U.S. imperialism and the wanton destruction of cultures: an open letter to Iran’s Ayatollah Khamenei


“The real aim of the invaders in the 9/11 wars is not to fight Islamic terror. It is rather to continue the process of toppling governments and whole societies slated for destruction by those vying for monopolistic domination. Those pushing forward the new incarnations of the Global War on Terror often project onto those they say they are fighting the very qualities that they themselves epitomize.”—Anthony James Hall
December 12, 2015
Above is an online conference on false flags and Islamaphobia held yesterday, Dec. 13, in Paris. It featured a number of guests and was hosted by the author of the letter below, Anthony James Hall, and Arabist/Islamologist and radio host Kevin Barrett. Below is an open letter to Iran’s Ayatollah Khamenei from Hall that was written originally for an Iranian audience. The letter, which is reproduced here in agreement with the author, is a response to the second letter written by Iran’s Supreme Leader to the youth of the West (Dated Nov. 29, 2015). The first was released in January of 2015 and was prompted by the Charlie Hebdo event in Paris. As well as being a 9/11 truth activist, Hall is professor of globalization studies at the University of Lethbridge in Calgary, Alberta, and is the author of two critically acclaimed books: The American Empire and the Fourth World (McGill-Queen’s University Press, 2003) and Earth Into Property: Colonization, Decolonization and Capitalism (McGill-Queen’s University Press, 2010).—Craig McKee
By Anthony James Hall (Special to Truth and Shadows)
Supreme Leader of the Islamic Republic of Iran
Dear Supreme Leader;
Thank you for your second letter addressed To the Youth of Western Countries. The letter’s title, “Today Terrorism Is Our Common Worry,” suggests that the audience for your wise and inspired commentary is not constrained to any particular age because the universal nature of the divine truths you impart is ageless.
The meanings you convey transcend generational boundaries even as they
also transcend religious, national, ethnic and ideological borders. To me it is clear you are addressing all of humanity in these times when the world is poised on the brink of global war.
At this moment of monumental crisis, when the forces of madness, division, and media engineered hatred are made to seem so pre-eminent, you have placed before us a blessed place of sanctuary. You have provided men, women and children of goodwill a literary space of contemplative reflection away from the psychological, militaristic, and economic storms all around us. Thank you for securing a refuge for moderation, reason, toleration and careful reflection in the midst of the mental and physical chaos that some of the most powerful cliques in the West are quite deliberately inculcating.

In a handout picture released by the office of Ayatollah Ali Khamenei's office, Iran's supreme leader salutes the public during a gathering in the Iranian city of Bijar, in the western province of Kordestan, on May 18, 2009. Khamenei urged the Iranian people in a televised speech not to elect a candidate in the June presidential election who could adopt a pro-West stance. His latest remarks again indicate Khamenei's support for hardline incumbent President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad, who is seeking a second four-year term in office in the June 12 poll.   AFP PHOTO/HO

Khamenei wrote to the youth of the West.


To me the terms “imperialism” and “colonization” are brought to the forefront by your observation that  “the Western world is insisting on the cloning and replication of its culture on a global scale,” that this process involves the “trivialization of independent cultures.”
 
Terrorism and colonization in the Western Hemisphere
This Western world’s efforts to replicate itself on one imperial frontier after the next began to gather momentum after 1492. That was the year when Christopher Columbus initiated a process whose true nature should be put at the forefront of contemporary questions about how North Americans should best respond to the massive migrations of violently uprooted Islamic populations from the Middle East.
After 1492 the whole Western Hemisphere was remade as a frontier zone for the re-settlement of European migrants as well as for the forced and involuntary migration of Black Africans as slaves.  In this process the “independent cultures” of the Indigenous peoples of the Western Hemisphere— those incorrectly described by Columbus as “Indians”— were indeed “trivialized” and worse, much worse
The colonization of the First Nations of the Western Hemisphere extended over several centuries right up to the present day. Too often a shroud of amnesia is made to obscure this unbroken saga a saga of theft and oppression extending even to genocide. In this terrible cycle of injustice the so-called Indians of the Americas became true witnesses of the violent extremes of which Western imperialists are capable. As evidenced now by the violent uprooting of millions in the Levant, this wanton destruction of ancient and independent cultures becomes especially intense when the lust for ownership and control of new lands and resources is cloaked in the language of religion.
 
The founding of the United States as a white settler polity
The emergence of the United States as a settler polity on the frontiers of Western imperial expansion would have enormous consequences for the whole world. These days the rise of the most heavily militarized superpower the world has ever known is having especially grave consequences for the Indigenous peoples of Palestine, Syria, Iraq, Yemen and Lebanon. As you explain in your letter, the recent surge of violence in Paris needs to be seen in the context of the enormous suffering, disruption and homicidal insanity being rained down on countless innocent Muslim victims especially in the Middle East.
Although the founders of the United States invoked the language of universal human rights in their famous Manifesto of 1776, the Declaration of American Independence included racist provisions. The Black slaves amassed in the process of building up the tobacco and cotton plantations of the southern Anglo-American colonies were not to be included as rights-bearing citizens in the new republic. The Black slaves of America would remain the private property of the slave masters for most of the following century.
Moreover, The American Declaration of Independence included provisions whose effect was to racially profile and criminalize the Indigenous peoples then living on the lands that the United States was created to annex, control, incorporate and own in the forthcoming transcontinental expansion. This feature of the Declaration of Independence helps explain the psychology of the so-called Global War on Terror, a massive campaign of military and psychological warfare that can be said to originate on July 4, 1776, as much as on September 11, 2001.
Responding to the attempt by the UK’s King George III to incorporate Indian lands into British North America through negotiation rather than conquest, Thomas Jefferson and the other drafters of the Declaration of 1776 accused the British monarch as follows: He has excited domestic insurrections amongst us, and has endeavoured to bring on the inhabitants of our frontiers, the merciless Indian savages, whose known rule of warfare, is undistinguished destruction of all ages, sexes and conditions.
 
Manufacturing enemies for the permanent war economy
It seems the United States has from its inception defined its real or imagined enemies in ways that help justify, define, and energize its imperial expansions. The Red Indians described in the Declaration of Independence as “merciless Indian savages” gave the nascent US war machine its original enemies. The Red Indians were subsequently replaced by the Red communists whose real, imagined or manufactured threat to the United States provided a justification to maintain and build up America’s permanent war economy.
The real beneficiaries of this system of aggression and domination assert owner ship and control over the lion’s share of the tight corporate network of banking, military and media institutions currently vying for complete domination of the world’s political economy. Since the demise of the Soviet Union on the late 1980s a new enemy was required to justify the continuing usurious, mental and military incursions into the diminishing realm of human health, freedom, dignity, self-determination and cultural independence.
The ongoing crusade to expand the the frontiers Western imperial powers extends to the contamination of our mental, spiritual and physical environments as well as to the pollution of life’s sacred cycles of ecological renewal. With the events of 9/11 the new enemy of Islamic terrorism was cast in the role once assigned to the Red communists and, before that, to the “merciless Indian savages.” After the Cold War a new global enemy was required and a new global enemy was invented, armed, financed and set in motion to continue the hierarchical structure of a very corrupt pyramid of power.
The Global War on Terror maintained the same top-down regime of elitist oppression that coalesced in dispossessing the Indigenous peoples of the Western Hemisphere and in building up the so-called permanent war economy in the course of the Cold War.
 
False flag terrorism and Takfiri mercenary armies
Those who identify most with the expansionary schemes of the Jewish state of Israel have been leading architects of the so-called Global War on Terror. The concocted false flag events of 9/11 were instrumental in transforming the predominately Muslim and Arab peoples indigenous to the lands of so-called “Greater Israel” into the perceived global enemies of the so-called “West.”
The very conception of the “West” is being re-engineered in the course of a gigantic psychological operation made to downplay the creative role of Islam. It is simply not true that the “West” emerged exclusively from Judeo-Christian roots and that Islam is an aberration recently imposed through newcomer immigration. We must not forget, for instance, that the genesis of the European Renaissance drew heavily on Islam as expressed, for instance, in the constructive interactions between Jews, Christians and Muslims that took place in the caliphate of Al-Andalus on the lands of present-day Spain.
As documented and explained by Edward Said and other scholars of the overlap of Islam and Christendom, the pluralism within Islam has from time to time been cynically manipulated and exploited to advance the interests of Western imperialism. After the Second World War the United States adopted this heritage from Hitlerian Germany in the quest to exploit Islam as an obstacle to the atheistic domination by the Soviet Union over parts of southern Eurasia.
The role in the 1980s of the CIA in creating, training, financing, and arming a Salafi proxy army to overthrow the Soviet backed government in Afghanistan is well known. One of the outgrowths of this project is al-Qaeda. The CIA’s al-Qaeda became a kind of prototype of concocted Islamic terror. Al-Qaeda provided agents and patsies to be exploited in false flag terrorism such as that which took place on 9/11.
Al-Qaeda and its successors including al-Nusra and DAESH are best understood as Takfiri mercenary armies to be deployed in the process of poisoning Western minds against Islam. These mercenaries also provide firepower as well as the ruse of an enemy to be defeated. Those engaged in such operations are made to seem in the Western media like independent entities motivated exclusively by religious fanaticism. The entities often financed and directed by Western intelligence agencies are, however, something quite different in reality.
The real aim of the invaders in the 9/11 wars is not to fight Islamic terror. It is rather to continue the process of toppling governments and whole societies slated for destruction by those vying for monopolistic domination. Those pushing forward the new incarnations of the Global War on Terror often project onto those they say they are fighting the very qualities that they themselves epitomize.
 
The new metropolis of an old empire
The cataclysmic outcome of this genre of malevolent intervention is on full display in Libya. Who can doubt that Syria has become the frontier for the application of imperialism’s updated formula for domination through divide-and-conquer? Who can doubt that beneath the deceptions of the Global War on Terror lie the politics of oil, pipelines and Israeli schemes for regional and global aggrandizement?
The Global War on Terror could better be described as the continuation of Western imperialism with Israel as the new metropolis of an old empire with roots going back to the conquest of the Americas beginning in 1492. The continuation of this war agenda requires the creation of a constant flow of new terrorists as currently provided by DAESH, the proxy army whose sponsors prominently include Saudi Arabia, Qatar, Turkey and the United States as well as many of their corporate patrons and clients. Your letter, Supreme Leader, provides a very insightful account of the fevered mental environments that have become instrumental in advancing DAESH’s recruitment strategies.
In conclusion let me quote your letter where you note, “The overt and well-known supporters of takfiri terrorism—despite having the most backward political systems—are standing arrayed as allies of the West while the most pioneering, brightest and dynamic democrats in the region are suppressed mercilessly.”
Since my visit to Tehran last year I have had the pleasure and honour of meeting some of these pioneering, bright and dynamic democrats. Some of them, I have reason to believe, give you advice and suggestions from time to time. I am happy for the wealth of inspiration they must provide you through the grace of God.
Your comments about the Western powers tendency to ally themselves with “the most backward political systems” have very important contemporary implications with many historical antecedents. Unfortunately a perennial characteristic of imperialism is its tendency to dominate peoples on the frontiers of empire through the empowerment of puppet regimes engaged in systems of remote control domination through indirect rule.
It is the younger generation who can change these patterns of manipulation and control provided they receive proper and sound education from a variety of steadfast sources including those at the forefront of the Islamic Revolution in Iran.
Yours Sincerely,
Anthony James Hall
Professor of Globalization Studies,
University of Lethbridge
 
 

12 comments

  1. I would like to congratulate Anthony James Hall, for addressing the real history of the conquest of the western hemisphere, and the deplorable genocides that took place through the ensuing centuries since 1492. and noting that now that conquest is turned back toward the eastern hemisphere by the same Realpolitik psychopathology of “might is right” and the meme of “means are justified by the ends”.
    As one who supports individual liberty, I cannot stand in agreement with a nation that is run as a theocracy, such as Iran is, however I see the most virulent purveyors of terror are certainly the western fascist powers and it’s reach for full spectrum dominance over the entire planet with a global tyrannical regime.
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  2. Anthony James Hall’s explanatory note to a Supreme Ayatollah who might or might not have been a bit remiss in his knowledge of North American history strikes as satisfactory in a facile way. Still, it needs to be acknowledged that every set of adversaries in life or death struggles for land in history, regardless who may have been the aggressor, have ultimately indulged in trash talk, hyperbole, and blood libel, so that Thomas Jefferson’s statement, while not noble, was not exceptional, Mr. Hall’s explanation, which I’m characterizing as seemingly convincing but facile, seems to suggest that the American founders, Washington, Jefferson, Madison, et al, would be pleased in any way at the present prospect of a militarily beefed-up deep-state bully U.S. by hook, crook, artifice and glorified mass murder striving to emulate Napoleon Bonaparte and the British Imperialists of their day times ten, a little doubtful.
    Remember, by consensus, they tried to avoid having a standing army or a permanent navy. Even Washington warned us to avoid all foreign entanglements..And Jefferson’s whole winning side of the early political argument tried mightily to save out country from the clutches of central banking — the sinister international entity now not only responsible for trashing and looting our own economy and stealing from the mouth of labor and humanity worldwide. It is the hijacking of western society and its once-pluralistic political system by that international force — partly American, partly European, yea even partly Canadian and seemingly invincibly fueled by its majority of the whole world’s wealth — that has the psychopathic urgency and cast to the current accelerated drive to enslave the world. Good as far as you went, Mr. Hall, but it’s a bigger and badder monster even than you described that confronts us all, and not just countries in today’s bombsites.

  3. Hall deserves much respect for being one of the very few university professors who have affirmed 9/11 for what it is. However, he appears to be cuddling a criminal against humanity at least as dangerous as Cheney/Rumsfeld/Hillary/etc. Khamenei could have aborted the neconservative-inspired war, fear and misery a long time ago by simply “inviting” the Iranian mass media, schools, and mosques to duly inform the Iranian public on 9/11’s essence. Had he done so, he would have been revered worldwide as humanity’s savior. Yet, like other rulers ostensibly in the U.S. crosshairs, he has preferred to live as an absolute truth the superstitious attribution of 9/11 to Osama bin Laden’s fanatical hijackers. Maybe, like Saddam and Gaddafi, he’d rather suffer a humiliating military defeat and an ignominious death than instruct his TV to align its scripts to 9/11 Truth.
    Even today, he apparently prefers to scare Iranians of a U.S./Israeli military assault that can start at any time than to discreetly notify Iranian architects and engineers that signing a certain online petition for a thorough technical investigation into the Twin Towers and Building 7’s destruction will not elicit personal adverse consequences.
    9/11 censors are dangerous people. Khamenei is no exception. He is probably playing some special role in Plato’s worldwide cave–2nd violin behind Obama?. Befriending him is akin to befriending Trump or Hillary: do it only if you will probably personally benefit from it, and do not be amazed if he stabs you in the back.
    Love,

    1. Daniel Noel’s comments deserve careful consideration. It seems to me that the Ayatollah Khamenei’s position on 9/11 is more open to genuine skepticism of the official cover story than other world leaders with the exception of, maybe, Evo Morales now as well as Hugo Chavez and Fidel Castro in the past. Surely there is significance in the fact that the Supreme Leaders of the Islamic Republic of Iran published my letter on his official web page. I don’t think I could expect that kind of treatment from Prime Minister Justin Trudeau. I think the discourse on Press TV pretty much assumes that 9/11 was some sort of false flag event. I participated last year on a panel discussion at the New Horizon conference in Tehran on Israel and 9/11. The host of the conference, Nader Talebzadeh, is well schooled in 9/11 skepticism. Nader hosts Iran’s most popular public affairs show. Also at the conference were, for instance, Thierry Meyssan, Wayne Madsen, Ken O’Keefe, and Kevin Barrett as well as two formidable Italian truthers. Gareth Porter came back from being a featured presenter at the conference and published a hit job on “anti-semitic truthers” among other targets of criticism. Tellingly Dr. Porter published his attacks in the USA in on the rather Israeliocentric site, Buzz Feed. True, his condemnation of “truthers” did not prevent him from working quite closely with the Iranian delegation on the nuclear negotiations. My point is that the Islamic Republic of Iran is a place where genuine discussion of 9/11-related issues and the dynamics of false flag terrorism is very much integrated into the domestic political discourse including in the higher echelons of interaction within the government. Surely it is hard to ignore the irony that on the topics front and centre in Truth and Shadows, the Shia theocracy of Iran is far more open and pluralistic than the official culture of elite sanctioned political discourse in Europe and North America.

      1. “the Shia theocracy of Iran is far more open and pluralistic than the official culture of elite sanctioned political discourse in Europe and North America.”~Anthony Hall
        I couldn’t agree more. My reservations for theocracies are tempered by the contemporary context to be certain.
        I loath what can surely be diagnosed as a ‘Christian Zionist’ theocracy as being in place in Amerika today under the guise of a secular republic.
        We live in a world of Orwellian Doublethink and Newspeak. Language has been abused beyond reasonable limits in the sociopolitical realm.
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      2. Anthony Hall has a point. Iran’s self-proclaimed theocrats have been friendlier than western rulers to western 9/11 scholars. However, my earlier comment stands. In Iran, like in the USA, all bully pulpits (mass media, schools, mosques) generally live the mythical attribution of 9/11 to Osama bin Laden’s hijackers as an axiom. PressTV, primarily aimed at westerners, may be the exception that confirms the rule. It lets on a regular basis Kevin Barrett and other western guests affirm 9/11 for what it is. However, the rest of its programs are antithetical to 9/11’s essence as a false flag and do not criticize U.S. warmongering very differently from how Amy Goodman would.
        Khamenei, Chavez, Fidel, North Korea’s comrade Kim, Assad, Hamas’ leaders…the list is very long of potentates who have vested interests in teaching their subjects “how evil the Americans truly are because they hit themselves in order to subjugate us.” Building on another point of Anthony Hall, Chavez did utter one mild 9/11 Truth comment, easily missed in his overabundant ramblings against capitalism/militarism/imperialism. Most interesting is that he never alluded to 9/11 Truth again, as if he had realized that he had exceeded the limits of his authorized discourse. Ditto for Fidel.
        “The Islamic Republic of Iran is a place where genuine discussion of 9/11-related issues and the dynamics of false flag terrorism is very much integrated into the domestic political discourse including in the higher echelons of interaction within the government.” Actually, this is partly true “in the higher echelons of interaction within the government” as far as interaction with western 9/11 experts is concerned, but not at all in the interaction between the government–or other institutions–and the Iranian public. To elaborate on my earlier statement, grassroots 9/11 activism in Iran is at an absolute zero, even though many ordinary Iranians understand 9/11 to be a false flag.
        This brings us to one unique and most intriguing fundamental teaching of 9/11. Muslim rulers, scholars, TV producers, and preachers could make 9/11-induced warmongering and Islamophobia fall flat–and summarily kill in the bud the neoconservative experiment–by simply teaching their subjects, students, viewers, and faithful how the macroscopic features of the video record of the Twin Towers’ destruction could not possibly be technically related to Osama bin Laden’s aerial attacks and how even people with an average intelligence could understand this. Iran was AE911Truth’s natural birthplace. Yet, although some Iranian architects and engineers have signed AE911Truth’s petition, none of them lives in Iran.
        An immediate corollary is that the necessarily highly talented engineers who directed the 9/11 controlled demolitions and the necessarily very savvy senior U.S. public servants who directed their cover with Osama bin Laden’s air show and fraudulent reports would have been very reluctant to accept their assignments without guarantees that Muslim and other bully pulpits would proclaim the official superstition, no matter how obvious the controlled demolitions and how transparent their cover-up. Hence the colorful finding that the commitment of Khamenei/Chavez/etc. to duly support the 9/11 censorship was a pre-requisite to the launch of the 9/11 project. This is precisely what distinguishes 9/11 from all other false flags and makes it a blessing in disguise. But this is another story.
        Love,

        1. Chavez, Kahmenei or Kim Jong-un know as much as we do, so they can prove nothing.
          China and Russia know much more. They were probably very impressed and even envious for the quality of the spectacle of 9/11.
          The US did nothing when Putin did his own false flags in 1999 (apartment bombings) in preparation for the 2nd war in Chechnya. Now they have goods on Putin.
          Making politics in public via media is not Chinese style, so I would not expect anything from them.
          EU countries are our allies. And they had their own events: 7/7 in London, and 11/13 in Paris. So they are in the same boat now.
          And when a ruler doesn’t want to play a ball something bad may happen to him. Vide Helen Clark of New Zealand
          http://www.nzherald.co.nz/nz/news/article.cfm?c_id=1&objectid=10120387
          http://www.theguardian.com/world/2004/jul/16/israel
          Now: http://www.timesofisrael.com/former-nz-pm-helen-clark-blown-away-by-israeli-creativity/

  4. ” Unfortunately a perennial characteristic of imperialism is its tendency to dominate peoples on the frontiers of empire through the empowerment of puppet regimes engaged in systems of remote control domination through indirect rule.”
    ‘Puppet regimes’ and ’empowerment’ mean ‘plausibly deniable’ mercenary death squads running the drugs and arms and money for deepstate prize. The nastiest brutes they can dredge from the slums of an angry world, to arm and ‘train’ into terrorist [GLADIO type] provocateurs. Gangs of murderers. Bullies.
    ” ‘You had to attack civilians, the people, women, children, innocent people, unknown people far removed from any political game. The reason was quite simple: to force … the public to turn to the state to ask for greater security.” [sworn testimony by Gladio agent Vincenzo Vinciguerra.]
    Black heart and empty soul of this degenerate covert system – now well directed back at ‘home populations’ via false flag 911 – is its ability to remain outside of and in control of ‘the Law’….a separate reality of deviant elite [Blair/Bush/Negroponte/Armitage – the pedophile HASTERT as just exposed by Sibel EDMONDS etcetc] –
    ““The overt and well-known supporters of takfiri terrorism—despite having the most backward political systems—are standing arrayed as allies of the West while the most pioneering, brightest and dynamic democrats in the region are suppressed mercilessly.”
    So beautifully said.
    So sad.
    Ukraine too. NATO/USAMO in bed with fascist Svoboda/Pravy Sector and oligarchial armies trying to provoke war with Russia.
    This is the new face of Fascism. Flying the five-eyes and NATO flag.

  5. Reblogged this on THE ONENESS of HUMANITY and commented:
    What if you believe men and women who claim certain terrorist attacks were in reality “false flags” are so-called “conspiracy theorists”? What if, after never investing any time to look into the topic of false flags, you decided to watch a four-hour video titled “False Flag Islamophobia Conference”? What if, after listening to the presenters in the video, you became convinced “false flag” proponents weren’t “conspiracy theorists” after all? What if you shared your newly found, absolutely disturbing concerns about the profoundly negative consequences of false flag terrorism with family, friends, and people with the ability to get your concerns addressed? What if, because of your and others’ highly focused purposeful actions, World War III and nuclear holocaust were prevented? What if you save the human race?

    1. Jerry, this is good in theory, much like a hundred things we’ve already done and tried for the last dozen years. The proof, once again will be in the pudding! But it’s been and continues to get past the big, loud 24/7/365 monopolized megaphone that keeps repeating and adding to the lie. Hey! What if we got rich and started our own big media! Or everyone reading this blog told a hundred people, who told a hundred people, who told… ?

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