False-Flag "Islamic Terror" : The New Blood Libel 

by Kevin Barrett http://mujca.com 

All of the classic anti-Semitic myths are being reinvented and re-deployed against Muslims.  

Here is Holocaust scholar Helen Fein's definition of anti-Semitism, with "Jew" changed to "Muslim": 

"A persisting latent structure of hostile beliefs towards Muslims as a collective manifested in individuals as attitudes, and in culture as myth, ideology, folklore and imagery, and in actions – social or legal discrimination, political mobilisation against the Muslims, and collective or state violence – which results in and/or is designed to distance, displace, or destroy Muslims as Muslims." (1) 

The hatred of Jews first turned into mass hysteria due to accusations of – believe it or not – bioterrorism. When, in late medieval Europe, the Black Death began ravaging populations, Jews were accused of causing the disease by poisoning wells. Epidemics of anti-Semitic hysteria have been coming and going in waves ever since. 

In fall 2001, US military anthrax from the Ft. Detrick biological warfare facility was mailed to the New York Post and NBC News along with a note reading: 

    09-11-01

    THIS IS NEXT

    TAKE PENACILIN [sic] NOW

    DEATH TO AMERICA

    DEATH TO ISRAEL

    ALLAH IS GREAT  

The same US military anthrax was sent to the two Democratic US Senators who stood in the way of the Patriot Act, Senators Daschle and Leahy, along with a similar note: 

    09-11-01

    YOU CAN NOT STOP US.

    WE HAVE THIS ANTHRAX.

    YOU DIE NOW.

    ARE YOU AFRAID?

    DEATH TO AMERICA.

    DEATH TO ISRAEL.

    ALLAH IS GREAT.  (2) 

Since only a few US military scientists had access to the Ft. Detrick anthrax, and since the FBI has thrown up its hands, it is abundantly obvious that the anthrax attacks were a covert operation designed to grease the skids of the Patriot Act (written before 9/11, just as the NSA spying was begun pre-9/11), to inspire fear in everybody with a mailbox...and, above all, to demonize Muslims. (3) 

It is one thing to ignorantly accuse a religious minority of poisoning wells. It is quite another to poison them yourself, and then blame the religious minority. That is what has been going on for decades, as false-flag terrorist incidents are staged with Muslims serving as patsies and scapegoats. 

The process began with the demonization of Arabs. Palestinian and Arab resistance to the Zionist settler colony in Palestine—every bit as natural, inevitable and morally justified as Algerian resistance against French settlers and Kenyan and Rhodesian resistance against British settlers—has been demonized in the Western media with the help of false-flag attacks like the one against the Achille Lauro. Former Mossad agent Ari Ben-Moshe has revealed that the Achille Lauro hijacking, and the emblematic murder of American Jew Leon Klingoffer, was a Mossad operation designed to make Palestinians look violent and bloodthirsty. Ben Moshe reveals that the Mossad unit responsible for the Achille Lauro affair specialized in such false-flag attacks, and was extremely successful in its "anti-terror" mission. One wonders how many other incidents of "Arab terrorism" were directed by this unit. (4) 

At the Jerusalem Conference in 1979, George Bush Sr. and Benjamin Netanyahu drafted a strategy of demonizing "international terrorism" as the next great enemy that would justify the militarization of Western societies. Since then, a growing crescendo of false-flag terror attacks have driven home the notion of an "Islamic threat." (5) 

The FBI informant in the 1993 World Trade Center bombing, who the other defendants say hatched the idea and handled all the logistics, has revealed a recorded conversation between himself and his FBI handler in which they discuss the fact that the FBI built the bomb. Despite this revelation, the mainstream US media continues to depict the 1993 WTC bombing as an attack by "Islamic extremists" rather than by its true author, the FBI. (6) 

The London bombings of 7/7/2005 took the pattern of bogus "Islamic terrorism" to a new height of absurdity. Peter Power of Visor Consultants admitted that his company, hired by an unnamed agency, had helped set up a 7/7/2005  "terror drill" and that by an amazing coincidence (!) the real bombs had gone off at the exact times and locations of the imaginary bombs in the drill. Eyewitness and forensic evidence in the London bombings, as in the Madrid bombings, shows that the bombs had been fixed underneath the busses and trains -- they were most certainly not in the bags and backpacks of "suicide terrorists." (7) 

False-flag terror seems to be the basic modus operandi of the war in Iraq, which was launched by the big lie that Saddam Hussein was linked to 9/11 and in possession of terror weapons with which he planned to threaten the US. There are reports  of Iraqis hired by Coalition forces and told to drive to a certain mosque or market. The driver gets behind schedule, stops to buy cigarettes, and his car explodes while he is in the shop. Had he been on schedule, he would have been another "suicide terrorist." In one especially well-documented incident, two British special ops soldiers, disguised as Arab members of al-Sadr's army, were arrested by Iraqi police. The Brits were in a car full of arms and explosives and heading for the Basra market. After a shootout in which an Iraqi policeman was killed, the Brits were jailed for murder and suspected of planning to blow up the Basra market in a false-flag attack. Proving those suspicions correct, the British army attacked the jail with six tanks, a helicopter gunship and a regiment of soldiers, destroying the jail and setting free over 100 Iraqi prisoners, all in order to rescue their two false-flag terrorists, who had been on their way to the market to  murder dozens if not hundreds of innocent people, and blame the murder on al-Sadr's Mahdi Army, with the aim of sowing division among the Iraqi people and legitimizing permanent occupation...or, failing that, destroying Iraq as a regional power. (8)  

It is no longer seriously disputed that the alleged 9/11 hijackers did not fit the profile of Muslim militants -- or Muslims at all for that matter. (Even those who have not yet examined the cumulative case that 9/11 was an inside job cannot argue with the numerous media reports about the hard-drinking, prostitute-fancying, party-hearty "fanatical Muslim terrorists" who spent their last night on earth in a strip club.) Yet  the myth of "radical Muslim suicide hijackers" lives on as a media-hyped blood libel. (9) 

Yes, a blood libel. Here is one definition of blood libel: "Blood libels are unfounded allegations that a particular group kills people as a form of human sacrifice, and uses their blood in various rituals." (10) 

I realize that nobody is claiming that "Islamic suicide terrorists" drink blood. The libel is the claim that they spill it -- in a way that is speciously linked to Islam as a religion, making "Islamic terrorism" a de facto form of religious human sacrifice. Islamic "fanaticism," it is claimed, inspires crazed, suicidal acts of mass murder. 

In fact, studies have shown that "extremism" including support for "terrorism" among nominal Muslims has absolutely nothing to do with their degree of religious commitment (i.e. their "fanaticism," if we are to accept the pejorative language of the anti-religious bigots). Instead, support for "terrorism" is strongly linked to the belief that Western colonial and imperial powers will not allow their communities self-determination. Those who hold this belief, regardless of whether they are atheists or religious people, are more likely to support political violence against the perceived imperial-colonial power--i.e. "terrorism." (11) 

It is time for the West to relinquish its myth that a religious minority, perceived as brown-skinned and Semitic, spills blood as a function of its religious identity. And it is time for Jews, the main victims of such libels in the past, to stand up for their Muslim brothers and sisters, and speak out against today's greatest blood libel: the myth of "Islamic terrorism." 

Works Cited 

(1) http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Anti-Semitism 

(2) http://www.anthraxinvestigation.com/index.html - letters 

(3) http://www.scholarsfor911truth.org/MattOrr_Anthrax.html 

(4) Ari Ben-Menashe: Profits of War: Inside the Secret U.S.-Israeli Arms Network  (Sheridan Square Press, 1992). 

(5) Nafeez Ahmed: "Interpreting Terrorism: Muslim Problem or Covert Operations Nightmare?" in Barrett, Cobb and Lubarsky, 9/11 and the American Empire v.2: Christians, Jews and Muslims Speak Out (Northampton: Interlink, 2007). 

(6) http://pdr.autono.net/WhoBombedWTC.html 

(7) Nafeez Ahmed, The London Bombings (Overlook TP, 2006); http://www.prisonplanet.com/articles/july2005/130705powerresponds.htm ;

http://www.cambridge-news.co.uk/news/region_wide/2005/07/11/83e33146-09af-4421-b2f4-1779a86926f9.lpf : “The policeman said 'mind that hole, that's where the bomb was'. The metal was pushed upwards as if the bomb was underneath the train. They seem to think the bomb was left in a bag, but I don't remember anybody being where the bomb was, or any bag," he said. 

(8) http://www.scoop.co.nz/stories/HL0510/S00052.htm 

(9) Nafeez Ahmed, ibid; Yasmin Ahmed, "The Remaking of Islam in the Post-9/11 Era" in Barrett, Cobb and Lubarsky, 9/11 and the American Empire v.2: Christians, Jews and Muslims Speak Out (Northampton: Interlink, 2007). 

(10) http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Blood_libel 

(11) http://www.foreignpolicy.com/story/cms.php?story_id=3637