06/03/10 – Dean Ahmad – The Scott Horton Show

For Antiwar.com and Chaos Radio 95.9 in Austin, Texas, I'm Scott Horton.
This is Antiwar Radio.
All right, now listen, let me introduce to you Dean Ahmed.
He is the founder of the Minaret of Freedom Institute.
The website is minaret.org.
Welcome back to the show, Dean.
How are you?
It's a pleasure to be back again.
Thank you.
Well, I really appreciate you joining us on the show.
First things first, your son Arlo is an old friend of mine from Austin.
And I got an email that he sent out to his email list the other day with family pictures.
And here are a proud Palestinian folk armed with rifles.
And this is, I don't know if it's your father or your uncles or exactly who all is in the photographs there.
Arlo was very proud and said, look at my grandfather, target practice.
Look, Palestinians used to have the right to bear arms.
That's right.
And was that your grandfather or your father in those pictures?
That's right.
One of the pictures is of my father.
And there's another one, I believe, of my uncle in which his wife is holding a pistol.
Yeah, just seeing Palestinians not trying to find something to eat out of a garbage pile, but instead standing there in brand new clothes with a brand new rifle and their back straight and their shoulders back and their head held high.
I've never seen pictures of Palestinians like that before.
Well, there are pictures of Palestinians with arms, but they're usually...
Crouching, yeah.
Well, actually, there was a famous picture.
There was a movie made by Vanessa Redgrave called The Palestinians, which showed Palestinians at a wedding celebration, some kind of celebration, where they were brandishing rifles in a dance.
Oh, there you go, like in Iraq, they all fire their guns in the air when somebody gets married, that kind of thing.
No, these weren't being fired, just being waved around the way that the Saudis wave swords in their dancing.
Oh, I see, yeah, yeah.
Cool.
Well, yeah, I guess they don't have the right to bear arms in the West Bank and the Gaza Strip these days, huh?
Well, times have changed, but unfortunately...
Well, as you know, the Second Amendment says the right of the people to keep and bear arms is part of the protection of a free state, and the West Bank and Gaza are not free states, so it makes sense that the people don't have the right to bear arms.
Yeah, yeah, exactly.
And vice versa and the other way around, too.
Well, the whole thing is just a tragedy.
I'm not even sure where to start with you.
Well, why don't you talk to us?
We actually had Rachel Corey's parents on the show a few minutes back, and we were talking with them about how Palestinians are human beings and stuff like that, and I think that Americans just don't understand that, Dean.
They just can't get their head around the idea that if the government says, if that's the side we're on, then they just go with that, and it doesn't even matter who these other people are.
It's like a football game, only the other side dies at the end, but Americans just don't even care at all.
And the reason why is because they can't figure out that Palestinians are just like them, only somewhere else.
Well, that's part of the problem.
You know, I don't know if you heard the interview yesterday with Ambassador Edward Peck, who, of course, was one of the many, I think it was 11 Americans, who were captured by the Israelis when they cracked down on this flotilla.
And Ambassador Peck returned to his home in Chevy Chase, and he immediately started giving interviews, and on one of the programs he was introduced as, among other things, an expert on the Middle East.
And Ambassador Peck, with his wonderful sense of humor, said, I'm an expert on the Middle East because, unlike the majority of Americans, I know where it is.
Yeah, exactly.
And that's the thing, too, right, is that if you do talk about Iran or Iraq or Israel, that is pretty much what people picture, is a vague, inaccurate shape on a map, rather than a place with people standing on top of it.
I doubt they even have an idea of an inaccurate shape on the map.
I suspect most have no clue whatsoever.
The kind of confusion, for example, the media painting the Palestinians as the bad guys and the Israelis as the good guys, is something that can only be sustained by people who are not paying attention.
For example, I'll give you just Edward Peck's experience.
Peck, the former ambassador from the United States to the Middle East, has been to Israel many, many times.
But he was told on this occasion that he probably would not be allowed in Israel again because now he's a criminal in the Israeli eyes.
And he said, what was my crime?
And they said, you entered Israel illegally.
And he said, you abducted me and forced me here against my will.
That constitutes entering Israel illegally?
They were unpersuaded by his argument.
Well, it was illegally, but not quite in the way that they were saying.
Yeah, the illegality was not any of his fault.
But this is the kind of thing where Americans, those few Americans who have bothered to visit the Palestinian territories, the occupied territories, will tell you that they've been very, very well treated and welcomed.
Well, you know, hey, that's what the Israeli government says about the people of Palestine, too.
They're very well treated.
Hey, look, if you want to get some food and some reconstruction aid, maybe, I don't know, simple antibiotics, that kind of thing to Gaza, well, just give it to us and we'll distribute it.
Everything's fine.
Why would you need to break a blockade?
What blockade?
Well, you know, in the various statements of spin that the Israelis have issued lately, which the critics of Israel have called lies, I would say the one statement that is the most clearly a lie for which no excuse can be made is the one you just quoted.
The Israelis will let some things into Gaza, although they limit the amount severely, but they will not allow reconstruction materials into Gaza.
And for them to imply that they would allow such a thing is simply a flat lie.
All right.
Now, so tell us about this flotilla.
Like, you know, I saw the headline came across this morning that one of the dead is an American citizen shot four times in the head, Dean.
Think maybe that'll count for anything?
Well, you'd hope so.
But remember, the other boat still on its way to Gaza is the Rachel Corey, named for an American citizen who was run over by a bulldozer, and not just once, but the guy backed up just to make sure she was dead.
And the American public, for the most part, has let it be, ignored it.
Maybe he's not even aware of it.
And if that's not enough, we have to go back to 1967 and the attack on the USS Liberty.
Those poor sailors who survived that attack, and many did not, have been trying all these years to get proper recognition, even just to the, if it's just a matter of upgrading the tombstone for the crew of the Liberty in Arlington Cemetery, which does not say that they were killed in action, you know, killed under hostile fire, as it should say, but simply says that they died at sea with no explanation or indication that they were the victims of a war-like attack.
That if the United States, which professes to have so much respect for its national honor, does not give proper honor to its own soldiers when they have been attacked in this way, then I suppose it's asking too much that a peace activist should get decent recognition when the same thing happens to them.
Well, and as Cindy Corey, Rachel's mother, actually just brought up on the show, a young lady in the West Bank, they shot her in the face with a grenade launcher, a tear gas canister, and knocked her eye out, like my cat.
Sorry, I have a one-eyed cat.
I always think of that whenever somebody loses an eye.
I hope nobody shot at the cat.
Yeah, no, the IDF, I don't have any evidence that the IDF was the ones who attacked May and the cat.
But anyway, no, listen, I mean, that's, what we're talking about here is the most important thing, right?
Because if Palestinians aren't human beings, unless maybe like an American is standing around, and yet even that doesn't count, I mean, I wouldn't have put it as crassly as this to her parents on the show, here is a blonde, white girl, American, who we all know if she'd been murdered down in Aruba on spring break, she'd be a news story for two and a half years in a row.
Her life to TV news is worth that of everyone in the old world combined, all other five and a half billion of them.
And yet, somehow, when it's Rachel Corey and she's murdered by the IDF, it doesn't even make the news.
And like you just said, most Americans have never even heard of her before.
And so, if they won't tell us about Rachel Corey, if they won't spotlight the IDF shooting this girl in the face with a grenade launcher, shooting this young man in the head four times for having the temerity to try to bring antibiotics and food to starving, sick people, then where's this going to end?
I mean, we're on a bad path here, Dean.
Well, there's no two ways about it.
You know, I think no one's ever been allowed to forget how Leon Klinghoffer was murdered when an act of piracy took place many years ago.
Now we have nine people murdered, and not only don't you have the same degree of indignation in the United States, by the way, I have to hasten to point out, because internationally there is indignation.
People from Britain, obviously from Turkey, the Arab world, the Muslim world, Europe, Africa, even the United Nations is issuing statements.
It's only in the United States that you get these, in the mass media, these apologetic defense claiming the Israeli commandos were quote-unquote defending themselves.
Even though a law, that international law that I am told was passed as a result of the Achilles Laurel incident, clearly states that when you illegally board another boat, any resistance against you, you cannot claim that you're acting in self-defense to use force against resistance for such an illegal boarding.
Well now, so there were headlines a couple of days ago where the Turks said, oh yeah, well, we're sending our Navy to make sure that next time this doesn't happen.
Are they still standing by that?
I know there are more boats on the way right now.
The SS, whatever it is, the MV Rachel Corey is on its way right now.
Yeah, the Rachel Corey is on its way, but I don't know whether the Turks intend to defend it or not.
The Turks are understandably very, very upset.
They're very, very proud people.
They had a great role in modern history that is not very well known, and especially their absolutely indispensable role in the protection of European Jews when they were being persecuted in Europe.
I mean, when the Jews were kicked out of Spain, they went into the Ottoman Empire, and they were invited to go there by the Sultan, who sent letters to the rabbis of Spain saying, we understand the Hispanics are expelling you, you're welcome to come here, practice your religion, conduct your businesses, raise your families, and we will treat you as honored guests.
When the Sultan received a letter from an admirer of King Ferdinand, the Sultan wrote back contemptuously saying, this man who you call a great king is the one who is enriching my empire at the expense of his.
So it's really, really hurtful to the Turks to see the State of Israel now engaging in this kind of wanton violence against one of their boats, and when their boat is just extending the same kind of Turkish humanitarian aid to the Gazans that they historically had extended to the Jews.
Well, you know, it brings up the question, I'm not for any of these things, of course, but here, Turkey's been an ally, an official treaty-having ally of the United States in the North Atlantic Treaty Organization for 60 years, and we're just friends with Israel.
We have no treaty with them.
We can't have a treaty with them because they don't have defined borders.
And so how can we have a treaty where we agree to protect their borders when we don't know where their borders are?
And they wouldn't sign a treaty with us anyway.
I think Jimmy Carter or one of these people tried to have them sign a treaty, and they still wouldn't do it.
So now it's our official ally versus our best friend in the Middle East.
And so who comes out on top to the National Security Council?
I guess the answer is obvious.
All you've got to do is ask the question.
You already know.
Well, I mentioned the American media's disgraceful behavior in the current circumstances.
What I did not mention is the mealy-mouthed response of the American government.
You know, I wrote an article that was on my blog the other day about this recent incident in which I said that in almost every respect the Israelis miscalculated when they did this.
There was only one respect in which their calculation was correct, and that is that they had nothing to fear from the American government.
The American government's response has been so tame and so lame to be really a disgrace.
And not only do they not roundly condemn what the Israelis have done, but they actually do a gratuitous attack on Hamas, claiming, and I've got to be honest with you, Scott, I try to keep on top of these things, but I have no idea why they say this, claiming that Hamas is preventing aid from coming into Gaza.
This is a bizarre response to a totally outrageous act.
Yeah, well, and I guess their audience there really is the American right that can never put two and two together.
Can't remember one assertion from the next as long as they agree with them all in a row or whatever, it's fine.
And so who cares?
I mean, they said that Al-Qaeda was on the boat.
Al-Qaeda was on the boat?
I mean, come on.
These are the people who said that, oh, yeah, and outright they didn't even pretend and ask for anonymity or their names, but not where they worked.
They put in the London Times that, oh, yeah, Mossad agents tell us that they saw the head of Iraqi intelligence hand a flask of anthrax to Mohammed Atta.
These people are liars.
And when they say lies that are obvious lies, like Al-Qaeda was on a boat from Turkey to blow up, wait, to bring medicine to the people of Hamas?
Didn't Hamas just kill all the Al-Qaeda guys in Gaza about six months ago?
And aren't there no Al-Qaeda anywhere in Turkey except in CIA flight training or whatever?
Well, you only need to be consistent in your lies if the people you're trying to fool have some rudimentary understanding of reality.
So contradictory statements such as, for example, while on the one hand claiming that Al-Qaeda was on the ship, the Israelis also have been claiming that Gaza is just a puppet of Iran of all places.
Now, if Gaza is a puppet of Iran and Al-Qaeda hates Iran and the Shias, exactly why are they trying to send aid there?
None of this makes any sense.
You know what that reminds me of is I think it was Jeff Stein cornered Sylvester Reyes when Nancy Pelosi didn't give the House Intelligence Committee chair job to Jane Harman because she's a traitor.
Instead, it went to Sylvester Reyes, who'd been sitting on the Intelligence Committee for years and years.
And Jeff Stein asked him, hey, man, what's the difference between Al-Qaeda and, I don't know, say, Hezbollah?
And Sylvester Reyes said, oh.
And he said, well, who's Sunni and who's Shia?
Do you even know where Lebanon is, Mr. Head of the House Intelligence Committee?
Oh, well, somewhere over there in the Middle East or something.
Same thing happened with the heads of counterterrorism at the FBI.
They said, some reporters asked them, hey, who is Osama bin Laden's spiritual mentor?
Hey, man, what religion are these guys?
Where do they live?
What are they about?
What does this have to do with anything?
And the heads of counterterrorism at the FBI couldn't answer any of these most rudimentary questions.
I mean, you take a Saturday off and read Lawrence Wright, you're going to know that much.
Come on.
Well, again.
These are the people in charge, man.
Yeah.
I'm sorry.
All right, listen.
So we got six or seven minutes here.
And let me ask you about this, because you know what?
Never mind what TV says.
Out there in America, there is a common understanding, more and more as time goes on, that the West is at war with Islam, that we're somehow defending ourselves or whatever.
Never even mind who started it.
But that there is some inevitable clash of civilizations here that can only be resolved with fire.
You know, you hear them say, Israel, they've been on the front line of this war on terrorism for a long time now.
And the thing is about Islam is, you know, whatever it is about it makes it so corrupt that it cannot get along in the long-term future with Western civilization.
And so we eventually, you know, got to either crush them or kill them.
And I think that's what people believe.
You hear people all the time, and you hear anecdotes all the time of people saying, I say we turn the whole Middle East to glass and just kill them all with hydrogen bombs.
But people believe, really do believe, Dean, that we just can't get along with this other billion people on Earth.
And there's nothing to do about it but sit the Pentagon on them.
The ones who want to level the Middle East and the Muslim world are an extreme fringe element.
Our problem is, as Edmund Burke said, not the people who want to do evil but the good people who do nothing.
We have to find some way to educate the general American public on what Islam is, what the Middle East is about, what the history of the Middle East is, both recent and long-term.
And we have to really counter some of the particularly destructive stereotypes and mythologies.
For example, one of the worst is the idea that the dispute between the Israelis and the Palestinians is a religious dispute, in particular a religious dispute between Judaism and Islam.
This is wrong on so many levels.
For one thing, many of the Palestinians are Christians, and as a matter of fact, the Christians who are most harmed by Israeli policies.
Lost and unfortunately drowned out by this outrageous attack on the flotilla is the fact that the Israelis have cracked down on the Tent of Nations, a Christian group that tries to do interfaith peacemaking in Nablus, and has come down to tear down the buildings that they have put up there on the ground that they were built without a permit.
Which of course is true, they were built without a permit, because Christians, like Muslims, are not allowed to have permits to build in Israel.
Only the Jews are allowed to build.
This is something that you would think would be of interest to Christian Americans, and yet Christian Americans are totally oblivious of this.
The war between the Palestinians and the Israelis is a war over land, and a war over self-determination.
The religious aspect is only an incidental one, and the religious aspect is not strictly between Jews and Muslims, but is pretty much between the Ashkenazi Jewish elite who control Israel and everybody else.
Well, you know, it's funny.
It used to always be, throughout history, the Christians versus the Jews and the Muslims.
But now the Christians are on the side of the Jews against the Muslims, it seems like.
Well, only the American Christians.
I mean, I assure you the Palestinian Christians are not.
And again, if you will look at the commentary around the world about what's going on with regard to the current or the recent events, you will see.
In fact, I was listening the other day just to the BBC broadcast of the debate in the House of Commons in England over what was happening and what the British response should be.
Now, I know that most Americans do not listen to the BBC, and that's too bad, because they would have been shocked, absolutely shocked, because the range of opinions, and there of course was a range of opinions, it is a British parliament, but the range of opinions was so divorced from what you hear from the United States to a range from those who are saying, well, clearly what Israel did was wrong, but we remain sympathetic to the state of Israel, and we want to put it in a certain context, to those who are saying this is absolutely outrageous, uncivilized behavior, and Britain has to be even more forceful than it has been in denouncing it.
Yeah, well, it really is, it's just like, I'm sure you saw the clip of Glenn Greenwald on MSNBC the other day, where he just puts the Pravda to the rest of the media, just the fact that he had five minutes on there to tell the truth straight, a Finkelstein-level owning, it was described as on my Facebook page by one of the guys who saw it, all it did was just put the lie to the rest of it, and it really is amazing the contrast between an honest discussion of Israel and Palestine and the rest of the media, but now, so we're about out of time here, Dean, I'll go ahead and let you go, but I do want to emphasize that your institute here, Minaret of Freedom Institute, at minaret.org, is about the nexus between libertarianism and Islam, individualism and Islam, and it's the subject of an interview we've done in the past and one that we need to do again in the future, very interesting to me, and I think will help open up a lot of people's minds, so let me just let you go with thanks for your time on the show today.
Thank you, Scott.
All right, everybody, that is Dean Ahmed from minaret.org.