Terrorism's Little Secret - Deepak Chopra, Huffington Post

[applegrove]

Terrorism's Little Secret
Deepak Chopra
Huffington Post
02.03.2006

"The one thing that terrorist leaders don't want their followers to know is that they have nothing to gain. Suicide bombers are only the most obvious example, since they won't survive to gain anything even if terrorism ever "wins." but no follower is going to gain, because the deeper secret is that Islamic terrorism helps the rich and powerful.

Osama bin Laden is himself a wealthy man from a prodigally wealthy family. He is a outcast from his clan in Saudi Arabia, but only because he crossed a certain line. The other wealthy people in Saudi Arabia fund and support jihadist Islam for obvious reasons: it keeps them in power. Terrorism has become the new opiate of the masses. An opiate keeps you drowsy; it makes you believe in fantasies instead of reality.

Terrorism is now doing that as effectively as religion. Millions of Islamic children are going to private Islamic schools, or madrasas, only to come out almost as unfit for modern life as the day they entered. Fundamentalist clerics, such as those in Iran, have become billionaires while the flocks they preach to fall lower and lower economically. Corrupt princes stay in power by funding these clerics, both serving the same reactionary politics that will never grant power, money, or a chance to rise in society to ordinary citizens.

Terrorism wears a revolutionary mask, but the revolution doesn't exist except as a fantasy of returning to a pre-modern age when the Muslim world had greater prestige. Without America and Israel to hate, terrorism would be socially and politically bankrupt, so why is it succeeding? Because it stands symbolically for the dispossessed. Al-Qaeda is perceived as the only chance for people who have nothing.

.... SNIP"

http://www.huffingtonpost.com/deepak-chopra/terrorisms-little-secret_b_15058.html

[Luke21]

1. Home run

Nails it.

[HysteryDiagnosis]

2. Kicked and recommended, spot on the money.... nt.

[JohnyCanuck]

3. Note that the US wasn't averse to stirring the Islamic fundamentalist pot

when it perceived it to be in its own geostrategic interest to do so. Blowback can be a bummer at times.

Why has the US been Shipping Muslim Extremist Schoolbooks into Afghanistan...for 20 Years?

And why is President Bush hiding it?

By Jared Israel
Posted 9 April 2002

<snip>

Washington Post investigators report that during the past twenty years the US has spent millions of dollars producing fanatical schoolbooks, which were then distributed in Afghanistan.

"The primers, which were filled with talk of jihad and featured drawings of guns, bullets, soldiers and mines, have served since then as the Afghan school system's core curriculum. Even the Taliban used the American-produced books..." -- Washington Post, 23 March 2002 (1)

According to the Post the U.S. is now "...wrestling with the unintended consequences of its successful strategy of stirring Islamic fervor to fight communism."

So the books made up the core curriculum in Afghan schools. And what were the unintended consequences? The Post reports that according to unnamed officials the schoolbooks "steeped a generation in violence."

How could this result have been unintended? Did they expect that giving fundamentalist schoolbooks to schoolchildren would make them moderate Muslims?

http://emperors-clothes.com/articles/jared/jihad.htm

[sam sarrha]

4. great.. recomended

[acmavm]

5. IMO here is the most relevant clip in the whole article:

<snip>
Because it stands symbolically for the dispossessed. Al-Qaeda is perceived as the only chance for people who have nothing.
<snip>

That is what the whole mess boils down to. Young men and women with nothing to look forward to. Men and women who are looking a dead-end futures and know that they are being locked out of the marketplace. There is a huge discrepancy in the Islamic world between the haves and the have nots. (Strange, just like here.) And the 'haves' want to keep it that way. So they provide these kids with schools that teach them to blame outward, and in the meantime get primed to blow up a bunch of innocent people because somehow, these innocent people are responsible for their lack of a future. But it does keep the Imams in power, and it does make certain that the culture remains isolated and the wealthy remain above the fray.

Of course western culture does little to help. We keep these young men and women locked out of the world community. We SUPPORT the Saudi Royals, and others like them, who are determined to keep the majority of it's people locked in the middle ages, thereby safeguarding their own positions, and that of their wealthy friends and family. And they watch all the assets of their nations, be it oil or whatever, being diverted into the pockets of a rich and powerful few.

In fact, it is exactly what the BFEE and Cheny and Wolfie etc. so much want to see happen here. And they are using religion and resentment and fear every bit in the same way as the crazy Imam in the madrassas are. Pat Robertson in a turban and robe would look and sound exactly like Mullah Omar.

So we come full circle. And it never ends.

[the other one]

6. Total NONSENSE

A willful misunderstanding of what terrorism is.

Terrorism: Acts of violence committed by non-state actors in order to bring attention to their cause.

A group who commits acts of terrorism does so because of their powerlessness to affect change. These are acts borne from frustration, and from an inability to be heard by "legitimate" state actors.

THEREFORE: A terrorist act is successful by its very nature.

How does one stop terrorism? By making sure all actors have a seat at the bargaining table, and making sure all actors have something to lose by the spread of violence.

Terrorism is not a cause, it is a strategy. By stripping a group of their identity and branding them "terrorists" instead of calling them by their names, one only succeeds in making them all the more intent.

[applegrove]

7. So killing civilians to make a point is fine?

[RazzleDazzle]

8. I see no real contradiction between your take and Chopra's

Your explanation is totally correct -- AT A PARTICULAR LEVEL, which is your everyday more basic level. At a geopolitical level, Chopra's take is more accurate. They are NOT mutually exclusive understandings of terrorism, not at all.

You know, the people who benefit from wars (and there are plenty of them and more all the time with our new homegrown Homeland Defense industries), are happy to supply arms to both/either sides. It matters not to them at all.

The people who benefit from our powerlessness and our infighting don't GIVE a damn about abortion and race and gays and such, religion too. They operate at a level where none of that has to concern them unless they want it to. These subjects and others are simply ways to keep the masses occupied and, if divided, then even MORE distracted from the REAL realities of the world, which is how we are all oppressed by those who operate at a geopolitical level, by the globalist corporations, by the corporatists in our own government, by all the polluters and extractive industries, etc. None of what WE are concerned about bothers them at all. They are HAPPY to have terrorism as a new excuse for the arms race, as a new distraction, as a new way to build unnecessary new industries that can get government contracts, as an excuse for private militaries and mercenaries, etc. It's all a game to them, including terrorism and terrorists.

[Boojatta]

9. Make sure Timothy McVeigh and Ted Kaczynski have a seat at the bargaining

table and then terrorism will stop?

"How does one stop terrorism? By making sure all actors have a seat at the bargaining table..."

[leftstreet]

10. Christian Fundamentalists + Preachers + American

Substitute the terms just from this section and it reads the same.


Terrorism is now doing that as effectively as religion. Millions of Islamic children are going to private Islamic schools, or madrasas, only to come out almost as unfit for modern life as the day they entered. Fundamentalist clerics, such as those in Iran, have become billionaires while the flocks they preach to fall lower and lower economically. Corrupt princes stay in power by funding these clerics, both serving the same reactionary politics that will never grant power, money, or a chance to rise in society to ordinary citizens.

[Hoping4Change]

11. This is very weird. I had same thought when I saw Syrianna the other day.

Let me say that Syrianna left me speechless. Its very powerful. Anyway I sat in the chair stunned when the film ended. My first thought was whether Osama's goal is to completely subjugate Muslims, making them tools of the uberwealthy but I hadn't really taken the idea further so thanks for this link. I remember a CNN interview with Chopra after 911. He had some very insightful remarks about religion. He talked about how religions encourage tribalism.