We are going to war again in Iraq and expanding the bombing to Syria, the seventh country in the Middle East to be graced with American bombings since 2001 (not including Gaza-Palestine, where American bombs are piloted by Israeli largesse). We’re doing this why? Because two Americans and a Brit were beheaded and American media whipped public opinion into a frenzy over it. The same media shrugged when 200,000 Syrians were butchered over the past three years, most of them by the same guy to whom the U.S. Air Force is about to give aid and comfort. The same media chest-thumped and encouraged the butchery of 2,000 Palestinians in July, about a quarter of them children, when Israel launched its latest massacre of Gaza residents. The killing was carried out mostly with weapons you and I paid for. But let the jingoes parade YouTube beheadings and Anglos, and suddenly it’s time to care.

At least this much is clear: we either don’t know what we want in Middle East or don’t have a clue how to go about getting what we want. We are not expanding the war again for humanitarian or strategic reasons. We are doing so as an emotional response, and because the president’s spine has been replaced with Playdoh. The beheadings were gruesome. And the brutality of the Islamic State is indisputable. But neither adds up to a compelling reason to step up the killing and get back into billion-dollar waste.

More to the point: we have no moral ground to stand on when it using the Islamic State’s bloodlust for execution as a spark plug for intervention. We do it all the time, just as gruesomely. Rick Scott has signed the death warrants of 13 people in his brief tenure as governor, a faster rate of executions than any of his predecessors in a four-year term. Florida has executed 81 people since re-instituting the death penalty in 1979, and the United States has executed almost 1,400 since 1976. We don’t show it on YouTube, because we’re ashamed while pretending to be civilized. We hide it behind a grotesque dead-man-walking ritual that poses as solemnity.

But I fail to see how less gruesome it is than beheadings, particularly when we have a shameful record of executions gone wrong, whether it’s a head exploding in flames in our own Starke prison or injections’ lethality proving more leisurely than advertised, to the gasping inmate’s realization.

There are also some misconceptions about beheading as a method of execution. It’s not an Islamic invention. It’s a western invention. The Greeks and Romans, founders of our civilization and all things grisly, considered beheading the privileged way of dying, because it was quicker, more certain and less painful than other ways. They reserved the—what, favor, in their eyes?–for their own citizens. Non-Romans, as we well know from Jesus’s experience, got crucified. European countries subsequently reserved beheadings for their aristocrats. All European countries have since abolished the death penalty altogether, finding the act, not just the method, gruesome.

A few more backward countries are still at it of course, including Pakistan, China, Iran and Saudi Arabia, which still has public beheadings. In that regard, those countries are no different than the Islamic State. And in that regard, we’re no different, either. We don’t behead people. At least not intentionally. That went out of style in the West with the retirement of the guillotine in Paris in 1977. But we electrocute them, lethally inject them, gas them, hang them or execute them by firing squad, as they still do in Oklahoma and Utah, though the two states, because they have such good hearts, also give prisoners the option of getting injected instead.

The conventional assumption, well-heeled by the American death penalty’s fans and PR specialists, is that capital punishment by these means is more humane, and that it’s more justified than the beheading of innocents. Murdering innocent people as the Islamic State does is barbaric. But it’s the fact that they murder them to start with that makes it barbaric, not the method. It’s not clear how less barbaric lethal injection is just because we say it is.

As for murdering the innocents: In Florida alone, 23 people have been exonerated off death row after conviction, after unexpected evidence turned up. Imagine how many people have been killed here and in other states who, on more careful review, would have been proven innocent. What is certain is that we, too, execute innocent people. We just do it after spending a lot more money to cover our asses.

That’s without getting into the racism of a death penalty system that is far more likely to sentence blacks than whites for the same crime. So much for due process.

There may be a few legitimate reasons to attack the Islamic State, though I’d prefer it if Arabs were attacking them, not us. The Islamic State’s method of executions is not among those. Otherwise, we should be bombing ourselves. When it comes to capital punishment, not much separates us from the butchers of the Islamic State. That we do it in English, with more recognizable uniforms and behind closed doors doesn’t make it any less backward, any less barbaric, any less repulsive.

This moral high ground can’t be claimed until the death penalty is abolished.

Gruesome Buddies: ISIS Beheadings And the American Death Penalty

from john passant

Well that didn’t take long did it? On Friday a week ago ASIO raised the terror threat level but had no specific intelligence. On Sunday Abbott announced we were going to deploy 600 troops to the Middle East to fight the ‘death cult’ Islamic State. Then, surprise surprise, on Thursday 870 police raided homes in Sydney and Brisbane, detained 15 people, charged one with conspiracy to commit a terrorist offence and what do you know? Since Friday reports of people abusing Muslims in the street have increased. No one police officer to protect them, let alone 870.

By the way, the one serious charge is based on a phone call from an Australian in Syria. If that is all there won’t be a conviction. There is no evidence released so far to justify the charge.

Three of those detained were or are (we don’t know) held incommunicado under terror laws that allow for detention without charge for up to 2 weeks. In other countries they call these people the disappeared.

Now the government has announced major changes to arrest laws to enable police to arrest and detain people without charge on suspicion of planning to commit a terrorist offence. In other countries they call them The Disappeared. According to 9 News the law changes will give ASIO a licence to kill suspects if their life or others is ‘threatened’.

The changes to the law will also give ASIO immunity from prosecution for torture, nothwithstanding the Attorney-General’s denials.

Abbot and co know exactly what they are doing. They are targeting Muslims. Don’t believe me? Here’s a sample of anti-Muslim sentiment in Australia right now.

The Sunshine Coast Daily reported on an anti-Mosque rally which clashed with supporters of the Mosque. The video in that report is revealing and revolting. Click on it and hold your nose against the racist stink.

On the Gold Coast recently the council refused to approve the building of a Mosque. Hundreds turned up to show their opposition to the Mosque at the Council meeting.

And this from mamamia.

So frightened are some in Australia’s Muslim community that a Facebook group dedicated to support for victims of hate crimes against Muslims was set up this week. Group members use the page to report instances of abuse and swap tips on how to stay safe. Posts like these feature on the page.

The posts show a pattern of abuse directed at Muslims for being Muslim.

The Courier-Mail in Queensland revealed on Sunday that ‘despite pleas for calm from the Queensland Premier and senior police, Muslims – particularly women – have been targeted in a series of hate attacks.’

The Northern Star reports:

A [Muslim] woman said she was terrified after she was spat on and called a terrorist at a Murwillumbah service station this week.

Tiger Airlines did its bit for Team Australia by removing a man doodling the word terrorism on his notepad from a flight.

So too did Customs. They did a ‘routine’ search of an Imam’s baggage a few days ago. Routine? It took over two hours and he missed his flight on the way to Mecca for the hajj with a group of pilgrims.

There is more. As Ben Hillier pointed out in Red Flag:

Mareeba mosque in Queensland had the word “Evil” graffitied over it. The Logan and Holland Park mosques were also targeted. Direct threats were issued against the grand mufti of Australia, Lakemba Mosque and Auburn Mosque, allegedly by anonymous members of the Australian Defence League. “Muslims”, their message read, “Australia will fight you ‘terror for terror’ ‘blood for blood’ ‘bomb for bomb’.”

Government Senator Cory Bernardi has called again for the burka to be banned and Palmer United Party Senator Jacqui Lambie has agreed with him. She has gone further, arguing that those who want sharia law should get out of Australia. When asked she couldn’t explain what sharia law was.

Abbott has cried havoc and let slip the dogs of racism.

The Government is going to war against Islamic State and calling it a death cult for its barbaric acts, unlike Western capitalism and its long history of barbarism, including here in Australia against Aborigines. There will be no distinctions drawn between Islamic State and Muslims. At best there will be mealy mouthed apologies after the event, like those offered by Queensland Premier Campbell Newman in response to the anti-Mosque protests on the Sunshine Coast. Apparently we are all in this together, but only if Muslims join Team Australia. The point is that for racists and many nationalists being Muslim automatically excludes Muslims from the white, Anglo-Saxon Christian Team Australia.

This government is pushing racism and Islamophobia to win support for its war in Iraq and to detract attention from its rotten austerity Budget. A war footing and jingoism are the breeding grounds for the ruling class to push fear of the other. The Labor Party is rushing to support Abbott.

As the war deteriorates and the economy worsens the anti-Muslim dog whistles from our politicians will become claxon horns.

Opposing the war and fighting against the Budget are linked, and must join up with the fight to defend our Muslim bothers and sisters.

Abbott unleashes terror against Muslims in Australia

from Crikey …..

It was the most worrying and wrong-headed speech by a national leader since, well, the last time we went to war under false pretences in Iraq. Tony Abbott's national security statement to Parliament yesterday - strongly backed by Opposition Leader Bill Shorten - takes Australia into a very dark place, and it does so based on what can only be described as lies - unless you accept that the government of Australia is profoundly ignorant.

It can only be a lie, or a reflection of an implausibly vast ignorance, to seriously maintain, as Abbott did yesterday, that Islamic State (also called ISIS or ISIL) represents any sort of "unprecedented" threat to Australia. IS is no more an unprecedented threat than it is an "existential threat", as the Attorney-General absurdly labelled it last week.

This is a group of terrorists who are, as the FBI and the Department of Homeland Security in the United States have noted, unable to mount any terrorist operations against the US. This is a group that, in its febrile statement of yesterday calling for anyone insane or evil enough to heed its demands to attack Westerners, admitted the difficulties in organising such attacks, suggesting that if all else failed they should pick up a rock and hit someone with it, or spit in strangers' faces. This is the group whose idea of terror in Australia isn't 9/11 or even public transport bombings but the murder of a random passer-by - although, bizarrely, at least one media outlet on the weekend was trying to claim such attacks would be somehow more damaging than a mass casualty attack.

Then again, that's one of the iron-clad rules of the War on Terror - each threat is always hyped as somehow worse than the last one.

And it can only be a lie to insist, as Abbott and Shorten both do, that our participation in the attack on Iraq will not make the risk of terrorism in Australia greater. It's a lie that voters, as today's Essential Report shows, simply don't buy. The government is literally using the Bush line that Islamic State simply hates us for our freedom. After Crikey reported yesterday that the Australian Federal Police had been gagged from offering its own assessment of whether the Iraq deployment made terrorism a greater risk, the Attorney-General's Department eventually sent us its "whole of government" response.

"ISIL and their followers in Australia do not hate us for what we do, they hate us for who we are and how we live," an AGD bureaucrat said. "They hate that fact that we are free, pluralist, tolerant, and welcoming." You can read the full response here.

AGD, the Prime Minister and Bill Shorten were, alas, humiliated within hours when Islamic State's ludicrously over-the-top statement calling for the killing of Westerners emerged, specifically targeting "the disbelievers waging war, including the citizens of the countries that entered into a coalition against the Islamic State" and referring to Australia "sending its legions" against IS.

Faced with the inconvenience of IS attributing the need for terrorism in the West to the attacks on itself, the Prime Minister's office was reported to have issued a bizarrely self-contradictory statement that "Australian agencies regard the statement issued today by ISIL calling for attacks against members of the international coalition, including Australians, as genuine. ISIL will claim that our involvement in this international effort is the reason they are targeting us, but these people do not attack us for what we do, but for who we are and how we live."

That is, you should believe IS when it says things that fit the government's War on Terror narrative, but not when it says things that don't fit it.

The government has built its case for extensions of national security powers and war in Iraq on these two lies - lies that, as we'll see, are self-reinforcing. This is the same War on Terror cycle that has previously been played out when the 2003 attack on Iraq made Westerners less safe from terrorism and that, in turn, was used to justify further extensions of powers and continued military intervention in Pakistan and Yemen over the course of the last decade. Now, the government's decision to attack IS has made Australia less safe, and that reduction in safety is being used to justify both the decision to attack IS and further curbs on our freedoms.

And Abbott's most chilling words yesterday were his blunt demand that liberty be sacrificed for security:

"Regrettably, for some time to come, the delicate balance between freedom and security may have to shift. There may be more restrictions on some so that there can be more protections for others."

But contrary to what Abbott implies, the balance between freedom and security in Australia has been relentlessly shifting for over a decade, and it has always shifted away from freedom. This is a "delicate balance" that only ever shifts in favour of more government power and less individual freedom -- the freedom that Abbott insists is why IS really wants to kill us.

They hate us for our freedom, so we curb our freedoms. Well, there's some logic there.

As for "more restrictions on some so that there can be more protections for others", there could be few more worrying threats by a political leader, especially when it is clear that the "some" will be drawn almost exclusively from one community. The Muslim men deemed to have been using their phones in some sort of suspicious manner at a footy match; the baseless detention of a senior Muslim cleric by Customs; the dozens of homes of Muslim Australians raided last week without any charges resulting; the strangely convenient first use of the hitherto "unworkable" preventive detention orders (which were created to deal with the terror threat created by the Iraq invasion) on Muslim citizens - all reflect that this is about the harassment of a single minority.

And that harassment, to borrow Abbott's phrasing, isn't because of anything Muslim Australians have done, but because of who they are.

It is also becoming painfully clear that the strategy the government has embarked on with the Americans in Iraq is likely to fail. That's the view of Tony Blair, who knows a thing or two about launching attacks in Iraq based on lies: echoing the CIA's view that the enterprise is "doomed to failure", he says airstrikes won't be enough and Western ground forces will be needed. And confirming the FBI's claim that support for IS has been strengthened by airstrikes, there is evidence airstrikes have prompted a massive surge in IS recruitment. Almost as if that was exactly what IS had in mind when it started trying to goad the West into attacking it.

And while the Abbott government is helping make IS stronger, regional powers appear reticent. Saudi Arabia won't commit any military forces to the fight against IS, the country's richest man Prince Alwaleed Bin Talal Al Saud says. "This does not really affect our country explicitly," he said. IS "doesn't really affect" Saudia Arabia: the Prince sounds ... what's Tony Abbott's word? ... almost "insouciant".

We've been here before, obviously - the quagmire of Iraq, Western intervention that strengthens terrorists, the curtailment of the freedoms, the systematic harassment of Muslims.

As John Howard popped up on the weekend to remind us, some still insist the 2003 Iraq War wasn't based on lies, but simply poor intelligence. Well, there's no doubt this time around: lies are at the heart of this new Iraq venture, and it will take us back to the same dark place as before.