The most infamous example of the barbaric violence inflicted on Filipino Muslims by American troops was the Moro Crater Massacre of March 1906 when hundreds of Muslims, including scores of women and children, were butchered. US army general Leonard Wood, who led the American troops in their murderous campaign and had been appointed as governor of theMoro province from 1903 to 1906 (he would later become Governor General of the Philippines), urged the extermination of all Filipino Muslims as he considered them fanatical. After the massacre, Roosevelt sent him a letter: “I congratulate you, and the officers and men of your command upon the brave feat of arms wherein you and they so well upheld the honor of the flag.” Clearly, Roosevelt’s teaching Egyptian Muslims a lesson in tolerance was not on account of some anxiety about the intolerance of American imperial or domestic policies in 1910 toward non-White Christians and non-Christians alike, but an expression of imperial hubris and doublespeak. (Joseph Massad)
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A century later, in June 2009, US President Barack Obama addressed not only a local Egyptian audience, but also, and as American officials insisted, the entire “Muslim World” from the same Cairo University at which Roosevelt had spoken. Like Roosevelt, Obama wanted to provide a theological justification for an American-sponsored policy, namely the imposition of a “peace” between Palestinians and Israelis that preserves Jewish colonialism and occupation at the expense of Palestinian rights. Obama was clearly stating, in Zionist fashion, that the Jewish colonisers of Palestine are resisted because they are Jewish rather than on account of being colonisers, hence his call for tolerance and ecumenical peace.
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Obama also announced several co-operative projects between the United States and Muslim-majority countries, one of which was “a new global effort with the Organisation of the Islamic Conference to eradicate polio”. We do not know what Obama might have intimated to administration officials after his speech or to American journalists off the record, and whether he thought his audience were a bunch of “Fuzzy Wuzzies”, but his subsequent actions spoke louder than his words and indeed made many Muslims “squirm”. His polio campaign was the same programme that the CIA would use two years later in May 2011 to stage a fake polio vaccination campaign to capture and kill Osama Bin Laden in Pakistan. That the fake campaign, which used a Pakistani doctor for the task, has imperiled the lives of hundreds of thousands of Muslim children in Afghanistan and Pakistan due to a subsequent ban on the vaccinations by the Taliban and the refusal of local Pakistani community leaders to allow doctors in for fear of being CIA agents, has hardly been registered by Muslims as a form of American co-operation.
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Like Roosevelt, Obama did speak about the importance of religious tolerance of Egyptian and Lebanese Christians by their Muslim compatriots, while promising to end institutionalised discrimination against American Muslims in the United States being practiced in earnest since 9/11, and justifying the ongoing murderous American military campaigns in Afghanistan and Pakistan (he could have added Yemen but he did not), though not in Iraq, as necessary. These were countries where his administration was killing not only non-American Muslims through massive bombings, but also targeting American Muslim citizens for assassination. Obama announced Indonesia as a model of tolerance for the Muslim world: “I saw it firsthand as a child in Indonesia, where devout Christians worshiped freely in an overwhelmingly Muslim country.”
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Obama had lived in Indonesia from 1967 to 1971, in the wake of the massive US-sponsored massacres of almost one million Indonesians following the US-supported coup of General Suharto. Yet, while Obama remembers well Muslim “tolerance” towards Christians, he seems to remember little of the US-imposed terror and American sponsorship of right-wing Indonesian Muslim groups to kill communists in the wake of the 1965 Suharto coup, an intolerance the US had engineered and called for since the 1950s, and which would expand later to Afghanistan and spill over to right-wing Islamist groups’ intolerance of Christians in places like Egypt (many of whose right-wing sectarian Islamists were recruited by the US for its anti-Soviet war in Afghanistan) to which Obama was now counselling tolerance.
Indeed, it is this same US-induced and supported intolerance that feeds the ongoing sectarian right-wing Islamist attacks on non-Sunni Muslims in Iraq (attacks that are depicted in the US media as an expression not of the US policy of sectarian agitation in Iraq, but on account of the indigenous “parochial” identities of Iraqis, which seem to have been unfortunately released by US-imposed “freedom”) and in Syria as well (in the latter case at least, with the full complicity of the Western press, if not Western governments, where sectarian attacks are being represented as part of the struggle for “democracy”).
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More here.