Islam

When you hear of the Ayatollah and others, don't think that is the way all Moslems think and behave:

(Subtitles)

https://youtu.be/_ZIqdrFeFBk

Mexico, Rest of the world

THE ABSURD TIMES

OUR COUNTRY AS FORSEEN, TRUMPNICKS RUN WILD [EDITOR'S MEME]

Trump has kept everyone busy with so many distractions that one can only react with resignation and hate.  Pick one, it's a toss-up.

Probably the most important issue is the SCOTUS nominee as it is certain that the main intention is to repleal or at least castrate Roe v. Wade.   The resignation of Kennedy came as a surprise to many people, but it may hve been in the works for some time.  It is now clear that Kennedy's son, working for Deutsche Welle Bank authorized about a billion dollar loan for Donald Trump.  He was involved with that bank since no United States banks woud lend him any money for the simply reason that he would not pay it back but, rather, delclare bankruptcy.  Should an important issue come up, that would certainly surface immediately.  It is such a bad move, frankly, that no matter how the affiliations work, the Media organization known as Deutsche Welle is now suspect as a possible German speaking Fox news.  Frankly, it is impossible to describe how bad this looks, or, in today's parlance, what "bad optics" it presents.

That, however, in not what we want to talk about but just another example of how he always manages to get us off the real topic at hand.  Obrador has finally been elected President to Mexico.  He has been involved in that pursuit since the 90s, and the United States has always managed to place a more fascistic style candidate in charge.  In fact, one wonders when and if the CIA will be allowed to act as normal in these circumstances and attempt to overthrow his government. 

Still, a few things that have not been covered here:  A woman was elected Mayor of Tunis, a Moslem, Arab, Country which one housed Yassir Arafat.  She was elected as a member of the Islamist Party.  I saw her taking the oath.  She is attractive and does not wear any of the typican hoods and whatever they are nearly always depicted as wearing here.  Completely secular looking and could be mistaken for an American or British actress.  Speaking of actresses, one is nominated, or expected to be nominated, for an Oscar.  She is from Saudi Arabia and, again, speakis fluent English and looks completely secular, including the standard make-up.  Her explanation of why her films are not better known here is that they have primarily distributed in the gulf States area.  (Another reason may be that our networks want to keep Moslems classified as "the others" for local consumption.)  Oh yes, I found this out on a PBS station that was carrying a FRANCE 24 English language newscast.  It was presented as news as usual.  That is to say, there was no fuss made about it one way or the other.

OK, and now on to Obrador:

n Mexico, leftist politician Andrés Manuel López Obrador, known as AMLO, has claimed victory after winning Sunday's presidential election by a landslide, vowing to transform Mexico by reducing corruption and violence. Preliminary election results show López Obrador, the former mayor of Mexico City, capturing 53 percent of the vote—more than twice that of his closest rival. His three main rival candidates have already conceded. His victory comes after the most violent electoral season in modern Mexican history. At least 136 politicians have been assassinated in Mexico since September. For more, we speak with Christy Thornton, assistant professor of sociology and Latin American studies at Johns Hopkins University. She was an election observer for the Scholar and Citizen Network for Democracy. She is currently writing a book about Mexican economic history.

Transcript

This is a rush transcript. Copy may not be in its final form.

AMY GOODMAN: We begin today's show in Mexico. In a landslide election, voters have chosen Andrés Manuel López Obrador to be Mexico's next president. Celebrations broke out across Mexico City Sunday night. The former mayor of Mexico City, who's known as AMLO, will become Mexico's first leftist president in decades. During a victory speech on Sunday night, he vowed to transform Mexico by reducing corruption and violence.

PRESIDENT-ELECT ANDRÉS MANUEL LÓPEZ OBRADOR:[translated] The new project of the nation will seek to establish an authentic democracy. We don't bet on building an open or closed dictatorship. The changes will be profound but will happen with a strict adherence to the legal established order. There will be corporate freedom, freedom of expression, of association and of beliefs. We will guarantee all the individual and social freedoms, as well as the political rights of citizens, consecrated in our Constitution. There will be no need to increase taxes in real terms, not for the country to fall into debt. There will also be no hikes in petrol. I will lower the general cost of living and the public investment to propel productive activities and to create jobs. The objective is to strengthen the internal market, to try to produce what we consume in the country. We won't act in an arbitrary way, and there will be no confiscation or expropriation of property. The transformation will consist in basically banishing corruption from our country. We won't have a problem in achieving this objective, because the people of Mexico are the heir of great civilizations.

AMY GOODMAN: Preliminary election results show López Obrador captured 53 percent of the vote, more than twice that of his closest rival. This marked AMLO's third time running for president. In Britain, Labour Leader Jeremy Corbyn praised López Obrador. Corbyn tweeted, "Today brings a new beginning for México. Congratulations @lopezobrador. His election as President with more than 50% of the vote offers the poor and marginalised a genuine voice for the first time in Mexico's modern history. I'm sure #AMLO will be a president for all Mexicans," Corbyn tweeted.

López Obrador's victory comes after the most violent electoral season in modern Mexican history. At least 136 politicians have been assassinated in Mexico since September.

We go now to Mexico City, where we're joined by Christy Thornton. She's an assistant professor of sociology and Latin American studies at Johns Hopkins University. She was an election observer for the Scholars and Citizens Network for Democracy, currently writing a book about Mexican economic history.

Professor Thornton, talk about the election. Talk about the celebration in the Zócalo and what AMLO, what this new leftist president, president-elect right now, has promised.

CHRISTY THORNTON: Yeah, good morning, Amy, from Mexico City. It's really been an incredible atmosphere here. The victory of AMLO, and the margin with which he did it, really signals a new day here. I think it's beyond the expectations of even some of AMLO's strongest supporters to have seen him win the presidency with what the initial result says is 53 percent of the vote. We have to think about this was a field of four candidates. So for him to have won an absolute majority is something that we haven't seen in recent Mexican elections. And so, this is really a very strong victory, a very strong message. And it will be the case not just in the presidency, but in the legislature, as well, and in a number of state governorships. AMLO's MORENA party, which he founded in 2014, has really become a vital new political force here in Mexico that's really set to shake things up.

AMY GOODMAN: So, talk about what this represents in terms of Mexico and the United States. Also, President Trump tweeted his congratulations. The corporate media is often now referring to López Obrador as "Mexico's Trump." It's not clear exactly why. Maybe they equate being opposed to NAFTA as being Trump.

CHRISTY THORNTON: Yeah, that's right. So, I think that the—López Obrador's election will have a number of important implications for the United States: on trade, as you said, the renegotiations of NAFTA; on security, with regard to the drug war; and with regard to migration. I think all three of those things are things in which we can expect a serious change from this Mexican administration. And we'll have to see what the relationship is between Trump and López Obrador.

You're right that a number of mainstream media outlets have made this kind of absurd comparison. And I think one of the reasons that has happened is the kind of—the worry from establishment politicians and mainstream media outlets about the idea of populism, and the worry about populism where they completely eviscerate the political content of that. And so, if you compare Trump and López Obrador, you could say that they are both, quote-unquote, "populists," but obviously their political platforms are on completely the opposite sides of the political spectrum. So, those kinds of comparisons, I think, are really bunk. López Obrador is really something more like a Bernie Sanders.

And what we saw here in Mexico City last night and in Tijuana, in major cities all over Mexico, people commented to me over and over that it felt like 2008. It felt like when Obama won the elections, and there was a kind of historic breaking of some precedent, right? And so, we have—that seems much more like an obvious comparison, the kind of breaking open of the political system and the hope for real change. Now, obviously, that comparison leaves those of us in the United States to worry about what might come next—right?—and what can actually be changed. There are real structural impediments. But, for now, the power of this movement indicates that Mexicans desperately want that change and are willing to fight for it.

AMY GOODMAN: Talk about what AMLO represented, what he promised. Talk about his stand on the wall, on immigration and on NAFTA, exactly what he's saying.

CHRISTY THORNTON: Yeah. So, there are a number of important areas where AMLO has said that he will change policy. With regard to NAFTA, he has kind of moderated his position over the years, but he has said that he wants the negotiations to wait until he assumes the presidency, and that members of his team will now be in the negotiating room. And so, he really hopes to now become an important part of the NAFTAnegotiations as they go forward. The most important thing for López Obrador on that is the protection of Mexican farmers and the Mexican agricultural sector. Obviously the United States really protects its agricultural sector in a way that is against a, quote-unquote, "free trade agenda." And that's been devastating for Mexican agriculture. So that's something we can expect to see López Obrador really push against.

With regard to migration, he has said that he intends to move Mexico's migration focus to the northern border rather than the southern border, where it's been, really at the behest of the U.S. government. So Mexico has really militarized its southern border with Guatemala as part of the larger U.S. policy against immigration, against refugees and SIVs and economic migrants. And so, López Obrador has said that he wants to reverse that policy, to demilitarize that border, to care for migrants here in Mexico and to move the center for migration up here to the north, rather than militarizing in the south and really terrorizing migrants as they cross the national territory. So, those are two areas in which there could be a real change in policies that affect the United States.

With regard to security, he has indicated that he wants to demilitarize the, quote-unquote, "war on drugs and organized crime," that was started by Felipe Calderón in 2007, 2008. The military has been sent into the streets with horrific human rights consequences—more than 100,000 people killed, 30,000 disappeared—and those of the conservative numbers. As you said, it's been an incredibly violent year this past year in Mexico. The statistics may indicate that it's the most violent year since they started keeping statistics here in Mexico. So, he has indicated that he intends to kind of back the military off of these law enforcement functions. And in your opening clip, a woman mentioned scholarships, not assassins, right? And so, that becarios, not sicarios, that was a big part of his platform, that he wants young people to have educational and economic opportunities that won't drive them into the hands of the drug cartels. So, it's really a sweeping change in Mexican policy that we can expect to see. And with the majorities in the House of Deputies and the Senate that he seems to have won, according to the exit polls, we can really expect to see some important changes.

AMY GOODMAN: Let's go back to Andrés Manuel López Obrador speaking at his victory rally last night in the Zócalo, in the main square in Mexico City.

PRESIDENT-ELECT ANDRÉS MANUEL LÓPEZ OBRADOR:[translated] We will follow three basic principles: to not lie, to not steal and to not betray the people. Long live Mexico! Long live Mexico!

AMY GOODMAN: So, that is AMLO last night. All the major candidates have conceded. Christy Thornton, give us a thumbnail sketch of his rise to power. I mean, back when the Zapatistas rose up in the mid-'90s, he was already running.

CHRISTY THORNTON: That's right. So, López Obrador was part of a kind of left insurgency from within the PRI. As your listeners and your watchers probably know, Mexico was effectively a one-party state, and the PRI controlled all levels of government, from the federal down to the local, for most of the 20th century. López Obrador was really important in the late 1980s in pushing to democratize from within the PRI. And then, when the 1988 elections were stolen fraudulently by the PRI—the computers were literally unplugged and replugged in, and when they came back, they mysteriously showed the PRI candidate winning—he broke off and was part of the new left party that was formed after that, called the Party for the Democratic Revolution. Over the decades since 1988, the Party for the Democratic Revolution has joined the PRI and the right-wing PAN party, the National Action Party, in a kind of consolidation towards the center. So the PRD was run by kind of centrist affiliates with the PRI, people who were willing to go along with the PRIand the PAN agenda. And so, we saw, after the Ayotzinapa crisis, where those 43 students were disappeared—and we still don't know exactly what happened to them—we saw López Obrador and a number of the founders of the PRI split—or, of the PRD, I'm sorry, split off from that party. And so, after that moment was when López Obrador formed his new party, MORENA.

He had run for the presidency in 2006, and there was massive fraud in that election. He lost by less than half of a percentage point. He ran against the current president, Enrique Peña Nieto, in 2012 and lost by a more sizable margin. One of the things that's been really interesting here, as an observer, has been to see the extent to which the machine for sort of election fraud, for the buying and coercion of votes, for the kind of corralling of voters to the voting places, it was definitely in action yesterday in the elections, but it was not enough to overcome this kind of tide of support for López Obrador and for his new party, MORENA. So this is really an incredible victory not just for this left candidate and his party, but really for the practice of Mexican democracy. This is really a new day for Mexican democracy. And you'll see people out in the streets celebrating this for some time to come.

AMY GOODMAN: Professor Thornton, as we begin to wrap up, you retweeted, "I am not sure people understand just how big an impact AMLO's election has the potential to have on Central American->US migration patterns. A MEX gov w/no interest in intercepting migrants on US' behalf? I dunno, man." Talk about that, as we wrap up.

CHRISTY THORNTON: Yeah, absolutely. So, the militarization of the southern border has been done as part of a kind of security cooperation agreement between the United States and Mexico, that stems from the beginning of the militarization of the drug war. The Mérida Initiative is an initiative that has sent something like $3 billion in training and equipment and military equipment to Mexico. And they have militarized that southern border in such a way that the Mexican government has really been acting as a proxy for the U.S. government in trying to keep Central American migrants out and really terrorize them as they try to cross that border. If López Obrador demilitarizes that southern border, allows migrants to cross Mexico, provides the protection for migrants that he has indicated, it will really change how migration is being handled. And that's something that the Trump administration will certainly confront, going forward.

AMY GOODMAN: Well, I want to thank you for being with us, Christy Thornton, assistant professor of sociology and Latin American studies at Johns Hopkins University, speaking to us from Mexico City. She was an election observer there for the Scholars and Citizens Network for Democracy, currently writing a book about Mexican economic history. And, of course, we'll have more on this tomorrow on Democracy Now!

In a landslide, voters have elected Andrés Manuel López Obrador to be Mexico's next president. The former mayor of Mexico City—who is known as AMLO—will become Mexico's first leftist president in decades. On Monday, López Obrador and President Donald Trump discussed immigration and trade in a phone call. Trump called on Mexico's president-elect to collaborate on border security and NAFTA, telling reporters, "I think he's going to try and help us with the border. We have unbelievably bad border laws, immigration laws, the weakest in the world, laughed at by everybody in the world. And Mexico has very strong immigration laws, so they can help us." We speak with John Ackerman and Irma Sandoval in Mexico City. Irma Sandoval is a professor and director of the Center for the Study of Corruption at the National Autonomous University of Mexico. She is set to become comptroller general in President-elect Andrés Manuel López Obrador's government. John Ackerman is the editor of the Mexican Law Review and a professor at the National Autonomous University of Mexico. He is also a columnist for Proceso magazine and La Jornada newspaper.

Transcript

This is a rush transcript. Copy may not be in its final form.

AMY GOODMAN: We begin today's show in Mexico, where voters have elected Andrés Manuel López Obrador to be Mexico's next president. The former mayor of Mexico City, who is known by his initials AMLO, will become Mexico's first leftist president in decades. López Obrador ran an anti-corruption, anti-violence campaign and has vowed to expand pensions for the elderly, boost spending for social programs and increase grants for students. On Monday, López Obrador and President Donald Trump had about a half-hour phone conversation, according to Trump, discussing immigration and trade. This is President Trump calling on Mexico's president-elect to collaborate on border security and NAFTA.

PRESIDENT DONALD TRUMP: I think he's going to try and help us with the border. We have unbelievably bad border laws, immigration laws, the weakest in the world, laughed at by everybody in the world. And Mexico has very strong immigration laws, so they can help us.

AMY GOODMAN: López Obrador captured 53 percent of the vote, more than twice that of his closest rival. This marked his third time running for president. López Obrador's victory comes after the most violent electoral season in modern Mexican history. At least 136 politicians have been assassinated in Mexico since September.

For more, we go to Mexico City, where we're joined by John Ackerman and Irma Sandoval. Irma Sandoval is a professor and director of the Center for the Study of Corruption at the National Autonomous University of Mexico, set to become comptroller general in President-elect Andrés Manuel López Obrador's government. John Ackerman is the editor of the Mexican Law Review and a professor at the National Autonomous University of Mexico. He's also a columnist for Procesoand La Jornada newspapers. They happen to be married.

Welcome to Democracy Now! John Ackerman, let's begin with you. Talk about the overall significance of this victory for López Obrador, who has been campaigning for this, it seems, for decades.

JOHN ACKERMAN: Yeah. Thank you, Amy. A real pleasure and a real honor to be on your show. You guys are the best.

Yes, López Obrador has been struggling for this, and the entire Mexican people have struggling for democracy, for decades. We supposedly had democracy in the year 2000, when ex-Coca-Cola executive Vicente Fox came into power, but he, you know, within a few months, basically cut deals with the old authoritarian regime and has really failed the Mexican people—not only him, but also his successor, Calderón, and, of course, Enrique Peña Nieto, over the last five or six years, have really—has really generated a vast crisis in corruption, in violence, in censorship, in repression of social movements.

And finally, this Sunday, July 1st, the Mexican people have really come up in, you know, a peaceful revolution. It's really quite amazing. It was amazing to see the poll stations this Sunday packed with long lines of voters, people who were really just fed up with this failure of the Mexican so-called democratic transition and want to really try again. This is a real historic moment, because throughout Latin America we've been having all this experimentation with left-wing and progressive governments throughout the region, from Brazil to El Salvador to Argentina, Bolivia, Venezuela, as to Uruguay, and Mexico had been left out of this pink tide. We have been stuck with this single ideology of neoliberal authoritarianism since the 1980s. But now, finally, it looks like we're going to be able to try something new.

AMY GOODMAN: A lot of the corporate media in the United States is referring to AMLO, to López Obrador, as "Mexico's Trump," talking about him as an anti-NAFTA populist. Your response?

JOHN ACKERMAN: No, there's absolutely no comparison between López Obrador and Trump. Trump is a right-wing demagogue who is quite ignorant about both national and international affairs. He's a chauvinist. He's someone who preaches hate. López Obrador is a quite sophisticated, modern, intellectual leader who is looking to, yes, defend the Mexican national economy, Mexican workers. He's actually pro-NAFTA. It's interesting. For many years, the left in Mexico has been anti-NAFTA, but things have changed. He's, you know, more similar to Bernie Sanders, if you want to do a comparison. But if you want to look at Latin America, it would be more like José Mujica or Lula da Silva. Jeremy Corbyn is a great friend of López Obrador. So, that's sort of his school of thought. This is—it's very quite funny to see how people think that anything that questions the status quo have to be similar. Trump and López Obrador have nothing to do with each other, from my point of view.

AMY GOODMAN: Irma Sandoval, you are going to be a part of the government, the comptroller general of Mexico. You're part of the team. Were you surprised by the massive outpouring of support? The significance of how much López Obrador won by?

IRMA SANDOVAL: Yeah. Hi, Amy. This is a historic moment, and we are very, very happy, because this moment really synthesized a lot of decades of struggles in Mexico, struggles for human rights, struggles for social movements, and also a very meaningful struggle that we had last year that is the struggle for justice in Ayotzinapa. And I think that everybody in Mexico is very happy of this moment, of this achievement. And also, personally, I'm very proud, very honored of being part of the team that is going help López Obrador to confront corruption, to combat corruption and to finish with this important—with this problem in Mexico.

Yeah, the meaningful is huge. The meaning is huge, precisely because López Obrador, as you may know, as your audience is aware, has won in the past. And in the past, he proclaimed himself as the legitimate president, with no legal result. But then, this moment is the contrary: He's going to be the legal president, the President López Obrador, with the highest level of legitimacy in modern history. So we are all very, very happy. And I'm sure that we are going to get the goal of finish corruption in our public life.

AMY GOODMAN: And, Irma Sandoval, talk about the role of women in the election of AMLO.

IRMA SANDOVAL: Well, it's very important. The general coordinator of his campaign, of López Obrador's campaign, was a very prominent entrepreneur. Tatiana Clouthier was the coordinator of his campaign. And the 50 percent of the Cabinet that he offered is composed by women. So, I'm very proud of that also. I think that López Obrador has—is the politician that has offered the real feminist legacy for Mexican politics, because when he was mayor of Mexico City, half of his Cabinet was confirmated, was formed by women, as well. And in this occasion, he's going to repeat this experience.

AMY GOODMAN: And Mexico City has elected its first female mayor, is that right? Claudia Sheinbaum.

IRMA SANDOVAL: Claudia Sheinbaum is also a great leader. And she's going to be, I'm sure, the best mayor of Mexico City.

AMY GOODMAN: I'd like to ask about how President-elect Obrador is likely to tackle drug violence in Mexico. He spoke briefly about how he would do this on Sunday.

PRESIDENT-ELECT ANDRÉS MANUEL LÓPEZ OBRADOR:[translated] The failed strategy to tackle insecurity and violence will change. More than using force, we will attack the causes that create insecurity and violence. I am convinced that the most efficient and most humane way to confront these evils necessarily demand we combat inequality and poverty.

AMY GOODMAN: John Ackerman, how exactly is López Obrador going to do this? And what role does the United States play in this, as well?

JOHN ACKERMAN: [inaudible] be changing the discourse, the logic on this. We have been going through a drug war for the last 12 years with Calderón, with Peña Nieto, very much politically motivated. You know, so, Calderón started this drug war, put the military out in the streets in the end of 2006, in a very similar way with, you know, Bush invading Iraq, to try to compensate for this lack of legitimacy in the context of the electoral fraud of 2006. And we've with this for the last 12 years, and also from lots of pressure from the United States to continue on that decapitation strategy, which has led to a bloodbath, you know, so 350,000 dead over the last 12 years, 35,000 disappeared, 25,000 displaced. So now López Obrador is talking about peace instead of war. So that's just, you know, changing the discussion.

Now, what he's going to do concretely, he's talked about really going at the base of the support for organized crime, so he's going to offer 3 million scholarships to youth, so that they can either have access to higher education or begin apprenticeships with businesses, or, on the other hand, there's also this generalized idea to support the countryside. So he wants to support the peasants. He wants to go for price supports for basic products from the countryside and, in general, support and move towards a possible food self-sufficiency in Mexico so we're not just importing and buying at Walmart. You know, so, Mexico is now the second-largest Walmart country in the world. We're increasingly dependent on U.S. agro products, and so—you know, Mexico, with this incredibly productive countryside. So, you know, supporting the peasants, supporting the youth, that would undercut the base support for the narcos, and, in general, trying to move towards a new strategy which is not based on the militarization, not fighting fire with fire, is what he says.

We need to investigate crimes. One of the great and the most important problems with this issue is that only 9 percent of crimes are even reported to the authorities. That's because the Mexican people, rightly, in fact, don't trust the criminal investigators. Often when you report a crime, you end up being investigated yourself, because they are often in the pocket of the criminals themselves. So you have to combat corruption, create more confidence and have people report crimes and have those reports actually get to—on the punishments for the criminals. And so, you know, let's go to the institutions, go to the questions of poverty and economic development, instead of just creating increased violence and war scenario. And here, you know, the discussion yesterday with Trump was pretty clear, from what I understand. I don't think the transcript was released, but López Obrador was saying this. He said this before. We want—from the United States, we don't want you guys to be sending us helicopters and arms. We want us—have a real joint strategy for economic development, to stop at the roots, so that we don't have this incredible flow of migrants, and they can make a living in Mexico themselves.

AMY GOODMAN: I want to talk about the level of violence, as you were talking about, during the most violent electoral season in modern Mexican history, at least 136 politicians assassinated in Mexico since September, a number of journalists also killed in the lead-up to Sunday's elections, including the reporter José Guadalupe Chan Dzib, who was killed Friday night in the southern state of Quintana Roo. John Ackerman, the significance of this? I mean, at least seven journalists recently killed in Mexico, not to mention this massive number of people who want to run for elected office.

JOHN ACKERMAN: Yes, this is a very sensitive issue. Over the last 10 years, we've had a hundred journalists assassinated. And, as you said, during the electoral season, these last 10 months, over a hundred politicians have been assassinated. I mean, this is really out of control. Last year, 2017, was the most violent year in Mexico for decades. Even 2007, '08, '09, the high point of the Calderón violence didn't get this high. So, we need an urgent solution. The Mexicans are willing to play their part.

The big problem, the roots of this problem, is the lack of a separation between the criminals and the government. People speak of, you know, a narco state, in which the government itself is in cahoots with and participating directly with organized crime. So, you know, if Irma does her job, which I'm sure she will, and other levels of the state-level governments really combating corruption and separating the criminals from the public function areas, I think we can actually make a major step forward here, you know, to have a real rule of law. You know, it's not easy. It's not going to happen from one day to the next. But the presidential terms of Mexico are 6 years long—no re-election, but 6 years long. And if López Obrador does what he says he's going to do, says he's going to wake up at 5:00 in the morning, as he did as mayor of Mexico City, working from 5:00 in the morning until midnight, make those six years feel as if they were 12, we could actually make progress in this area.

AMY GOODMAN: Irma Sandoval, if you could talk about immigration policy? You have President Trump sitting with the Dutch prime minister in the White House yesterday, saying he had a great half-hour phone call congratulating López Obrador and that they will work together to enforce immigration policy, that the U.S. has the worst immigration laws, making the U.S. the laughingstock of the world, and that AMLO has agreed to enforce Mexican immigration laws, which are much better.

IRMA SANDOVAL: I think that the AMLO is going to take the approach of solving this problem through development. He's going to offer economic, social and cultural development for Mexicans. Mexicans need, aspire—they want to live their lives in their country, within their culture and with their families. And I think that that's going to be the solution for the immigration problem that we have with the U.S. And AMLO, Andrés Manuel López Obrador, is very clear with that. In terms of combat corruption, also we are going to try to struggle to combat impunity, because impunity is real—it's really the other side of the coin of corruption. To some extent, people are used to the levels of corruption. But we really—we cannot deal more with that is with impunity. And, of course, if we combat impunity, we are going to solve injustice. We are going to solve poverty. We are going to also confront all the social troubles that generate the highs—the high flows of migration in our country. So, corruption, impunity, poverty and other social challenges, we are going to confront.

AMY GOODMAN: And, John Ackerman, this issue of whether Mexico will start deporting Central Americans, for the United States, before they make it to the United States?

JOHN ACKERMAN: This is already happening. So, Enrique Peña Nieto's policy, along with Luis Videgaray, his foreign minister, has been a real disgrace for Mexico. Mexico has given up on its long tradition of sovereignty, you know, not sort of radical nationalism, but just basic sovereignty, in terms of foreign relations, in terms of control over their own territory. With Peña Nieto and Videgaray, basically, they're taking orders directly from Trump—well, not even from Trump, from Jared Kushner. And they have beefed up the southern border with the Plan Frontera Sur. And at the migration detention centers in Mexico, the biometric data from Central America and even Mexican migrants are going directly to the computers of the U.S. ICE offices. Now, obviously, there needs to be some collaboration—right?—economic, political. We share a continent. We share a region. But Mexico should—you know, I'm speaking from my own personal point of view, but Mexico should recover some sort of basic sovereignty and shouldn't be acting as, you know, the Border Patrol, extended Border Patrol, of the United States.

Now, of course, Mexicans need to, you know, actively encourage migration. And as Irma said, the Mexicans themselves, there are plenty of migrants in the United States who are happy there, but most people in Mexico and many migrants in the United States themselves would like to be in their homeland, would like to be able to have productive jobs and a productive life in Mexico themselves. And with López Obrador, there's going to be a lot of hope at that. And so, if Trump really wants to have a good relationship with Mexico, and really wants to stop migration, from his point of view, what would be in his interest is a wealthy, growing and safe Mexico to the south of the border. So, you know, I really hope that Trump opens up his eyes, sees the opportunity in Mexico today with López Obrador, and instead of grabbing Mexico as his punching bag or, López Obrador says, instead of grabbing Mexico as his piñata, you know, wakes up and tries to have a more respectful relationship with Mexico and with Mexicans. And I think then we can move forward as a more productive and peaceful North America and Latin America.

AMY GOODMAN: I want to thank you both for being with us. John Ackerman is editor of of the Mexican Law Review, columnist for the Mexican papers Proceso and La Jornada. And Irma Sandoval is set to be comptroller general in the new government of President Andrés Manuel López Obrador.

The original content of this program is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-Noncommercial-No Derivative Works 3.0 United States License. Please attribute legal copies of this work to democracynow.org. Some of the work(s) that this program incorporates, however, may be separately licensed. For further information or additional permissions, contact us.

Will the Real Charlie Hebdo Stand up?

THE ABSURD TIMES

Illustration: double standards

It's pretty clear that there are no qualifications needed to be a "Terrorism Expert".  It does help, however, if you are able to spout fear inducing mantras.  We are hereby declaring ourselves to be "Terrorism Experts" and are available for a high price on any mainstream medium.

Of course, be careful as there is not a great market for experts on "JudeoExtremism," or "RadicalJudaism" these days.  Bibi may come knocking on your door.

A ChristoTerrorist was arrested in Cincinnati.  He said he was Jesus and was going to Poison John Boehner (Speaker of the House) for being the devil and bringing Ebola into the country.   Hold on.  This just in: he is actually a home-grown (love that term?) terrorist inspired by ISIS.  We find this out because the FBI says so.  How do they know?  1) his tweets and 2) he bought a bunch of automatic weapons and made bombs.  But then, his father said he only had $1,200 (kid was "20, going on 16).  Ah, but he got the money from this FBI agent, we find out.  So, now we hear about entrapment. 

Someone asked what smart phones call us?  Does anyone know?

Ever thought of joining a "Sleeper Cell"?  They eventually want you to wake up.  That's a big down side of the whole deal.

No, we haven't printed any cartoons of Mohamed.  For one thing, there are too many jumping on that bandwagon we we already told you how to find all the copies you could ever want.  We have also not denied the Holocaust, although we did point out that at least three times as many Russians died in WWII as Jews in Camps. 

The Circulation of the magazine has gone from 60,000 to 6,000,000.  The newspaper Liberation lent them space to put together the last issue.

What we have right now in this country is a repeat of the Vietnam mantra: "I don't think people should be criticizing the war while ourt men are over there defending their rights, one of which is the right to free speech, which they should not be practicing while...." and on and on.  Also, we "don't have all the facts."  When we got them, in the Pentagon Papers, that was bad.  Right now, Snowden is being blamed again for these attacks as he revealed our manner of gathering intelligence, so called, by "violating our fourth amendment rights, which we should not be protesting when people a dying protecting that right, even though..... " and so on.

Well, here's the deal on being a Terrorism Expert:

Glenn Greenwald on How to Be a Terror "Expert": Ignore Facts, Blame Muslims, Trumpet U.S. Propaganda

11,067

SHARED

     

Who are the so-called terrorism experts? In the wake of the Paris attacks, the corporate media has once again flooded its news programs with pundits claiming authority on terrorism, foreign policy and world events. We discuss the growing and questionable field of "terrorism experts" with three guests: Glenn Greenwald, Pulitzer Prize-winning journalist and co-founder of The Intercept; Lisa Stampnitzky, social studies lecturer at Harvard University and author of "Disciplining Terror: How Experts Invented 'Terrorism'"; and Luc Mathieu, foreign affairs reporter for the French newspaper Libération.

TRANSCRIPT

This is a rush transcript. Copy may not be in its final form.

AARON MATÉ: As we continue to cover the fallout from last week’s attacks in Paris, we turn now to look at the growing field of so-called terrorism experts.

REV. AL SHARPTON: Back with me is NBC News terrorism analyst Evan Kohlmann.

EVAN KOHLMANN: The cleavages that exist in French society between Muslims and non-Muslims are far more severe than they exist here in the United States.

BROOKE BALDWIN: He is Samuel Laurent, live from Paris. He is the author of The Islamic State and al-Qaeda in France.

SAMUEL LAURENT: The landscape of jihadism and terrorism is deeply changing, and it’s proving to be a much harder task than it used to be for the intelligence service, because it’s very, very difficult now to spot and to stop the threats.

SEAN HANNITY: Joining me now, terrorism expert Steve Emerson.

STEVE EMERSON: Throughout Europe, Sean, you have no-go zones. When I was in Brussels a year ago, when I asked the police to take me to the Islamic zone or the Islamic community area, they refused. They say, "We don’t go there." This goes on in Belgium. This goes on in Sweden, in the Netherlands, in France. It goes on in Italy. I mean, it goes on throughout Europe. So, there are no-go zones.

AARON MATÉ: A few of the so-called terrorism experts who have appeared on television over the past week. That last voice was Steven Emerson, who made international headlines this weekend after this appearance on Jeanine Pirro’s show on Fox News.

JEANINE PIRRO: Developing tonight, new reports that terrorist sleeper cells may have been activated in France. This as we’re learning new details about hundreds of no-go zones across France and other countries that are off-limits to non-Muslims. Steve Emerson, founder of the Investigative Project, joins us.

STEVE EMERSON: These no-go zones exist not only in France, but they exist throughout Europe. They’re sort of amorphous. They’re not contiguous, necessarily, but they’re sort of safe havens. And they’re places where the governments, like France, Britain, Sweden, Germany, they don’t exercise any sovereignty. So, you basically have zones where Sharia courts are set up, where Muslim density is very intense, where the police don’t go in, and where it’s basically a separate country almost, a country within a country. And—

JEANINE PIRRO: You know what it sounds like to me, Steve? It sounds like a caliphate within a particular country.

STEVE EMERSON: It certainly does sound like that. ... And in Britain, it’s not just no-go zones; there are actual cities, like Birmingham, that are totally Muslim, where non-Muslims just simply don’t go in.

AMY GOODMAN: While Steve Emerson claimed the British city of Birmingham was totally Muslim, it’s in fact a predominantly Christian city. Emerson, who describes himself as, quote, "one of the leading authorities" on Islamic extremist networks, appeared on the BBC Monday and apologized.

STEVE EMERSON: I relied on incorrect research. It was totally irresponsible for me not to have fact-checked the information that I obtained. And it was not done out of any malice, but out of a total irresponsible journalistic practice, which I usually and uniformly don’t practice.

NICK OWEN: Are you aware that our prime minister has called you a complete idiot?

STEVE EMERSON: Yes, I’m aware.

NICK OWEN: What does that make you feel?

STEVE EMERSON: Not great. You know, mistakes are made. What can I tell you?

AMY GOODMAN: While Steve Emerson is making headlines today, many questions have been raised about the entire field of so-called terrorism experts. Another so-called expert, Evan Kohlmann, has been described as "the Doogie Howser of terrorism" for building a career based on essays he wrote on al-Qaeda as an undergrad.

We’re joined now by two guests who have closely analyzed this issue. Joining us from Boston is Lisa Stampnitzky. She’s a lecturer on social studies at Harvard University and author of the book Disciplining Terror: How Experts Invented "Terrorism." And from Rio de Janeiro, Brazil, we’re joined by Pulitzer Prize-winning journalist Glenn Greenwald, co-founder of The Intercept and author of No Place to Hide: Edward Snowden, the NSA, and the U.S. Surveillance State.

Glenn, let’s begin with you. The terror attacks, the Paris attacks took place last week, and the so-called terror experts are in—very prominent all over the networks. Can you talk about who we are hearing from?

GLENN GREENWALD: The concept of terrorism is a very widely debated concept all over the world, and there are incredibly divergent opinions, even about what terrorism is, about who it is who’s perpetrating it, about how it is that you define it and understand it, and whether or not there’s even a meaningful definition of the term at all. And yet you have all of these so-called terrorism experts employed by leading American television networks—all of them, really—and on whom most establishment newspapers rely, who are called terrorism experts and yet who are incredibly homogenous in their views, because they spout the very homogenized American conception of all of those questions.

It’s an incredibly propagandized term. It’s an incredibly propagandistic set of theories that they have. And that’s really what these media outlets are doing, is they’re masquerading pro-U.S. propaganda, pro-U.S. government propaganda, as expertise, when it’s really anything but. These are incredibly ideological people. They’re very loyal to the view of the U.S. government about very controversial questions. They certainly have the right to express their opinions, but the pretense to expertise is incredibly fraudulent. And that’s why they have not just Steve Emerson, the Fox News strain, but really all of them who are held up as the most prominent terrorism experts in the U.S. have a really shameful history of incredible error and all sorts of just very dubious claims, because they’re really just rank propagandists.

AARON MATÉ: And so, Glenn, what allows them to continue perpetuating these myths that you describe? What is the dynamic that allows this expert industry to keep going?

GLENN GREENWALD: Well, there are several aspects to it. I mean, one is the United States government obviously has an interest in making people believe that its very particular and self-serving views of terrorism are not subjective or debatable, but are in fact just objective expertise, and so they do all sorts of things to prop these people up. They give them contracts. They pay them lots of money to teach people inside the government about terrorism. Really most disturbingly of all, they continuously call them as, quote-unquote, "experts" at terrorism trials. And all of these experts then dutifully march forth and say whatever the government wants about the Muslim defendants who are on trial, and help the government obtain conviction after conviction, and get a lot of money in the process.

Part of it is just the role that think tanks play in Washington, which is to lend this kind of intellectual artifice to whatever the government’s policy is or whatever the government wants. And so you have a lot of them who work at think tanks, like Brookings Institute, which employs Will McCants, who misled American media outlets into believing for a full day and then telling the world that the Anders Breivik attack in Norway was actually the work of a jihadist group. Even the more respectable ones are people who generally spout the conventional orthodoxies of the American government about terrorism, and therefore it’s very much in the interest of the U.S. government and these media outlets to continue to depict them not as polemicists and highly opinionated, you know, just participants in debates, but as actual academic experts. And that’s where the fraudulent aspect comes in.

AMY GOODMAN: I want to bring in Professor Lisa Stampnitzky. Again, your book is called Disciplining Terror: How Experts Invented "Terrorism." What do you mean by "disciplining terror"? You carried out one of the first empirical studies of these so-called terror experts on television.

LISA STAMPNITZKY: That’s right. So, "disciplining terror" has a dual meaning. On the one hand, it refers to the attempts of states to get control over the problem of terrorism. On the other hand, it refers to the attempt to develop a discipline of terrorism studies. And that problematic field is the story that I’m telling in the book.

AARON MATÉ: What’s your assessment of the merits of this field in terms of its level of expertise and its seriousness?

LISA STAMPNITZKY: I mean, one of the conclusions I draw is that it’s a very peculiar field in terms of fields of expertise, because there is no strict boundary around it, there is no control according to who can be an expert. There’s no credentialing. And so, you have people coming on TV who are just sort of spouting hysteria and not drawing on any real expert knowledge. And even those who are more serious in the field have no ability to regulate who gets called an expert.

AMY GOODMAN: In 2008, self-described "terrorism consultant" Evan Kohlmann was interviewed on the public radio newshour The Takeway. Host John Hockenberry challenged Kohlmann on his level of expertise.

EVAN KOHLMANN: This is a far-ranging international conspiracy that began, you know, as many as two decades ago, involves hundreds of different people spread around, you know, various different places in the world, and it’s also based in a language and a culture that, you know, to be honest with you, very few Americans are familiar with.

JOHN HOCKENBERRY: Right, and in speaking of that, do you think, now that the movie has been played in open court, and, you know, you’ve achieved a certain amount of notoriety, that it might be time to learn Arabic, maybe go to Afghanistan or Pakistan—

EVAN KOHLMANN: Well, I mean, I—I mean, I—

JOHN HOCKENBERRY: —or familiarize yourself with the culture?

EVAN KOHLMANN: Well, I have a degree in Islam. And, I mean, I do speak some Arabic; I’m not fluent. But, you know, in terms of traveling to Pakistan, trying to do this research right now in Pakistan is extremely difficult. Trying to even get into Pakistan right now to do this is extremely difficult.

AMY GOODMAN: That’s Evan Kohlmann, an NBC News analyst. Glenn Greenwald, your comment?

GLENN GREENWALD: And there are so many of them like that. I mean, he’s one of the people called by the U.S. government in these prosecutions, these really dubious prosecutions, of American Muslims for really remote charges of material support for terrorism. And his expertise is basically just that he gets called an expert by the U.S. government. And the more he gets called to testify, the more that expertise builds. That’s really the only foundation for it, is that some people call him an expert because it’s in their interest to do so. There’s another one like him, Matthew Levitt, who was profiled in Harper’s, who has a long history of unbelievably erroneous claims that he makes in service of this agenda. They get paid a lot of money, too. I mean, he goes on—they go on NBC News. They get held up as a terrorism analyst. They get paid for that. They get called as an expert in court. And yet, as that tape said and as Lisa said, there’s really no foundation for the expertise. There’s no Ph.D.s that they have in terrorism studies.

There’s not even agreement about what the word "terrorism" means, which is why the old cliché that one man’s freedom fighter is another man’s terrorist is, though clichéd, is so resoundingly true. You can have debates about what terrorism is, about who perpetrates it, and yet all of these so-called experts simply assume the answers to those questions, because if they were, for example, to say that the U.S. government is a state sponsor of terrorism by virtue of its support for death squads in El Salvador or the Contras in Nicaragua or any of the other groups across the United States—across the world that the United States continues to support that engages in violence against civilians for political ends, you would immediately have them eliminated. No major network like CNN or MSNBC or NBC would ever call somebody like that a terrorism expert, even though that’s a very plausible claim to make. It’s an extremely ideological and politicized view that gets called expertise. And they don’t even have the basic attributes of what we generally consider that makes somebody an expert.

AARON MATÉ: Glenn, do you personally use the word "terror," or do you avoid it entirely?

GLENN GREENWALD: I generally avoid it. I mean, you could probably find instances in my writing where I’ve invoked the term, usually just ironically or to refer to the fact that somebody else is using it. But I do think that until we have an understanding of what the term means, it really is a term that ought to be avoided.

There is some amazingly great scholarly research by Rémi Brulin, who was at the Sorbonne and then NYU, where he traces, essentially, the history of this term in political discourse. And what he has described, in a very scholarly way, is that the term "terrorism" really entered and became prevalent in the discourse of international affairs in the late '60s and the early ’70s, when the Israelis sought to use the term to universalize their disputes with their neighbors, so they could say, "We're not fighting the Palestinians and we’re not bombing Lebanon over just some land disputes. We’re fighting this concept that is of great—a grave menace to the world, called 'terrorism.' And it’s not only our fight, it’s your fight in the United States, and it’s your fight in Europe, and it’s your fight around the world."

And there are all these conferences in the late '60s and early ’70s and into the 1980s even, where Israelis and Americans and neocons are attempting to come up with a definition of the term "terrorism" that includes the violence that they want to delegitimize, meaning the violence by their adversaries, while legitimizing—excluding the violence they want to legitimize, namely our violence, the violence of Israel, the violence of our allies. And it was virtually impossible to come up with a definition, and that's why there really is no agreed-upon definition. The term is incredibly malleable, because it’s typically just meant as a term that says any violence we don’t like is something we’re going to call terrorism. And at this point it really just means violence engaged in by Muslims against the West. That’s really the definition of the term "terrorism," the functional definition. It has no fixed definition.

AMY GOODMAN: Glenn, I remember at the beginning, at the Oklahoma City bombing attack, when two names of Arab men were floated. It turned out they were New York taxi drivers who had gone to Oklahoma City to renew their licenses. But those names were put out by the media, and then there was the question: Was this a terrorist attack? When it turned out it was Timothy McVeigh—Timothy McVeigh, who worked with other people, had all the—you know, all the definition of a terrorist attack—then it wasn’t. "Oh, no, it was Timothy McVeigh, and he did this, a white Christian man." No longer did we refer to it as a terrorist attack.

GLENN GREENWALD: Right. I mean, that happens all the time. First of all, it was Steve Emerson, the very same Steve Emerson who just said that Birmingham was an all-Muslim city that no non-Muslims can enter, who was working at the time—either at the time for CNN or just afterwards, who went on, on the air, and was the most influential comment shaping what you just described. And he said the attempt here was to kill as many people as possible, which is a Middle East attribute, and therefore we should assume or highly speculate that this is likely an attack perpetrated by someone from the Middle East, someone who is Muslim. That’s how that narrative actually started. Steve Emerson’s career didn’t suffer at all from that.

But, you know, if you watch how these attacks are discussed, every time there’s an attack where the assailant or the perpetrator is unknown, the media will say it’s unknown whether or not terrorism is involved. And what they really mean by that is: It’s unknown whether or not the perpetrator is Muslim. And as soon as they discover that the perpetrator is a Christian or is American, a white American, they’ll say, "We now have confirmation that this is not a terrorist attack." It’s something else—someone who’s mentally unstable, some extremist, something like that. It really is a term that functionally now means nothing other than Muslims who engage in violence against the West.

AMY GOODMAN: I mean, we have a perfect example right now in Colorado Springs. There was a bomb that was affixed that blew up outside the NAACP. The media is not saying right now, as the man is looked for, there is a search for a terrorist going on right now on our own soil in Colorado.

GLENN GREENWALD: Yeah, I remember there was an individual named Joseph Stack who flew an airplane into a government building in Texas, into the side of theIRS, actually. And for the first several hours of the reporting, it was said that the suspicion is that this is a terrorist attack, because it was on a government facility. And then when it was discovered that he was actually a right-wing, anti-tax, anti-government American, they said, actually, this isn’t a terrorist attack, this is just kind of this crazy person who did this for political ends.

You know, I was in Canada about two months ago when those two attacks happened, first one in Quebec and then the other one at the Parliament in Ottawa. And the first one, in the outskirts of Quebec, was somebody—two people who had waited two hours in a car to see a soldier, a Canadian soldier, and then targeted him and ran him over. And that was instantly branded a terrorist attack, even though they purposefully avoided targeting civilians and targeted a soldier of a country that is at war. It really is a term that is so muddled and confused in terms of how it’s used, and it is used for very specific agendas and very ideological purposes.

AMY GOODMAN: We’re going to break and then come back to this discussion. We are talking to Glenn Greenwald of The Intercept. We’re also speaking with Lisa Stampnitzky. She is a lecturer at Harvard University, author of Disciplining Terror: How Experts Invented "Terrorism." Stay with us.

[break]

AMY GOODMAN: This is Democracy Now!, democracynow.org, The War and Peace Report. I’m Amy Goodman, with Aaron Maté. Our guests are Glenn Greenwald of The Intercept, Lisa Stampnitzky of Harvard University, who wrote the bookDisciplining Terror. And we’re joined from Paris by Luc Mathieu, the foreign affairs reporter for the French newspaper Libération, who has written critically of so-called terrorism expert Samuel Laurent. He appeared on CNN last week with host Brooke Baldwin. This is Samuel Laurent.

BROOKE BALDWIN: He is Samuel Laurent, live from Paris. He is the author of The Islamic State and al-Qaeda in France. Samuel, nice to see you, sir. Here’s my question. You know, Fareed was making the point about how this totally seems to be changing the game, the face of terror. These are, you know, seemingly local, perhaps French natives from perhaps a much larger organization. When you watch the video, very trained. What’s your read on this?

SAMUEL LAURENT: Mm-hmm. Well, basically, what you have to understand is that the situation has changed a lot from the time of al-Qaeda. Basically, Qaeda was operating cells. They were breeding them, and they were targeting a specific objective. Nowadays with the Islamic State, what has changed is that the caliph, Abu Bakr al-Baghdadi, is supposed to be the leader of the believers, so therefore he issues some orders at wide. And basically, some of his orders in October and November has been to kill the French, by any possible means. That was his words.

AMY GOODMAN: That’s Samuel Laurent, often seen on CNN. Luc Mathieu, you’re with the French newspaper Libération. You have written about who Samuel Laurent is. Can you talk about him?

LUC MATHIEU: Well, it’s difficult to talk about him, because he is not a journalist. He is not an analyst. He is not a former diplomat. He is not a former member of an intelligence community. I mean, he’s describing himself as an international consultant, which doesn’t mean any—which doesn’t mean nothing. So, he wrote like three books, and one was culturally interesting, which was Al-Qaeda in France. So I investigate on that book, and basically nothing is holding together. I mean, facts are not matching. Places he’s supposed to go are not matching. So, there are a lot of mistakes and a lot of approximations and a lot of nonsense in his books.

AARON MATÉ: Lisa Stampnitzky, I want to ask you, what do you think the experts are missing? What issues should they be looking at that these so-called experts are not?

LISA STAMPNITZKY: I mean, I think one of the key difficulties is, A, as Glenn mentioned, that there is no settled definition of what terrorism is, and that insofar as there is a common understanding of what terrorism is, it tends to be that it’s violence that we don’t like. And one of the most interesting things that I show in my book is that that wasn’t always the case. I look at debates on terrorism from the 1970s until 2001. And if you look at when people were first starting to talk about terrorism in the early 1970s, they were talking about it in a very different way.

So, Glenn mentioned this cliché: One man’s terrorist is another man’s freedom fighter. And that seems almost obvious today, that these are opposed, that you can’t be a terrorist and a freedom fighter. But if you look at the way that people were talking about terrorism or political violence of this sort in the late '60s and early 1970s, this wasn't considered to be in opposition. There wasn’t this assumption that acts of terror as a tactic were necessarily something that was done by people who we think are evil. There was not this moral overlay over it. And this has come to be understood as so basic to understanding of terrorism now that it really clouds any attempt to understand the issue.

AMY GOODMAN: And let me go back to Luc in Paris—first of all, our condolences—and what you’re writing about right now in Libération, what you feel these terrorism experts do not bring us that we should understand about what’s happening in France.

LUC MATHIEU: It’s perhaps too early to say and to be sure of it. We have to look back at al-Qaeda history, because it comes from al-Qaeda in Yemen. We have to look deeply into Islamic State, because one of the three assailants said he was from Islamic State. So, it’s a lot—it’s very messy right now in France, because a lot of people are trying to know exactly where those guys come from, where they went, what they wanted to do exactly. So it’s a bit early to say. I think we are missing. We are missing that. We are still searching a lot.

AARON MATÉ: I want to go back to Fox News host Jeanine Pirro, a former prosecutor. This is from her show on Saturday.

JEANINE PIRRO: We need to kill them. We need to kill them, the radical Muslim terrorists hell-bent on killing us. You’re in danger. I’m in danger. We’re at war, and this is not going to stop. After this week’s brutal terror attacks in France, hopefully everybody now gets it. And there’s only one group that can stop this war: the Muslims themselves. Our job is to arm those Muslims to the teeth, give them everything they need to take out these Islamic fanatics. Let them do the job. Let them have at it. And as they do, we need to simply look the other way.

AARON MATÉ: That’s Jeanine Pirro of Fox News, a former prosecutor in Westchester, also a former judge. Glenn Greenwald, it’s easy to make fun of Fox News, but your response to this? And how does—how do attitudes like these play out in the corporate media, generally?

GLENN GREENWALD: I mean, you know, if you listen to her, Jeanine Pirro, that clip you just played, I mean, she’s obviously psychotic. I mean, that’s just like bloodthirsty fascism in its purest, you know, expression. But I don’t really think that the substance of what she’s saying, to the extent one can attribute substance to those comments, is really all that rare or even controversial in the U.S. I mean, we have been a country that has declared ourselves at war with some formulation of Islam, radical Muslims, whatever you want to call it, something that John Kerry actually just affirmed a few days ago, that the French president and others have embraced, as well, over the last week.

And I think this is one of the most pernicious aspects of these so-called terrorism experts and terrorism expertise, which is, if you are an American citizen or if you’re a French citizen or if you’re a British citizen, you have a greater chance of being killed by slipping in the bathtub tonight and hitting your head on the ceramic tile, or being struck by lightning—literally—than you do dying in a terrorist attack. And yet these terrorism experts have it in their interest to constantly hype and exaggerate the threat and fearmonger over it, because that’s how they become relevant. They become relevant in terms of their work. They become relevant in terms of their government contracts and in terms of the money that they make. And it really has infected large parts of Western thinking to view terrorism as a much, much greater threat than just rationally and statistically it really is. And I think that’s—a big part of that is at the feet of these so-called terrorism experts.

AMY GOODMAN: I want to thank Luc Mathieu, speaking to us from Paris, fromLibération. I also want to thank Lisa Stampnitzky, who wrote Disciplining Terror, speaking to us from Boston, Harvard lecturer.

---

The original content of this program is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-Noncommercial-No Derivative Works 3.0 United States License. Please attribute legal copies of this work to democracynow.org. Some of the work(s) that this program incorporates, however, may be separately licensed. For further information or additional permissions, contact us.

-->