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  • McCarthyism or Red herring?

    The new McCarthyism
    Syed Mansoor Hussain


    Ongoing investigations into Al Qaeda and its sympathisers have thrown most American Muslims, including many Pakistani Americans, into a state of turmoil. After having devoted their lives to America and having brought up their children to be good Americans, they feel as American as the next person and just cannot understand why they are being subjected to the sort of scrutiny that is reserved for subversives. Most of them had never heard of Al Qaeda before 9/11 and even today much of what they know about it comes from the US media. However a vast majority of them, like many non-Muslims all over the world, do support the right of the Palestinians to a viable state of their own and oppose the US decision to invade Iraq.

    The paranoia is reaching a point where the “prophets of doom and gloom” are forecasting at least a national internment of Muslims like that of the Japanese Americans after Pearl Harbour. The more historically knowledgeable think that what the Muslims are headed for is something akin to what happened to them after the re-conquest of Spain in 1494. The consensus however is that Muslims are in for a rough time over the next few years. What worries them is the fact that even though there are laws and constitutional guarantees that safeguard rights of all American citizens, yet these laws have often been either ignored or circumvented during times of imagined or real crises.

    The US, like many other countries, has a strong ‘security’ establishment that needs some form of a national campaign to validate its usefulness. After the fall of the international communism, these establishments were left with the ‘war on drugs’ and then the ‘war on Medicare fraud’ as their major preoccupation. Things have changed now. Even though the terrorists that attacked the US on 9/11 are all dead, there have been many high profile investigations and trials of members of terrorist cells and terrorist sympathisers since then. None of them have yielded any major convictions. In spite of a total lack of success in finding any real terrorists within the US, this ‘war on terror’ has become the major preoccupation of the entire security establishment bringing billions of dollars in budgets and providing jobs for many thousands. Bureaucratic imperatives mandate a continuance of this campaign and every day, newer and more intrusive mechanisms of investigating possible terrorist are emerging that are aimed primarily at Muslim immigrants from the Middle East or South Asia.

    From the perspective of the millions of law-abiding Muslim Americans, the situation is indeed fraught with unpleasant possibilities. In trying to make some sense of what is happening to them, they are trying to find parallels with problems faced by other minorities in the past. Almost every new immigrant wave that hit America’s shores was initially the target of considerable discrimination. What the Muslims are now facing is unfortunately more than just that. The latent American xenophobia has been compounded by an attack on America from abroad. And unfortunately for Muslims the perpetrators of the attack are ideologically similar to them thus creating a certain connection that many find unjustifiable.

    Comparison of what is happening to Muslims in America today might be made with the famous Red Scare that happened in 1919. Fear of Communism combined with an anarchist campaign within the US, bombings and all, produced mass hysteria and along with it a vicious anti-communist campaign. Thousand, mostly eastern European immigrants, were arrested on mere suspicion and deported. Civil liberties were virtually suspended for all practical purposes. But this lasted for only a few years and sanity soon returned. The more appropriate comparison though might be with the second period of anti-communist hysteria at the beginning of the Cold War that is now referred to as the era of McCarthyism. During this time communists, communist sympathisers and even those remotely connected to them came under suspicion. For the political heirs of Senator Joseph McCarthy, the threat of ‘Islamic’ terrorism is now the new Red Scare.

    The methods being used to investigate Muslims and the sort of surveillance they are being kept under at this time is scarily reminiscent of the early fifties. Every Muslim is suspect, if not as an actual terrorist then at least as a possible sympathiser of terrorists. Political support for Palestinians and the Iraqi insurgency is now conflated with support for terrorism and worse, open practice of the Muslim faith is held to the same standard that membership of the Communist Party was in those times. Mosques are the new Communist Party meeting places and informers are being sought to monitor what goes on in there.

    The political environment is also a very important aspect of this new McCarthyism. Criticising the ‘anti-terror’ campaign is deemed unpatriotic and can mean political suicide. Therefore, even those that are opposed to this are unwilling to openly come out against it. Even though this question is not being discussed, in essence, the upcoming elections in the US are really about this very issue. The real question facing Americans today is a simple one. Are they willing to give up their freedoms in exchange for safety and protection against an amorphous enemy, and should the Bill of Rights be suspended in times of crisis?

    Fortunately for America, the voices of reason eventually triumph. The best example of that is what Harry Truman had to say about McCarthyism fifty years ago: “It is now evident that the present Administration has fully embraced, for political advantage, McCarthyism. I am not referring to the Senator from Wisconsin. He is only important in that his name has taken on the dictionary meaning of the word. It is the corruption of truth, the abandonment of the due process of law. It is the use of the big lie and the unfounded accusation against any citizen in the name of Americanism or security. It is the rise to power of the demagogue who lives on untruth; it is the spreading of fear and the destruction of faith in every level of society.” (Harry S Truman, New York Times, November 17, 1953)


    Syed Mansoor Hussain is Professor and Chief of Cardiac Surgery at King Edward Medical College-Mayo Hoaspital. He has practised and taught medicine in the US.
    _____________________


  • #2
    Originally posted by tarek
    Are they willing to give up their freedoms in exchange for safety and protection against an amorphous enemy,
    What freedoms have been given up?
    No man is free until all men are free - John Hossack
    I agree completely with this Administration’s goal of a regime change in Iraq-John Kerry
    even if that enforcement is mostly at the hands of the United States, a right we retain even if the Security Council fails to act-John Kerry
    He may even miscalculate and slide these weapons off to terrorist groups to invite them to be a surrogate to use them against the United States. It’s the miscalculation that poses the greatest threat-John Kerry

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