The Militia Movement and the Salafists: Looking for Lost Purity

The armed seizure of the Malheur National Wildlife Refuge outside Burns, Oregon by a right-wing militia group calling itself Citizens for Constitutional Freedom puts on the front page an issue of longstanding importance to environmentalists -- grazing rights on federal land. There are several good comments that append today's story "Why the Government Owns so Much Land in the West," by Quoctrung Bui and Margot Sanger-Katz. Paul in Albany, NY says,

The Times is attempting to make rational sense concerning why these people are angry, but it's impossible because these ranchers are not rational themselves! These ranchers ought to be grateful for the federal government and the extremely cheap rents it charges. They should be grateful for the giant subsidies the taxpayers give ranchers every year. Go to Environmental Working Group.com to see how much individual landowners have received each year. The subsidies to cattle ranchers are outrageous in that beef production adds more carbon dioxide to the atmosphere than do all cars! Beef is about the most destructive food ever devised.

Or CGW:

Behind most overly-romanticized notions like a home on the range where wildlife and cattle live in harmony and the Indians keep to themselves somewhere else, is brutal reality.

Driving most native wildlife and people to near extinction aside, the basic economics of why no one wants to take over financial and legal responsibility of these huge tracts of land is why that home on the range can only be provided by the collective strength of the federal government.

Or JustWondering in New York:

What would happen out there if the land was transferred from Federal control to the States? You've got 3 very politically schizophrenic states (California, Oregon and Washington) but the growing progressive majorities are on the coasts and the inland areas are more rightwing. They're not likely to change the management process much; if anything they'll make it more restrictive and raise the grazing fees. State's the would sell this land, who would they sell it too? Small ranchers aren't likely to be able to afford it or pay the taxes on it so it'll likely go to big Ag and they'll rent it back - at market rates.

These guys seem to be dreaming of West that never existed except in a screenwriter's imagination. This is simply based on "belief"; facts are irrelevant. There was an earlier commenter that said that "Common Law" trumps statutory law. It the U.S. at least that is utter nonsense. However, for these folk the "belief" in that idea is where it gets its validity from. These fantasies help spawn things like the Sovereign Citizen' movement and idiocies like Oath Keepers or 3 Percenters.

What is truly galling is that they fly the flag, swear oaths the Constitution, shout out their "patriotism" and not a single one them believes in this Country not one. If they did, this nonsense wouldn't be happening - especially the guns part. Our history lesson here should go back to the Whiskey Rebellion and how George Washington ended that bit of nonsense in very short order.

This idea of a more pure past obviously motivates Citizens for Constitutional Freedom leader Ammon Bundy. This from a story yesterday, "Cautious Response to Armed Oregon Protest,"
by Kirk Johnson, Richard Perez-Pena and Erik Eckholm:

In a forum here last month, Ammon Bundy was explicit about starting a national movement, and said God had instructed him to come here. 

“We can restore the Constitution back to this county, and it can be an example to all the other counties across this nation,” he told local residents. “The people of this country will come to you and protect you if you will make the right stand.”

As Algerian novelist Kamel Daoud related in an excellent editorial that appeared this past Saturday, "ISIS’ War on Christmas," what unites the hard right of the West with the Salafists of the Middle East is this myth of a purified past:

To celebrate a birthday, even that of a prophet, is to accept the existence of Time, whereas Islamists fantasize about eternity. In their eyes, Time itself is a crime, because it is a departure from original Islam. Thus restoration is the Islamists’ second foundational myth. Their goal is to return to the beginning of Time, to T=0. To the moment of Revelation, when the prophet was still alive and God was so close to his ear. To the moment when Islam had not yet been soiled, to before it was contaminated by History and “Fitna,” the first Muslim civil wars, which followed the death of Muhammad.

This quest for purity also explains Islamists’ relation to physical space. In addition to wanting to conquer territory, the Islamic State seeks to negate and destroy any evidence of the passing of time, such as monuments and ruins, in Palmyra and elsewhere. It tries to extend the desert’s domain: to replace walls with sand, to flatten out landscape, to return to a vacuum so as to start history all over again.

The purification myth is not the exclusive purview of Salafists. It also runs through other utopian and totalitarian movements, as well as some of the Islamists’ enemies, like the far-right political parties of today. All of them share the same fantasy of returning to some (imagined) original state of purity.

The far right in France, for example, wants to go back to “la souche,” its roots, and restore the land of its Gallic ancestors to what it was before immigrants, the Stranger, flooded in. Like the Islamists, it glorifies geography and negates Time.

As the jihadists have been used as proxies for concentrated wealth, so too has the American far right. The Tea Party was Jiffy Popped into being owing to the Kochs' and other wealthy conservatives' fear of Obama's 2008 landslide. If it ever looks as if a coherent progressive movement is taking shape, you can count on some sort of well-armed militia showing up and taking over. The police will just melt away.

Strange Fruit

Yesterday the main backers of regime change in Syria held a fundraiser in Kuwait under the auspices of the United Nations to raise money for the refugees they have helped create. Pledges totaled $2.4 billion, an amount that falls far short of the $6.5 billion needed, according to UN secretary general Ban Ki-moon. The current tally is 6.5 million internally displaced Syrians added to the 2.3 million who have fled the country, which is nearly 40% of the population.

What makes these numbers truly alarming is that the adjoining countries Syrians are fleeing to are also experiencing civil wars of their own. Iraq is being cracked. Yesterday 64 were killed. The violence in Anbar where the Iraqi government is locked in a struggle with Al Qaeda is creating a humanitarian crisis with tens of thousands displaced. Car bombs continue to detonate in Shiite neighborhoods in Lebanon as a show trial in The Hague begins on the 2005 Rafik Hariri assassination. Four men with ties to Hezbollah are being tried in absentia.

There is no indication that violence will decrease anytime soon. The main driver of the instability in the Middle East is Salafi jihad funded and, what is more apparent each day, directed by the Gulf Sheikhdoms and the West. The region is being transformed in a doomed attempt by these powers to maintain their control. Already warning signals are being sent up about the possibility of blowback as Muslims from the West travel to Syria for jihad and then return home to Frankfurt, Manchester, Detroit, Neuilly-sur-Seine, etc. with fighting and bomb-making skills.

It is all so obvious. We have seen this before in Afghanistan at the dawn of the neoliberal age. Except what is happening now is far worse because it is taking place in the heart of the Middle East; it affects far more countries with a great many more people.

The United States is not pursuing a legitimate agenda. The U.S. says it wants peace and is worried about the foreign-sponsored terrorism that the war in Syria is creating, yet it maintains a covert program that fuels the conflict. Such contradictions bear strange fruit.

Mayhem in Nasr City + Somalia on Turkey's Southern Border

The sit-in in front of the Republican Guard officers' club in Nasr City where deposed president Mohamed Morsi is believed to be held was fired on. Over 40 people are reported dead. This from David Kirkpatrick and Kareem Fahim, "At Least 40 Die as Soldiers Said to Open Fire on Morsi Backers":

Egyptian soldiers opened fire on hundreds of unarmed supporters of ousted President Mohamed Morsi early Monday as they were praying before dawn outside the facility where he is believed to be detained, dozens of witnesses said. 

At least 43 civilians were killed, all or most of them shot, and more than 300 wounded, doctors and health officials said. Security officials said one police officer died as well. 

The attack marked a sharp escalation in the confrontation between the generals who forced out the president and his Islamist supporters in the streets. 

Dozens of Islamists who had gathered in vigil for Mr. Morsi denied there was any provocation for the attack. Two bystanders who had supported Mr. Morsi’s ouster also said that the demonstrators were unarmed and ran in terror as the attack began. 

Bullet holes in cars, lampposts and corrugated metal barriers indicated that gunfire was coming from the top of a nearby building where the sandbag barriers around makeshift gun turrets were visible. Bullet casings on the ground and collected by Islamist demonstrators bore the label of the Egyptian Army.

It would be remarkable if this doesn't spark a move by Islamists away from civil protest to civil war in Egypt. David Kirkpatrick reports that Al Nour, the Salafi party that scuttled the naming of Mohamed ElBaradei as prime minister, has withdrawn from negotiations over the composition of the interim government as a result of the massacre. This might be just as well since Al Nour's bottom line is the inclusion of Islamic law in any Egyptian Constitution. Eventually this was going to be a flash point with the other members of the anti-Morsi coalition. The downside is that it removes the Islamic fig leaf from the anti-Morsi coalition, making it harder to argue this isn't about secularism vs. religion in politics.

Anne Barnard and Hania Mourtada have a story this morning, "Opposition in Syria Continues to Fracture," covered yesterday by Reuters, about fighting between rebels affiliated with the Free Syrian Army and the new Al Qaeda franchise on the block, Islamic State of Iraq and al-Sham:

Islamist fighters said recently that they had driven a rival rebel brigade out of Raqqa, a rebel-held provincial capital in northeastern Syria, because they had found some of its fighters drinking wine and consorting with women, and because they considered brigade reluctant to fight.

And in the most recent confrontation, in Dana, a rebel-held town in Idlib Province near the Turkish border, members of an extremist Islamist group were accused of beheading two rival fighters and leaving their severed heads beside a garbage can in a town square.

That grim discovery on Sunday followed a protest and clashes in the town, highlighting the antagonism that some Syrian fighters and civilians are beginning to feel toward some of the radical factions. 

Simmering tensions within the insurgency have intensified lately, especially between rebels affiliated with the Free Syrian Army, the loose-knit umbrella group backed by the West, and members of the Islamic State of Iraq and Al Sham, the new Syria-based affiliate of Al Qaeda, which includes the well-armed fighters of the Nusra Front.

The disputes that have erupted in provinces like Raqqa, Idlib and Aleppo are often centered as much on individual egos and economic resources as on ideology. Still, the frictions inhibit the insurgency from functioning as a single fighting force, and as government forces have appeared to retake control of some rebel-held territory, they are threatening to deepen into a new conflict that would further weaken the rebels on the battlefield.

According to residents, activists and fighters, popular resentment toward radical factions including foreign fighters began sweeping into villages that had been under the control of the Free Syrian Army and trying to impose their strict conception of Islamic law, sometimes even carrying out summary public executions. 

The Nusra and Free Syrian Army fighters have accused each other of profiting from the war, demanding bribes at checkpoints and selling oil from captured wells. The Qaeda-affiliated units are said to be buying up land in Aleppo and Idlib Provinces and trying to monopolize supplies of wheat and fuel, Reuters reported.

The Associated Press is reporting this morning that the SAA has taken the Khaldiyeh district in Homs. There has been intense fighting in the rebel-held areas of Homs. The government appears to be adding territory to its control. And with the news out of Idlib of rebel factions at war with each other and civilians being mowed down in the crossfire, it's time for the warhawk U.S. Secretary of State John Kerry to get real and agree to conditions to get talks underway as soon as possible. Otherwise we're looking at a situation where there will be a Somalia-type Hobbesian state on Turkey's southern border.

ElBaradei Apparently Not PM

Ben Hubbard is now reporting, "Signs of Disarray Emerge in Egyptian Generals’ Plan for Governance," that because a Salafi party, an important Islamist part of the anti-Muslim Brotherhood coalition, balked and withdrew from SCAF's transition plan, Mohamed ElBaradei is not prime minister, at least for now.

The other thing about last night's street battles between pro- and anti-Morsi fighters that I forgot to mention was the large number of guns and gunshot wounds, which is unusual because gun ownership is not a prevalent part of Egyptian culture (as it is here in the land of Yankee Doodle Dandy). This does not bode well for the possibility of nonviolent protest.