soldiers. He had a lot of hate in him.” Ironically though, the same eyewitness reported that as he was shooting, Mateen was trying to be politically correct: He made it clear he did not have a problem with “black people,” who have “suffered enough” in this country.

However, less emphasis has been placed on the link between his violent behavior and his employment at G4S. But it is equally important to understand the role this international private security company plays in maintaining new zones of apartheid within the global capitalist system around the world. G4S is responsible for managing prisons and military installations, erecting apartheid walls, and protecting the transnational capitalist class. Indeed, G4S is the same company that is responsible for constructing the 600-mile Great Wall around Mecca as well as the apartheid separation wall in Palestine.

Islamic Homophilia

On their part, Muslims around the world, but especially in the West, have fallen in line to perform what seems to be by now a familiar script in the aftermath of catastrophic terrorist acts: They refuse to accept, and correctly so, that these terrorist acts are committed “in the name of Islam” and at the same time, they insist on showing that Muslims account for the majority of victims of extremist Muslim violence.In this particular case, moreover, the focus in Islamic circles has shifted to theological squabbles about the meaning and status of homosexuality in the Quran and the traditions of the prophet Mohammad. As the first openly gay Imam Daayiee Abdullah states, “Nowhere in the Quran does it say punish homosexuals. And historians have also never found any case of the Prophet Muhammad dealing with homosexuality.”Undoubtedly, this theological squabble can be important for deconstructing the tyranny of the literalist interpretation of religious texts. This emphasis on interpretation can also demonstrate the diversity of theological views on homosexuality in different Muslim countries around the world. Indeed, as liberal commentators insist on reminding us, a 2015 Pew poll shows that most Muslims in the U.S. are more tolerant of homosexuality and gay marriages than major Christian groups

Nonetheless, the hermeneutic question keeps the problem within the cultural realm, away from questions about the political economy where attitudes to homosexuality and terrorism can be articulated together. In other words, the attitudes of diverse Muslim countries towards homosexuality should not only be examined in relation to the struggle over religious authority, however important that is for the project of reforming Islam, but more significantly in relation to the impact of global capitalism on these countries and their integration into the global capitalist system.Although some countries endorse homophobic terrorism as an expression of their anti-colonial struggle against Western hegemony, most countries that criminalize homosexuality have major stakes in the geopolitical struggle over power in the region and world, even more as allies of these same Western colonial powers. This might explain the difference in the official governmental position on the issue between on the one hand, more gay friendly or neutral countries such as Indonesia, Jordan, and Albania, and on the other, homophobic countries such as Iran, Turkey and Saudi Arabia that actively criminalize queer desire and disparage the LGBTQ community as “perverts.”

Re-inscribing the Class Struggle

Understanding homophobic terrorism in the context of global capitalist dynamics clears a space for dealing with the problem of terrorism in new ways. Indeed, no serious measures or policies can be taken to prevent another mass-shooting of this scale, unless the global dimensions of such acts are clearly worked out. By erasing the role of global capitalism in reproducing these acts of terrorism, moreover, conservative and liberal approaches also fail to offer a new emancipatory universal position that can unite diverse groups in the struggle for fundamental change in the global capitalist system.

This cannot be done, as Kenan Malik states, by “celebrating diversity, while treating everyone as citizens, rather than as simply belonging to particular communities.” Since local traditions work well with global capitalism, as Žižek points out, the precondition for a new path of freedom is precisely the renunciation of all roots in favor of an emancipatory universal identity. Žižek is thus right to insist, in his recent book Against the Double Blackmail, on the need to reinscribe the class struggle, since the task of the left today should be building “global solidarity of the exploited and oppressed,” a politics of solidarity structured around a common struggle for a “positive universal project shared by all.” This is the only ground from which a meaningful solution to terrorism can emerge.