Politics of US Oligarchy, Muslim World Bourgeois Layers Share Much In Common - Activist

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The US ruling oligarchy seeks to exploit the horror over James Foley’s death at the hands of the Islamic State (IS), much as the bourgeois layers in the Arab and Muslim world attempt to promote their own agenda by manipulating sectarian divisions through bloodshed, argues Bill Van Auken in his article for the World Socialist Web Site.

MOSCOW, August 22 (RIA Novosti) - The US ruling oligarchy seeks to exploit the horror over James Foley’s death at the hands of the Islamic State (IS), much as the bourgeois layers in the Arab and Muslim world attempt to promote their own agenda by manipulating sectarian divisions through bloodshed, argues Bill Van Auken in his article for the World Socialist Web Site.

“The politics of ISIS [IS] and other Al Qaeda-linked groups reflect not the strivings of the oppressed masses for liberation from imperialist oppression, but rather the interests of disaffected bourgeois layers in the Arab and Muslim world, which seek to manipulate sectarian divisions as a means of advancing their own class agenda,” Bill Van Auken wrote.

“In this sense, their outlook is not all that different from that of predominant layers within the US ruling oligarchy, which are determined to exploit the horror over Foley’s death as a lever in shifting the broad-based hostility of the American population to the drive toward a new war in the Middle East,” he adds.

This week the IS released a video showing a masked man beheading Foley, who was taken prisoner in northwestern Syria in November 2012. The journalist’s executioner said in the video that Foley was killed because US President Barack Obama had ordered airstrikes against IS positions in northern Iraq.

The murder of Foley, who described himself as an opponent of war sparked “genuine revulsion and anger among working people in the US and all over the world,” Bill Van Auken says.

The main media outlets in the United States immediately started to call on Washington to increase its involvement in the Middle East, while ignoring the dire results of the US intervention in other states. The media placed the blame of Foley’s death on the Obama administration which “stood aside as the Islamist extremists built up their strength in Syria.”

“These briefs for a new US war of aggression in the Middle East are founded on grotesque lies aimed at concealing the real roots of Foley’s murder,” Bill Van Auken writes. “The rise of ISIS was fueled not by US imperialism ‘refusing to intervene’ or ‘standing aside’ in Syria. On the contrary, abandoning the former “war on terrorism” pretext for US intervention, the Obama administration armed and supported Islamist-led militias in wars for ‘regime change’ first in Libya and then in Syria.”

So while Foley’s murder is used in the United States to justify Washington’s attacks against Iraq, the Islamic State says it was carried out in the name of revenge for US killings in Iraq.

“The hope within ruling circles that Foley’s savage killing can be exploited for purposes of another war found their most grotesque expression in the resurfacing on the television news of former Vice President Dick Cheney, who demanded that Obama ‘deal with the crisis in Iraq.’ Acknowledging that Foley’s murder was a ‘terrible development,’ Cheney warned of another 9/11,” Van Auken argues.

The ultimate question is to blame for the murder of James Foley. Van Auken warns that the war fever in the US ruling establishment is driven “by the irresolvable contradictions of crisis-ridden capitalism.” But the Middle East is not the only place for Washington to lash out its imperialism, but also Eastern Europe and the Asian Pacific among others.

Bill Van Auken concludes by saying that the mankind could be once again dragged inro a global bloodbath unless imperialism is stopped by a revolutionary movement of the working class.

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