02/03/16 – John Feffer – The Scott Horton Show

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All right, y'all welcome to the show.
I'm Scott Horton.
It's my show, The Scott Horton Show.
And next up, it's our friend, Jon Pfeffer.
This is a little bit along the same lines of our previous interview, but just a little bit.
The article is Life in the Gray Zone, and of course, it's at foreignpolicyinfocus, fpif.org, as well as antiwar.com.
Welcome back to the show, Jon.
How are you?
Fine.
Thanks for having me on the show.
Very happy to have you back here.
And so, the gray zone, this whole thing was mentioned by our previous guest, Ira Chernus, about how ISIS has a strategy of trying to divide the American people from the Muslims among us.
Could you please elaborate, sir?
Sure.
Well, you know, ISIS basically has launched a war, not so much against us, i.e., the West.
The war is largely being waged against fellow Muslims, and that's largely because of where ISIS is located.
It's located in the Middle East.
It's not located in Brooklyn so much, or San Francisco.
And it is a war, basically, for the hearts and minds of Muslims.
And ISIS has its own conception of what Islam should be.
It's basically a 6th century A.D. conception of Islam.
And it believes that any Muslim that does not basically swear allegiance to the caliphate is a Muslim that has stood against ISIS.
In other words, ISIS has the same kind of philosophy as George W. Bush had, and that is you're either with us or against us.
And anybody who's against us, anybody who's against the caliphate, is basically living in what they call the gray zone.
And the gray zone is basically Muslims living in Europe who have decided to live in Europe as Europeans, or it could be Muslims living throughout the Middle East who have absolutely no intention of either fighting for or swearing allegiance to the caliphate.
But it, of course, includes a wide range of non-Muslims, Christians, Jews, anybody, frankly, who doesn't subscribe to ISIS's philosophy.
Well, and then so it's a PR battle as to who's betraying Islam, the crazy headchoppers or the people who would dare to commit the sin to live among a bunch of post-Christians in France.
That's correct.
And, you know, this is, in some sense, it's a continuation of the struggle that Al-Qaeda put forward back in the 90s and in the 2000s.
It's a little bit more extreme.
Al-Qaeda and ISIS don't really get along.
But they both had this conception that their brand of Islam would gradually take over the Islamic world.
And once that took place, perhaps they would have enough strength to take on the West.
But this is a philosophy that is accepted by a minuscule number of Muslims in the world.
And we're talking about 1.2, 1.3 billion people in the world.
And we're only talking about tens of thousands of adherents of ISIS.
Right.
Right.
Well, and boy, there's a part of the narrative that never gets explained very thoroughly.
And thanks for mentioning that.
And then.
So I wonder, has Abu Bakr al-Baghdadi, the so-called self-declared caliph Ibrahim there, has he hired John Kerry to be his PR man?
Because I saw the Secretary of State was saying, oh, yeah, well, you know, the Islamic State, they're infidels.
Or what was the quote?
I'm getting the quote wrong.
I think I have it here somewhere, though, where, yeah, no apostates.
He calls the Islamic a white Presbyterian or Episcopalian or Lutheran from the northwest of the middle part of North America, says that Baghdadi and his men are apostates.
And I'm thinking that, come on, they must have paid him off to say that, right?
Well, that is valuable recruitment material, I'm sure, for ISIS, as is most of the statements by Donald Trump, the other kind of candidates in this election year, all of whom kind of feed ISIS lines, whether it's their Islamophobia in the case of Donald Trump saying that there should be no Muslims admitted into the United States or Ben Carson saying that there should be no Muslim president.
All of this for ISIS confirms the notion that there is no place for Muslims in the West.
In other words, there is, frankly, no viable gray zone that Muslims really should make a choice between us, the caliphate, and them, who will never accept Muslims.
And this polarization, of course, is not just taking place in the United States, it's taking place throughout the world, perhaps most vividly, most disturbingly in Europe, where the kind of far right wing, the most extreme versions of Donald Trump, if you will, in Europe have indulged in the same kind of Islamophobia, basically saying there's no room in Europe for Muslims, even though Muslims have lived in Europe for hundreds of years, and in the case of the Balkans for a thousand years or so.
And now, it's true, too, isn't it, that in Europe, by and large, Muslims are much more alienated from society than they are here, because, I guess, mostly, most Muslim Americans are recent arrivals, and they tend to be from the upper classes of the countries that they fled from, rather than tired, poor, huddled masses.
They all have PhDs and big houses.
Yes.
I mean, there is a definite socioeconomic difference between Muslims in the United States and Muslims in Europe, and that means that, essentially, Muslims in Europe suffer from a double stigma.
They're treated like Mexicans.
Precisely.
Exactly.
And, you know, at one point for Europe, that was fine.
I mean, Europe needed, quote-unquote, their Mexicans.
They needed migrant labor throughout the 1960s and 1970s, when European economies were growing, and increasingly, Europeans, indigenous Europeans, were not interested in taking the dirty, dangerous jobs.
And so, they brought in folks from Turkey, from North Africa, and so forth.
But that is not really the case any longer.
European economies, largely, are stagnant, large unemployment rates, and so the folks that had previously been absolutely needed for economic growth are seen as competitors in the economic marketplace.
Yeah.
And, you know, I'm sorry, I actually don't really remember specifically off the top of my head, but I'd be willing to bet a hundred bucks that you and I have talked about in, say, 2011, 2012, that me saying something to you like, geez, John, doesn't it seem dangerous for America and its NATO and GCC allies to be supporting a bunch of suicide bomber jihadists against Assad in Syria?
And I'm pretty sure you would have said something like, yeah, you know, this could be problematic for the future, something like that.
I mean, this is the kind of fire they're playing with.
It's like magnesium, which burns really hot.
Right.
Yeah, I mean, you're absolutely right.
And you know, the United States made a decision a long time ago, in the 1940s, actually, to make a strong alliance with the House of Saud in Saudi Arabia.
And throughout the Cold War, there was a perception that our religious allies in Saudi Arabia and throughout the Middle East were useful in the fight against communism and the fight against nationalism.
And of course, those roosters or those chickens have come home to roost.
And but the United States has not severed its relationship with Saudi Arabia.
It's it's and you can even see this in in the in the current elections.
I mean, even Bernie Sanders, unbelievably, would say that the United States has to get Saudi Arabia to put more boots on the ground against ISIS, against the Islamic State without realizing in some sense that there's a strong ideological affinity between Saudi Arabia and ISIS, even if at a formal rhetorical level, the Saudi government is not going to say that it supports ISIS.
Right.
And meanwhile, of course, the U.S.
Army is Saudi's foreign legion.
They don't have their own.
Well, the Saudi actually this this is a very disturbing development, and that is that the Saudi government has decided that particularly after the nuclear agreement between the United States and Iran, that the Saudi Saudi military has to import even more weapons than it has been importing, many of which come from the United States.
So Saudi government is expecting a major increase in its military fighting capability.
But they've got no field army, no real one, just internal Gestapo forces.
Right.
And I'm sorry, because now we're out of time for this segment.
That's the question when we get back from this break with the great John Pfeffer.
He's at FPIF foreign policy in focus.
Great stable of writers over there and more about the gray zone after this.
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All right, you guys.
Welcome back.
Well, we got to mention this in a minute, I guess.
Obama right now is giving his speech at a mosque.
On sort of kind of the same subject we're discussing here, the so-called gray zone where, you know, civilization, where people can get along despite the fact that they have different beliefs that is the enemy of the war party on our side and the war party on their side, too.
But where we left off, I'm sorry, it was the narrower question of Sanders claim that, yeah, we got to get the Saudis field army to go invade Iraqi Sunni stand for us.
And but then I was thinking, you know what?
Maybe I'm wrong.
Maybe I'm overstating the case that they don't really have an army capable of a foreign adventure, only putting down domestic dissent.
But I guess that's just what I'd always heard, John.
Oh, and I'm sorry.
I'm talking with John Pfeffer from Foreign Policy and Focus about it all.
Is that right, John?
I mean, they have they have some army.
It's not extensive, but, you know, they have a pretty extensive air force and they are bulking up.
I mean, Saudi Arabia is one of the leading arms importers in the world, and it brings in some of the heaviest, heaviest guns from the United States.
And so they are even though they are their budget has been hit hard by the declining prices of oil internationally.
They are still committing huge resources to their military.
Well, yeah, Lord knows they're raining hell down on the poor Yemenis all day, every day.
That's correct.
Question about that.
All right.
And with plenty of help from the U.S., by the way.
All right.
But now.
So, yeah, back to the narrative here.
We have a real problem.
I think that the best progress anyone ever made was Ron Paul back in 2007 when he had his big fight with Rudy Giuliani and he said, no, wait, the 90s existed.
And it was our intervention over there bombing Iraq for 10 years from bases in Saudi.
That's what provoked the terrorist war against us.
And we could just call it off and they'll dry up and go away and leave us alone.
But man, no one on that level is making that kind of argument.
It just has no traction whatsoever on the national level.
The damn debate is dominated by Ted Cruz, if not anybody else.
I can't think of who does a better job of making it plain that the enemy is radical Islam, which could mean one man in every neighborhood, everywhere from Morocco to the Philippines.
Right.
Yeah.
And, you know, it has had an impact on American public opinion.
You know, more than half of Americans believe that they or their family will be affected by a terrorist attack in the next few years, even though the likelihood of being involved in a terrorist attack at this point, especially if you're in the United States, is comparable or even less likely than being hit by lightning.
So, you know, this this is how the rhetoric has translated into public opinion and public opinion reinforces the candidate's position kind of feedback loop.
And you're right, there's really nobody, including Bernie Sanders, who some have put forward as kind of a peace alternative.
No one is talking about the transformation of the national security complex, you know, at the moment.
And it's hard for me to say this, but, you know, our current president has a better foreign policy than, you know, the what we have on offer, frankly, from most of the candidates.
And that means that at least he's engaged in some diplomatic overtures.
The candidates, you know, especially on the right wing side, have all rejected every diplomatic overture that the administration's made, promised to rip up the Iran agreement.
They want to sever relations with Cuba and they want to bomb ISIS until the sand glows radioactively.
It is amazing, isn't it, with all of the horrible stuff that Obama has done, the regime change in the half in Libya and Syria and the Dublin down to the whole disastrous surge in Afghanistan and all the drone wars across the whole damn world.
And yet every single other alternative that we have to choose from is avowedly worse than him from the get go.
Great.
And, you know, so there is there is some marginal difference in the foreign policies of the candidates who are running, but there's no fundamental difference with the status quo in a positive way.
And the status quo is I wrote something today on this.
The status quo is that essentially America is an aggressive actor in the world and no one challenges that narrative.
And it's not surprising that we are getting not just the leadership that we deserve, which is the common expression, but we're getting the leadership that our foreign policy deserves.
Our foreign policy is aggressive, hard hearted and parochial.
And so are our candidates.
And most likely our next president will be as well.
Yeah.
All right.
Now you have a great little bit about Gaza in here, too.
And of course, we all know from reading Robert Dreyfus in his great book, Devil's Game.
Andrew Higgins, I believe it is, at The Wall Street Journal and Richard Sale at UPI, all about how Israel and their intelligence agency Mossad helped to create Hamas in the first place to create a right wing religious alternative to the PLO.
But now it seems like perhaps Netanyahu would prefer that Islamic State or Al-Qaeda types be able to get away with more murder in the Gaza Strip so that he can pretend that all Gazans are a bunch of Baghdadists.
That's correct.
I mean, this is a terrible irony, because, of course, the Islamic State is arrayed against Hamas, even though plenty of people I imagine in the United States would not see much daylight between the two organizations.
But Hamas is after, you know, a pretty standard set of goals for a liberation movement, that is a separate state and some political entity, whereas ISIS is not interested in that.
It's not interested in these kind of territorial ambitions.
It wants to establish a caliphate globally.
And so within Gaza, there is a current fight going on between Hamas and the adherence of the Islamic State.
Now, ordinarily, a sensible policy coming out of a neighboring government like Israel would say, well, God, we don't want ISIS on our border, so let's support Hamas.
We don't like Hamas very much, but they are the devil we know versus the devil we don't know.
And we can at least negotiate with Hamas, and ISIS is, of course, not interested in negotiations at all with anybody.
But that's not, I think, the perspective coming from Netanyahu, because if ISIS were to take over in Gaza, it would eliminate Hamas, which Netanyahu doesn't like very much anyway.
And then if Israel were to unleash another barrage of aerial bombing, the world wouldn't say, oh my God, don't do this, Bibi, this is making us uncomfortable because there are human rights violations, etc., war crimes, possibly.
No, the international community would say, thank you very much, Netanyahu, for doing this, because you're fighting against the Islamic State.
So I think that is the calculation in Netanyahu's mind at the moment.
Bastard.
And we're still talking about a region here, this tiny little Gaza Strip prison, where is it not the case that a majority of the population are minors?
They're actually not minors, they're majors, the people under 18 there.
Yeah, well, that's because so many people are trying to get out of Gaza.
So anybody who comes of age is looking for a job somewhere else or education somewhere else.
But, you know, there's so few jobs, so few opportunities.
It's just not a functioning economy at the moment.
All right, well, thanks very much again, John, for coming back on the show.
Really appreciate all your work, of course, as always.
Thank you very much for having me on again.
All right, y'all.
That is the great John Pfeffer.
He is the director of foreign policy and focus at fpif.org, fpif.org.
And that's it for today.
Thanks, y'all, for listening to me.
See you tomorrow.
Scott Horton dot org.
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