by Patrick Henningsen

Created on: July 05, 2008

Islam and Terrorism. The reality is that these two terms are mutually exclusive to each other.

Those Westerners, namely Americans, Europeans and Israelis, who cannot differentiate between the Islamic faith and terrorism are lost in their own labyrinth of media conditioning and self-constructed culture of fear.

We have already been told by our leasers that the War on Terror could last hundreds of years and that the enemy is an invisible one. By setting such vague and surreal parameters to this apparent phenomenon of evil, the much of the Western finds itself in a state of psychological bewilderment similar to psychology employed in cults. Our unreal stance towards this invisible enemy will not produce any constructive results and will only serve to heighten our state of paranoia and our unreasonable appetite to feel hyper-secure.

So how is this debate connected with the domestic affairs of Western countries? Today, the Iraq occupation and the War on Terror have become conflated to mean one in the same. So what is the product of our wider War on Terror?

Of course there are economic effects. The USA's out of pocket costs in Iraq are approximately $257 million a day, with reports that we are spending $800,000 a day paying Sunnis not to fight. The Department of Homeland Security, an apparatus spawned out of the nation's fear of Islamic terrorists, is now the largest and most expensive of all Federal departments.

Of course, a rational argument could easily be made that the West's campaign of violence and occupation is place like Afghanistan, Iraq and Palestine- are all massive terrorist operations conducted by the state and funded by those state's taxpayers. That would be true in a thriving democracy or Constitutional Republic, but what we are seeing in the West is executives who have seized and unprecedented amount of power so those old rules and definition nearly do not apply any longer.

The ideas penetrate even further into our society and our lives. The real tell-tale products of this new ideal logy of fear have clearly manifested themselves on America's home shores. Patriot Acts I & II succeeded in breaching the first barrier of protection the American people have from their Federal government. And new, more invasive legislation is on the way. The "Protect America Act" an Orwellian invention at its very least. This dictatorial act requires zero accountability on the part of the executive.

US already had the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act or FISA', a 30 year

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