Bill Maher is a decidedly tasteful man. After discussing the controversy over a kid sexually defiling a a statue of Jesus, he draws a very interesting conclusion: "[It] speaks volumes about why liberal Western culture is not just different, but better!" After this, he goes into what is implicitly a diatribe of a presumed liberal "politically correct" tendency toward cultural relativism. Bitterly critiquing Obama's "insistence" on ISIS not being Islamic, he goes into the standard knee-jerk islamophobic talking points, taken straight out of the New Atheist handbook. They are obviously all fanatics, he says, ready to kill anyone who draws a cartoon of Mohammed or having sex with the wrong person. He even directly lies, claiming female genital mutilation is somehow inherent to Islam, even though these practices precede Islam in the regions where it's prevalent. "Cultures are different", he claims, "it's ok to judge that rule of law is better than theocracy."
And indeed, if one were to honestly believe that "culture" is this product of the inherent magical nature of the ideals, values and beliefs of different groups of people in different geographical locations developing in complete independence of other cultures and values, maybe this isn't such a far-fetched idea. We, in the West, believe in democracy and freedom, and according to this thesis, the comforts, benefits and protection we have emanate directly from our adherence to these principles. The Muslim world, on the other hand, believe in religious intolerance and the Koran, and the suffering, injustice and insecurity in these countries are a direct product of the faulty ideas of this group of people.
The truth is this narrative of different, competing "cultures" relies not only on a faulty sociological and philosophical basis, but also omits the real history of the growth of Islamic extremism in the Middle East and elsewhere. The extremist Islamic foes the warmongers have frothed their mouths over for the past decades, curiously have a similar connection.
The story never told about Islamic extremism.
In 1979, the US government begins Operation Cyclone, a covert operation in Afghanistan, in response to the take-over by the Democratic People's Party of Afghanistan after the Saur Revolution. These terrifying reds had pushed dangerous policies, like friendliness toward the Soviet Union, land reform and the end of forced marriages in Afghanistan. Obviously, the enlightened liberal Western culture had to do something about this. The CIA armed the Mujaheddin, a religiously extremist group, with millions of dollars. Although the official story is the US only got involved after the Soviet invasion, in reality, CIA was in it before that war even broke out. This comment by Zbigniew Brzezinski, security adviser of Jimmy Carter, in an interview with the French newspaper Le Nouvel Observateur, in 1998, illustrates the reasons for this:
Q: When the Soviets justified their intervention by asserting that they intended to fight against a secret involvement of the United States in Afghanistan, people didn’t believe them. However, there was a basis of truth. You don’t regret anything today?
Brzezinski: Regret what? That secret operation was an excellent idea. It had the effect of drawing the Russians into the Afghan trap and you want me to regret it? The day that the Soviets officially crossed the border, I wrote to President Carter: We now have the opportunity of giving to the USSR its Vietnam war. Indeed, for almost 10 years, Moscow had to carry on a war unsupportable by the government, a conflict that brought about the demoralization and finally the breakup of the Soviet empire.
For this reason, violent, religious extremists that used sexual assault as a means of control, who forced people to grow opium for them, took control. In total, between 1980 and 1984, the US government had given the Mujaheddin $2,49 billion dollars from the American taxpayer. These Mujaheddin fighters for "Afghan independence" turn out to have come from all around the world, mainly Pakistan, but other places as well. When they returned home, they took their guns and their US taxmoney with them.
"Hundreds of them returned home to Algeria, Chechnya, Kosovo, and Kashmir to carry on terrorist attacks in Allah’s name against the purveyors of secular “corruption." - Michael Parenti
In December 1993, Robert Fisk interviewed a "Saudi businessman" who had helped recruit fighters for Mujaheddin. Hailed as an "anti-Soviet warrior", he was making great progress in trying to establish peace in Afghanistan. His Taliban party was to overcome to factionalism and infighting, and produce a truly peaceful Islamic order. We all know how that went.History repeats itself - ISIS and the FSA.
The history of Islamic extremism and it's connection to the West does, of course, not end there. A couple of years ago the US declared it was funding "moderate rebels" against that tyrant and Hitlerite Assad in Syria. Very quickly, these moderate rebels turned out to be something else entirely, when reports of US and the Gulf States trained rebels appeared in media. The notion that the Free Syrian Army represented "moderate rebels" against the Assad regime was quickly shown to be on very shaky grounds, The NYT reported as early as 2012:
Most of the arms shipped at the behest of Saudi Arabia and Qatar to supply Syrian rebel groups fighting the government of Bashar al-Assad are going to hard-line Islamic jihadists, and not the more secular opposition groups that the West wants to bolster, according to American officials and Middle Eastern diplomats.
The FSA wasn't the shining story of moderate, pro-democratic anti-Assadists the Western media had portrayed them as. The connections to religiously fundamentalist Islam popped up everywhere. Abu Yusaf, a high level security commando for ISIS, puts the myth of the FSA to rest:“In the East of Syria, there is no Free Syrian Army any longer. All Free Syrian Army people [there] have joined the Islamic State,” - Washington Post, 18/10/2014As ISIS beheads, tortures and terrorizes it's way through Iraq, Kurdistan and Syria, the connections to US funded covert action grows clearer and clearer. In his great piece, How The West Created ISIS, Nafeez Ahmed goes through all the Western meddling and covert action that led to the monster now known as ISIS. ISIS, and terror, it seems, are very useful when Empire needs to destroy and divide nations to protect it's interests and dominance.
Culturally relative?
In this context, Maher's ideological war against the "culturally relative" is thrown into a different light. "Cultures are different," he claims, as if "culture" is this context-free, inherent quality of a society. I submit, that instead of the Western, "enlightened", liberal and tolerant culture and the oppressive, Islamic, intolerant society being radically "different", they are in fact the same culture. What the United States, this bastion of tolerance and liberal values, did to bolster Jihadist groups everywhere, not just through covert funding, but through fueling anti-Western attitudes that make easy recruitment propaganda for the different factions of extremists, is unprecedented. Had it not been involved in these, and so many other of the Middle Easts political turmoil, the notion that extremist Islam would have anywhere close to the hegemony it has now is ludicrous. Without denying that extreme elements of Islam could exist, we can pretty confidently say that it would've looked very radically differently. The reason this form of rhetoric from Bill Maher - the West is Best - is so insidious is that the West became the "Best" through decades of covert warfare, direct invasion and funding coup-d'etats. It became an enlightened, free democracy on the backs of it's imperial subjects, who supplied it with cheap oil, gas, minerals, opium and cheap labor. We can say "eh, whatever" to the kid simulating a blowjob with a statue of Jesus because the imperial surplus gives us enough convenient distractions to not care. What Bill Maher does is directly analogous to the White Supremacist narrative that developed post-WWII: that the material reality of a society is a product of an inherent geographical "culture" that possesses inherent virtues or vices, and when they clash, the purest one must stride toward victory. This is exactly the danger of ignoring imperialism.