The Hypocrisy of Democracy

By Justin Soutar

What a stupendous, what an incomprehensible machine is man! Who can endure toil, famine, stripes, imprisonment & death itself in vindication of his own liberty, and the next moment ... inflict on his fellow men a bondage, one hour of which is fraught with more misery than ages of that which he rose in rebellion to oppose.   --Thomas Jefferson

Why are "Islamic" terrorists and orthodox Muslims alike infected with such loathing for the US? Because the policies of the American, Israeli and other Western governments since World War I toward the Middle Eastern countries, most of which are predominantly Muslim, have both fallen short regarding the Middle Eastern peoples' rights to independence and self-determination. Moreover, Western leaders have responded to the results of their errors with a sinister pattern of denial. First they succeed in denying their faults or crimes to their domestic constituencies, painting a picture of "what really happened". Next they create a scapegoat from some outspoken Muslim king, president, or imam who dares to rail against the evil of Western atrocities, and blame him for the trouble. Then they inflate that figure into a monster, accuse him of the very offenses the US or Israel has perpetrated, and either stir up the people to fight an open war against him or concoct a special operation to remove him from power secretly. And the apparent driving force beneath this demonic strategy is the entrepreneurial interests of a few rich Westerners.  

Iran

One nation that has dramatically exemplified this malevolent Western pattern several times in the twentieth and early twenty-first century is Iran. Dominating the Persian Gulf, situated midway between the Suez Canal and China, possessing 70 million residents, [1] and controlling more untapped oil than any other known place on earth, Iran has figured prominently in Western foreign policy since England and Russia began competing for influence there in the 1800s, and especially since oil was unearthed there in 1908. Now the country is widely seen as an exporter of terrorism, a rogue state, a nuclear belligerent, a dictatorship, and an implacable foe of Israel and the United States that must be watched carefully and reproached diligently.

Colonialism, domination, imperialism, and big business--cloaked as "free trade", "influence", "expansion", and "the favor of Divine Providence"--are directly responsible for turning the ancient land of Persia into a hotbed of anti-Westernism.

- more -