INDIA: DIAL M FOR MASSACRE

Clinching documentary evidence corroborates serious charges against Narendra Modi and key officials in his administration

BY TEESTA SETALVAD, Combat Communalism, June 2010

Three months ago, our covert story, SIT-ting on the Truth (March 2010) exposed the frivolous and shallow investigations of the Gujarat massacres undertaken by the high-profile Special Investigation Team (SIT) appointed by the Supreme Court and headed by former CBI director RK Raghavan. One of the major issues raised was the deliberate refusal of SIT – influenced as it was by the three officers of the Gujarat police cadre, Shivanand Jha, Geeta Johri and Ashish Bhatia – to examine available documentary evidence to pin responsibility for complicity and gross dereliction of duty by top police officers, civil servants and politicians.

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Freedom Rider: Endless Terror

by BAR editor and senior columnist Margaret Kimberley, Black Agenda Report, May 19, 2010

“Few people are willing to make the connection between the killing of Muslims by the United States government and the inevitable hatred of the American people that is unleashed.” The United States government continues to kill Muslims like roaches in its never-ending war of terror. It shouldn’t come as a surprise when that violence spawns revenge directed against this nation. Nonetheless, every act or attempted act of terror against Americans is met with shock and defiance in the face of American instigated violence. Faisal Shahzad, a Pakistan-born American citizen, is in custody for attempting to detonate a car bomb in New York’s Times Square. Fortunately, Shahzad was an untrained amateur who thought he could set off an explosion with ordinary fire works. He also didn’t have enough common sense to know that he should leave town immediately instead of waiting for two days before attempting his escape. No damage was done to life or property and the suspect is in custody, but every attempt not only endangers us all but brings untold damage to American’s civil liberties. Senator Joseph Lieberman is proposing legislation that would strip citizenship from terror suspects. His goal is to prevent the use of the Fifth Amendment to the Constitution which protects against self-incrimination. It is all a canard, because the right to remain silent can be exercised by citizens and non-citizens alike. “Senator Joseph Lieberman is proposing legislation that would strip citizenship from terror suspects.” Shahzad’s biography has been analyzed and his every move scrutinized. Few people are willing to make the connection between the killing of Muslims by the United States government and the inevitable hatred of the American people that is unleashed. It isn’t very complicated. Shahzad was angry about the continued killings of his people and he wanted to inflict the same suffering on Americans. While politicians out do one another with demagoguery, the simplest cause of terrorism is ignored. The fear which always follows an attempted attack should be an impetus for Americans to think about the fear and terror their government visits upon the rest of the world. Instead, the same hand wringing and whining about “why they hate us” are the rule. Why was Shahzad angry? Undoubtedly because thousands of Pakistanis and Afghans have been killed by American drone attacks. If we were at all encouraged to think beyond the “spectrum of thinkable thought” we might be able to speak with some intelligence on this issue. Instead we see Barack Obama and the rest of the Democrats succumbing to Republican demands to destroy our civil liberties at home and continue mass death abroad. “Court decisions are clear that the renunciation of American citizenship must also take place before it can be taken away.” Attorney General Eric Holder made the rounds of Sunday morning talk shows and made it clear he is bowing to lies and the political expediency that follows: “I think we have to give serious consideration to at least modifying that public-safety exception [to the Miranda protections. And that’s one of the things that I think we’re going to be reaching out to Congress, to come up with a proposal that is both constitutional, but that is also relevant to our times and the threats that we now face.” Senator Lieberman’s proposed Terrorism Expatriation Act (TEA) goes even further. The constitution has very strict rules regarding the removal of American citizenship. Sworn allegiance to an enemy is insufficient cause to strip citizenship. Court decisions are clear that the renunciation of American citizenship must also take place before it can be taken away. It is shocking that Lieberman, an attorney, would peddle this nonsense that even if passed would be struck down by the courts. For now, the always cringing Democrats aren’t saying very much. Of course they always allow Lieberman, a Democrat who endorsed the Republican candidate without punishment from his party, to do whatever he likes. Both the Clinton and Bush administrations prosecuted terror cases in criminal court, with all rights of suspects being preserved. All of these cases resulted in convictions and at the time, no protest from Republicans. The cry for the awful enemy combatant designation in the cases of Shahzad and Umar Abdulmultallab should spark outrage and debate about American actions abroad. While political demagoguery becomes the norm, our government’s acts of terror continue with little protest. “Secretary of State Hillary Clinton is repeating the demand that Pakistan speed up the killing of its own people in order to satisfy her government’s demands.” Now the Obama administration claims that the Pakistan Taliban were responsible for this act. We don’t know if that is true, we don’t know if their claims that Shahzad is talking are true either. We can only be certain that political considerations come first. Now Secretary of State Hillary Clinton is repeating the demand that Pakistan speed up the killing of its own people in order to satisfy her government’s demands. The Shahzads in Pakistan and in the United States will also be like ticking time bombs, growing more and more angry about the deaths of their people and more determined to strike back. The sickening propaganda which makes invasion and occupation appear acceptable and even beneficial continues with little opposition. As long as the country lives under the grip of empire building and white supremacy, the rest of the world will be in danger and Americans will be endangered by the inevitable repercussions. One day our luck will run out. A terror attack will not be carried out by someone trying to ignite his shoe or explosive placed in his underwear. The car bomb or other apparatus of death will be expertly put together and Americans will die. It isn’t right that anyone should die violently, but it isn’t worse for Americans to die under such circumstances than it is for people in Pakistan or Afghanistan. Of course, our government and media won’t say that. The end result will be an even louder cry for death from the nation that is the greatest purveyor of violence in the world. Margaret Kimberley’s Freedom Rider column appears weekly in BAR. Ms. Kimberley lives in New York City, and can be reached via e-Mail at Margaret.Kimberley(at)BlackAgandaReport.com.

Buchanan: Is the War Coming Home?

Patrick J. Buchanan, LewRockwell, May 11, 2010

Faisal Shahzad sought to massacre scores of fellow Americans in Times Square with a bomb made of M-88 firecrackers, non-explosive fertilizer, gasoline and alarm clocks.

Umar Farouk Abdulmutallab tried to blow up a U.S. airliner over Detroit with a firebomb concealed in his underpants. Maj. Nidal Malik Hasan shot dead 13 fellow soldiers at Fort Hood and wounded 29.

Why did these men attempt the mass murder of Americans who did no harm to them? What impelled them to seek martyrdom amid a pile of American corpses?

Though all were Muslims, none seems to have been a longtime America-hater or natural-born killer. Hasan was proud to wear Army fatigues to mosque. Shahzad had become a U.S. citizen. Abdulmutallab was the privileged son of a prominent Nigerian banker.

The New York Times ties all three to the Internet sermons of Anwar al-Awlaki, a Yemen-based imam born and educated in the United States who inspires Muslims worldwide to jihad against America. But, following Sept. 11, al-Awlaki had been seen as a bridge between Islam and the West.

Now President Obama has authorized his assassination.

What do the four have in common?

All were converted in manhood into haters of America willing to kill and die in a jihad against America. And the probability is high that there are many more like them living amongst us who wish to bring the war in the Af-Pak here to America.

But what radicalized them? And why do they hate us?

Taking a cue from George W. Bush, Mayor Michael Bloomberg said of the Times Square bomber, “We will not be intimidated by those who hate the freedoms that make … this country so great.”

This was the mantra after Sept. 11. We are hated not because of what we do in the Middle East, but because of who we are: people who love freedom and stand for women’s rights.

And that is why they hate us – and why they come to kill us.

In a way this is a comforting thought, because it absolves us of the need to think. For no patriotic American is going to demand we surrender our freedom to prevent fanatics from attacking us.

The Wall Street Journal’s Bret Stephens advances a parallel view. We are hated, he says, because of our popular culture.

We are loathed in the Islamic world, Stephens writes, because of “Lady Gaga – or, if you prefer, Madonna, Farrah Fawcett, Marilyn Monroe, Josephine Baker or any other American woman who has … personified what the Egyptian Islamist writer Sayyid Qutb once called ‘the American Temptress.’”

This hatred is at least 60 years old, says Stephens, for Qutb wrote even before “Elvis, Playboy, the pill, women’s lib, acid tabs, gay rights, Studio 54, Jersey shore and … Lady Gaga.”

Qutb’s revulsion at American degeneracy is why his legion of Islamic followers hate us.

Again, a comforting thought. For, if Lady Gaga is the problem, there is nothing we Americans can do about it.

Yet, this is as self-delusional as saying the FLN set off bombs in movie theaters and cafes in Algiers to kill the French because of what Brigitte Bardot was doing on screen in “And God Created Woman.”

America’s toxic culture may be a reason devout Muslims detest us. It is not why they come here to kill us. Mohammed Atta’s friends did not target Hollywood, but centers and symbols of U.S. military and political power.

U.S. Marines were not attacked by Hezbollah until we inserted those Marines into Lebanon’s civil war. No Iraqi committed an act of terror against us before we invaded Iraq. And if the Sept. 11 killers were motivated by hatred of the immorality of our society, what were they doing getting lap dances in Delray Beach?

Osama bin Laden declared war on us, first and foremost, to end the massive U.S. presence on sacred Saudi soil that is home to Mecca and Medina.

Some may insist this was not his real motive. But, apparently, the Saudis believed him, for they quickly kicked us out of Prince Sultan Air Base.

As for the Taliban, they would surely make short work of Lady Gaga. But their stated grievance is the same as Gen. Washington’s in our war with the British: If you want this war to end, get out of our country.

By Occam’s razor, the simplest explanation is usually the right one. Looking at America’s wars in Iraq, Afghanistan and Pakistan, Maj. Hasan, Abdulmutallab and Shahzad decided that what we call the war on terror was in reality a war on Islam.

All decided to use their access to exact retribution for our killing of their fellow Muslims.

We are being attacked over here because we are over there.

Nor is it a good sign that U.S. intelligence is reporting that rising numbers of U.S. Muslims are making Internet inquiries about how and where to get training to bring the war home to America.

Patrick J. Buchanan [send him mail] is co-founder and editor of The American Conservative. He is also the author of seven books, including Where the Right Went Wrong, and A Republic Not An Empire. His latest book is Churchill, Hitler, and the Unnecessary War. See his website.

Islamophobia – Now in American Children’s Textbooks?

Middle East Online, April19, 2010

True, the demonizing of Arabs and Muslims in America began well before the terrible tragedy of September 11, 2001 but, what is new post-9/11, is that now demonizing Muslims and Islam is not only more widespread but also considerably more mainstream and respectable. In short, Muslim-bashing has become socially acceptable in the United States, notes Abdus Sattar Ghazali.
As if the adult media’s vitriol wasn’t enough, the seven-million strong American Muslim community, is now being faced by the alarming publication of a series of ‘children’s books’, containing misleading and inflammatory rhetoric about the Islamic faith. The 10-book series – entitled the “World of Islam,” – is published by Mason Crest Publishing in collaboration with the Philadelphia-based pro-Israel and pro-war Foreign Policy Research Institute.

Anti-Islamic sentiment pervades the entire series, portraying Muslims as inherently violent and deserving suspicion. It encourages young readers to believe Muslims are terrorists, who seek to undermine US society.

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Green Scare: The Making of the New Muslim Enemy

by Deepa Kumar, CommonDreams.org, April 19, 2010

The events of September 11 laid the basis for the emergence of a vicious form of Islamophobia that facilitated the U.S. goals of empire building in the 21st century.  This form of Islamophobia focused on the enemy “out there” against which the U.S. supposedly had to go to war to protect itself, from Afghanistan to Iraq.

As George Bush famously put it, “We’re fighting them there, so we don’t have to fight them here.” Or as he stated in his West Point speech in 2002, “We must take the battle to the enemy, disrupt his plans and confront the worst threats.” In short, an endless “war on terror” on the enemy beyond U.S. borders was now justified, according to Bush.

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Muslims Are Their Own Worst Enemy

by Paul Craig Roberts, Foreign Policy Journal, March 2, 2010

Muslims are numerous but powerless. Divisions among Muslims, especially between Sunni and Shi’ites, have consigned the Muslim Middle East to almost a century of Western control. Muslims cannot even play together. The Islamic Solidarity Games, a regional version of the Olympics, which were to be held in April in Iran, have been cancelled, because the Iranians and the Arabs cannot agree on whether to call the body of water that separates Iran from the Arabian Peninsula the Persian Gulf or the Arabian Gulf.

Muslim disunity has made it possible for Israel to dispossess the Palestinians, for the U.S. to invade Iraq, and for the U.S. to rule much of the region through puppets. For example, in exchange for faithful service, Egypt receives $1.5 billion a year from Washington, which enables President Mubarak to buy off opposition. The opposition had rather have the money than support the Palestinians. Therefore, Egypt cooperates with Israel and the U.S. in the blockade of Gaza.

Another factor is the willingness of some Muslims to betray their own kind for U.S. dollars. Don’t take my word for it. Listen to neoconservative Kenneth Timmerman, head of the Foundation for Democracy, which describes itself as “a private, non-profit organization established in 1995 with grants from the National Endowment for Democracy (NED) to promote democracy and internationally-recognized standards of human rights in Iran.”

By now we all know what that means. It means that the U.S. finances a “velvet” or some “color revolution” in order to install a U.S. puppet.  Just prior to the sudden appearance of a “green revolution” in Tehran primed to protest an election, Timmerman wrote that “the National Endowment for Democracy has spent millions of dollars during the past decade promoting ‘color’ revolutions in places such as Ukraine and Serbia, training political workers in modern communications and organizational techniques. Some of that money appears to have made it into the hands of pro-Mousavi groups, who have ties to non-governmental organizations outside Iran that the National Endowment for Democracy funds.”  So, according to the neocon Timmerman, funded by the National Endowment for Democracy, it was U.S. money that funded Mousavi’s claims that Armadinejad stole the last Iranian election.

During President George W. Bush’s regime it became public knowledge that American money is used to purchase Iranians to work against their own country. The Washington Post, a newspaper sympathetic to the neocon’s goal of American hegemony and war with Iran, reported in 2007 that Bush authorized spending more than $400 million for activities that included “supporting rebel groups opposed to the country’s ruling clerics.”

This makes the U.S. government a “state sponsor of terrorism.” For confirmation, one of the U.S. paid operatives, who conducted terror operations in Iran, has ratted on his terrorist supporters in Washington. Abdulmalek Rigi, leader of the Baloch separatist group responsible for several attacks, was recently arrested by the Iranians. Rigi admitted that the Americans in Washington assured him of unlimited military aid and funding for waging an insurgency against the Islamic Republic of Iran.

Possibly he was tortured into confession. It is the American way. If the “light of the world,” the “indispensable people,” and the “shining city on the hill” tortures people, perhaps the Iranians do as well. Rigi’s younger brother, himself on death row in Iran, has said that the U.S. provided direct funding to the separatist group and even ordered specific terrorist attacks inside Iran.

The U.S. and its NATO puppets have been killing Afghan women, children, and village elders since October 7, 2001, when the U.S. military invasion “Operation Enduring Freedom,” a proper Orwellian title for a self-serving war of aggression, was launched. The U.S. installed puppet president of Afghanistan, Hamid Karzai, is bought and paid for with U.S. dollars.

The money that Washington gives Karzai finances the corruption that supports him. Karzai’s corruption and his treason against the Afghan people encourage the Taliban to keep fighting in order to achieve a government that serves Afghans instead of Washington, D.C.

Without the puppet Karzai selling out Afghans to Washington, the U.S. would have already been driven out of the country. With Karzai paying Afghans with American money to fight Afghans for the Americans, the war drones on into its ninth year.

Feminists, liberals, and naive American flag-wavers will say that what is written here is utter rot, that Americans are in Afghanistan to bring women’s rights and birth control to Afghan women and to bring freedom, democracy and progress to Afghanistan, even if it means leveling every village, town, and house in the country. We, “the indispensable people,” are only there to do good, because we care so much for the Afghan people who live in a country that most Americans can’t find on a map.

While this collection of naifs rants on about America “saving” Afghans from whatever, the White House and the Congress are conspiring against the American people to cut $500 billion dollars out of Medicare in order to give the money to private insurance companies. Jobless benefits are about to run out for millions of Americans, whose jobs have been moved offshore in order to make the rich richer. The U.S. Senate failed on Friday, Feb. 26, to extend jobless benefits. A single Republican Senator, Jim Bunning of Kentucky, was able to block the bill because it would cost a measly $10 billion and “would add to the budget deficit.”

The “fiscally responsible” Bunning supports blank checks for wars of aggression (war crimes under the Nuremberg standard) and payoffs to investment banks for wrecking the retirement plans of most Americans. Bunning sends the bills to the unorganized and unrepresented Americans, whose jobs have been stolen by corporate offshoring of jobs and whose retirements have been stolen by the endless greed of the Wall Street investment banks.

What fool believes that the U.S. government, which is totally indifferent to the fate of its own citizens, cares so much about Afghanistan that it will spend blood and treasure to bring “progress” and “women’s rights” to a country half a world away, while it drives its own citizens into the ground?

At Washington’s behest, the government of Pakistan is conducting war against its own people, killing many and forcing others to flee their homes and lands. The Pakistani government’s war against its own citizens has caused military expenses to soar, putting Pakistan’s budget deep in the red. Deputy US Treasury Secretary Neal Wolin ordered the Pakistani government to raise taxes to pay for the war against its own people. The puppet ruler, Asif Ali Zardari, complied with his American master’s orders.  Zardari declared a broad-based value added tax on virtually all goods and most services in Pakistan. Thus, Pakistanis are forced to finance a war against themselves.

The “cakewalk war” in Iraq has lasted 7 years instead of the promised 6 weeks, and the violence is still ongoing with Iraqis killed and maimed nearly every day. The reason Americans are still in Iraq is because the Iraqis hate each other more than they hate the American invader. The vast majority of the violence in “the Iraq war” was committed between Iraqi Sunnis and Iraqi Shi’ites as they cleansed one another from neighborhoods.

The majority Shi’ites regarded the American invasion of Iraq as an opportunity to gain power over the minority Sunnis, who ruled under Saddam Hussein. Therefore, the Shi’ites never engaged the American invading forces. The minority Sunnis (20 percent of the population) gave most of their effort to fighting the Shi’ite majority, but in their spare time a few thousand Sunnis were able to inflict serious losses on the American superpower.

Finally realizing the power of lucre in the Arab world, the Americans put 80,000 Sunnis on the U.S. military payroll and paid them to stop killing Americans.

This is how the U.S. won the war in Iraq. Iraqis sold out their independence for American dollars.

Considering that a few thousand Sunnis were able to prevent superpower America from successfully occupying Baghdad or much of Iraq, had the Shi’ites joined with the Sunnis against the invaders, the U.S. would have been defeated and driven out. This outcome was not possible, because the Shi’ites wanted to settle the score with the Sunnis, who had ruled them under Saddam Hussein.

This is the reason that Iraq today is in ruins, with one million dead, four million displaced or homeless, and the professional class having fled the country. Iraq, under the American puppet Maliki, is an American protectorate.

As long as Muslims hate and fear one another more than they hate their conquerers, they will remain a vanquished people.

Dr. Roberts was assistant secretary of the U.S. Treasury in the Reagan administration, associate editor of the Wall Street Journal, Senior Research Fellow in the Hoover Institution, Stanford University, and held the William E. Simon Chair in Political Economy, Center for Strategic and International Studies, Georgetown University.

This tide of anti-Muslim hatred is a threat to us all

The attempt to drive Islamists and young Asian activists out of the political mainstream is a dangerous folly

Seumas Milne, The Guardian/UK, Feb 25, 2010

If young British Muslims had any doubts that they are singled out for special treatment in the land of their birth, the punishments being meted out to those who took part in last year’s London demonstrations against Israel’s war on Gaza will have dispelled them. The protests near the Israeli ­embassy at the height of the onslaught were angry: bottles and stones were thrown, a ­Starbucks was trashed and the police employed unusually violent tactics, even by the standards of other recent confrontations, such as the G20 protests.

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Slandering Muslims is increasingly acceptable in Western media

Foreign Policy Journal, February 22, 2010

by Barnabe Geisweiller

In July of last year, Hamas, the Palestinian Islamist group, organized a mass wedding celebration for hundreds of couples in the Gaza Strip. The happy adult grooms, immaculately dressed in black suits and colourful ties, received $500 each from Hamas, no small sum in the besieged territory.

It might have been a joyous event if not for the fact that the brides were “pre-pubescent girls, dressed in white gowns and adorned with garish make-up,” according to the article written by author and journalist Paul L. Williams, and republished by rightwing pundit David Horowitz’s Frontpage Magazine, who regularly appears on mainstream news networks such as Fox and CNN.

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“When the ‘War on Terror’ Becomes Genocide”

by J.B.Gerald, nightslantern.ca, Feb 10, 2010

The “Convention for the Punishment and Prevention of the Crime of Genocide” stresses the prevention of genocide more than prescribing its exact manner of punishment. Genocide does not have to be committed for the Convention to have effect. By defining “genocide” it seeks to avert agendas which will confirm the crime. Physical manifestations of genocide are preceded by psychological preparation and the resulting psychological damage to entire victim groups. There is no way not to apply this awareness to current pressures on Islamic communities in North America, so this is an obvious and rather late notation of a genocide warning for Islamic peoples in the U.S. (see also Canada), late, in that one could sense the program over twenty years ago without knowing the scope of its intentions. The threat of whole or partial destruction of this religious group is exacerbated by Israel’s treatment of the Palestinian people, bombing of civilian Lebanon, invasion of Gaza, which placed essentially Islamic civilian populations without human value, in a manner politically acceptable to U.S. and Canadian governments.

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From Blackwater to Xe, the Templar Crusade

Mercenary soldiers and security personnel for the US government by Michael Carmichael
Global Research, January 10, 2010
Planetary Movement
Blackwater is a corporation that provides mercenary soldiers and supporting security personnel to the US government. Erik Prince, the founder and owner of the now infamous US corporation, Blackwater, hails from Holland, Michigan where his family was both powerful and prominent in two institutions – (1) the Republican Party and (2) the evangelical Christian Church.  After scandals hit his large and lucrative firm, Prince ordered a curious rebranding that changed its name to Xe. X is an archaic form of abbreviation for Christ and/or Christian that was derived from the cross and the Greek Alphabet.  X or Chi is the Greek letter that is the initial of “Christos” – X – which at the same time served as a symbol for the cross.  Sometimes written Chi-Rho, (Xp) is another abbreviation for Christos and his followers, the Christians.  From the perspective of medieval Christian symbology, ‘Xe’ is a combination of the Christic cross and the Greek letter, Epsilon, the first letter in the Greek word, Evangelion, glad tidings or gospel.  From the perspective of a modern member of the Knights Templar, Xe is immediately recognizable as it symbolizes Christian Evangelism. Prince’s background Eric Prince’s father owned a thriving automotive parts business and sent his son to Holland Christian School – an evangelical establishment that accepts students from Kindergarten through the 12th grade.  Since then, Prince has converted to Roman Catholicism – and may be a member or associate of Opus Dei, a very conservative cult now described as a prelature that is a strong ally of the current pope, Benedict XVI, who – when he was a Cardinal – paved the way for the beatification and canonization of the cult’s founder, St. Josemaria Escriva by his predecessor, Pope John Paul II. Here is a brief description of Erik Prince’s religious background taken from a website : The founder and CEO of Blackwater is Erik Prince, son of Edgar Prince, the now deceased businessman from Holland, Michigan. Prince’s background as a Western Michigander is not just limited to geography, the brother of Betsy DeVos has also embraced the conservative religious beliefs that his family promoted zealously, particularly with their money. Erik began his political career working as an intern for Gary Bauer at the Family Research Council and also worked in the Bush I White House, although he thought that this administration was too liberal. Prince disapproved of the Bush I administration to the extent that in 1992 he supported Patrick Buchanan for President, something that got him into trouble with his sister Betsy. Unlike his family, which is part of the Christian Reformed Church, Erik Prince is a Catholic. He most likely became Catholic when he married his first wife, who died of cancer shortly after they were married. Interestingly enough, most of the leadership at Blackwater is also Catholic, albeit a conservative wing of the church that is quite reactionary. Erik Prince is personally connected to conservative Catholic groups like Catholic Answer, Crisis magazine, and a Grand Rapids-based group, the Acton Institute. But Prince has not abandoned his Protestant/Evangelical roots and is a close friend of Watergate criminal turned believer Chuck Colson. They have shared the podium on several occasions, even once at Calvin College. According to Scahill, Prince is aligning himself with a new Catholic/Evangelical alliance called “Evangelicals and Catholics Together.” The ECT manifesto states: “The century now drawing to a close has been the greatest century of missionary expansion in Christian history. We pray and we believe that this expansion has prepared the way for yet greater missionary endeavor in the first century of the Third Millennium. The two communities in world Christianity that are most evangelistically assertive and most rapidly growing are Evangelicals and Catholics.” Prince’s relationship to what Scahill calls the “Theocon” movement is not marginal. Prince himself writes about this relationship and it’s importance, particularly with the mission of Blackwater. Prince says “Everybody carries guns, just like the Prophet Jeremiah rebuilding the temple in Israel – a sword in one hand and a trowel in the other.” The current Crusade In 2004, the current pope signed a letter to the Bishops in the United States warning the laity not to vote for Catholic candidates who had voted in favor of women’s rights to abortion.  Cardinal Ratzinger’s letter weakened the campaign of John Kerry and strengthened George W. Bush who had used the term, “crusade,” to rally his forces shortly after 9/11. Speaking in Regensburg in 2006, Pope Benedict XVI made insensitive remarks about the Islamic faith that caused outrage in the Muslim world. Erik Prince’s personal Crusade Among his personnel at Xe, Prince is known to be a high-profile Islamophobe who believes his personal mission in life is to bring about the total extinction of the Muslim population of this planet in what he has described as a global campaign of genocide or a, “Crusade.” Here is an excerpt of an article about Prince that appeared in The Economist: In an affidavit lodged with a court in Virginia, one of the witnesses said that Mr Prince “views himself as a Christian crusader tasked with eliminating Muslims and the Islamic faith from the globe.” The statement continues To that end, Mr. Prince intentionally deployed to Iraq certain men who shared his vision of Christian supremacy, knowing and wanting these men to take every available opportunity to murder Iraqis. Many of these men used call signs based on the Knights of the Templar, the warriors who fought the Crusades. Mr. Prince operated his companies in a manner that encouraged and rewarded the destruction of Iraqi life. For example, Mr. Prince’s executives would openly speak about going over to Iraq to “lay Hajiis out on cardboard.” Going to Iraq to shoot and kill Iraqis was viewed as a sport or game. Mr. Prince’s employees openly and consistently used racist and derogatory terms for Iraqis and other Arabs, such as “ragheads” or “hajiis.” Michael Carmichael is the founder of Planetary.