DOES THE UNITED STATES OF AMERICA, AS A NATION STATE, HAVE THE RIGHT TO EXIST?
By Michael O'McCarthy
In an earlier criticism of my piece on the right of the State of Israel to exist, David @ radioleft.com asked thus, if the United States of America had the right to exist? and then posited that a state does not have the right to exist “… other than by international agreement. All political boundaries are manmade. Every country is artificial.”
Let me state a preface to my conclusion --- the state of Israel has more the moral, (historical) and legal right to exist than the United States of America:
It is my position that the current US domestic and foreign policy is shaped in large part by the official and social refusal of the government and people of the United States to redress the race-based, genocidal programs against Native Americans, and those directed at African slaves and African Americans post slavery.
This systemic denial, blaming the victim for being a “complainer,” and the obfuscation of facts as a result, allows the individual US citizen to dismiss both the historic acts of its government and citizenry, their continuation in variant forms today, and to refuse any responsibility to “repair the damage done” … to make appropriate amends to those victims. In the case of African American slavery a good part of this denial is due to the refusal of both the government and the citizens to acknowledge that the institution of slavery was the primary economic engine in the growth of the United States of America. (*1)
That is because systemic racism is alive and toxic within the United States.
In looking at the issues involved in the question of whether the US has the right to exist goes beyond the standard stated by David; that now used by the United Nations properly or not. This “sanction” of course, potentially flies in the face of the right of national liberation, especially given the history of imperialism, colonialism and neo-colonialism. It raises the issue of the “right to self-determination” by nations – giving the national population the right to determine the nature of the state and its right to exist.
In the case of the Native American nations that right was denied by forces of arms. (*2)
These issues of the “right to self-determination” and “national liberation” create a real problem for the legal model. Coupled with the arbitrary, externally imposed boundaries by the imperialist nations of France and Great Britain these issues create a complex arena in the Middle East in which to determine what nations ought to exist or not. We see this today in the battles between the disenfranchised Palestinian people and Jewish people and their nation, Israel; in Lebanon, Syria, Jordan, Iraq and Iran.
However, it must be noted that there are two status categories of the right of a given state “to exist” that have evolved and are generally accepted – the Legal and the Moral.
Previously, I addressed the complexities of what created Israel and the current status of the Palestinian people. (*3) I will allow that to suffice.
The question is does the United States of America have the right to exist as a nation state?
1- The Legal Right of a nation to Exist:
“In international politics, unilateral declarations of independence are generally frowned upon, since preservation of territory is one of the few things that most countries of the world agree upon.
In international law, there are multiple schools of thought regarding the creation of statehood. One of these, the declarative theory of statehood holds that a self-declared state that meets certain criteria is indeed a state, even if not recognized by any other nation. Conversely, the constitutive theory of statehood requires that a self-declared state receive at least a minimal level of acknowledgement (but not formal recognition) by existing states. …” (Wikipedia.)
In the case of the United States of America:
Morocco was the first country in the World to recognize the newly sovereign United States in 1777. France and Spain granted recognition in 1778. In April 1782 Dutch newspapers announced that the Prince of Orange, Willem V, and Princess Wilhelmina received John Adams at the Palace Huis TenBosch and formally proclaimed the Dutch Republic's recognition of the United States of
States of America. Great Britain recognized US independence and it’s “right to exist” by King George at the Treaty Paris, 1783.
Many states have come into being through a Declaration of Independence. The legality of a Declaration of Independence is often the subject of debate and unsurprisingly the previous government typically asserts that a Declaration of Independence is illegal. (Wikipedia.)
The history of United States of America, its development and the treatment of the Native American would deny it that right if the native population could have had a voice to do so:
Throughout the 17th and early 18th centuries, England (and later Great Britain) established new colonies, took over Dutch colonies, and split others. With the division of the Carolinas, in 1729, and the colonization of Georgia, in 1732, the British colonies in North America, excluding Canada, numbered thirteen. These thirteen colonies would be drawn closer together over the coming decades. …
Before the European colonization of the Americas, a process that began at the end of the 15th century, the present-day continental U.S. was inhabited exclusively by Native Americans and Alaska Natives, who arrived on the continent over a period that may have begun 35,000 years ago and may have ended as recently as 11,000 years ago.
The first confirmed European landing was by a Spaniard, Juan Ponce de Leon, who landed in 1513 in Florida, and as part of his claim, the first European settlement was established by Don Pedro Menendez de Aviles on the site of a Timucuan Indian village in 1565 at St. Augustine, Florida. The first successful English settlement was at Jamestown, Virginia, in 1607, followed in 1620 by the Pilgrims' landing at Plymouth, Massachusetts. (Wikipedia.)
The native peoples lived within the territories that are defined loosely speaking as “tribal lands.” Estimates of the number of Native Americans living on the continent vary greatly:
Estimates of how many people were living in the Americas when Columbus arrived have varied tremendously; in the 20th century scholarly estimates ranged from a low of 8.4 million to a high of 112.5 million persons. (Wikipedia.)
Other sources double and triple that number.
However, without regard to the already established Native American political entities, culture or history, the European colonists took position of those territories through force of arms and then in 1776 laid “legal” claim to those territories in a victory over the English King George’s right to the domain.
Thus, in their Declaration of Independence and then in the subsequent ratification these caucasion, land-owning males decreed all territories then called states a unified national state.
They especially disallowed the voting rights to white males without land, white females of any status, African slaves and of course, the native population which they set out to remove from the lands and then eradicate as best possible. They amended the process out of necessity by allowing any non-indentured white males the vote. Everyone else was NOT considered as one of those enfranchised by the phrase “all men are created equal.”
Having achieved the official recognition of the four most powerful European imperial powers of the time the United States continued the systematic eradication of the remaining native population and the rationale of its actions:
The earliest European immigrants offered two principal explanations for the population decline of the American natives. The first was the brutal practices of the Spanish conquistadores, as recorded by the Spanish themselves, most notably by the Dominican friar Bartolomé de Las Casas, whose writings vividly depict atrocities committed on the natives by the Spanish.
The second explanation was religious: God had removed the natives as part of His divine plan in order to make way for a new Christian civilization. Many natives of the Americas also understood their troubles in terms of religious or supernatural causes. Scholars now believe that, among the various contributing factors, epidemic disease was the overwhelming cause of the population decline of the American….” Up until the time of the establishment of the United States of America.
2 - The “moral right of a state to exist”:
We Have The Right To Exist, Black Thistle Press: Chapter II - The Western European colonists and their Indian interface.
Early United States Indian policy -
The United States of America is founded on an unresolvable dilemma, because the land upon which that nation claims sovereignty is not theirs. On one hand, the formulators of the U.S. Constitution defined the Aboriginal Indigenous peoples and nations as non-existent, describing us as a "vast extent of unpeopled territory." On the other hand, the European colonists knew very well that Aboriginal Indigenous peoples and nations were real. The White men who framed the United States Constitution intended that their new nation "endure not only for ages but indeed forever." They understood that the foundation of their future was the legacy of their past and present, and sought to resolve their quandary by dealing with their Indians, who were patrilineally Lislakh and therefore came within the Western European paradigm--although these Indians were not the Aboriginal Indigenous people who owned the land.
The first executive act of George Washington, President of the United States, after inaugural expressions of divine support and Congressional compliments, and a discussion of Presidential pay, was the following message to the Senate dated May 25, 1789, New York:
In pursuance of the order of the late Congress, treaties between the United States and several nations of Indians have been negotiated and signed. These treaties, with sundry papers respecting them, I now lay before you, for your consideration and advice, by the hands of General Knox, under whose official superintendence the business was transacted, and who will be ready to communicate to you any information on such points as may appear to require it.
Six years earlier, General George Washington had outlined the principles of his Indian policy in a letter included in the published papers of the Continental Congress:
... the faith of the United States stands pledged to grant portions of the uncultivated [sic] lands as a bounty to [the U.S.] army, and in reward of their courage and fidelity, and the public finances do not admit of any considerable expenditure to extinguish the claims upon such lands; because it is become necessary, by increase of domestic population and emigrations from abroad, to make speedy provision for extending the settlement of the territories of the United States, and because the public creditors have been led to believe and have a right to expect that those territories will be speedily improved into a fund towards the security and payment of the national debt. Nor in the opinion of the committee can the Indians [sic] themselves have any reasonable objections against the establishment recommended ...[v]
With racist blindness to the irony, the United States added genocide to the colonization tactics applied to themselves by King George III. The Americans took the European colonial practices under which they themselves had suffered, and added yet another layer of violence. They attacked the Aboriginal Indigenous people of this Continent with such brutality that everyone from Adolf Hitler to the Mongols of Genghis Khan's homeland have considered U.S. history the archetype of genocide. The founding fathers set the cornerstone of the land of the free on stolen property soaked with blood.
On September 17, 1787, Congress ratified the U.S. Constitution. Through the Commerce Clause (Section 8), they used categorical Indians to unilaterally try to abrogate the inherent Sovereign right of the Aboriginal Indigenous nations to trade. This violation of International Law was expanded and elaborated with additional Acts of Congress, so-called Indian treaties, executive orders, Government-monopoly trade, federal bureaucracies, and State statutes. The Indian pseudo-structure created by the United States is still here, and it's still a violation of Aboriginal Indigenous peoples' natural rights, human rights, property rights and Sovereignty.
GENOCIDE:
The genocide then waged by the government of the United States and its citizens against the Native American continued by virtually every method that could be applied, from savage displacement and violate death at the hands of armed civilians, both under the color of state law and as sanctioned vigilantes. However, it was the legally sanctioned actions of the United States’ government in its use of armed forces that inflicted mass murder on the population of warriors and civilian Native populations and at last, the forced removal from their ancestral homelands and detention in concentration camps, (known as “reservations”) that all but ended the social existence of the native american:
Those that the United States of America could not kill, they placed in gulags.
Some scholars believe that it does. Historian David Stannard, for example, has argued that
"The destruction of the Indians of the Americas was, far and away, the most massive act of genocide in the history of the world." Stannard believes that the natives of the Americas were deliberately and systematically exterminated over the course of several centuries, and that the process continues to the present day. Stannard estimates that almost 100 million American indigenous people have been killed what he calls the American Holocaust.
By any standard of “human rights” this act of genocide would deny the moral right of any government to exist. The very nature of the development of the government of The United States would be further proven by its method of economic development. While there was an attempt to create an institution of slavery of the Native American, it failed, due in part to European carried diseases and in part because of the ability of the Native American to escape and disappear into the homeland. (**)
What occurred next is signature to both the social and economic development of the nation of the United States of America:
Simultaneous with the genocide against the native population was the introduction of another subject population. This would become one of the largest acts of genocide in world history: that of African slave holocaust.
Slavery during the 16 th to 18th centuries:
In the sixteenth century, Ahmad Al-Mansur, the Golden overthrew the Sonhai empire to the south and retook coastal areas from the Spanish. The region became a major destination for trans-Saharan slave trade despite internal conflict over whether free men could be made slaves under Islamic law. (http://africanhistory.about.com/library/bl/bl-Independence-NA1.ht)
African slaves were transported to Spanish and Portuguese colonies in the Caribbean, Mexico, and Central & South America, starting very early in the 16th century.
Landowners in the American colonies originally met their need for forced labor by enslaving a limited number of Natives, and "hiring" many more European indentured servants. In exchange for their transportation across the Atlantic, the servants committed to work for the landowner for 4 to 7 years. A few slaves were imported from Africa as early as 1619. With the spread of tobacco farming in the 1670's, and the diminishing number of people willing to sign-on as indentured servants in the 1680's, increasing numbers of slaves were brought in from Africa. They replaced Native American slaves, who were found to be susceptible to diseases of European origin. "...small numbers of white people were also enslaved by kidnapping, or for crimes or debts." 2 The Africans "came from many racial stocks and many tribes, from the spirited Hausas, the gentle Mandingos, the creative Yorubas, from the Igbos, Efiks and Krus, from the proud Fantins, the warlike Ashantis, the shrewd Dahomeans, the Binis and Sengalese."
Both slave transportation, and slavery itself in the U.S. were brutal institutions. It was not unknown to have a 50% mortality rate during the passage from Africa. Slaves who were too ill to survive the trip were sometimes thrown overboard to drown. …(A brief history of the "peculiar Institution" of slavery 16th-18th centuries, in North America & Britain. (http://www.religioustolerance.org/sla_hist.htm#16)
Estimates of the number of Africans made slaves are roughly 10-15 million. The English and Portuguese being the worst transgressors.
In North Africa, the main slave markets were in Morocco, Algiers, Tripoli and Cairo.
The slave trade resulted in approximately 100 million people being lost on the continent if one includes deaths during slave trade-related wars, slaves lost during the middle passage (across the ocean) and those landing alive in other countries. At least 15 million Africans landed alive as slaves in the Americas during the whole slave trade period. (http://www.maritimeheritage.org/ports/africa/africa.html)
That “Peculiar Institution:”
Slavery has existed in varying forms throughout the history of humankind. Its embedded in both native European, Asian Arabic and African society. It came to a nexus, however, during the transatlantic slave trade that fed what became "the Americas."
The major world powers were Great Britain, Spain, Portugal and France. Great Britain and Spain became the primary colonizing forces in Americas. They colonized previously Native occupied lands in what would become North America with Great Britain becoming the prominent cultural force in what would become The United States of America.
The Peculiar Institution came to be the predominant means of production when the attempted enslavement of Native Americans failed and indentured poor Caucasians could not meet production demands.
Thus, not only were Africans kidnapped and enslaved in the colonies and later in the established state of the US the plantation institution was constructed to breed them for labor purposes. Like the theory of producing thoroughbred livestock, Africans of various tribes with varying physical attributes were forced into industrial cohabitation, usually the strongest and youngest of males and females in the attempt to produce a longer lasting producer and one who would produce the greater production and breeding profit.
And unlike the slavery that generally existed throughout the culture of slavery, where slaves could gain their freedom through exchange, marriage or work, the American Slave was adjudicated as property for life. This institution forever cast the African outside the mainstream of American culture and fractured all family and national (tribal) cultural ties to the homeland. (Albeit, the "homeland" of Africa was being destroyed in the process of the slave trade and colonization in which fabricated "national" structures (colonies) were being constructed to suit the needs of the European imperialists.
The so-called Civil War, (alternately know as the War Between The States - the War of Secession – the War for Southern Independence,) was begun by the slave bound economic states of what would become the Confederate States of America.
This claim of the right to political secession clearly rebutted the “right of the United States to exist” as one entity. Based upon a strict constructionist interpretation of the Constitution and Articles of Confederation, the CSA seceded. The failure of a constitutional remedy led to a war over slavery and the “means of production” of the state’s economy, where it would be allowed in imperial America, and what imperial expansionist plans of the CSA would be permitted by the “Union.”
To defeat the CSA the Union declared the Emancipation Proclamation, freeing all slaves within the Confederacy only. Slaves within the Union remained enslaved.
With victory the Union established a program of limited “Reconstruction” but within ten years, permitted the patriots of the Confederacy to overthrow the measure of civil equality and institute an apartheid regime which was ruled by violence and intimidation both under color of state law and at the mercy of caucasion terrorist organizations in the form of armed civilian militias, i.e., the Klu Klux Klan.
Until the voting rights act of 1964, 99 years AFTER the Emancipation Proclamation, Africans were arbitrarily disenfranchised in various states within the “Union.”
Symptomatic of institutional discrimination and exploitation, women of all color were disenfranchised and subject to both domestic and legal chattel until they won the right to vote in 1920. Consistent with institutional discrimination and exploitation, children were treated as chattel, without rights until the Child Labor Laws of the mid-nineteen thirties.
The westward expansionist plans of the CSA shadowed the imperialist victories of the US in the war between the “Republic of Texas” and Mexico and the “Mexican American” war which followed. In those two caucasion male-engineered wars and its victory over the CSA, the US took dominion over the native Hispanic populations of the southwest; The Treaty of Guadalupe Hidalgo ended the Mexican-American War. Under the treaty, Mexico surrendered a vast tract of land (known as the Mexican Cession) to the United States for a sum of USD $15 million.
The cession included parts of the modern-day states of Texas, Colorado, Arizona, New Mexico, and Wyoming, and the whole of California, Nevada, and Utah. The remainder of what are today the states of Arizona and New Mexico was later ceded under the 1853 Gadsden Purchase.
On February 2, 1848, the treaty was signed by Antonio López de Santa Anna and Nicholas P. Trist at the Villa of Guadalupe (today Gustavo A. Madero), a few kilometers to the north of Mexico City, and subsequently ratified by the United States Senate on March 10 and by Mexico on May 19, 1848.
This “treaty” was without regard to the political rights or agreement of its citizenry. Arguments that the land was barren, uninhabitable and scarcely populated dominate the rationale for its theft and occupation.
Mexico lost more than 500,000 square miles (1,300,000 square km) of land, which was almost half of its territory. (It ought be noted that the citizens of Mexico and the Hispanics of the areas of concern continue to view those lands, the lands into which many “illegals” transit, as their native domain.)
Throughout the history of the United States Southwest states, discrimination, subjugation and exploitation hallmark the relationship between Hispanic natives and the “gringo” landowners.
Racism, a psycho-cultural genocidal ideology: the psychology of US agrarian and capitalist development in the US:
In studying the history of the transmigration of the human species, (assuming a scientific perspective rather than one of organized superstition and especially that of the Judeo-Christian fiction which in the end produces a blond blue-eyed Adam and Eve, a cross between Charleton Heston and Jeffrey Hunter,) it is clear that all of humanity is of "African" origin. Thus, racism is the product of political biases and prejudices rather than natural deduction.
All the more relevant, in studying the slave trade and most specifically that of the North African-European connection inclusive of the history of Morocco and of the Moors, one learns of the absolute falsity of the construct of European, Christian racism. It was of a strain that was toxically pernicious in the politics of Catholic Spanish, Portuguese and Protestant British imperialism.
Relevant to North America, this strain of Protestant racism was the worst creating a form of psycho-cultural genocidal ideology which cast both the Native American and the African as the spawn of the Devil and thus, nonhuman.
This racism has been dominant in US foreign policy from the Monroe Doctrine and its neo-colonial intervention in Hispanic America, the colonization of Hawaii, the Philippines, in the wars with Japan and Korea, Southeast Asia and now in the Middle East. Coupled with its corporate state ideology and military force it is a substantive raison detr’e in the US effort to rule the world. The goal is to fulfill its superstitious mandate culminating in a white Christian Heaven afterlife.
Thus, the political agenda of the United States of America, from its white, neo-aristocratic male founders, morphed into the crypto-Greco-Roman Slavocracy of the Confederate States of America, has always been, and continues today as that based upon caucasion Christian male supremacy. Cosmetic concessions to females, children, people of color, Catholics and Jews have taken place out of political pragmatism and to some degree out of the natural social evolution which takes place within the possibilities of a republican form of government.
Does the United States of America have the right to exist as a national political entity?
Provisionally legally, based upon the criteria of recognition by its co-conspirators in the genocide of the slave trade and destruction of native populations and by virtue of longevity and subsequent recognition by other states.
Morally?
Perhaps only a few like kind national situations come close to that of the US:
1- South Africa: the colonialist apartheid government was overthrown by a majority native population.
2- Rhodesia: the colonialist government was overthrown by a majority native population.
3- Australia: Insufficient native population to overthrow the white colonial rulers.
The two former nations were considered as abominations by civilized society, with the exception of the United States until the last days of their survival.
Nazi Germany, was the last great "white" nation to attempt genocide, clearly did not have either the moral or legal right to exist, and by virtue of losing a war for world conquest, was destroyed and surviving, primary principles brought before a world court and found guilty of crimes against humanity.
Anecdotally, contemporary history indicates a continued pattern of unconstitutional rule by the government of the United States:
1- The theft of the election of 2000 – sanctioned by the Supreme Court and Congress of the US.
2- The illegal war against the nation of Iraq ordered by the President and his use of fraudulent evidence put forth before the Congress and the people of the United States, and before the governing body of the United Nations; a war sanctioned and funded by the Congress of the United States.
3- The institution of unconstitutional treatment of detainees, both domestic and foreign in contravention of the Geneva Convention; The Patriot Act, I and II: illegal surveillance and invasion of privacy ordered by the President and sanctioned by the Congress of the United States.
4- The arguable legitimacy of the imprisonment of some 2.5 million, mostly African and Hispanic Americans.
Could the United States stand the test of such international, judicial scrutiny?
NO, is the answer of history.
I concur and the current white male racist corporate state of George W. Bush has acknowledged that by fiat in refusing sign onto the provisions of any international court.
Suits continue by Native Americans, demands for reparations to African Americans are current.
Two of the obvious claimants to redress are Hispanics who wage an informal claim to land and citizenship via constant illegal immigration. Generations of women suffered as property and were and are subject to barbaric battery and rape and their heirs have yet to claim compensation as a class.
A Suggested Marginal solution:
The impractical reality of disassembling the structure of the United States is obvious. It is the most powerful military power in the world and would not succumb. Thus, the demand must be for the impeachment and trial of arguably the “worst President in the history of the United States” and his administration.
However, such a “nation” might be saved by the Impeachment and convening of a national congress to redress the grievances of those peoples who suffered its barbarism.
Given the generational problems of its victims, direct reparations to a funding of universal free education, from childcare, elementary, high school, tech school, college-university through post-doctoral, with health care, housing, transportation and living allowance might be sufficient. In contrast to the expected plaint of the cost, the current disclosed amount spent on the illegal war in Iraq is $300 billion dollars.
Using the model of “drip down,” these monies spent in the local economies would not only enhance the lives of the recipients, provide greater skill sets viable for employment, but employ both middle class, working class, and poverty level citizens.
Accompanied by an appropriate official apology from the White House and Congress, a revisit to tribal land reorganization, this would be a reasonable starting point for negotiations.
-the end-
Footnotes:
(**) Native Americans could not become citizens before 1924 and were not given the right to vote until 20 years later.
(*1) Segment 1: "Slavery and the Making of America." Real Media. MP3.
From Dialogue: "Slavery was the dominant economic engine of early America. It was present in every region and by the mid-19th century exceeded every other “product” in its monetary value to the society. Given that slavery in America lasted from 1619 to 1865 and was a direct contradiction of professed national values it is clearly the central narrative of American history. This is the argument of James and Lois Horton who documented it in this conversation." James and Lois Horton are the authors of Slavery and the Making of America.
(**2)
In contemporary history these challenges to sovereignty faced nations that chose to overthrow the regimes of the aristocrats, France and Russia being notable examples. Both had long imperial histories, both had despotic, dictatorial autocracies. Both changed in violent revolutions and their new governments chose new forms of popular or democratic models.
France chose a republican form of government and the capitalist-imperialist, economic model; Russia chose a socialist, anti-democratic model.
France faced little international opposition as the aristocratic model was under siege throughout the “modern” world and it quickly aligned itself with the other capitalist-imperialist powers of Britain and the United States.
Deeming the capitalist-imperialist model as insufficient to solve the domestic and international problems of its nation, (and an end to Russia’s involvement in the First World War,) the revolutionaries choose an anti-royalist, anti-capitalist-imperialist government.
Immediately Russia became embroiled in a pro-longed civil war. The new government immediately faced the issue of the right of self-determination as it was invaded by twenty-one pro-royalist and capitalist armed forces led by Great Britain and the United States of America. Only because of its victory in the civil war and its repulsion of the foreign armies did the Soviet Union survive, in the process it mutated into what was called “War Communism.” It would not be until the ascension of the “dictatorship of the proletariat,” which in fact was a dictatorship of the Communist (Stalinist) Party that the “moral right to exist” would have international value.
Clearly, and certainly after WWII, the West determined that the Soviet Union did not have the “moral” right to exist and set about destroying it. A prolonged war of “containment” followed the warning shot by President Harry Truman when he demonstrated the power of the atomic bomb in Japan. Whether or not that qualified as the beginning of the Third World War is debatable. President Ronald Reagan finally fired the final broadside when he called the Soviet Union, “the Evil Empire.”
The issue for the “right to exist” today faces once Soviet-aligned North Korea, that like North and South Vietnam was arbitrarily divided by the world powers after the Second World War.
Cuba, whose Native population was the victim of genocide by Spanish imperialism, then colonized, and when “liberated,” became a neo-colonial state of the United States. The revolutionaries of 1959 overthrew the dictatorship of Batista and threw off the neo-colonial control of the United States.
These are the only two Soviet-aligned nations remaining from the “Cold War” and both remain defiant of the United States and are so besieged by the United States.
China, the other Communist government, and arguably the most repressive, “Communist” government in history, has become an economic ally of the United States and thus does not face the external opposition of the former two. Its “moral” right to exist is sanctioned by the international corporate state under the auspices of the United State of America.
(*3) As for Israel, the Jews, Palestine and the Arabs: the historical animus between the two superstitious driven ideologies of Islam and Zionism surmounts the issues of legal borders and the status of state.
(However, what cannot be understated are autocratic divisions within the “middle east” engineered under the auspices of the United States by Britain that have created legitimate “national” issues. These add to the animus, i.e., the irritating issue of Iraq-Kuwait borders, which contributed to the Iraq-Kuwait invasion, and the war of “Desert Storm.”)
Islam:
Rights of Non-Muslims in an Islamic State, By Samuel Shahid
Concept of "Islamic State"
"An Islamic state is essentially an ideological state, and is thus radically different from a national state."
This statement made by Mawdudi lays the basic foundation for the political, economical, social, and religious system of all Islamic countries that impose the Islamic law. This ideological system intentionally discriminates between people according to their religious affiliations. Mawdudi, a prominent Pakistani Muslim scholar, summarizes the basic differences between Islamic and secular states as follows:
1) An Islamic state is ideological. People who reside in it are divided into Muslims, who believe in its ideology and non-Muslims who do not believe.
2) Responsibility for policy and administration of such a state "should rest primarily with those who believe in the Islamic ideology." Non-Muslims, therefore, cannot be asked to undertake or be entrusted with the responsibility of policymaking.
3) An Islamic state is bound to distinguish (i.e. discriminates) between Muslims and non-Muslims. However the Islamic law "Shari`a" guarantees to non-Muslims "certain specifically stated rights beyond which they are not permitted to meddle in the affairs of the state because they do not subscribe to its ideology." Once they embrace the Islamic faith, they "become equal participants in all matters concerning the state and the government."
The above view is the representative of the Hanifites, one of the four Islamic schools of jurisprudence. (http://answering-islam.org.uk/NonMuslims/rights.htm)
It reflects the supremacist nature of Islam as well as the worldview of Islam as a nation without borders. A nation in perpetual war with infidels. Therein lies the “ideological” foundation for radical Islam as espoused by Al Queda, et al. Likened to that of the Christian Conevangelicals, there will be no peace until the world is of one superstitious mind. Thus, the call for the elimination of Israel represents the most convenient political and military aims of radical Islam and its host nation states.
Zionism: I once again refer you to http://www.dailykos.com/story/2006/7/18/173530/709 for an insight into the colonial, racist Zionist view. (For a contrasting view of Jews and Judaism I suggest the following:
http://www.jewsagainstzionism.com/zionism/history.cfm.)
If you take these two mutually antagonistic views, force them into a position of opposing, competing, geographic confrontation, as was done by the caucasion European elitists, you have the current Middle East and a war of unforeseeable end with nuclear war as a real possibility.
I suggest again that the Middle Eastern war is NOT solely about the right of Israel to exist, nor about a sovereign Palestinian state. Nor is it solely about the corporate state’s demand for petrol: Like the evolution of racism from a subjective bias to a operative, albeit psychotic ideology, underlying this war threatening to engulf the entire world is the driving force of a superstitious-ideological battle between three militarized, organized superstitions:
1- Fundamentalist, Conevangelical Christianity, the most powerful and most dangerous.
2- Zionism
3- Radical Islam
In the current, dangerous confrontation the latter two present the immediate danger
