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Bob Fitrakis
September 13, 2010

It’s happening here: mindless nationalism coupled with the acceptable of cold-hearted mass murder. Former mayor of New York Rudolph Giuliani’s appearance on Meet the Press underscores the rise of the new American jackboot movement.

Giuliani emerged as an apologist for forces in America that seek the clash of cultures, many driven by a longing for Armageddon and a Christian fundamentalist notion of the rapture. This idea of salvation through apocalypse echoes the Nazi belief that God was on their side during the World War II in the holocaust against perceived lesser people.

Giuliani shamelessly attacked Imam Feisal Abdul Rauf for wanting to build an Islamic community center in lower Manhattan. This makes no sense. Should we fight against building Christian community centers in Oklahoma City that are within a few blocks of the old federal building? After all, Tim McVeigh was a member of the racist and radical Christian Identity sect. Shouldn’t we suspect all Christians of being terrorists and murderers because McVeigh was a Christian?

There’s the good Imam and the bad Imam, Giuliani told David Gregory. Here’s the case for Rauf being the “bad” Imam: “..there’s the bad imam who said America is an accessory to September 11.” This is worth discussing openly. The United States government helped create al Qaeda in its battle against the Soviet Union. Our nation worked closely with the Saudis to finance and train this terrorist network. We also incubated the Taliban in the madressas of Pakistan. Several of the hijackers learned how to fly in the U.S. in Oklahoma, Florida, and New York. Sure, Presidents Reagan and Bush were calling them “freedom fighters,” but they were always terrorist thugs. So, an argument that our government was an accessory is more than plausible.

Giuliani’s next accusation was that the Imam is “bad” because he said that “America has more Muslim blood on its hands than vice versa.” We should not attack the Imam because he knows basic math and refuses to tell a convenient lie. In the aftermath of the first Gulf War alone, half a million Iraqi children died as a result of our illegal and inhumane bombing of the Iraq infrastructure. When asked by CBS’ Lesley Stahl on 6o Minutes asked Secretary of State Madeleine Albright “We have heard that half a million children have died [as a result of sanctions]. I mean, that’s more children than died in Hiroshima. And, you know, is the price worth it?” Albright replied: “I think this is a very hard choice, but the price — we think the price is worth it.”

After the first 3½ years of the Iraq War, Johns Hopkins Bloomberg School of Public Health reported that 654,965 Iraqis as a direct result of the U.S. invasion. The Hopkins study correctly used a “but for…” analysis, a common U.S. legal analysis. That is, had the U.S. not invaded Iraq, dismantled their police and army, and shocked and awed their people and infrastructure with massive bombings, how many more people would be alive today based on the expected death rates in the country. The U.S. military only likes to count the casualties we directly kill, not the ones who die as result of the ill-planned and haphazard invasion and occupation.

The vast majority of people killed in Iraq were Islamic. We can see from these two examples alone that the U.S. government is responsible for the deaths of more than a million Muslims. This is a holocaust against a Muslin country that was not a threat to the United States, had no weapons of mass destruction and, indeed, could not fly over two-thirds of its sovereign territory due to U.S. military presence.

The government of the United States, both the Clinton and W Bush administrations, has far more Muslim blood on its hands than the small U.S.-trained Islamic terrorist group al Qaeda has American blood on their hands. But, the key point is that terrorism is terrorism, and crimes against humanity are crimes against humanity whether done by the Bush administration or by bin Laden.

As long as the U.S. government continues to deny that its last president George W. Bush is a war criminal who should have been hung along with Saddam Hussein for crimes against humanity, we will proceed along a path that leads to endless war against Islamic people. This new crusade, that is blasphemy against Jesus, the Prince of Peace, will be embraced by opportunists like Giuliani. Giuliani’s rhetoric about Ground Zero signals that facts don’t matter, only blind nationalism, and that genocide against Muslims is acceptable. Gott Mit Uns.

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Bob Fitrakis is Editor & Publisher of https://freepress.org, where this article first appeared.