Deus Vult!

​Have you noticed how much Americans seem ready to fight a new holy crusade against Islam more than usual, as of late?

It’s not just algorithmic bias on social media.

Sure, anti-Islamic sentiment has been more or less a hallmark of Western society ever since 9/11, coming and going with the winds of political trends, but a mid-2024 report by the Council on American-Islamic Relations reveals that hate crimes and discrimination complaints against Muslims and Arabs in the United States have hit all-time record high numbers.

Moreover, it seems like rabidly anti-Islam, pro-Israel figures are being boosted across social media, like Republican congressional aspirant Valentina Gomez. She went viral for publicly burning the Quran with a flamethrower, calling all Muslims “terrorists,” and claiming she’s going to “stop Islam...once and for all.”

​Despite rising to fame as a fierce critic of organized religion, American comedian Bill Maher sure loves to pick and choose which faiths actually deserve criticism. Maher will trash Americans all day, liberal or conservative, who dare to even question the atrocities Israel has committed in Palestinian lands, labeling them all terrorist supporters.

Conversely, the only state in the world to declare itself the singular homeland of a specific religious group, Israel, gets a free pass to kill men, women, and children en masse, torture prisoners, steal the land of another nation in violation of international law, and engage in more scandal that can be explored in a single article.

Islam: The West’s Harbinger of Destruction?

The list of American anti-Islamic crusaders goes on and on, notwithstanding the fact that a unified Islamic or Arab monolith that could bring about the demise of Christianity or Western civilization… does not exist! The pan-Arab Ba’athist movement, formerly embodied by the political parties of Saddam Hussein and Bashar Al Assad, has been crushed – the culmination of a destabilizing series of events for which we all have the West to thank.

​No single entity unites Sunnis, Shiites, Wahabbis, Sufis, etc., for the purpose of expanding Islamic civilization, contrary to the claims of our 21st-century Templars; in fact, Muslims are mostly too busy fighting one another to pose any real threat to anybody else.

The widespread distaste for Islam in the West primarily concerns mass illegal migration and the fact that many of these migrants are Muslims who are breaking the law, as well as refusing to assimilate to the cultures of their host countries.

But that has nothing to do with Islam itself and everything to do with the fact that the West has destabilized the Middle East and North Africa through decades of wars and regime change! The so-called “Islamic invasion,” which is really an exodus of people fleeing war-torn lands, constitutes a crisis of the West’s own making; and its negative consequences are of a spontaneous nature, not that of an Islamic conspiracy.

On the other hand, Jews indeed have a unified force that directs their well-funded political interests – Israel. The Jewish state is dependent on billions of dollars in annual U.S. military aid and Washington’s global diplomatic influence for the continuation of its colonial project.

Israel Wants You To Hate Islam

It should then come as no surprise that Israeli influence operations in the United States constitute one of Tel Aviv’s primary foreign policy objectives. In 2024, the American Israel Public Affairs Committee spent nearly $52 million in political campaign donations to directly influence the course of U.S. politics. That’s not even to mention all the other, more clandestine, Israeli influence operations such as the Esther Project, in which social media influencers are being paid $7000 per post to spread Israeli propaganda demonizing Arabs/Muslims and improving Israel’s public image in the United States.
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However, when it comes to the faith common among all of Israel’s adversaries, Islam, Tel-Aviv has been waging a multi-million dollar campaign to brainwash Americans into hating it, ever since the outbreak of recent hostilities between Israel and Hamas on October 7th, 2023.

According to Al Jazeera, the Tel-Aviv based marketing company Stoic behind the campaign is funded by Israel’s Ministry of Diaspora Affairs, with the explicit purpose of covertly manipulating American public opinion away from supporting Palestine:

“The campaign’s existence came to light in early 2024 when researchers began noticing suspicious patterns across social media platforms. Scores of fake accounts were identified spreading pro-Israeli content, primarily focused on garnering support for Israel’s actions in Gaza. These accounts were predominantly linked to three websites: “Moral Alliance”, “Unfold Magazine” and “Non-Agenda”. Collectively, these sites amassed over 40,000 followers across Facebook, Instagram and X.

The campaign involved publishing pro-Israeli articles, often lifted from legitimate news outlets, and then sharing them through hundreds of fake social media accounts. One such example was an article reporting on allegations of UNRWA staff involvement in the 7 October attack. Researchers noted that the content was frequently repeated verbatim across multiple accounts, targeting the same individuals with identical posts and replies.”

The cherry on top? None of these firms, neither Stoic nor Bridge Partners behind the Esther Project, have registered as foreign agents or even revealed their identities - a clear violation of the Foreign Agents Registration Act (FARA). The legislation is selectively applied to countries on Washington’s hitlist, like Russia, whose television network RT was charged with ‘hijacking public discourse’ last year for failing to register media organizations allegedly associated with the channel.

‘Be discriminating about what images and ideas you permit into your mind.’ - Epictetus

When it comes to Israel, however, powerful people in Washington clearly don’t care about what happens to public discourse or what well-funded political interests are telling us to believe. With these forces in charge, it becomes nearly impossible for the individual to properly inform him or herself on just to what extent political issues are being artificially manufactured by the media and if, otherwise, it would even be worth paying much attention.

Don’t allow yourself to be brainwashed into thinking that Israel’s adversaries, essentially all of whom are trying to protect their own national sovereignty, are out to get you. Israel has its own predatory foreign policy agenda that cares for no nation other than its own – and Tel Aviv has demonstrated that its willing to do whatever it takes to carry out its expansionist ambitions.

Originally published on Donald’s Substack.

Author

Donald Courter is an American journalist and political analyst based in Moscow, offering a unique perspective from within the multipolar world.

Comparing China to the United States as if it were just another imperialist power normalizes an error stemming from an ideological wound rooted in the discourse of neocolonial power: the belief that any economy reaching a certain scale is automatically an invading force. This comparison, besides being misguided, obscures the fact that the Chinese process no longer fits within the neocolonial phase, simply because this would imply the Asian country's ambition to become a unipolar power. Unipolarity is no longer viable; therefore, China is leading essential processes in the opposite direction, such as dedollarization, the use of national currencies in a network, overcoming the monopolistic monetary system, and decarbonization. 

A few days ago—while participating in a panel on economics at the Zócalo International Book Fair—an attendee suggested that the United States is comparable to China, identifying them as equally imperialist countries. It's not the first time I've heard this idea, but it is the first time I felt it wasn't just a question, but an ideological wound embodying the impossibility of imagining a large economy without hegemonic ambitions. This column stems from that wound. Not as a defense of China, but to ask ourselves: what if the problem isn't who dominates, but rather that there's no longer room for just one king on the chessboard? 

In the previous installment, we discussed how Immanuel Wallerstein recovers the dimension of "discourse of power" to remind us that the global economy is not only about the exchange of products, but also about the collective construction of a horizon of meaning, a model of society to be achieved, the establishment of a vision from which all actions acquire a particular meaning. It is a paradigm from which certain actions are normalized and others become unacceptable. 

The identification of two historical phases within the capitalist system itself has also become clear: the first, of a colonial nature, unfolded from 1492 until the mid-20th century; and the second, of a neocolonial nature, evolving from 1945 to the current crisis. From an economic and political perspective, the financial phase effectively ended in 2008, as it was during this Wall Street crisis that the financial strategy of offshoring in the United States demonstrated its inability to maintain control over global production processes. Since then, the rise of the Chinese economy has consistently shown impressive levels of productive capacity, not only quantitatively, but especially in its qualitative core. 
When asked whether China is another imperialist country like the United States, it has become commonplace to assume that any economy that reaches a certain scale is immediately an invading force. However, this actually stems from the neocolonial "discourse of power" itself, which has normalized the idea that a country can only follow one path—that is, the one that leads it to assume the role of absolute ruler. This is the discourse of normalizing hegemonies. 

This allows us to obscure a fact that we must emphasize forcefully: the Chinese process no longer fits within the neocolonial phase simply because this would imply the Asian country's aspiration to become a unipolar power. But this is not the case. In fact, the Asian project, in practice, has already demonstrated the understanding that unipolarity is unfeasible, and therefore the goal is to transition to polycentric or multipolar forms. Such a network precisely inhibits, even if intended, the aspiration to become a unipolar force. The essential processes, therefore, are, dedollarization the use of national currencies within a network, overcoming the monopolistic monetary system, and decarbonization, that is, avoiding the massive transfer of human costs to the natural system. With just these two elements, we are already talking about a civilizational process with a radically different horizon of meaning. 

But this multipolar project is still under development; we could say we are just at the beginning of its metabolic renewal. This is why it is also necessary to become aware of a process of de-Westernization, that is, to undertake a profound critique of the horizon of meaning normalized under neocolonialism. It is natural that, currently in this period of transition, we still have reflections of the colonial world in our vision, in which we have accepted a series of imposed principles that operate against the liberation process of peoples. Often, the enemy lies deep within our own minds, so de-Westernization means the search for supposedly universal elements that are not; that is, it is about opening ourselves to other possible forms. There is no such thing as one version being right and another wrong. 

In other words, the new post-neocolonial period needs to acknowledge other universalities. Just as Orientalism, even with its significant limitations, signified the recognition of "others" as civilizations (albeit "incomplete" because they did not evolve into the Western form), this time it is necessary to reaffirm the recognition of other civilizations, but as complete, in their own right. Just as it is a matter of ensuring that each national currency can be exchanged on the world market, it is a matter of recognizing that each culture is, in itself, both unique and universal. This recognition of the "other" is what founds the new era. It is the horizon of meaning for the Global South. In this sense, China is leading the way; now let us consider, analogously, what is happening in Mexico.

Author
Óscar David Rojas Silva is a Professor of Political Economy at FES-Acatlán UNAM.