"Ideologies of Hatred": What Does Condi Mean?

Russert might have asked whether the new, liberated Afghanistan and Iraq represent any improvement in the hatred department. In the former, to the administration's embarrassment and the consternation of its Christian fundamentalist supporters, people face death for conversion to Christianity. In the latter, women are now obliged to follow a religious dress code or risk attack. These countries are in Bush-theory "free and democratic" now, apparently solely because their regimes have been changed by U.S. military force. They're free by definition, much like the countries of the "Free World" labeled such during the Cold War.

Rice's statement has drawn a lot of comment, which is appropriate, since this is a concentrated expression of the administration's logic as it proceeds to target other Middle East nations with no role in 9-11. But it's not new. Rice has been saying that the Middle East "provides a fertile ground for ideologies of hatred" since at least August 2003. She told U.S. troops in Afghanistan last May: "We are going to build a different kind of Middle East, a different kind of broader Middle East that is going to be stable and democratic and where our children will one day not have to be worried about the kind of ideologies of hatred that led those people to fly those planes into those buildings on Sept. 11."

I suggested at the time that this was tantamount to saying that Islam itself generates hatred and is the problem. What other ideology extends from Morocco to the Khyber Pass? (The neocons like to talk about the "Greater Middle East" in order to include some Muslim nations outside the conventional geographer's Middle East.) Of course she used the plural form, ideologies, suggesting that hatred unites such diverse systems of thought as Syrian and Iraqi Baathism, the political Shiism of the Iranian mullahs and Hizbollah, the Sunni Islam of Hamas, the quasi-Marxism of the Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine founded by the Christian George Habash, etc. But the administration's strategy all along has been to conflate disparate foes, subliminally linking them to 9-11. In seeking support for ongoing war it banks on the geographical and historical confusion of the masses and the Islamophobia promoted by popular preachers like Pat Robertson and Franklin Graham.

But the administration denies that it's anti-Islam. It finds the Christian right's anti-Muslim sermonizing useful, to the extent that it sustains support for U.S. aggression in the Middle East. But officially, it avers that "Islam is a religion of peace" and not one of hatred. So what does the former Stanford provost mean by "ideology of hatred"? And what is the object of the hate?

"They hate our freedoms," the president has declared, "our freedom of religion, our freedom of speech, our freedom to vote and assemble and disagree with each other." He was referring, soon after 9-11, specifically to al-Qaeda. But surely he wanted us to apply his charge to lots of others too. In any case Osama bin Laden disputed the allegation: "Let [Bush] tell us why we did not strike Sweden, for example We fought you because we want to restore freedom to our nation."This sort of statement resonates in places like the occupied Palestinian territories.

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