This is why all of the media talk (echoing Trump) about how he “killed Americans” reeks of racism and imperial narcissism. However many US troops Soleimani may have been responsible for killing in Iraq, this was the least of his massive crimes. Similarly, calling him a “terrorist,” implying he was responsible for attacks on Westerners (always the connotation of that label in mainstream Western discourse), is a vast understatement. He was worse than a terrorist: he was a war criminal.

And if the reports are true that he was in Baghdad on a diplomatic mission to broker some kind of rapprochement between the equally tyrannical regimes of Iran and Saudi Arabia, it doesn’t make him any the less a war criminal.

And so, of course, is the man who ordered his assassination. In response to the drone strike that killed Soleimani, UN Special Rapporteur on Extrajudicial Executions Agnes Callamard tweeted that the assassination “likely” violated international law. “Outside the context of active hostilities, the use of drones or other means for targeted killing is almost never likely to be legal,” she wrote, entirely too generously.

Soleimani could only have been heartened over the past few years, as Trump’s warplanes turned the ISIS-held cities of Raqqa and Mosul into ruins and rubble. But now Trump is threatening to unleash US firepower on Soleimani’s homeland. Wedding utter moral depravity to schoolyard vindictiveness, he tweeted a warning to Iran that he has “targeted 52 Iranian sites (representing the 52 American hostages taken by Iran many years ago), some at a very high level & important to Iran & Iranian culture, and those targets, and Iran itself, WILL BE HIT VERY FAST AND VERY HARD.”

Human Rights Watch quickly responded that “Trump’s public threat to attack Iranian sites of cultural importance would be war crimes if carried out.” The Los Angeles Times thankfully noted in an editorial:

A part of the Hague Convention of 1907, signed over a century ago, says that “all necessary steps must be taken” to spare “buildings dedicated to religion, art, science, or charitable purposes, historic monuments, hospitals, and places where the sick and wounded are collected.” Similarly, the Geneva Convention Protocol I, signed in 1949 and amended in 1977, renders unlawful “any acts of hostility directed against the historic monuments, works of art or places of worship which constitute the cultural or spiritual heritage of peoples.”

Even amid the relentless horrors of World War II, Japan’s ancient capital of Kyoto was spared US bombardment due to its cultural significance. Trump’s threat is, of course, redolent of the crimes against cultural heritage sites by ISIS (Palmyra, Hatra, Nimrud) and the Taliban (the Bamiyan Buddhas).

Fortunately, the Pentagon itself says it has ruled out striking Iranian cultural sites as violating “the laws of armed conflict,” contradicting Trump, the New York Times reports.

All this makes clearer than ever what secular-left forces in the Greater Middle East have been saying for nearly 20 years now: that the region is caught between two poles of terrorism—that of the US and that of political Islam.

There are plenty of signs that things are escalating toward a confrontation. The Iranian government announced it will no longer honor its commitment under the 2015 nuclear deal to limit its enrichment of uranium. (NYT) Iraq’s parliament has voted to expel the US military from the country, although the measure is non-binding and it is unclear if it will really lead to the withdrawal of the 5,000 US troops now stationed there. The US has announced that it is suspending operations against ISIS. (CNBC, The Hill)

And ominously, the strike on Soleimani came as Iran’s armed forces were holding joint naval exercises with Russia and China in the Indian Ocean—the first such trilateral maneuvers. (CNBC)

Amid all this, Iraqi protesters flooded the streets of Baghdad and other cities the day after Soleimani’s death to denounce the US and Iran alike as “occupiers,” chanting “No to Iran, no to America!” (AFP).

A similar neither/nor position is taken in a statement from the Anarchist Union of Afghanistan and Iran. Noting that Soleimani’s death closely follows a wave of murderous repression of protesters in Iran, they write: “On the one hand, the viciousness of the criminal Islamic regime became more apparent and on the other hand, it further showed the corrupt nature of US state terrorism, which does not care about the lives of their own nor those of the people in the Middle East… We reiterate that the contemporary Middle East is shaped by wars, massacres, displacement, and famine because of religious fanatics and terrorists on the one hand and the interference of international capitalists and backers (Eastern and Western Imperialism) on the other.”

Photo: Iran Briefing

The perverse irony, of course, is that both Trump and Tehran can be seen as perfectly correct. Left-secular forces in the Middle East have long decried that the region is caught between two poles of terrorism—that of political Islam and that of Western and especially US imperialism. To speak only of Syria, Iran’s massive military presence there is spearheaded by the Revolutionary Guards, and is complicit with “sectarian cleansing” of Sunni Muslims. CENTCOM’s warplanes meanwhile virtually destroyed the city of Raqqa in the battle against ISIS—with civilian casualties nearly doubling after Trump took over. Compounding the irony is that in Iraq, the US and Iran were in a de facto alliance—both supporting the Baghdad government and fighting ISIS. And indeed, given Washington’s growing tilt to Assad in the Syrian war, an element of this alliance can be seen there as well.

But, hey, that’s why they call it a Great Game.

Before the blood was dry in Paris, a fire broke out at the migrant camp in the port of Calais, where some 6,000—mostly Syrian refugees—await passage across the channel to England. It is not yet determined if it was intentionally set, but the xenophobes certainly wasted no time in expressing their glee. An anti-migrant group known as 'The Angry of Calais' immediately posted videos of the inferno on Facebook. One video showed emergency vehicles arriving at the camp. No casualties are reported, but many tents were burned down. The camp had been the scene of clashes with police in recent days. (The Mirror, Daily Mail)

Prim Minister Francois Hollande has declared a state of emergency, tightened boder controls, sent the army into the streets, and warned that "our fight will be merciless."  (BBC News, BBC News)

Not to be outdone, US presidential hopeful Ted Cruz explicitly called for a bombing campaign that's not afraid to kill innocent civilians. In an official statement, he said: "We must immediately recognize that our enemy is not 'violent extremism.' It is the radical Islamism that has declared jihad against the west. It will not be appeased by outreach or declarations of tolerance. It will not be deterred by targeted airstrikes with zero tolerance for civilian casualties, when the terrorists have such utter disregard for innocent life." He did not specify where these air-strikes should take place or what they should target. (ThinkProgress)

In other words, "we" should adopt the same moral standards as the "terrorists." This perfectly illustrates what the secular-left forces in the Middle East mean when they say that the region is between two poles of terrorism—that of the jihadists and that of Western imperialism. Cruz seems happily unaware of the propaganda assistance loaned to ISIS with every civilian casualty under US (or French) bombardment.

As for those who took online glee at the fire in Calais… they and the jihadists that they (ostensibly) oppose are equally exponents of a new fascism. As we've said before: We can and must oppose both political Islam and the fascistic backlash against it (whether in form of the Western security state or xenophobic thuggery), which merely fuel each other. Opposition to one is meaningless without opposition to the other.

Note the identical political logic either side of the "terrorist" and "anti-terrorist" divide. Lebanese blogger Mahmoud Ramsey recalled the last wave of terror attacks in Beirut in 2013, decrying the "de-civilianizing civilian victims of violence"—and called out the Western media as complicit. In the 2013 Beirut attacks, as in those this week, a Shi'ite district was targeted by presumed Sunni militants. Then, as now, the Western media referred to the targeted district almost uniformly as a "stronghold of Hezbollah"—as if the civilians living there were legitimate targets in the ISIS-Hezbollah war.

Of course the Beirut attacks generated but a fraction of the world media coverage won by the Paris attacks. Over September and October, probably twice the number of those killed in the Paris attacks were killed in a relentless campaign of Boko Haram terror in Nigeria—eliciting hardly any attention in the Western media. This demonstrates not only the double standard about whose lives are worth more in the media accounting, but a related misconception about the nature of jihadist violence. Paris notwithstanding, the principal concern of jihadist franchises like ISIS and the various Qaeda affiliates is the struggle within Islam against secularism and internal heresy such as Shia, and only secondarily the jihad against the West. The ongoing, practically daily terror in Nigeria, Chad, Cameroon, Mali, Libya, the Sinai, Lebanon, Syria, Iraq and Pakistan is mere background noise for the world media.

An effective citizen response to Paris must mean repudiating the objectification of victims, and seeking to build solidarity with pro-secular and progressive forces in the Muslim and Arab worlds—including in France, and where we live.

This also points up yet again the elastic and politicized nature of the word "terrorism." Maybe AJC didn't get the memo about Sisi's massacres of protesters after his seizure of power in 2013, which has even caused the White House to at least consider cutting aid to his regime. But I guess that doesn't count as "terrorism." Nice friends you got there, AJC. Which "anti-terrorist" dictator you gonna schmooze next, Bashar Assad?

Actually, it's not that far-fetched. Middle East Monitor noted July 7 how a growing number of Israeli military officials, politicians and pundits are calling for Netanyahu to prop up the Assad regime in order to keep the jihadis at bay. Ex-military intelligence official Azer Tsfrir apparently warned in Ha'aretz that allowing the Assad regime to fall would mean turning Syria into a "black hole" in which the border areas could become launch pads for operations against Israel. Commentator Jacky Houki reportedly made similar noises on the Yizrael Pulse website.

We are having trouble independently verifying these quotes through Google, so we cannot vouch for the accuracy of the Middle East Monitor account. But we have pointed out before that—contrary to the prevailing conspiracy theory of an Israeli destabilization campaign in Syria—a significant chunk (at least) of the Israeli security establishment and its neocon allies in Washington would rather stick with Assad as the Devil they know.

The AJC has exhibited such cognitive dissonance before. They have weighed in for an annexationist agenda on the West Bank while (of course) conflating anti-Zionism and anti-Semitism in water-muddying manner. The Zionists and dictators will never defeat terrorism, because they are part of the problem. They and their imperial allies (whether in Washington or Moscow) constitute one of the region's two poles of terrorism.

From Jurist, June 9. Used with permission.

We do hope that after this, Malala’s sanctimonious critics will learn some humility. Back in July, one Assed Baig wrote on Huffington Post a piece with the grating title of “Malala Yousafzai and the White Saviour Complex”…

There is no justifying the brutal actions of the Taliban or the denial of the universal right to education, however there is a deeper more historic narrative that is taking place here.

This is a story of a native girl being saved by the white man. Flown to the UK, the Western world can feel good about itself as they save the native woman from the savage men of her home nation. It is a historic racist narrative that has been institutionalised. Journalists and politicians were falling over themselves to report and comment on the case. The story of an innocent brown child that was shot by savages for demanding an education and along comes the knight in shining armour to save her.

The actions of the West, the bombings, the occupations the wars all seem justified now, “see, we told you, this is why we intervene to save the natives.”

The truth is that there are hundreds and thousands of other Malalas. They come from Iraq, Afghanistan, Pakistan and other places in the world. Many are victims of the West, but we conveniently forget about those as Western journalists and politicians fall over themselves to appease their white-middle class guilt also known as the white man’s burden.

What hideous condescension. One line of perfunctory lip-service to the notion that the Taliban should perhaps not shoot 14-year-old girls, followed by a dismissal of Malala for playing into the hands of racists and imperialists! The mind truly boggles at such blindness. Far from appealing for a “knight in shining armour to save her,” Malala was standing up to the Taliban on her own. And far from justifying the US bombardment of her country, she protested it at the first opportunity. Are the peoples of south and central Asia and the greater Middle East to not resist jihadist tyranny for fear of playing into the hands of Western imperialism? By the same token, perhaps they shouldn’t protest Western imperialism for fear of playing into the hands of jihadist tyranny.

A response, also on HuffPost, came Oct. 9 from one Taufiq Rahim, in a piece entitled “Malala Yousafzai and the Missing Brown Savior Complex.” He writes: “The real reason that the ‘white savior complex’ even is relevant is that we fail to champion the very ‘brown saviors’ in our midst.” Rahim acknowledges the terror of the drone strikes, and the complicity of the US in the rise of political Islam in the region (in terms far more forthright than Baig’s lukewarm pseudo-support for Malala). But then:

Does saying all of that make Malala Yousafzai any less of a hero (or heroine)? Is her courage dimmed by the crimes of others? Is her movement for the empowerment of young girls in Pakistan any less important? Of course not. Criticisms of the West will bring no one closer to emancipation. And it cannot mask the very pure fact that today’s purveyors of disaster and death in the world also include Muslims…

It has become far too easy on all sides to blame the other rather than introspect inward. Above all, instead of blaming the West for its ‘white savior complex’ maybe it’s time to develop our own brown savior complex to save ourselves from ourselves.

In fact, Malala did win widespread support from secularists across Pakistan. (The pro-secular Pakistani newspaper Dawn on Oct. 11 runs an hilarious send-up of the endless conspiracy-thoerizing about Malala, saying their “researchers” have determined through DNA tests that she is the Hungarian-born offspring of Christian missionaries; alarmingly, they had to add a “disclaimer” at the start of the piece making clear that it is satire!) Appallingly, many of her critics are hurling their rhetoric from the safety of the West. (Baig appears to be based in the UK.) This brings us to a related point about the nature of real heroism and who has earned the right  to criticize whom.

Business Insider notes an exchange during Malala’s appearance on the Jon Stewart show. Stewart asked her how she reacted when she learned that the Taliban wanted her dead. Her remarkable answer:

I started thinking about that, and I used to think that the Talib would come, and he would just kill me. But then I said, ‘If he comes, what would you do Malala?’ then I would reply to myself, ‘Malala, just take a shoe and hit him.’  But then I said, ‘If you hit a Talib with your shoe, then there would be no difference between you and the Talib. You must not treat others with cruelty and that much harshly, you must fight others but through peace and through dialogue and through education.’ Then I said I will tell him how important education is and that ‘I even want education for your children as well.’ And I will tell him, ‘That’s what I want to tell you, now do what you want.’

Like the heroic peasant pacifists of Colombia, who are taking a nonviolent stand in the face of paramilitary terror, Malala has faced down evil, in real life and up close. Nothing could be further from the hypocritical stance of too many Western pacifists, who, with bewildering arrogance, preach nonviolence to the oppressed of Pakistan or Syria from the comfort of New York or London.

Malala Yousafzai has clearly not been co-opted, even now, and she owes this to her life experience of real immersion in real struggle, at real sacrifice. She is a hero still.

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In the end, there has to be a political solution to terrorism. But it can only start with recognition of the disastrous effect of Western foreign policy in the Middle East and South Asia for decades, exacerbated by the consequences of 12 years of wars.

That means acknowledging that those of us who said these wars were not the answer and would make things worse were absolutely right.

A “political solution” to terrorism? What might that look like, exactly? Placid negotiations with people who blow up Shi’ite mosques or cut off the hands of those who steal bread, as in northern Mali when the jihadists recently had control there? Even accepting the media label of the problem as “terrorism”—rather than political Islam—keeps the focus on the West. As we have repeatedly argued, the jihad against the West is of secondary importance for such militants—after the struggle within Islam between secularism and fundamentalism. But German (who sloppily conflates the Libya and Mali interventions with those in Iraq and Afghanistan, despite very different dynamics) seems incapable of recognizing any threat to the peoples of the Greater Middle East (or “Islamic world,” or whatever you want to call it) other than Western imperialism. She cannot grasp that the region is caught between two poles of terrorism—that of imperialism and that of political Islam.

Neither, it seems, can James Bloodworth in The Independent, who beseeches, “It’s about time the left spoke out against religious fanaticism.” And we agree that it is indeed—which makes it all the more frustrating that Bloodworth starts out by dismissing the notion of political context:

[D]enunciations of the crime have been book-ended with murmurings about British foreign policy.

As Ken Livingstone put it in an interview with Russia Today last week: “If you invade other people’s countries, there will be a comeback”.

In other words, in order to be politically intelligible, the beheading of a British soldier in broad daylight in our own capital city must be framed in terms of what ‘we’ did to provoke it.

If this sounds to you like masochism that’s because it is. As the French philosopher Pascal Bruckner has noted, when asked who is to blame for some particularly egregious atrocity or violation of human rights, the Western liberal’s response is increasingly reducible to two short words: “we are”.

Does recognizing the danger of religious fanaticism preclude any discussion of the grievances it exploits?

Similarly, Britain’s left-wing press, like The Independent, aggressively report on the ugly xenophobic backlash following the Woolwich murder—the attacks on London-area mosques and mobilizations by the fascistic English Defence League. (The Woolwich attackers were apparently Biritsh citizens of Nigerian descent.) The right-wing press, like The Express, make much of the defacement of London’s Bomber Command Memorial with the word “Islam” spray-painted in big red letters. The outrage is almost exclusively selective.

We don’t expect nimrods like the EDL to understand that they and the jihadists they ostensibly oppose are birds of a feather. But why don’t “progressives” get it?

We are really tired of having to make the same point over and over.

“It kind of opens our aperture,” said Army Lt. Col. Marion “Ced” Carrington, whose unit, 1st Battalion, 508th Parachute Infantry Regiment, was assisting the Afghan police. “In addition to looking for military-age males, it’s looking for children with potential hostile intent.”

The account claims 11 children, including an 8-year-old girl, were killed in Afghanistan last year carrying out suicide attacks. That’s perfectly plausible, and The Guardian points out that Human Rights Watch noted the practice (“Afghanistan: Taliban Should Stop Using Children as Suicide Bombers,” Aug. 31, 2011). But Carrington and the sympathetic Military Times reporters seem not to grasp that by legitimizing attacks on kids like this, they are basically embracing the Taliban’s monstrous moral standards. 

Amos Guiora, a verteran Israeli army legal advisor now with the University of Utah, spoke to The Guardian of the grim implications of Carrington’s comments:

“I have great respect for people who put themselves in harm’s way. Carrington is probably a great guy, but he is articulating a deeply troubling policy adopted by the Obama administration.

“The decision about who you consider a legitimate target is less defined by your conduct than the conduct of the people or category of people which you are assigned to belong to … That is beyond troubling. It is also illegal and immoral.”

Guiora added: “If you are looking to create a paradigm where you increase the ‘aperture’—that scares me. It doesn’t work, operationally, morally or practically.”

We’ve noted before Obama’s growing embrace of the perverse logic of “collateral damage.” This is approaching a very dangerous threshold…

Malala is the victim of Talibanization, the radical mind-set spawned from a theocratic and obscurantist interpretation of Islam. Talibanization is about forcefully imposing a theocratic agenda on the people. It is about radicalizing them. It is about creating more and more suicide-bomb squads in the name of jihad against liberals and moderates, Muslims and non-Muslims. The attack on Malala liberated many shackled and Talibanized minds. She has won.

Dawn and Express-Tribune also note the candlelight vigils being maintained in support of Malala in cities across Pakistan, with such slogans as "These gun-toting mullahs are afraid of an unarmed girl."

The Taliban, however, haven't skipped a beat. The Express-Tribune reports Oct. 12 that Malik Gul Zada, a village militia leader who stood up to the Taliban, was assassinated in Barawalis tehsil (county) in Khyber Pakhtunkhwa province. The Tehreek-e-Taliban Pakistan claimed responsibility for the slaying.

Meanwhile, what have progressive voices in the West to say about Malala? Precious little, and some of it unbearably stupid. One ultra-paranoid blogger calling himself American Everyman has two posts seizing in lugubrious manner on the inevitable inconsistencies in the early coverage of the shooting as well as purely imaginary inconsistencies in some of the accompanying photos to make the case that the whole thing is a charade spawned by some neocon conspiracy. Under the headline "The Staged Malala Yousafzai Story: Neoliberal near-Martyr of the Global Free Market Wars," he writes: "The 'brave Malala' story is completely fake just like the Jessica Lynch story, just like the Nurse Nayirah story, just like the Nada story from Iran…"

The "Nada" (sic) referenced is presumably Neda Salehi Agha Soltan, the young woman killed by security forces during the 2009 protests in Tehren—whose death was very real despite the ugly conspiracy theories that were spun by the official media in Iran. "Nurse Nayirah" was the woman whose bogus testimony about non-existent Iraqi war crimes in Kuwait helped lubricate Operation Desert Storm in 1991, and of course Jessica Lynch was the US army private whose supposed "rescue" in Iraq in 2003 really does appear to have been staged. But nothing indicates that Malala was thusly manipulated. What cruel, maddening, reactionary idiocy. Recalls the "leftist" paranoids who could only see a neocon conspiracy in the Egyptian revolution. Only even worse.

As we have noted, the "neoliberal" Malala is actually a Marxist revolutionary! The one leftist website in the West we've been able to find that has anything principled or intelligent to say about Malala is In Defence of Marxism, UK-based site of the International Marxist Tendency (IMT), the Trotskyist current to which the precocious Malala apparently gravitated:

IMT sympathiser shot in Swat — Barbarism must not prevail!
The suffering of the people of Pakistan is largely unknown in the West. A veil of silence has been carefully drawn over the number of people killed every day by American drones and Taliban murders. But recently a small corner of the curtain was raised as the result of a particularly appalling event.

Yesterday Malala Yousafzai was brutally shot by gunmen as she was returning home from school. Masked assassins stepped onto a bus filled with terrified children, identified her, and shot her at point blank range in the head and neck.

Who are these men who wage war on defenceless schoolgirls? We know who they are because they have already admitted their guilt. The cowardly murderers who perpetrated this vile deed feel no need to hide away from public opinion. They feel no shame, for they are utterly shameless. The Pakistan Taliban has claimed responsibility for this act of bloodthirsty savagery.

What crime did this fourteen year-old girl commit that could justify the taking of her life? Was she a friend of American imperialism? Did she support the occupation of Afghanistan? Was she on the side of the Pakistan government and its army?

No, she was none of those things. On the contrary, Malala was on the side of the oppressed people of Pakistan and Afghanistan and every other country. She was an enemy of imperialism, landlordism and capitalism. She stood for the cause of freedom, progress and socialism. And for that they have tried to take her young and innocent life.

And what do anti-war sites in the US have to say? We see nothing—not a word—about Malala on the pages of the War Resisters League, United for Peace & Justice or US Labor Against the War. We are happy to note that Code Pink (which sparked recent controversy in Pakistan by participating in a cross-country march in protest of the drone strikes organized by Imran Khan, a politician widely considered too soft on the Taliban) at least sports a lone Tweet reading: "We condemn the shooting of #MalalaYousafzai by the #Taliban. Raised funds to support her school ow.ly/eoEbl #Pakistan." Nothing on the front pages of Toward Freedom, TruthOut or AntiWar.com. (Don't even bother with the openly reactionary International ANSWER, International Action Center or Workers World.)

A pretty pathetic record for the stateside left, so far. As we have pointed out time and again, Pakistan and Afghanistan (and Iraq and Yemen) are between two poles of terrorism—that of US imperialism and that of political Islam. Of course our first responsibility is to protest the drone strikes, which are carried out in our name and with our tax dollars. But we cannot do so effectively without actually grappling with the reality on the ground in Pakistan (and Afghanistan, and…). 

If only progressives in the West could realize it, Malala is ours—not the neocons', not the neoliberals', not Hillary Clinton's. She is our ally, and has displayed a heroism that puts the best of us to shame. We have a responsibility to loan her vigorous support—not only because basic human solidarity mandates it, but also because shrewd tactics demand it. We cannot allow her legacy to be usurped by the war-mongers.