Dr. Mahboob A. Khawaja

The mankind is fraught with sorrows and pains of institutionalized animosities and wars. When fear of unknown animosities and killings overwhelm the daily thinking process, a society - a nation no matter how normal claims to be, cannot function as normal beings to co-exist with their own self, the surroundings - in the human culture and make any positive contributions to human change and progress. This state of affairs reflects complete societal breakdown and march towards self-annihilation. We are witnessing and living in that delusional culture of human degeneration. Animosity and wars are not outgrowth of celestial bodies but essentially man-made follies throughout the history. All human acts are subject to change and reformation. Over the decades, this vital concern has occupied my scholarly thoughts, human interactions with so many other beings (both in the industrialized West and with people in the developing nations) to find out, how can we safeguard the “succeeding generations from the scourge of wars” and maintain normal societal living and co-existence in diversity. Had this concern and priority been in the thoughts and commitments of the governance of the modern institutions evolved more than half of century ago for global peace and security, it would have supported the sustainable movements for global peace and harmony.

To great surprise, looking at the modern history of international affairs, every new man-made conflicts takes new approaches and time and resources to ponder and new agenda as if we have wasted decades in doing nothing except giggling, laughing and lying about peace and the ideals of the mankind in competitive and hilarious animosities and blame games. Is it part of the human nature to look for animosity and madness of war? Wars kill people – the living human beings, destroy humanity of the man enforcing barbarism and cruelty, practically denying all prospects of peace and co-existence. Previous wars of centuries were aimed at annihilation of political and economic enemies but the 21st century conflicts are ready-made recipes not only to eliminate the mankind but also the environment in which human beings survive and the planet Earth that sustains life. Given the strategic know-how and the scientific-technological developments, it is an established fact that any futuristic global warfare could end the very existence of man and humanity on this planet. The United States, West Europeans and Russia placed unknown sophisticated Weapons of Mass Destruction on Earth and in space are ready-made menaces to the survival of mankind. Wars appear to be the outcome of sinister minds, devilish individual plans and monstrous scheme of things against the very humanity of which these people are a member of the construct.

Professor Richard Falk is a reputable international jurist and academia and UN Human Rights Council to offer some concerns on the deplorable human conditions in Gaza, Occupied West Bank and Jerusalem, Palestine. “…the United States has been fortunate not to experience worse blowbacks, and these may yet happen, especially if there is no disposition to rethink U.S. relations to others in the world, starting with the Middle East.” The global mankind is not obsessed with any loss of rational sense of the facts of life that the United States and Israel both suppress any disclosure or international discussions of the issue of human rights violation in Palestine. Author B. Fantina (“Hostility toward a Nation: What is the Source?” "Information Clearing House" -"War Is A Crime" 5/03/2013), spells out what happens when you try to reason the unreason. “This thoughtful, reasonable statement was met with a typical unreasonable response by the United States. Via Twitter, U.S. Ambassador to the United Nations, Susan Rice, said this: “Outraged by Richard Falk's highly offensive Boston comments. Someone who spews such vitriol has no place at the UN. Past time for him to go.”

B. Fantina adds: “What, one might ask, in Mr. Falk’s statement was ‘highly offensive’? Where, in what he said, is the ‘vitriol’? Is it not reasonable that there might be anger by people victimized by periodic bombings of their country by the U.S.? Would U.S. citizens not feel anger if some other nation continually bombed them? U.S. policy in the Middle East has been drastically skewed to support Israel’s interests, disregarding completely the basic human rights of any of Israel’s supposed enemies. The American Israeli Political Affairs Committee (AIPAC) basically owns the U.S. Congress, which dances to its tune without hesitation, knowing that doing so will ensure further campaign donations, funneled into their individual coffers by AIPAC…….. The Israeli government targets Palestinians for no other reason than their ethnicity.”

You wonder if some West Europeans conscious of their nationalism and superior ethnicity went to the Muslim world in search of freedom, to preserve human dignity and justice or was it a planned encroachment of all that humanity could imagine to be valuable and enshrined in the League and UNO Charter, French Revolution, Immanuel Kant’s ideals for peace and what European themselves claim to be following through. History reveals that for centuries the European scheme of colonization - the so called freedom time after the WW2, Arabs and other Muslim societies had neither educated and intelligent leadership nor institutions to analyze the global affairs objectively and to develop a policy of mutual interests and strategic equilibrium in relations with the former Masters of the Western world. They were naïve and coward then, and they are proven dummy and stupid to this day. They willingly followed the George Bush dictum of military threats unless they should fully submit to the American doctrine of War on Terror. The US bogus War on Terror used the false pretext of the 9/11 attacks to pursue its pre-planned wars against the Muslim world.

Across America and in some West European circles, 9/11 terrorist attacks on America assume an epic center of hatred and wooing against Muslim world. There is no known and official evidence anywhere to indicate that Muslims and Islam were engaged in making the 9/11 attacks on the US. Those who were alleged to have carried out the attacks had no claim or relationship to Muslim thinking or States. Whatever they did, were individual acts and not sponsored by Islam or Muslims. It is common throughout the Western democracies when individuals commit crimes; they are treated by law in the same context not assuming the beliefs and religious characteristic of the person accused in any crimes. How come the official American policies and practices exhibit dubious and often self-negating constructs in global affairs? What Ms. Rice, the America Ambassador at the UN alleged did not appear to be case in Professor Falk’s statement:

Professor Falk statement seemed rational and reasonable and did not appear to be ‘offensive’ or full of ‘vitriol’, as Ms. Rice suggested. The former New York City Mayor Rudolph Giuliani attempted to blame that the terrorists of 9/11 "came here and killed us because of our freedom of religion, freedom for women, because they hate us." B. Fantina wonders: “Why, one might ask, do they hate us? As stated by the 9/11 Commission Report, it is at least partly due to the U.S.’s policy choice…… The U.S. goes around dropping bombs, ostensibly to ‘protect freedom’ and ‘liberate’ oppressed peoples. There seems to be a belief that everyone throughout the world wants to be just like the U.S., with its limited liberties and skewed definition of freedom. Yet the U.S. doesn’t often consider the wishes of those it attempts to ‘liberate,’ resulting in quagmires such as Vietnam a generation ago, and Afghanistan today.”

Stephen Lendman (“America's Permanent War Agenda” 3/01/2010), an American political intellectual and a man of universal conscience puts the history in one nutshell:

“America glorifies wars in the name of peace, what historian Charles Beard (1874 - 1948) called "perpetual war for perpetual peace" in describing the Roosevelt and Truman administrations' foreign policies - what concerned the Federation of American Scientists when it catalogued about 200 post-1945 conflicts in which America was, and still is, the aggressor”

Huntington (“The Clash of Civilizations”, 1993) warned of the coming of new age of disharmony is dawning and that the West lacked an ‘ennobling animosity’- from an economic perspective, the ‘golden age’ of low birth rates and aging population as reasoning contributing to Western moral and cultural decadence. But the match-maker political opportunists have come up with many answers to Huntington’s concerns and curiosities. Few sadistic minds try interpreting wars against humanity as act of heroism and glorification. There is no sense of holistic values in killing the fellow human beings. Strangely enough, warmongers hire war propagandists to classify wars as “noble”, “good”, necessity of the ruling nobility and to protect the flag, borders and national interests. George Bush claimed being “Man of God” who started the day with the Bible, to orchestrate the bogus war on terrorism. These are cynical notions implied to enforce the monstrous viewpoints of the few warlords in every age. There is no quality criterion except falsification of information and facts of human life. The global political affairs are not managed by rational people, with rational thinking, doing the rational practices for the interests of global citizenry.

The 1% global elite – men of king operate the international institutions - the perverted insanity lacking basic understanding of the Human Nature and of the working of the splendid Universe in which we enjoy coherent co-existence. The mankind continues to be run down by the cancerous ego and cruelty of the few superpower warlords. Killing unjustifiably one innocent human being is like killing of the whole of the humanity. The global warlords represent cruel mindset incapable to see the human side of the living conscience. Madness of the perpetuated war on terrorism and its triggered insanity knows no bound across the global spectrum. Animals do not commit massacre of their kind and species, nor set-up rape camps for the war victims, the Western led wars against the humanity have and continue to do so at an unparallel global scale without being challenged by any global organizations or leaders. Torture and massacres of innocent civilians are convenient fun games to be defined as “collateral damage” and a statistic. Perhaps, they view humanity just in digits and numbers, not as the living entities with social, moral, spiritual and intellectual values and progressive agendas for change and development. Every beginning has its end. It is just that most powerful nations have failed to learn from the living history- a slap to EH Carr’s precious thoughts of human history. Einstein (“The World as I see it”) made it known that he was against military campaigns, killings and destruction of the natural environment: "This topic brings me to that worst outcrop of herd life, the military system, which I abhor... This plague-spot of civilization ought to be abolished with all possible speed. Heroism on command, senseless violence, and all the loathsome nonsense that goes by the name of patriotism -- how passionately I hate them!.”

American historian Harry Elmer Barnes ("Perpetual War for Perpetual Peace: A Critical Examination of the Foreign Policy of Franklin Delano Roosevelt and It's Aftermath”) offered this stern warning to American politicians if the US led wars continue leading to man’s annihilation from this planet:

"If trends continue as they have during the last fifteen years, we shall soon reach this point of no return, and can only anticipate interminable wars, disguised as noble gestures for peace. Such an era could only culminate in a third world war which might well, as Arnold J. Toynbee has suggested, leave only the pygmies in remote jungles, or even the apes and ants, to carry on 'the cultural traditions' of mankind."

If a hate crime results in killing of the innocent people in American society, America foreign policy is actively doing the same to other nations - Iraq, Afghanistan, Pakistan, Yemen and others as if they were not entitled to be human beings.

Chris Hedges - author of Empire of Illusion: The End of Literacy and the Triumph of Spectacle (“How to Think”, Common Dreams, 7/9/2012) offers a global context to perpetual animosity and dreadful notion of hatred encouraging the few warmongers to undermine the very existence of humanity of which they are an essential part:

And here is the dilemma we face as a civilization. We march collectively toward self-annihilation. Corporate capitalism, if left unchecked, will kill us. Yet we refuse, because we cannot think and no longer listen to those who do think, to see what is about to happen to us. We have created entertaining mechanisms to obscure and silence the harsh truths, from climate change to the collapse of globalization to our enslavement to corporate power that will mean our self-destruction. If we can do nothing else we must, even as individuals, nurture the private dialogue and the solitude that make thought possible. It is better to be an outcast, a stranger in one’s own country, than an outcast from one’s self. It is better to see what is about to befall us and to resist than to retreat into the fantasies embraced by a nation of the blind.

Can we THINK to be human in all of our moral, political and intellectual endeavors?

Can we critically look at ourselves - why have come to be on a cliff to destroy the cause of freedom, equality and justice for all? Can we see the Mirror with a collective conscience - why have we been pushed to resort to animalistic characteristics and behaviors that those who seem to be most educated and morally and intellectually intact but act like agents of the Draconian age as if there were no people of REASON and accountability populating the Planet Earth? I wait to learn more from your inner conscience, your sense of humanity, your deep insight to human thinking as once Alexis Carrel noted: Man, The Unknown.

-###-

(Dr. Mahboob A. Khawaja specializes in global security, peace and conflict resolution with keen interests in Islamic-Western comparative cultures and civilizations, and author of several publications including the latest: Global Peace and Conflict Management: Man and Humanity in Search of New Thinking. Lambert Publishing Germany, May 2012)