Beatings and Abuse Of Palestinians By Israeli Security Forces

“Do you know what it means to serve in the occupied Palestinian territories?” With these words, Breaking the Silence released stunning testimonies from former soldiers, six Israeli women.

Some of the ghastly headlines: “Slap,” “Collective Punishment,” “Flak Jackets with ‘Death to Arabs Written on Them’” “Throwing them into the sewage pit,” “Because I’m bored,” “Settler violence.”

Brutalization,  debasement, degradation! Israeli society has lost its soul.

In this video, a women describes the brutalization of the Palestinians, enforced by debasing peer pressure among the soldiers:

“You can’t think that they’re good hardworking people trying to survive in a closed, place.”

“Later I realized that in order to be there you have to break them, break their spirit. Breaking them means  making them wait, blindfolding them, treating them badly, writing ‘Death to Arabs’ on their vests.”

“Putting cigarettes out on them.”

Several describe routine thefts from Palestinians: of prayer beads, pottery, food. What is wrong with taking gifts? one said to herself.

One stated: “We could do whatever we wanted.” “People don’t know what’s going on there.”

To Our Countries – لبلادي

Video contains English subtitles. The singer has a really nice voice.

لبلادي عمل من إعداد وإنتاج وتنفيذ مجموعة شباب يقيمون في السويد وهم من سوريا و العراق و لبنان و فلسطين. على أمل السلام

To Our Countries is a project produced by a group of youths who live in Sweden and are originally from Syria, Iraq, Lebanon and Palestine.

There Is No War On Terror. There Is A War OF Terror

Statistically, the majority of terrorism is our terrorism, it is state terrorism.

The greatest victims of terrorism are Muslims.

The whole understanding of terrorism is upside down.

Now there is as opposed to state terrorism,  privatized terrorism, it’s very tiny. It’s run by organizations like Al-Qaeda.

There is a study from the University of Chicago a study that found of this privatized terrorism in the last 30-odd years, something like 20,000 people had died,  a very tiny figure compared to the millions who have died as result of state terrorism.

The attacks on 9/11 were appropriated by a clique in the U.S. establishment in order to further its aims around the world.

There is no war on terror. There is a war of terror.

[John Pilger]

“We Invented The Car Bomb”

Car bombing has become synonymous with the Middle East in recent years, so few people would be surprised to realise that this most destructive and indiscriminate form of terror became established in this part of the world.

However, less well known is the fact that this was originally a Jewish weapon used against the Arabs.

The method of killing and destruction was actually pioneered in 1920 in New York, and in a cart rather than a car. An Italian anarchist called Mario Buda packed a horse-drawn wagon with explosives and killed dozens of innocent bystanders on Wall Street in a protest against capitalism.

However, the first bomb to be transported to a target in a motorised vehicle was created by two fighters of the Lehi movement in pre-state Palestine.

These pioneers of a uniquely horrible form of warfare are still alive and were interviewed by the presenter, former CIA agent Bob Baer.

Yaakov Heruti and Eliezer Ben-Ami explained how they chose their target, the Soraya building in Jaffa, used as the headquarters of the armed Arab resistance. They parked their truck bomb outside the building and set it off, killing 28 people including innocent bystanders, and injuring hundreds more.

The two 83-years-old were unrepentant about the operation but regretted the non-combatant casualties. Said Heruti:

“We never wanted to kill innocent civilians and children, it happened by bad luck.”

Perhaps, but it must have crossed their minds that by exploding a truck packed with explosives in a crowded street without any warning, civilians and children were likely to be blown away along with enemy fighters.

This was not a film that set out to make any moral points – indeed most of those interviewed showed little remorse for their actions – but it did demonstrate that in every single case, the reverberations of the explosions had a negative impact on those who planted the bomb as much as on those who were attacked.

After the Lehi bomb, an Arab called Fawzi El Kuttub set about wreaking vengeance on the Jews. Trained by the Nazis in bomb-making, he aped the Jewish fighters by setting off car bombs which killed Jewish civilians in Jerusalem, and came close to assassinating future Israeli Prime Minister David Ben-Gurion. When the smoke eventually cleared, eight car bombs had been set off – four Arab, four Jewish – claiming 120 lives.

Source: The Jewish Chronicle

The Irgun: Terrorists or Freedom Fighters?

On Sunday, the 9th of 2014, I posted an article with appeared in the Jerusalem Post (Israeli) and The Telegraph (UK), stating that Tzipi Livni stated that her father, considered her father Eitan – who was the Irgun Zva’i Leumi’s director of operations during the pre-state days and fought British rule – as as freedom fighter.

Tom Segev responded to  her claim in a 2006 article in Haaretz Newspaper (Israeli):

Foreign Minister Tzipi Livni stated that there is a difference between Palestinian freedom fighters who act against soldiers and terrorists, who act against civilians.

The Livni test is interesting, of course, both because the foreign minister was basically talking about her father, Eitan Livni, who was the chief operations officer in the Irgun and later a Knesset member.

Naturally, Livni does not view the Irgun people as terrorists, but as freedom fighters. And so says the Irgun’s official history, too: It operated against military and government facilities, not against civilians.

Livni most likely was raised on this myth, on the lofty self-image nurtured by Menachem Begin even before his organization fell apart.

The Truth Was Different:

On July 6, 1938, Irgun people snuck a bomb into the produce market on Hamelachim Street in Haifa. Two Irgun veterans reported later, in a book that was printed with the aid of the Defense Ministry, that 18 Arabs were killed and 38 wounded in the operation.

Two days later, Irgun people carried out an attack in Jerusalem; four Arabs were killed. Ten days after that, the Irgun returned to the Haifa market: 27 Arabs were killed and 47 wounded.

In their book, “Divrei hayamim le’milhemet hashihrur” (“Chronicles of the War of Independence”), editors Yaakov Amrami and Arie Melitz described how the attacks were carried out:

Twice, the bombs were brought in inside baskets of vegetables. One bomb was placed inside a crate of shoe polish. Over the years, the organization also struck at buses, coffee shops and movie houses. People from the Haganah and Palmach also carried out actions against Arab civilians. Both were terrorists, also according to the criteria presented by Livni on “Nightline.”

Livni focused on the targets of the attacks, for a moment it seemed that she ruled out in principle any harming of civilians. This also makes for a nice historic lesson: Indeed, there is no justification for harming civilians. Never: Not in Dresden or Hiroshima or Hanoi or Beirut or Ramat Gan or Gaza.

But Livni also justified the artillery fire on Gaza, and then the definition game requires other participants: state-sponsored terror, harming civilians during wartime.

Neither Israelis nor Palestinians have ever forsworn terror. Both have used it and found on occasion that it advances their goals. Arab terror in the 1930s almost led to the expulsion of the British from Palestine, on the eve of World War II; Jewish terror gave a push to their expulsion in the late 1940s. There is a generation of Israelis that grew up not only admiring the terror used by the underground organizations prior to the state’s founding, but also on a whole ethos of wars against colonialist regimes everywhere.

Yitzhak Shamir called himself “Michael” after Michael Collins, the famed leader of the Irish underground.

Naturally, Israelis also grew up admiring the partisans who fought against the Nazis.

In the 1950s and ’60s, they identified with the liberation movements in Africa and South America. Along with their admiration for Che Guevara and Steve Biko – a leader of the struggle against apartheid in South Africa.

Israelis also nurtured friendships with leaders who had sat in jail up to then as terrorists: Israel gave them weapons and money, invited them to Israel and showered them with great honor. Their books were translated into Hebrew and published by national publishing houses. Nothing offended Israelis more than the pejorative “imperialists.”

Moshe Dayan compared the Fatah to the Irgun; in this comparison, Israel took the role of the despised British.

Many years later, Ehud Barak said that if he were a Palestinian, he would have joined the terror organizations. 

Fatah hijacked planes and thereby put the Palestinian problem on the world map – Who knows if anyone would have heard about their distress if it weren’t for their terror?

It’s doubtful if Ariel Sharon would have initiated the dismantling of the settlements in the Gaza Strip if not for Palestinian terror.

This is the same Ariel Sharon who in the 1950s stood at the head of a renowned paratroop unit that committed acts of terror in Palestinian villages across the border.

By Tom Segev
Apr. 20, 2006
12:00 AM

Myanmar Plans To Eradicate Rohingya Identity

Authorities sealed off villages in Myanmar’s only Muslim-majority region and in some cases beat and arrested people who refused to register with immigration officials, in what may be the most aggressive effort yet to force Rohingya to indicate they are illegal migrants from neighboring Bangladesh.

Immigration officials, border guards and members of the illegal-alien task force in the northern tip of Rakhine state — home to 90 percent of the country’s 1.3 million Rohingya — this year, in addition to questions about marriages, deaths and births, people were classified by ethnicity.

Residents said those who refused to take part suffered the consequences.

“We are trapped,” Khin Maung Win said last week. He said authorities started setting up police checkpoints outside his village, Kyee Kan Pyin, in mid-September, preventing people from leaving even to shop for food in local markets, work in surrounding paddies or take children to school.

“If we don’t have letters and paperwork showing we took part — that we are Bengali — we can’t leave,” he said.

Chris Lewa of the Arakan Project, which has been advocating on behalf of the Rohingya for more than a decade, said residents reported incidents of violence and abuse in at least 30 village tracts from June to late September.

Most worrying to many, the government has largely stood by as Buddhist extremists have targeted Rohingya, sometimes with machetes and bamboo clubs, saying they pose a threat to the country’s culture and traditions.

Denied citizenship by national law, members of the religious minority are effectively stateless. They feel they are being systematically erased.

Almost all Rohingya were excluded from a U.N.-funded nationwide census earlier this year, the first in three decades, because they did not want to register as Bengalis. And Thein Sein is considering a“Rakhine Action Plan” that would make people who identify themselves as Rohingya not only ineligible for citizenship but candidates for detainment and possible deportation.

Most Rohingya have lived under apartheid-like conditions in northern Rakhine for decades, with limited access to adequate health care, education and jobs, as well as restrictions on travel and the right to practice their faith.

In 2012, Buddhist extremists killed up to 280 people and displaced tens of thousands of others. About 140,000 people of those forced from their homes continue to languish in crowded displacement camps further south, outside Sittwe, the Rakhine state capital.

Many villages were placed under lockdown, with police checkpoints set up to make sure only those who have cooperated could leave, more than a dozen residents confirmed in telephone interviews with The Associated Press.

In other villages, the names of influential residents were posted on community boards with verbal warnings that they face up to two years in jail if they fail to convince others to take part in the registration process, Lewa said. Other Rohingya say officials forced them to sign the papers at gunpoint, or threatened that they would end up in camps like those outside Sittwe if they didn’t comply, she said. In some cases residents say authorities have shown up after midnight and broken down doors to catch residents by surprise and pressure them to hand over family lists.

Villagers also have been kicked and beaten with clubs and arrested for refusing to take part, according to Lewa and residents interviewed by the AP.

Rohingya said they didn’t want to register family members because they worry the information might be used to deny them citizenship.

As international pressure mounts to end abuses against Rohingya, the government has agreed to provide citizenship to anyone who qualifies. But many Rohingya say they cannot meet the requirements, which include submitting documents proving that their families have been in Myanmar for at least three generations. And under the plan Thein Sein is considering, even that would not be enough for people who insist on calling themselves Rohingya rather than Bengali.

How Much Moral High Ground Does The US Have Over ISIS?

The United States’ war on sexual violence, mass murder and religious persecution should begin at home.

Without question, ISIS is an abomination. However, it is unclear whether America is the right agent to see this through. Part of the trouble relates to the Obama administration’s strategy, which seems likely to empower ISIS even as it undermines the security and interests of the Unted States and its allies – but there is an ethical dimension as well.

While ISIS poses a serious (although likely overstated) threat to the governments of Iraq and Syria, over the last two administrations, the United States has itself forcibly overthrown the governments of Iraq and Libya – each time in defiance of international law. And along with ISIS, the United States has spent the last three years seeking to undermine the Syrian government. Additionally, it has sheltered Israel from meaningful accountability to the international community, allowing the crisis in Palestine to fester.

It would not be a stretch to say that the United States is actually a greater threat to peace and stability in the region than ISIS – not least because US policies in Iraq, Libya and Syria have largely paved the way for ISIS’s emergence as a major regional actor.

But perhaps more disturbingly, many of the same behaviors condemned by the Obama administration and used to justify its most recent campaign into Iraq and Syria are commonly perpetrated by US troops and are ubiquitous in the broader American society. Until these problems are better addressed, United States’ efforts to undermine ISIS will be akin to using a dirty rag to clean an infected wound.

Sexual Violence

The initial driver of US involvement was the outrage over ISIS’ capture of thousands of Yazidi women and the sexual violence subsequently exercised against them – horrors which provided moral credence to the war against ISIS in much the same way that the 2001 US war against the Taliban was justified in part by highlighting the plight of Afghan women living under their rule.

However, over the course of that war, and the subsequent 2003 war in Iraq, US soldiers and contractors repeatedly used rape as a weapon of war, both against prisoners and the local civilian population. But perhaps more disturbing than the crimes committed by US personnel against Iraqis and Afghans were the atrocities committed by servicemen against their fellow soldiers.

As many as one out of three female soldiers are raped over the course of their military careers. Up to 80 percent of these assaults go unreported, in large part because reported cases rarely result in convictions or proportional punishment. In fact, the victims are frequently punished socially and professionally for reporting abuse, and they are barred from suing the government for reparations even when wrongdoing is proven.

The stats are not much better in the broader population. As many as one in five women who attend college in America are sexually assaulted over the course of their academic career, often with no justice even when the crimes are reported. This is commensurate with the broader trend in America – according to White House estimates, roughly a fifth of all American women are raped at some point in their lives.

As in the military, most of these crimes are not reported to the police, and most reported rapes are never prosecuted – let alone result in convictions for the perpetrators.

If the crimes against thousands of women in Iraq and Syria justify a US mobilization that costs nearly $10 million per day, how much more militant should Americans be about resolving the tens of thousands of cases of sexual violence that go unpunished and largely unnoticed in the United States each year?

Astonishing Cruelty

In addition to sexual violence, there was widespread outrage over ISIS’s uncompromising brutality and the pornographic way they record and broadcast these acts – which include beheadings, crucifixions, and occasional incidences of cannibalism.

Of course, US soldiers and contractors have and continue to torture their enemies, often taking obscene photos to brag about and reminisce upon their acts. The contractors who were implicated in these abuses have never been prosecuted. Instead, one whistleblower who initially exposed these crimes, Chelsea Manning, has been sentenced to 35 years in prison.

There are further reports of US servicemen committing massacres, desecrating the corpses of their enemies, or even hunting the locals for sport while collecting photos, and even body parts, as trophies. And these are just a sampling of the acts which have been picked up by war correspondents and detailed in the media – many more crimes have never received exposure abroad, with crimes committed against Iraqis and Afghans by US servicemen going largely under-prosecuted or altogether unprosecuted.

Because these atrocities are not sufficiently dealt with by the United States, the governments of Iraq and Afghanistan have demanded the right to try Americans in their own courts.However, as protecting US politicians and soldiers from international accountability formed the basis of US opposition to establishing or joining the International Criminal Court, the Obama Administration refused to cede anything to these nascent states.

As a result, concerns about accountability proved to be the main obstacle in the US reaching a security agreement with Afghanistan – and Iraq’s refusal to grant US soldiers immunity was the reason the US ultimately abandoned the pursuit of a status of forces agreement there, contributing significantly to the security vacuum that allowed ISIS to rebuild in Iraq and expand into Syria. That is, ISIS’s crimes were largely enabled by America’s refusal to face up to its own.

Americans should bear this in mind as the Obama Administration loosens its already overly permissive standards vis à vis collateral damage and targeting civilians in its current campaign. The killing of innocents is not somehow morally superior if committed remotely by a drone or missile rather than the tools at ISIS’ disposal.

Religious Persecution

Finally, many Westerners have been horrified by ISIS’s persecution of religious minorities (especially crimes against Christians). However, the United States is complicit in this as well: US policies in Iraq helped spark this cycle of sectarian violence.

Meanwhile, its own armed forces were indoctrinated with anti-Muslim propaganda – complete with recommendations for servicemen to resort to “Hiroshima tactics,” in a “total war against Islam,” in which protections for civilians were “no longer relevant.” 

Reflective of this mentality, the armed forces have been heavily infiltrated by white-supremacists, neo-Nazis and other hate groups who believe and act as though they are engaged in a holy war to begin in the Middle East and then be carried back into America. This institutionalized misrepresentation of Islam and dehumanization of Muslims probably played a significant role in the aforementioned atrocities.

However, this is hardly just an issue in the Army. Anti-Muslim discrimination and hate crimes are pervasive in America, from the classroom to the boardroom. In the popular culture, Islamophobia transcends the political spectrum and is fairly mainstream – to the point where pundits and politicians can openly call for Muslim internment camps, or push for laws restricting or altogether banning Muslims from practicing their faith, even as many of these same people work to obliterate the lines between the (Christian) church and state.

Muslim voices which could unapologetically challenge these tropes are largely excluded from the public discourse in favor of“house-Muslims“ who will nod their heads in condemnation of terrorism (emphasizing that most Muslims are “moderates“) while uncritically calling for (liberal) reform and revolution in Muslim lands of which they are no longer residents (if they ever were) – and all without voicing much (if any) substantive criticism of the Western countries in which they reside, beyond the narrow concerns about discrimination and persecution.

And yet despite these compliant spokespeople, and the fact that only 6 percent of terror incidents in the United States have been carried out by Muslims over the last 30 years (and the threat of terrorism is itself overblown), Muslims are frequently subjected to arbitrary surveillance and detention, as well as legal entrapment.

All of these practices are considered crimes against humanity according to the Universal Declaration of Human Rights, which the US ostensibly champions everywhere else in the world . . . perhaps nowhere more than in Muslim-majority countries – seven of which the US has bombed in the last 6 years, almost always under the auspices of “humanitarian intervention.”

Authentic Outrage, Authentic Patriotism

Criticisms like these invariably evoke charges of anti-Americanism among reactionary readers – unduly. If one were truly committed to defending America and promoting its values, if sincerely outraged by the sorts of atrocities committed by ISIS – rather than sanctioning condescending and counterproductive incursions abroad, Americans should dedicate much more time and energy to responding to these same problems within the United States and its institutions abroad.

In this way, the United States could respond to the ISIS challenge by growing better and stronger, rather than undermining American’s interests and freedoms in the name of “security.”

By Musa al-Gharbi

Image: Warning: 72 virgin dating service. Apply here

6 Million People Killed In CIA Secret Wars Against Third World Countries

This is a 6:26 minute teaser

John Stockwell, former CIA Station Chief in Angola in 1976, working for then Director of the CIA, George Bush. He spent 13 years in the agency. John Stockwell is the highest-ranking CIA official ever to leave the agency and go public. He ran a CIA intelligence-gathering post in Vietnam, was the task-force commander of the CIA’s secret war in Angola in 1975 and 1976, and was awarded the Medal of Merit before he resigned.

The clip is showing parts of a lecture that Stockwell gave in 1987, explaining the CIA’s secret war. A war he describes as ‘The Third World War’. Not because it is the thermonuclear exchange that is commonly meant, but because it was mainly waged against people in the third world countries. In Stockwell’s own words:

The six million people the CIA has helped to kill are people of the Mitumba Mountains of the Congo, the jungles of Southeast Asia, and the hills of northern Nicaragua. They are people without ICBMs or armies or navies, incapable of doing physical damage to the United States the 22,000 killed in Nicaragua, for example, are not Russians; they are not Cuban soldiers or advisors; they are not even mostly Sandinistas. A majority are rag-poor peasants, including large numbers of women and children.

Since its creation in 1947, the CIA has mounted approximately 3,000 major operations and 10,000 minor operations of this nature, every one of them illegal and many of them “bloody and gory beyond comprehension”.

The War On Democracy

‘The War On Democracy’ (2007), It explores the current and past relationship of Washington with Latin American countries such as Venezuela, Bolivia and Chile.

The film shows how serial US intervention, overt and covert, has toppled a series of legitimate governments in the Latin American region since the 1950s.

The democratically elected Chilean government of Salvador Allende, for example, was ousted by a US backed coup in 1973 and replaced by the military dictatorship of General Pinochet. Guatemala, Panama, Nicaragua, Honduras and El Salvador have all been invaded by the United States.

John Pilger interviews several ex-CIA agents who took part in secret campaigns against democratic countries in the region.

He investigates the School of the Americas in the US state of Georgia, where Pinochet’s torture squads were trained along with tyrants and death squad leaders in Haiti, El Salvador, Brazil and Argentina.

The film unearths the real story behind the attempted overthrow of Venezuela’s President Hugo Chávez in 2002 and how the people of the barrios of Caracas rose up to force his return to power.

It also looks at the wider rise of populist governments across South America lead by indigenous leaders intent on loosening the shackles of Washington and a fairer redistribution of the continent’s natural wealth.

John Pilger says:

“[The film] is about the struggle of people to free themselves from a modern form of slavery. These people describe a world not as American presidents like to see it as useful or expendable, they describe the power of courage and humanity among people with next to nothing. They reclaim noble words like democracy, freedom, liberation, justice, and in doing so they are defending the most basic human rights of all of us in a war being waged against all of us.”

Mexican Drug Cartels Are Worse Than ISIL

Western Obsession With The Islamic State Is Fueled More By Bigotry Than Any Genuine Assessment Of Risk Or Atrocities

The horrific rampage of the Islamic State of Iraq and the Levant (ISIL) has captured the world’s attention. Many Western commentators have characterized ISIL’s crimes as unique, no longer practiced anywhere else in the civilized world. They argue that the group’s barbarism is intrinsically Islamic, a product of the aggressive and archaic worldview that dominates the Muslim world. The ignorance of these claims is stunning.

While there are other organized groups whose depravity and threat to the United States far surpasses that of ISIL, none has engendered the same kind of collective indignation and hysteria. This raises a question: Are Americans primarily concerned with ISIL’s atrocities or with the fact that Muslims are committing these crimes?

For example, even as the U.S. media and policymakers radically inflate ISIL’s threat to the Middle East and United States, most Americans appear to be unaware of the scale of the atrocities committed by Mexican drug cartels and the threat they pose to the United States.

CARTELS VERSUS ISIL

A recent United Nations report estimated nearly 9,000 civilians have been killed and 17,386 wounded in Iraq in 2014, more than half since ISIL fighters seized large parts on northern Iraq in June. It is likely that the group is responsible another several thousand deaths in Syria. To be sure, these numbers are staggering.

But in 2013 drug cartels murdered more than 16,000 people in Mexico alone, and another 60,000 from 2006 to 2012 — a rate of more than one killing every half hour for the last seven years. What is worse, these are estimates from the Mexican government, which is known to deflate the actual death toll by about 50 percent.

Statistics alone do not convey the depravity and threat of the cartels.

They carry out hundreds of beheadings every year. In addition to decapitations, the cartels are known to dismember and otherwise mutilate the corpses of their victims — displaying piles of bodies prominently in towns to terrorize the public into compliance. They routinely target women and children to further intimidate communities. Like ISIL, the cartels use social media to post graphic images of their atrocious crimes.

The narcos also recruit child soldiers, molding boys as young as 11 into assassins or sending them on suicide missions during armed confrontations with Mexico’s army. They kidnap tens of thousands of children every year to use as drug mules or prostitutes or to simply kill and harvest their organs for sale on the black market. Those who dare to call for reforms often end up dead.

In September, with the apparent assistance of local police, cartels kidnapped and massacred 43 students at a teaching college near the Mexican town ofIguala in response to student protests. A search in the area for the students has uncovered a number of mass graves containing mutilated bodies burned almost beyond recognition, but none of the remains have been confirmed to be of the students.

While the Islamic militants have killed a handful of journalists, the cartels murdered as many as 57 since 2006 for reporting on cartel crimes or exposing government complicity with the criminals. Many of Mexico’s media have been effectively silenced by intimidation or bribes.

These censorship activities extend beyond professional media, with narcos tracking down and murdering ordinary citizens who criticize them on the Internet, leaving their naked and disemboweled corpses hanging in public squares.

Yet American intellectuals such as Sam Harris appear to be more outraged when Muslims protest or issue threats in response to blasphemous or anti-Muslim hate speech than when cartels murder dozens of journalists and systematically co-opt an entire country’s media.

Similarly, Westerners across various political spectrums were outraged when ISIL seized 1,500 Yazidi women, committing sexual violence against the captives and using them as slaves. Here again, the cartels’ capture and trafficking of women dwarfs ISIL’s crimes. Narcos hold tens of thousands of Mexican citizens as slaves for their various enterprises and systematically use rape as a weapon of war.

U.S. media have especially hyped ISIL’s violence against Americans. This summer ISIL beheaded two Americans and has warned about executing a third; additionally, one U.S. Marine has died in efforts to combat the group. By contrast, the cartels killed 293 Americans in Mexico from 2007 to 2010 and have repeatedly attacked U.S. consulates in Mexico. While ISIL’s beheadings are no doubt outrageous, the cartels tortured, dismembered and then cooked one of the Americans they captured — possibly eating him or feeding him to dogs.

The US government cannot formulate an effective response to the narcos’ severe threats because the American public is far too busy disparaging Islam while the US military kills Arabs and Muslims abroad.

The cartels’ atrocities are not restricted to the Mexican side of the border. From 2006 to 2010 as many as 5,700 Americans were killed in the U.S. by cartel-fueled drug violence. By contrast, 2,937 people were killed in the Sept. 11, 2001, attacks. Over the last decade, some 2,349 Americans were killed in Afghanistan, and 4,487 Americans died in Iraq. In four years the cartels have managed to cause the deaths of more Americans than during 9/11 or either of those wars.

Barack Obama’s administration claims ISIL poses a severe threat to U.S. interests and national security. However, the militants were primarily concerned with seizing and holding territory in Iraq and Syria until the U.S. began targeting them. Even now, while they have called for lone wolves to carry out attacks on targets in the United States, so far those arrested in connection to ISIL have been trying to go and fight abroad rather than plotting domestic attacks. To the extent ISIL wants to kill Americans, its primary tactic has been to try to lure U.S. troops to its turf by publicly executing citizens they already hold hostage.

In fact, several U.S. intelligence officials have asserted that ISIL poses no credible threat to the United States homeland.

However, the same cannot be said of the cartels.

Narcos have infiltrated at least 3,000 U.S. cities and are recruiting many Americans, including U.S. troops and law enforcement officers, to their organizations. They have an increasingly sophisticated and robust foundation in the U.S., with Mexican cartels now controlling more than 80 percent of the illicit drug trade in the United States and their top agents deployed to virtually every major metropolitan area. There are no realistic assessments indicating that ISIL could achieve a similar level of penetration in the United States.

EXPLAINING THE DISSONANCE

It is clear that the anti-ISIL campaign is not driven by the group’s relative threat to the United States or the scale or inhumane nature of their atrocities. If these were the primary considerations, the public would be far more terrified of and outraged by the narcos. Perhaps the U.S. would be mobilizing 50 nations to purge Mexico’s Sinaloa cartel rather than shielding it from prosecution, helping it polish off its rivals or even move drugs into the United States.

Some may argue that despite the asymmetries, the cartels are less of a threat than ISIL because ISIL is unified around an ideology, which is antithetical to the prevailing international order, while the cartels are concerned primarily with money. This is not true.

A good deal of the cartels’ violence is perpetrated ritualistically as part of their religion, which is centered, quite literally, on the worship of death. The narcosbuild and support churches all across Mexico to perpetuate their eschatology. One of the cartels, the Knights Templar (whose name evokes religious warfare), even boasts about its leader’s death and resurrection. When cartel members are killed, they are buried in lavish mausoleums, regarded as martyrs and commemorated in popular songs glorifying their exploits in all their brutality. Many of their members view the “martyrs” as heroes who diedresisting an international order that exploits Latin America and fighting the feckless governments that enable it. The cartels see their role as compensating for state failures in governance. The narco gospel, which derives fromCatholicism, is swiftly making inroads in the United States and Central America. In short, the cartels’ ideological disposition is no less pronounced than ISIL’s, if not worse.

Unfortunately, the U.S. government cannot formulate an effective response to these much more severe threats because the American public is far too busy disparaging Islam while the U.S. military kills Arabs and Muslims abroad. One thing is certain: America’s obsession with ISIL is fueled by Islamophobia rather than any empirical realities.

Musa al-Gharbi is an instructor in the Department of Government and Public Service at the University of Arizona, and an affiliate of the Southwest Initiative for the Study of Middle East Conflicts (SISMEC). #CrimesAgainstHumanity   #DAESH