Salon.com > John Feffer

The GOP’s new Islamophobic narrative

Thu, 29 Mar 2012 15:44:00 +0000

Those who fervently believe that Barack Obama is a Muslim generally practice their furtive religion in obscure recesses of the Internet. Once in a while, they’ll surface in public to remind the news media that no amount of evidence can undermine their convictions.

In October 2008, at a town hall meeting in Minnesota for Republican presidential candidate John McCain, a woman called Obama “an Arab.” McCain responded, incongruously enough, that Obama was, in fact, “a decent family man” and not an Arab at all. In an echo of this, a woman recently stood up at a town hall in Florida and began a question for Republican presidential hopeful Rick Santorum by asserting that the president “is an avowed Muslim.” The audience cheered, and Santorum didn’t bother to correct her.

America’s new role in the Pacific

Tue, 04 Oct 2011 15:00:00 +0000

The United States has long styled itself a Pacific power. It established the model of counterinsurgency in the Philippines in 1899 and defeated the Japanese in World War II. It faced down the Chinese and the North Koreans to keep the Korean peninsula divided in 1950, and it armed the Taiwanese to the teeth. Today, America maintains the most powerful military in the Pacific region, supported by a constellation of military bases, bilateral alliances, and about 100,000 service personnel.

It has, however, reached the high-water mark of its Pacific presence and influence. The geopolitical map is about to be redrawn. Northeast Asia, the area of the world with the greatest concentration of economic and military power, is on the verge of a regional transformation. And the United States, still preoccupied with the Middle East and hobbled by a stalled and stagnating economy, will be the odd man out.

Elections will be part of the change. Next year, South Koreans, Russians, and Taiwanese will all go to the polls. In 2012, the Chinese Communist Party will also ratify its choice of a new leader to take over from President Hu Jintao. He will be the man expected to preside over the country's rise from the number two spot to the pinnacle of the global economy.

Forget China; Turkey is the next superpower

Mon, 14 Jun 2010 17:40:00 +0000

The future is no longer in plastics, as the businessman in the 1967 film "The Graduate" insisted. Rather, the future is in China.

If a multinational corporation doesn't shoehorn China into its business plan, it courts the ridicule of its peers and the outrage of its shareholders. The language of choice for ambitious undergraduates is Mandarin. Apocalyptic futurologists are fixated on an eventual global war between China and the United States. China even occupies valuable real estate in the imaginations of our fabulists. Much of the action of Neal Stephenson's novel "The Diamond Age", for example, takes place in a future neo-Confucian China, while the crew members of the space ship on the cult TV show "Firefly" mix Chinese curse words into their dialogue.

Why doesn't Turkey have a comparable grip on American visions of the future? Characters in science fiction novels don't speak Turkish. Turkish-language programs are as scarce as hen's teeth on college campuses. Turkey doesn't even qualify as part of everyone's favorite group of up-and-comers, that swinging BRIC quartet of Brazil, Russia, India, and China. Turkey remains stubbornly fixed in Western culture as a backward-looking land of doner kebabs, bazaars, and guest workers.

Our misguided fight against Somali pirates

Fri, 24 Apr 2009 10:29:00 +0000

In comic books, bad guys often team up to fight the forces of good. The Masters of Evil battle the Avengers superhero team. The Joker and Scarecrow ally against Batman. Lex Luthor and Brainiac take on Superman.

And the Somali pirates, who have dominated recent headlines with their hijacking and hostage-taking, join hands with al-Qaida to form a dynamic evil duo against the United States and our allies. We're the friendly monsters -- a big, hulking superpower with a heart of gold -- and they're the aliens from Planet Amok.

In the comic-book imagination of some of our leading pundits, the two headline threats against U.S. power are indeed on the verge of teaming up. The intelligence world is abuzz with news that radical Islamists in Somalia are financing the pirates and taking a cut of their booty. Given this "bigger picture," Fred Iklé urges us simply to "kill the pirates." Robert Kaplan waxes more hypothetical. "The big danger in our day is that piracy can potentially serve as a platform for terrorists," he writes. "Using pirate techniques, vessels can be hijacked and blown up in the middle of a crowded strait, or a cruise ship seized and the passengers of certain nationalities thrown overboard."

The challenge facing local food

Thu, 18 Jan 2007 12:30:00 +0000

On Oct. 3, with the fall semester in full swing, the dining hall at Georgetown Law School was packed with students slumped over bookbags and laptops. Squeezed among their plates and papers were tabletop displays announcing that the day's meal was part of an "Eat Local Challenge" that required the school's chef to create a meal of ingredients entirely grown or raised within 150 miles of his kitchen. Between bites, the future lawyers peered at the signs with a mix of curiosity and indignation. Reducing food-shipping miles and supporting small farms were all good and fine -- but what ever happened to Taco Tuesday?

Though it's been 20 years since graduation, I can still recall my alma mater's grim fare: the tetrazzinis, the iceberg lettuce, the gluey stews. I remember how my fellow students clamored for more vegetarian dishes -- or more anything that just plain tasted better. The garlic roasted chicken and sautéed greens served up at Georgetown Law would have blown our minds and our taste buds. But the students I met there spoke longingly of packaged sandwiches and tacos filled with greasy, industrial-strength hamburger meat -- while the food service staff sounded like gourmet revolutionaries. I wondered: What kind of culinary looking-glass universe had I fallen into?

All democracy, all the time

Tue, 15 Mar 2005 21:35:00 +0000

President Bush's "axis of evil," in targeting only Iraq, Iran and North Korea, was apparently an understatement. Saddam Hussein, the ayatollahs and "Dear Leader" Kim Jong Il were just the tip of the iceberg. The backers of new legislation before Congress have a much bolder vision: to "achieve universal democracy" by 2025 by removing -- nonviolently -- approximately two dictatorships a year. President Bush's call, in his February State of the Union address, for support of "democratic movements in the Middle East and beyond, with the ultimate goal of ending tyranny in our world," must have been just what they wanted to hear.

If enacted, the new bill -- the ADVANCE (which stands for Advance Democratic Values, Address Nondemocratic Countries, and Enhance) Democracy Act of 2005, introduced into both houses on March 3 -- would bring about a fundamental change in U.S. foreign policy. To maintain a regional balance of power, ensure access to vital resources, and pursue larger national security goals such as the "war on terror," the United States has traditionally worked with dictators big and small, from the tyrants of the past (such as Anastasio Somoza in Nicaragua) to current autocratic allies (such as Pervez Musharraf in Pakistan and Crown Prince Abdullah in Saudi Arabia). The ADVANCE Democracy Act, the foreign policy version of "Just Say No," on the other hand, would attempt to steer the United States away from engaging with tyrants under any circumstances.

The military industrial porn complex

Tue, 30 Mar 2004 20:30:00 +0000

Photo spreads of supersized weapons, sidebars of eye-popping stats, and prose of pumped-up power: What is happening to popular science magazines? It's not quite hardcore, like the descriptions of raw, sweaty military ops in Soldier of Fortune or the Marines' in-house organ, Leatherneck. The science magazines have more of a soft-core vibe. Over the last several years, several have turned themselves into military versions of a Victoria's Secrets catalog.

Take the September 2003 issue of Popular Mechanics. The cover proclaims "American Megapower: Inside the Most Awesome Fighting Force on Earth." A bat-winged stealth bomber presides over a group shot of tanks, an aircraft carrier and a visored soldier. The text inside amounts to an unabashed love letter to the Pentagon. No mention is made of how this megapower appears to be bogged down in Iraq or that there are any limits to military force, scientific or otherwise.

The megapower issue was only one of five cover stories that Popular Mechanics ran on the U.S. military in 2003, each one announced with all the subtlety of a tabloid ("Floating Self-Propelled Military Base Projects American Power Anywhere!"). Nearly every month last year featured a new celebration of the military's know-how or sheer force.