Take a whirlwind tour of the ages
Jewish Persecution | Timeline of Judaism | History of AntiSemitism
Lesser Known Highlights of Jewish International
Relations In The Common Era (an Abbreviated sampling)
Jewish persecution source:
P.E. Grosser & E.G. Halperin, Anti-Semitism: Causes and Effects, New York: Philosophical Library, 1978
No dogs, no blacks, no Jews'
http://www.sptimes.com/2003/03/07/Floridian/_No_dogs__no_blacks__.shtml
 [Photo: Florida Regional Office, Anti-Defamation League] This Ku Klux Klan Christmas tree, with hooded decorations and topped with a swastika, was photographed at a National Association for the Advancement of White People rally in Fort Pierce in 1999. |
By JULIE HAUSERMAN, Times Staff Writer
© St. Petersburg Times
published March 7, 2003
© St. Petersburg Times
published March 7, 2003
Warning: "Blacks" may not be the word you'll find in a disturbing exhibit of racist images from Florida culture. |  |
TALLAHASSEE -- As far as anyone can remember, this is the first time that an exhibit at Florida's state museum has come with a warning label. It needs one.
"The Art of Hatred: Images of Intolerance in Florida Culture" includes some of the most offensive images that you're likely to see at a museum. The collection spotlights the Sunshine State's dark side, unearthing racist propaganda from the past and present.
The images are relentless.
 [Image courtesy of Jewish Museum of Florida]This 1950 brochure for Ellinor Village, a popular Florida tourist destination, says it is for “restricted clientele.” |
One photograph shows hooded figures on a 1928 Ku Klux Klan parade float in Miami. Old Florida postcards depict black people getting eaten by alligators as a joke.
"Free lunch in the Everglades, Florida" reads one.
There's an application form for the Ku Klux Klan in Dunedin, which requires potential Klan members to sign an oath promising that they aren't Jewish and don't work for the FBI.
The date on the form? 1995.
There's also a 1995 copy of The Eagle, a white supremacist newspaper in Tampa.
"More than 400 attend Florida Race Rally at Auburndale Civic Center," the headline says.
Hundreds of anxious faces peer from a 1939 Miami Herald photograph. They are Jewish refugees from Germany on the SS St. Louis, which cruised within sight of Miami Beach but couldn't land because Cuba and the United States refused asylum. The refugees were forced back to Germany, where most of them died in the Holocaust.
Some of the materials on display at the Museum of Florida History were seized by law enforcement, and some were collected by the Anti-Defamation League in Florida. The exhibit was assembled by the Jewish Museum of Florida in Miami Beach and will travel to St. Petersburg's Florida Holocaust Museum in January.
"Most museums do "pretty' and "happy' and they don't like to do tough topics," said Marcia Zerivitz, the Jewish Museum's executive director.
Museumgoers are told up front just how tough this topic is. "WARNING," reads the sign at the entrance,"THIS EXHIBIT CONTAINS OFFENSIVE MATERIAL. MANY OF THE IMAGES AND TEXTS REPRESENTED HERE WERE CREATED AS PROPOGANDA TO ADVANCE AN AGENDA OF HATRED. THE JEWISH MUSEUM OF FLORIDA PRESENTS THIS MATERIAL AS AN EDUCATIONAL SERVICE."
 [Image courtesy of Jewish Museum of Florida]A wartime poster depicts an anti-Semitic theme in the 20th century: Jewish domination of America, particularly New York City. A five-pointed Soviet star on the character’s coat identifies him as a Communist. |
An alarming number of the images of hate are recent. A photograph taken just four years ago shows a hooded Klansman in Fort Pierce, holding a "Welcome to Klan Country" sign and standing next to a Christmas tree with a swastika on its top.
"We spent a lot of hours agonizing over individual images," said Dr. Henry Abramson, an associate history professor at Florida Atlantic University and the exhibit's curator.
Jeana Brunson, chief of Florida's Bureau of Historical Museums, said the state hasn't received any complaints about the content. But people who go through the exhibit get emotional.
"This is the only exhibit that anybody around here remembers that's had this degree of subject matter that's this emotional," Brunson said.
At the exhibit's opening on Feb. 13, Maxine Weiss of Tallahassee peered at a series of Miami Beach hotel brochures from the 1920s, '30s, and '40s, which advertised "gentile only" or "restricted clientele."
"I remember this one," said Weiss, 78, stabbing her finger at a brochure for the Marine Terrace Hotel. The brochure boasts that a "restricted clientele assures you of a pleasant environment."
"I was dating a man, and he took me there," Weiss recalled. "As we walked up the steps, on the terrazzo floor it said: "No dogs, no n---, and no Jews.' I turned around and walked away."
 [Image courtesy Jewish Museum of Florida]A stereotypical Jewish stockbroker sits atop a bag of gold. The Nazis claimed that Jews commited crimes to get money. |
Weiss is now volunteering as one of the guides at the exhibit. She says it's important for people to see these images so they don't forget how open racial hatred once was in Florida.
Florida, the museum catalog points out, was a "Catholic only" Spanish colony until 1763, when Jews were first allowed to live in the state.
Many of the images of racial hatred target both Jews and blacks, and one White Power handbill from 1996 decries Miami as a "multiracial cesspool of a city."
"It is still going on, and it's very frightening," said Sue Edelson, 72, of Tallahassee, waving toward Klan photographs that are only 4 years old.
Zerivitz, the Jewish Museum director, believes that it's important to show older children -- middle school and up -- how severe racial hatred can be. The idea, she said, is to inoculate them against the messages of hate, which sometimes come couched in "white power" comics.
"We want kids to be able to look at this and say: "The people who made this picture are trying to sell me something,"' Zerivitz said. "I heard one girl say to the other, "Do they think we're stupid enough to buy this stuff?' That's what we're hoping for."
At a glance
"The Art of Hatred: Images of Intolerance in Florida Culture" is at the Museum of Florida History, 500 S Bronough St., Tallahassee, through June 1. The museum is open every day and admission is free. For more information, please click on dhr.dos.state.fl.us/museumor call (850) 245-6400.
No Dogs and Jews Allowed
Posted: Updated:
here is an ancient Jewish folktale which tells of a man visiting Hell and being amazed to find its inhabitants all seated at long tables with fancy tablecloths, beautiful silverware and delicious food in front of them. Yet no one was eating. They were all wailing. On closer examination the visitor saw that none of them could bend their elbows. So while they could touch their food no one could bring the food to their mouths.
The visitor then went to Heaven where the scene was identical, long tables, fancy tablecloths, beautiful silverware and delicious food. And here too people could not bend their elbows.
But here no one was wailing -- because each person was serving his neighbour.
But here no one was wailing -- because each person was serving his neighbour.
Being sensitive to one's neighbour, can there be any better definition of human rights?
More than most, Jews have had a vested interest in embracing human rights. Antisemitism, as Jewish historian Robert Wistrich once wrote is undoubtedly the "longest hatred." Indeed, in the modern era, hardly a generation has gone by without the dark cloud of Jew-hatred erupting into a calamitous storm. The Holocaust became the ultimate expression of antisemitism.
With the deep and visceral understanding of humanity's potential for evil, for many Jews and other minorities, human rights became a watch word, a fence of protection.
Despite widespread belief that Canada, especially Ontario, was distinctly different from its southern neighbour, it was not uncommon for restaurants to refuse service to people of colour. In Windsor, in the early 1950s, the United Auto Workers-Congress of Industrial Organizations once filed a complaint against a local café for refusing to serve a black member of the Canadian armed forces a cup of coffee.
And following the war, within living memory, the colour of your skin, or the God you chose to worship, could prevent you from buying and holding land. Restrictive land covenants were used by landowners in Ontario to prohibit Jews, racial minorities and others of "questionable" nationality from doing so.
In cottage country, and even on Toronto's beaches up to the mid 1950s, it was common to see signs that read "No Dogs or Jews Allowed".
So it was in Ontario, the most diverse of all of Canada's provinces that work began in establishing a mindset of equality.
Ontario Jews worked together with black leaders and labour groups to advocate for a human rights apparatus in the province. Canadian Labour Congress human rights co-ordinator Kalmen Kaplansky, Alan Borovoy, a young law student and budding civil rights lawyer, then head of the Jewish Labour Committee; Canadian Jewish Congress community relations director Ben Kayfetz; and renowned civil rights litigator Sidney Midanik all worked with black leaders like Bromley Armstrong and Dan Hill to press their case.
Their advocacy led to the establishment in 1961 of the Ontario Human Rights Commission -- the first such body in North America.
Thanks to work by the Ontario Human Rights Commission discrimination, so commonplace in the past, is far less so today.
Yet hate is not easily squelched. Robust, hatred seems to find ways to pick itself out of the dustbin, brush itself off, and find other methods to spread its poison.
Only last week a madrassah (Islamic School) in Toronto was found to be teaching antisemitic lessons to its young students.
A few months earlier a mixed race couple in Newmarket Ontario were the victims of a racial attack.
In a recent study, the Toronto Star reported that, "Employers in Toronto, Vancouver and Montreal 'significantly discriminate' against applicants with Chinese and Indian names compared to those with English names."
The good news is that Canada has strong anti-hate laws which make it a criminally indictable offence to promote hatred. And most human rights codes across the country have strong tools to deal with outright discrimination.
But we cannot be complacent. Louis Lenkinski a former Chair of Canadian Jewish Congress and a past secretary-treasurer of the Ontario Federation of Labour, once explained to me that you cannot have justice for Jews if there is not justice for everyone.
Today with the advent of the internet, Wi-Fi and communications technology only dreamed about years ago, information dissemination is instantaneous. No longer must we solely count on newspapers and television. Today any one of us can be a purveyor of information, a columnist with an opinion and literally thousands do so as bloggers. Regretfully though, the responsibility of measuring criticism with sensitivity is sometimes sadly lacking.
Some bloggers do not hesitate to use their blogs not only to voice an opinion but to defame, libel and disparage. Human rights codes and commissions must play a careful balancing act between our cherished right of free speech, and the right of those most vulnerable to be free from the hateful harm caused by those who would use their blogs as bully-pulpits.
Humanity is never linear. It takes all kinds to make a community. Thus we all have responsibility to ensure collective dignity. Human rights codes and anti-hate laws are simply tools to help maintain that needed dignity.
The Christians want Jews to help them fight Terrorist when I and others were called insane Jews and Jewish whores and Bitches because we told them what was going to happen in the USA in 1976... I will be the Moses of the Jews.To the Jews.... Who ever wants to come with me to Israel I will bing you out of Christian bondage.Now there is a Christian surge to back Israel a Jewish State and like the Crusades the Christians agenda is to convert Jews to Christains and it aint working. So the certain Churches are now teaming up with Muslims and brought back the Blood Libel Stories and the Christa Morta (Constitine) orginial hate story which started all this hate.
Ann Coulter uses a made up story of a Jerry Steinfield to demonstrate Elaine (a non Jewish Character on the show) in her liberal dating of a black man . And Ann Coulter uses this example in her speaches to many churches ( GOOD CHRISTIAN) as an example of what Jews are like, Just like the Blood Libels,,,, video Below......
If Ann Coutler is for Trump I will not vote for Trump. Ann Coulter is Anti Semite and spreading Anti Semitism.
I was told by one Muslim who works at Disney "We dont want to kill all the Jews because if we do we wont have anyone as an Enemy and we will end up killing each other"..
Good Christians scream no murder of innocent babies.... where do we hear this? Oh yes the Palestinians.. the ones who claim are freedom fighters and the Pro Lifers have the same calling they are freedom worshipers just like the Muslims who are suicide bombers. And the Christians want the Jews to help them fight the Muslims when it is not a Jewish problem. When it was a Jewish problem before Israel the Christian world turned it's back on 7,000 Jewish children seeking to enter Canada, United Kingdom, the Untied States of America and they were turned down since each country had enough Jews and they had Jew restrictions. It was okay to send Jewish Children to the concentration camps and to their death... They did this in the name of Jesus.... But that was okay after all it's just Jews and the world hates Jews because we didnt accept a made up human G-d.
In this video below explains how you got Easter.... and it had nothing to do with Jesus . There were many hung up on crosses by the Romans.
Christian began to blame the Muslim population on and Terrorism in the USA on Jews when it was a Good Jew Hating Christian by the name of Henry Ford who brought them to the USA and place them in Dearborn.
This is from Bare Naked Islam http://www.barenakedislam.com/2010/01/03/why-are-there-so-many-muslims-in-dearbornistan/
Why are there so many Muslims in ‘Dearbornistan?’
Dearborn, Michigan has the largest Muslim population of any U.S. city. The main reason can be tied directly back to the beacon of hatred Henry Ford had for the Jews. Ford would not allow a Jew* to work in his factory, which is why Dearborn became known as the American Mecca for Muslims.
*The ‘no-Jew’ policy has since been rescinded
In this modest town of just about a hundred thousand people, about a third of the population there is of Middle Eastern origin. Muslims make up approximately 60% of the population while the remaining 40% are Christians. In the current political climate it has led to problems, with Muslims complaining of surveillance in mosques and social prejudice. When the American car-maker Henry Ford opened his plant in Dearborn, Michigan, his legacy was more than an industrial one – he contributed to the formation of one of United States’ largest Middle Eastern communities. RT
1938: GERMANY. Four months after the forced annexation of Austria by the Nazis, Henry Ford accepts the Grand Cross of the Supreme Order of the German Eagle for his invaluable contributions to the Third Reich, including large cash donations to the Nazis to finance their takeover of Germany, and thousands of military vehicles and warplane engines to power the Nazi conquest of Europe and Britain
Henry Ford was a giant anti-Semite who partnered with Adolf Hitler’s deranged pre WW II vision of how the world should unfold in the future. Ford had a flawed character since he was so captivated by the idea of Jewish financiers plotting to undermine the United States prior to World War Two.
Henry Ford became a proselytizer for “The Protocols” in his newspaper, The Dearborn Independent. Adolph Hitler, an admirer of Ford, was introduced to “The Protocols” by the Nazi ideologue Alfred Rosenberg, and cited it in “Mein Kampf.”More than 23 editions of the The Protocols were published by the Nazi party. This 34-page 1939 newspaper, illustrated above, was dedicated to exposing how warped and un-American this powerful businessman had become prior to World War Two (Ford’s rant against the Jews had been going on for nearly 20 years up to this time)
Henry Ford’s beliefs and core values around his movement of “Jews being the world’s foremost problem” was an extreme negative proposition. By the late 1930s, Ford knew he was being used by Fascist groups all over the world and that reprints of his writings on “The Jewish Question” in his Dearborn Independent magazine had become a “best seller” among the Nazis. CARS
Let us not forget Ronald Reagans part in the Islamic Conquest of the USA..
President Ronald Reagan meets his Taliban friends in the White House.The mujahideen consisted of at least seven factions, who often fought amongst themselves in their battle for territory and control of the opium trade. To hurt the Russians, the U.S. deliberately chose to give the most support to the most extreme groups. A disproportionate share of U.S. arms went to Gulbuddin Hekmatyar, "a particularly fanatical fundamentalist and woman-hater."' According to journalist Tim Weiner, " [Hekmatyar's] followers first gained attention by throwing acid in the faces of women who refused to wear the veil. CIA and State Department officials I have spoken with call him 'scary,' 'vicious,' 'a fascist,' 'definite dictatorship material."There was, though, a kind of method in the madness: Brezinski hoped not just to drive the Russians out of Afghanistan, but to ferment unrest within the Soviet Union itself. His plan, says author Dilip Hiro, was "to export a composite ideology of nationalism and Islam to the Muslim-majority Central Asian states and Soviet Republics with a view to destroying the Soviet order." Looking back in 1998, Brezinski had no regrets. "What was more important in the world view of history?... A few stirred-up Muslims or the liberation of Central Europe and the end of the Cold War>"With the support of Pakistan's military dictator, General Zia-ul-Haq, the U.S. began recruiting and training both mujahideen fighters from the 3 million Afghan refugees in Pakistan and large numbers of mercenaries from other Islamic countries. Estimates of how much money the U.S. government channeled to the Afghan rebels over the next decade vary, but most sources put the figure between $3 billion and $6 billion, or more. Whatever the exact amount, this was "the largest covert action program since World War II" - much bigger, for example, than Washington's intervention in Central America at the same time, which received considerably more publicity. According to one report:The CIA became the grand coordinator: purchasing or arranging the manufacture of Soviet-style weapons from Egypt, China, Poland, Israel and elsewhere, or supplying their own; arranging for military training by Americans, Egyptians, Chinese and Iranians; hitting up Middle-Eastern countries for donations, notably Saudi Arabia which gave many hundreds of millions of dollars in aid each year, totaling probably more than a billion; pressuring and bribing Pakistan-with whom recent American relations had been very poor-to rent out its country as a military staging area and sanctuary; putting the Pakistani Director of Military Operations, Brigadier Mian Mohammad Afzal, onto the CIA payroll to ensure Pakistani cooperation.
Aid to the mujahideen, who Reagan praised as "freedom fighters," increased, but initially Afghanistan was not a priority:In the first years after the Reagan administration inherited the Carter program, the covert Afghan war "tended to be handled out of [CIA director William] Casey's back pocket," recalled Ronald Spiers, a former U.S. ambassador to Pakistan, the base of the Afghan rebels. Mainly from China's government, the CIA purchased assault rifles, grenade launchers, mines and SA-7 light antiaircraft weapons, and then arranged for shipment to Pakistan.... The amounts were significant-10,000 tons of arms and ammunition in 1983, according to [Pakistani General Mohammed] Yousaf-but a fraction of what they would be in just a few years.In March 1985, the Reagan administration issued National Security Decision Directive 166,29 a secret plan to escalate covert action in Afghanistan dramatically:Abandoning a policy of simple harassment of Soviet occupiers, the Reagan team decided secretly to let loose on the Afghan battlefield an array of U.S. high technology and military expertise in an effort to hit and demoralize Soviet commanders and soldiers....Beginning in 1985, the CIA supplied mujahideen rebels with extensive satellite reconnaissance data of Soviet targets on the Afghan battlefield, plans for military operations based on the satellite intelligence, intercepts of Soviet communications, secret communications networks for the rebels, delayed timing devices for tons of C-4 plastic explosives for urban sabotage, and sophisticated guerrilla attacks, long-range sniper rifles, a targeting device for mortars that was linked to a U.S. Navy satellite, wire-guided anti-tank missiles, and other equipment.Between 1986 and 1989, the mujahideen were also provided with more than 1,000 state-of-the-art, shoulder-fired Stinger antiaircraft missiles.By 1987, the annual supply of arms had reached 65,000 tons, and a "ceaseless stream" of CIA and Pentagon officials were visiting Pakistani Inter-Services Intelligence (ISI) headquarters in Rawalpindi and helping to plan mujahideen operations:At any one time during the Afghan fighting season, as many as 11 ISI teams trained and supplied by the CIA accompanied mujahideen across the border to supervise attacks, according to Yousaf and Western sources. The teams attacked airports, railroads, fuel depots, electricity pylons, bridges and roads....CIA operations officers helped Pakistani trainers establish schools for the mujahideen in secure communications, guerrilla warfare, urban sabotage and heavy weapons.Although the CIA claimed that the purpose was to attack military targets, mujahideen trained in these techniques, and using chemical and electronic-delay bomb timers supplied by the U.S., carried out numerous car bombings and assassination attacks in Kabul itself. Bin Laden and the Arab-AfghansAs well as training and recruiting Afghan nationals to fight the Soviets, the CIA permitted its ISI allies to recruit Muslim extremists from around the world. Pakistani journalist Ahmed Rashid reports:Between 1982 and 1992, some 35,000 Muslim radicals from 43 Islamic countries in the Middle East, North and East Africa, Central Asia and the Far East would pass their baptism under fire with the Afghan mujahideen. Tens of thousands more foreign Muslim radicals came to study in the hundreds of new madrassas [religious schools] that Zia's military government began to fund in Pakistan and along the Afghan border. Eventually more than 100,000 Muslim radicals were to have direct contact with Pakistan and Afghanistan and be influenced by the jihad [against the USSR].In camps near Peshawar and in Afghanistan, these radicals met each other for the first time and studied trained and fought together. It was the first opportunity for most of them to learn about Islamic movements in other countries, and they forged tactical and ideological links that would serve them well in the future. The camps became virtual universities for future Islamic radicalism.One of the first non-Afghan volunteers to join the ranks of the mujahideen was Osama bin Laden, a civil engineer and businessman from a wealthy construction family in Saudi Arabia, with close ties to members of the Saudi royal family. Bin Laden recruited 4,000 volunteers from his own country and developed close relations with the most radical mujahideen leaders.
He also worked closely with the CIA, raising money from private Saudi citizens. By 1984, he was running the Maktab al-Khidamar, an organization set up by the ISI to funnel "money, arms, and fighters from the outside world in the Afghan war."Since September 11, CIA officials have been claiming they had no direct link to bin Laden. These denials lack credibility. Earlier this year, the trial of defendants accused of the 1998 U.S. embassy bombing in Kenya disclosed that the CIA shipped high-powered sniper rifles directly to bin Laden's operation in 1989. Even the Tennessee-based manufacturer of the rifles confirmed this. According to the Boston Globe,Some military analysts and specialists on the weapons trade say the CIA has spent years covering its tracks on its early ties to the Afghan forces.... Despite the ClA's denials, these experts say it was inevitable that the military training in guerrilla tactics and the vast reservoir of money and arms that the CIA provided in Afghanistan would have ended up helping bin Laden and his forces during the 1980s."In 1988, with U.S. knowledge, bin Laden created Al Qaeda (The Base): a conglomerate of quasi independent Islamic terrorist cells spread across at least 26 countries," writes Indian journalist Rahul Bhedi. "Washington turned a blind eye to Al-Qaeda, confident that it would not directly impinge on the U.S." After the Soviet withdrawal, however, bin Laden and thousands of other volunteers returned to their own countries:Their heightened political consciousness made them realize that countries like Saudi Arabia and Egypt were just as much client regimes of the United States as the Najibullah regime [in Afghanistan] has been of Moscow.In their home countries they built a formidable constituency-popularly known as "Afghanis"-who combined strong ideological convictions with the guerrilla skills they had acquired in Pakistan and Afghanistan under CIA supervision.Over the past 10 years, the "Afghani" network has been linked to terrorist attacks not only on U.S. targets, but also in the Philippines, Pakistan, Saudi Arabia, France, Tajikistan, Azerbaijan, China, Egypt, Algeria, Morocco, and elsewhere. "This is an insane instance of the chickens coming home to roost," one U.S. diplomat in Pakistan told the Los Angeles Times. "You can't plug billions of dollars into an anti-Communist jihad, accept participation from all over the world and ignore the consequences. But we did. Romancing the TalibanAs the Russians withdrew from Afghanistan in early 1989, American policymakers celebrated with champagne, while the country itself collapsed into virtual anarchy. Almost a quarter of the population was living in refugee camps and most of the country was in ruins. Different factions of the mujahideen struggled for power in the countryside, while the government of Muhammed Najibullah, the last Soviet-installed president controlled Kabul. Eventually, in April 1992, Kabul fell to some of the mujahideen factions and Burhannudin Rabbani was de dared president, but civil war continued unabated. Hekmatyar in particular was dissatisfied with the new distribution 0 power. With his huge stock of U.S.-supplied weapons, h began an artillery and rocket assault on Kabul that lasted for almost three years, even after he was appointed prime minister in 1993. "The barrage...killed more than 10,000 Afghans [drove] hundreds of thousands into squalid refugee camps, created political chaos, and blocked millions of exiles from returning." The rest of the country disintegrated into isolated fiefdoms dominated by local warlords.In 1994, a new group, the Taliban (Pashtun for "students"), emerged on the scene. Its members came from madrassas set up by the Pakistani government along the border and funded by the U.S., Britain, and the Saudis, where they had received theological indoctrination and military training. Thousands of young men-refugees and orphans from the war in Afghanistan-became the foot soldiers of this movement:These boys were from a generation who had never seen their country at peace-an Afghanistan not at war with invaders and itself. They had no memories of their tribes, their elders, their neighbors nor the complex ethnic mix of peoples that made up their villages and their homeland. These boys were what the war had thrown up like the sea's surrender on the beach of history ...They were literally the orphans of war, the rootless and restless, the jobless and the economically deprived with little self-knowledge. They admired war because it was the only occupation they could possibly adapt to. Their simple belief in a messianic, puritan Islam which had been drummed into them by simple village mullahs was the only prop they could hold on to and which gave their lives some meaning. Untrained for anything, even the traditional occupations of their forefathers such as farming, herding or the making of handicrafts, they were what Karl Marx would have termed Afghanistan's lumpen proletariat.With the aid of the Pakistani army, the Taliban swept across most of the exhausted country promising a restoration of order and finally capturing Kabul in September 1996. The Taliban imposed an ultra-sectarian version of Islam, closely related to Wahhabism, the ruling creed in Saudi Arabia. Women have been denied education, health care, and the right to work. They must cover themselves completely when in public. Minorities have been brutally repressed. Even singing and dancing in public are forbidden.The Taliban's brand of extreme Islam had no historical roots in Afghanistan. The roots of the Taliban's success lay in 20 years of "jihad" against the Russians and further devastation wrought by years of internal fighting between the warlord factions. Initially, villagers-especially the majority Pashtuns in the south who shared the Taliban's ethnicity-welcomed them as a force that might end the warfare and bring some order and peace to Afghanistan. Their lack of a social base within Afghanistan made them appear untainted by the factional warfare, and their moral purism made them appear above compromise. Before launching their war to conquer power, they first won some public support by appearing as the avenger against the warlords' raping of women and boys. Of course, they could not have risen so far and so fast without the financial and military backing of Pakistan.The U.S. government was well aware of the Taliban's reactionary program, yet it chose to back their rise to power in the mid-1990s. The creation of the Taliban was "actively encouraged by the ISI and the CIA," according to Selig Harrison, an expert on U.S. relations with Asia. "The United States encouraged Saudi Arabia and Pakistan to support the Taliban, certainly right up to their advance on Kabul," adds respected journalist Ahmed Rashid. When the Taliban took power, State Department spokesperson Glyn Davies said that he saw "nothing objectionable" in the Taliban's plans to impose strict Islamic law, and Senator Hank Brown, chair of the Senate Foreign Relations Subcommittee on the Near East and South Asia, welcomed the new regime: "The good part of what has happened is that one of the factions at last seems capable of developing a new government in Afghanistan." "The Taliban will probably develop like the Saudis. There will be Aramco [the consortium of oil companies that controlled Saudi oil], pipelines, an emir, no parliament and lots of Sharia law.
We can live with that," said another U.S. diplomat in 1997.The reference to oil and pipelines explains everything. Since the collapse of the USSR at the end of 1991, U.S. oil companies and their friends in the State Department have been salivating at the prospect of gaining access to the huge oil and natural gas reserves in the former Soviet republics bordering the Caspian Sea and in Central Asia. These have been estimated as worth $4 trillion. The American Petroleum Institute calls the Caspian region "the area of greatest resource potential outside of the Middle East." And while he was still CEO of Halliburton, the world's biggest oil services company, Vice President Dick Cheney told other industry executives, "I can't think of a time when we've had a region emerge as suddenly to become as strategically significant as the Caspian." The struggle to control these stupendous resources has given rise to what Rashid has dubbed the "new Great Game," pitting shifting alliances of governments and oil and gas consortia against one another.Afghanistan itself has no known oil or gas reserves, but it is an attractive route for pipelines leading to Pakistan, India, and the Arabian Sea. In the mid-1990s, a consortium led by the California-based Unocal Corporation proposed a $4.5 billion oil and gas pipeline from Turkmenistan through Afghanistan to Pakistan. But this would require a stable central government in Afghanistan itself. Thus began several years in which U.S. policy in the region centered on "romancing the Taliban." According to one report,In the months before the Taliban took power, former U.S. assistant secretary of state for South Asia Robin Raphel waged an intense round of shuttle diplomacy between the powers with possible stakes in the [Unocal] project."Robin Raphel was the face of the Unocal pipeline," said an official of the former Afghan government who was present at some of de meetings with her....In addition to tapping new sources of energy, de [project] also suited a major U.S. strategic aim in the region: isolating its nemesis Iran and stifling a frequently mooted rival pipeline project backed by Teheran, experts said.But Washington's initial enthusiasm for the Taliban's seizure of power provoked a hostile reaction from human rights and women's organizations in the United States. The Clinton administration quickly decided to take a more cautious public approach. Plans to send the U.S. ambassador to Pakistan on a visit to Kabul were canceled, and the State Department decided not to recognize the new regime immediately. Nevertheless, Unocal executive vice president Chris Taggart continued to maintain, "If the Taliban leads to stability and international recognition then it's positive."Tacit U.S. support for the Taliban continued until 1998, when Washington blamed Osama bin Laden for the bombing of the U.S. embassies in Kenya and Tanzania and retaliated by launching cruise missiles at bin Laden's alleged training camps in Afghanistan. The Taliban's refusal to extradite bin Laden- not its atrocious human rights record-led to UN-imposed sanctions on the regime the following year. "Former Secretary of State Madeleine Albright used to say that she cared about the women suffering under the Taliban, but after the Taliban took over the U.S. accepted very few refugees," points out journalist Laura Flanders. "In '96 and '97 no Afghan refugees were admitted to the United States; in '98, only 88, in '99, some 360."Whatever the U.S. government's current rhetoric about the repressive nature of the Taliban regime, its long history of intervention in the region has been motivated not by concern for democracy or human rights, but by the narrow economic and political interests of the U.S. ruling class. It has been prepared to aid and support the most retrograde elements if it thought a temporary advantage would be the result. Now Washington has launched a war against its former allies based on a strategic calculation that the Taliban can no longer be relied upon to provide a stable, U.S.-friendly government that can serve its strategic interests. No matter what the outcome, the war is certain to lay the grounds for more "blowback" in the future.
Phil Gasper is a professor of Philosophy at Notre Dame de Namur University, and is also a member of the International Socialist Organization in San Francisco.
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Read more at http://www.liveleak.com/view?i=3d1_1374168674#pFEPbpWc3Hgw6H1x.99
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