U.S. Imperialism Stokes Anti-Muslim Bigotry

Chauvinist Mania Over “Ground Zero Mosque"

NEW YORK CITY—American and immigrant Muslims are under siege as a rabid campaign mounts against plans to build an Islamic community center two blocks from the site of the September 11 terrorist attacks on the World Trade Center. What is being pilloried as the “Ground Zero mosque” is, in reality, the proposed 13-story Cordoba House/Park51 community center, which includes a mosque along with a pool and many other facilities. Polls showed that Manhattan voters favored the city-approved plans for the Cordoba Initiative’s cultural center by a ten-percentage-point margin. But a Tea Party-style hate campaign got considerable traction in the outer boroughs of New York City and fueled a surge in anti-Muslim rallies nationally. New Islamic centers have been the targets of chauvinist protest in California, Wisconsin, Tennessee, Kentucky and Georgia, and on Staten Island and in Brooklyn in NYC.

In Manhattan, an “anti-mosque” rally mobilized several hundred near the proposed site on August 22, outnumbering counterprotesters. Far-right Dutch politician Geert Wilders, who calls for deporting immigrants, banning the Koran and closing Islamic schools in the Netherlands, has announced he will attend a reactionary mobilization at the World Trade Center site on September 11, the same day that a Florida church plans to hold an “International Burn a Koran Day.” Wilders exemplifies the virulent anti-Islamic reaction sweeping Europe, where measures barring women from wearing the Islamic veil are being adopted in France, Spain and elsewhere, with Switzerland even banning the building of minarets on mosques following a hysterical fear-mongering campaign by ultra-right-wing politicians.

As proletarian fighters against racist capitalist rule, we staunchly oppose the persecution of any religious group and defend the right of the Cordoba Initiative to build its community center. We defend the separation of church and state and the First Amendment right of religious organizations to be free from government control, oversight and interference. At the same time, as atheist materialists we are firm opponents of religion itself—all religion—and the social and political reaction spawned by religious and national-chauvinist backwardness. Religious superstition and belief will fade away only as human want is conquered through socialist revolution and the creation of a communist society worldwide.

The outpouring of racist chauvinism in the U.S. underscores the urgency for trade unionists and all fighters for black and immigrant rights to forthrightly defend Muslim minorities, including against any fascist elements that emerge from the sewers of the “anti-mosque” campaign. The workers movement must oppose the whole construct of U.S. imperialism’s “war on terror,” which feeds the flames of bigotry by labeling people of Muslim faith or origin as “terrorists.” What is needed is a fight against the policies of the misleaders of the labor movement, who from the onset of the “war on terror” signed on as lieutenants for the capitalist rulers in the name of “national unity.”

This concocted “war,” fought with very real weapons, is being continued into its tenth year with fervor by Obama and his government. At home, the capitalist rulers waved the “bloody shirt” of the nearly 3,000 killed at the World Trade Center on September 11 to implement repressive measures aimed first at immigrants from the Near East and South Asia. The government’s “anti-terror” drive engendered an anti-Muslim lynch mob atmosphere that has returned with renewed fervor. As we warned from the outset, the USA Patriot Act, Maritime Transportation Security Act and other such measures threaten not only immigrants but black people and the entire labor movement. Abroad, Obama has made Afghanistan his preferred theater of imperialist carnage. Currently there are some 120,000 NATO forces, 65 percent of them American, wreaking havoc in Afghanistan. The troop “pullout” from Iraq leaves 56,000 U.S. “non-combat” personnel on the ground there along with thousands of mercenaries in Washington’s pay.

These brutal military occupations are far from the end of the story. As part of its series titled “The Shadow War,” the New York Times (14 August) reported: “In roughly a dozen countries—from the deserts of North Africa, to the mountains of Pakistan, to former Soviet republics crippled by ethnic and religious strife—the United States has significantly increased military and intelligence operations, pursuing the enemy using robotic drones and commando teams, paying contractors to spy and training local operatives to chase terrorists.” The article documents secret airstrikes in Yemen (where the “collateral damage” included numerous civilians and the Marib Province deputy governor) as well as operations in Somalia waged from Kenya.

U.S. imperialism’s occupation of Afghanistan, as well as all its depredations in Iraq and repeated drone attacks in Pakistan, serve not simply the quest to control oil supplies, as liberal-reformist opinion would have it, but to promote U.S. strategic interests worldwide against its imperialist rivals. These interests include not least the military encirclement of the Chinese bureaucratically deformed workers state, currently the imperialists’ key target for capitalist counterrevolution. All U.S. troops out of Iraq and Afghanistan now! U.S. imperialists, hands off the world! For class struggle at home against the U.S. capitalist rulers!

Washington’s “Good” Muslim

With the witches’ brew of midterm electioneering on the boil, Sarah Palin, Newt Gingrich & Co. figure that it will help the Republicans win back control of the House and Senate to march at the head of the anti-Muslim frenzy. Up to a fifth of Americans appear to have bought the tale that Barack Obama is a secret Muslim, which is about as much an affront to the racists as his (very real) black skin. In the New York Times (21 August), liberal columnist Frank Rich caught the manufactured quality of the hoopla over a “mosque” being built on “the ‘hallowed ground’ of a shuttered Burlington Coat Factory store one block from the New York Dolls Gentlemen’s Club,” where strippers have backed the building of the community center. Rich noted that the yahoos “have never attacked the routine Muslim worship services at another site of the 9/11 attacks, the Pentagon.”

Both the Democratic and Republican parties are split on the “anti-mosque” furor. New Jersey Republican governor Chris Christie, taking a brief break from bashing the teachers unions, has joined some Democrats in refusing to condemn the Cordoba community center. Meanwhile, Senate Democratic leader Harry Reid, whose Senate seat is being contested by a Tea Party Republican, has lectured that the center’s founder, Feisal Abdul Rauf, should build the community center “somewhere else.” Reid was echoed by Democratic New York governor David Paterson, who is aiming to offer state property far from “Ground Zero” as an alternative site. NYC mayor Michael Bloomberg has strenuously backed the Islamic center, but he has little to lose. He has had high voter approval ratings, he’s not standing for re-election and he’s richer than Croesus, which has helped him do things like change parties and extend term limits. But just a few years ago, Bloomberg saw to it that Yemeni immigrant Debbie Almontaser was fired from her job as principal of the Khalil Gibran International Academy in Brooklyn in the heat of a media frenzy falsely branding her a Muslim fundamentalist.

Barack Obama’s backing of the Cordoba center particularly galvanized the forces of right-wing reaction. Sections of the ruling class fret that the outbreak of open anti-Islamic bigotry is undermining American interests in the Near East and especially Afghanistan. As Frank Rich put it in his Times column: “How do you win Muslim hearts and minds in Kandahar when you are calling Muslims every filthy name in the book in New York?”

On August 13, Obama stated at a White House Ramadan ceremony that he defends the planned Islamic center in lower Manhattan, although in now-typical fashion he backpedaled the next day after getting flak from some Democrats as well as Republicans. Obama has reason to go to bat for Feisal Abdul Rauf. Painted by the Fox News rabble as a “terrorist supporter,” the Sufi imam has served U.S. imperialism under both Bush II and Obama, repeatedly traveling to the Near East to preach the virtues of American “democracy.” In 2008 he signed on to a report with former Secretary of State Madeleine Albright and Richard Armitage, Deputy Secretary of State in the Bush administration, declaring that the “war on terror” had not been adequate in improving U.S. “security.” In 2003, he addressed a New York FBI meeting to give agents “sensitivity” training after they were criticized for abusing Arab Americans in the post-September 11 witchhunts!

Abdul Rauf is Washington’s go-to “good” Muslim, to be called upon when the bourgeoisie wishes to cover its imperialist depredations with talk of tolerance, liberty and other supposed “American values.” The imam is currently on a three-country tour of the Persian Gulf sponsored by the U.S. State Department. His appearance in this area serves to shore up America’s Arab client states against the reactionary Iranian regime. Washington has repeatedly targeted Iran with economic sanctions and has provocatively set up “missile defense” batteries in Bahrain, Qatar, Kuwait and the United Arab Emirates.

The same Obama administration that today intones pieties about “religious freedom” threatened last November to seize mosques and other U.S. properties, including a 36-story Manhattan skyscraper, held by the Iranian-backed Alavi Foundation on the grounds that the money it obtained for developing the properties violated U.S. laws banning trade with Iran. We oppose the government’s moves against the Alavi Foundation, which pose grave implications for the rights of freedom of religion and association. We oppose as well the whole framework of sanctions against Iran, behind which is the threat of war. U.S. hands off Iran!

Defeat Imperialism Through Workers Revolution!

Following the September 11 attacks on the World Trade Center and the Pentagon, we dubbed the forces around Osama bin Laden Washington’s Frankenstein’s monster. Bin Laden was among the many beneficiaries of the massive U.S. aid given to Islamic mujahedin cutthroats who were embraced by the imperialists for their murderous anti-Communism. These “holy warriors” fought against the modernizing left-nationalist People’s Democratic Party of Afghanistan (PDPA) beginning in 1978 and subsequently against Soviet troops after they came to the aid of the embattled PDPA in 1979. The Soviet military intervention opened the possibility of social liberation for the Afghan masses, particularly women, while the threat of a CIA-backed Islamic takeover on the USSR’s southern flank posed the need for unconditional military defense of the Soviet Union, a bureaucratically degenerated workers state.

We Trotskyists proclaimed: Hail Red Army! Extend the social gains of the October Revolution to the Afghan peoples! The Soviet withdrawal in 1988-89 was a political betrayal by the Stalinist bureaucracy under Mikhail Gorbachev, opening the door to capitalist counterrevolution in the USSR itself in 1991-92. In the bloody years after the mujahedin finally took Kabul in 1992, re-enslaving Afghan women and reducing the capital, Kabul, to rubble, the Taliban emerged as the leading force in Afghanistan. U.S. imperialism supported the Pakistani-backed Taliban from 1996 until they drove them from power in the 2001 U.S./NATO invasion. With no more need for its former clients, Washington withdrew its support for the Taliban, bin Laden & Co. On 11 September 2001, bin Laden bit back.

The International Communist League fought to the end in defense of the Soviet Union against the forces of capitalist counterrevolution. In today’s world, where the destruction of the Soviet Union removed what had been the main deterrent to U.S. imperialism’s bloody global ambitions, we rededicate ourselves to the fight to construct workers parties of the Bolshevik type in the struggle for new October Revolutions. As we wrote in “Down With Obama’s War in Afghanistan!” (WV No. 942, 11 September 2009):

“The horrors produced by U.S. imperialism’s ‘holy war’ against the Soviet Union in Afghanistan, as well as the present occupation of the country, show once again that the capitalist system is a barrier to social progress and a breeding ground for barbaric reaction. Our purpose is the forging of a multiracial revolutionary workers party that fights for the defeat of U.S. imperialism through socialist revolution.”