[Marxism] Fwd from United for Peace of Pierce County (Reformatted)

[Louis Proyect <lnp3@xxxxxxxxx>]

NEWS: In 2006, GOP to exploit Democratic divisions by 'unambiguously
embracing' Iraq war (NYT) [On Thursday, the U.S. Senate voted 87-13
"against setting a firm deadline for withdrawing American troops from
Iraq," the *New York Times* reported.[1]

CNN reported the vote as 86-13, and added that "Minutes later, the Senate
rejected the proposal more popular with Democrats, a nonbinding resolution
which was offered by Sens. Carl Levin, D-Michigan, and Jack Reed, D-Rhode
Island that would call for the administration to begin withdrawing troops,
but with no timetable for the war's end. That was a closer vote, 60-39."[2]

As these votes illustrate, the Democratic party has failed to reach
consensus on the Iraq war, a failure Republicans hope to exploit in the
2006 elections.

In a front-page piece on Thursday, the *New York Times* reported that
Republicans will adopt a political analysis contained in "a 74-page
briefing book to Congressional offices from the Pentagon to provide
ammunition for what White House officials say will be a central line of
attack against Democrats from now through the midterm elections: that the
withdrawal being advocated by Democrats would mean thousands of troops
would have died for nothing, would give extremists a launching pad from
which to build an Islamo-fascist empire and would hand the United States
its must humiliating defeat since Vietnam."[3]

The briefing book implements a politics of fear by nonsensically merging
the Salafism of al-Qaeda with other currents of radical Islam to form an
imaginary monolithic "Islamo-fascist" threat, just as rhetorical strategies
of the Cold War systematically potrayed movements for national liberation
and against social justice as part of a monolithic world Communist movement.

NOTE: The term "Islamo-fascist" is a relatively new addition to the
rhetorical panoply of the U.S. national security state.

The history of its use in the *New York Times* is notable.

"Islamo-fascist" first appeared in the *Times* only fifteen months ago, in
an article quoting Geert Wilders, a "rising right-wing politician" in the
Dutch parliament.

Wilders's position is that "Islamic dogmas and democracy are incompatible,"
and he advocates a five-year suspension of "third-world immigration," the
closing of radical mosques in the Netherlands, and the preventive arrest of
terrorist suspects or, as he calls them, "Islamo-fascist thugs" (*New York
Times*, Mar, 4, 2005).

The term "Islamo-fascist" next appears a year later, toward the end of a
long piece in the *New York Times Magazine* about the Sudan conflict, in a
quotation from Roger Winter, special representative for the Sudan conflict
at the U.S. State Department: "If you want to liquidate an Islamo-fascist
regime that committed genocide, the way to do it that is accepted by the
international community is through the [Comprehensive Peace Agreement that
ended the North-South war] and prosecutions by the I.C.C." (Elizabeth
Rubin, "If Not Peace, Then Justice," *New York Times Magazine*, Apr. 2, 2006).

Today's use of "Islamo-fascist" is the third appearance of the term in the
columns of the *New York Times*.

The migration of the term "Islamo-fascist" from a racist far-right Dutch
party to the Dept. of State to the Pentagon to the Republican leadership in
Washington, D.C., is instructive.

Mark
<http://www.ufppc.org/content/view/4697/>http://www.ufppc.org/content/view/4697/


1. U.S. Washington SENATE VOTES AGAINST IRAQ DEADLINE WITHDRAWAL By David
Stout New York Times June 22, 2006
<http://www.nytimes.com/2006/06/22/washington/22cnd-cong.html>http://www.nytimes.com/2006/06/22/washington/22cnd-cong.html


2. Politics SENATE REJECTS CALLS FOR WITHDRAWAL FROM IRAQ CNN June 22, 2006
<http://www.cnn.com/2006/POLITICS/06/22/iraq.senate.ap/index.html>http://www.cnn.com/2006/POLITICS/06/22/iraq.senate.ap/index.html


3. U.S. Washington G.O.P. DECIDES TO EMBRACE WAR AS ISSUE By Jim Rutenberg
and Adam Nagourney New York Times June 22, 2006 Page A1
<http://www.nytimes.com/2006/06/22/washington/22capital.html>http://www.nytimes.com/2006/06/22/washington/22capital.html



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