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 old act which lets the President spy via a warrant from a secret court. But at least this warrant allows for accountability under FISA, so the President doesn't spy on his political opponents. We can only sit in wonderment as Congress and Senate and the Supreme Court elevate the office of President to where it sits above and is not restrained be any law, only accountable to himself. No accountability. In essence, our leadership is saying to us that "you can't be safe unless the executive is unaccountable". For all you students of history, does this sound familiar?
What we face now is a totally unaccountable executive privilege. At other times in history, this would be labelled "tyranny", but in the 21st Century the goal posts have been effectively moved to accommodate a Police State who appears to have an unquenchable thirst for power over its citizenry. And the roots of this can be traced to our fear of Islamic Terrorism.
Our pervasive fears of this vague external enemy are not grounded in facts, information, as much as they are in emotion. Fear is an emotion which the state has utilized throughout history in order to acquiesce its own populations to accept new and unusual forms of control. It's the nature of the beast.
In the US, Congress is becoming like the Roman senate under the Caesars. The whole "War on Terror" is a contrivance to accumulate massive power within the oval office.
And here we have Americans who are still trying to differentiate between Islam and terrorism.
Those who truly value freedom and liberty need to change the conversation before it's too far gone.