As the US-Israeli plot to reshape West Asia is coming to fruition, there too comes a plot to manufacture consent for what is to come across the collective West. This is being done through reviving the anti-Muslim rhetoric of the early 2000’s that provided a justification for the so-called "War on Terror".

For the past 20+ years, so-called "Muslim extremism" and "Islamic terrorism" have been the centerpiece of Western news coverage. On September 11, 2001, Islam officially replaced the Soviet Union’s Communism as the embodiment of all that is evil. The West’s new enemy had been born.

Instantly, the neoconservatives that headed the United States government had their justification to carry out the agenda set forth by the pro-war think-tank known as the Project for a New American Century (PNAC). War on Afghanistan, war on Iraq, war on anyone and everyone they chose and the American public was overwhelmingly in favour of it.

Now, around two decades later, the results of this "War on Terror" are widely acknowledged to have been catastrophic. Yet, unfortunately, despite it being popularly acceptable to consider interventionism in countries like Iraq to have been wrong, most people still don’t actually understand why.

The truth has to be told. In two decades of non-stop news headlines about Muslims and Muslim-majority nations, the average person in the West does not know the difference between an Iraqi, Iranian, or Afghan, and would mistake all three for being Arab. If you were to ask the average American, Canadian, Brit, or Australian what language is spoken predominantly in Iran, you wouldn’t be told Farsi.

Similarly, most people in the Western World will have some kind of opinion on Muslims and Islam, but almost none of them can tell you the most basic facts about the faith. This, sadly, is by design. Although the younger generations in the West are becoming more liberal, and accepting of different faiths and people from varying ethnic backgrounds, especially in more culturally diverse areas, the knowledge still isn’t on par with what it should be.

Why A War on Terror 2.0?

Israeli Prime Minister, Benjamin Netanyahu, has been talking about a "New Middle East" for some time, even presenting his proposal for such a restructuring of the region during a UN General Assembly address in September of 2023. At this time, the success of the project rested upon a normalization agreement with Saudi Arabia; that would facilitate a new trade route called the India-Middle East-Europe Trade Corridor.

However, following the Hamas-led October 7 attack, the agenda dramatically changed. The Zionist regime endured an earth-shattering defeat that day, which its leadership interpreted as an existential threat. Suddenly, overnight, the image of Israeli regional power collapsed and with it US stock with Arab leaderships dropped.

The answer to this major failure and tactical defeat was to commit a genocide in the Gaza Strip, while pursuing plans to flatline the members of the Iranian-led Axis of Resistance. It is now in the process of implementing a series of plans to redraw borders and achieve what Netanyahu announced before US Congress in July of 2024; "total victory".

A major weakness that is evident in Israeli strategy-making is their ability to respond to events that have not been anticipated. In fact, the Israeli military doctrine evolves around "striking first" and fighting wars outside its "borders". By their own admission, the war with Gaza failed on both of these levels and therefore necessitated an earth-shattering response.

In the midst of committing its genocide in the Gaza Strip, the entire world turned against the Zionist regime after witnessing the horrors it was committing on a daily basis. At every organ of the United Nations, the ICJ, ICC, human rights organisations, and by countless countries around the world, the Israelis found themselves accused of war crimes and genocide. Beyond this, social media delivered a minute-by-minute stream of the devastation in Gaza.

While the instant response from the Zionist regime was to link Hamas to Daesh, labeling the Palestinian movement "Hamas-ISIS", this label didn’t stick. Now that the regime has had 15 months to fine-tune its propaganda, it is employing the very same messaging, attempting to link all Palestinian Resistance groups to al-Qaeda and Daesh, but in a more effective fashion.

How The West Is Being Manipulated By Anti-Islam Propaganda

The Israeli assault on the Gaza Strip managed to sway many Americans out of favour with the regime, especially amongst Democratic Party voters in the United States. Even some of its traditional allies in Right-Wing circles ended up turning against it after watching the atrocities unfold in Gaza.

Simultaneously, another trend was also emerging, a major resurgence of Islamophobic attacks across the Western World, which were directly correlated with the conflict in occupied Palestine. In the United States in particular, but also across Europe, the rate of anti-Muslim hate crimes spiked exponentially.

The likes of US President Joe Biden lied to the American public and claimed to have seen confirmed images of children who were beheaded by Hamas, later claiming that the Palestinian group was driven by an "ancient desire" to wipe out the Jewish people. The idea of a genetic disposition being the force that governs Hamas, driving its propensity to "barbaric" violence, is textbook orientalism and the definition of a racist remark. Yet, despite the absurdity of such claims, the so-called liberal media refused to confront the American president about them.

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This kind of rhetoric was repeated in different iterations throughout the halls of power in the United States and across the West, it was also catapulted by the corporate media that uncritically re-produced the most outrageous Israeli hoaxes. The purpose of this anti-Palestinian propaganda was simple, the Zionist regime and its backers in Washington were trying to convince the world that the Israeli genocide was justified.

It was never about "the horrors of October 7" or "saving the hostages", which the Western media and leadership continue to harp on about, even 15 months after the fact. Instead, it was about setting the parameters of what would constitute an acceptable discourse on Palestine and "Israel". Therefore, if you lie about all kinds of baseless events, such as a "pre-meditated mass rape campaign", "connections to al-Qaeda", "40 beheaded babies", "children slain in an attic", "fetuses torn from a mother’s womb" and a litany of other gruesome allegations that no evidence corroborates, it works to try muddy the waters.

The goal here, with the ever-emerging claims about what happened on October 7, is not to have the average consumer of corporate media propaganda believe every single lie, it is to make so many claims that at least some of them stick. Why? Because in order to do as Israeli PM Netanyahu does and label the people of Gaza "Amalek", in order to justify their mass extermination and ethnic cleansing, you must turn them into savages and barbarians first.

Unfortunately for the Zionists, it wasn’t as simple as fabricating atrocity stories to convince a large enough portion of the Western public to adopt their view that exterminating the people of Gaza was justified, let alone that soldiers in Western armies should be deployed to support the Israelis in their regional ambitions.

This is where the self-styled "alternative right-wing media" comes into play. For example, following the car-ramming attack in Germany - committed by an anti-Islam Saudi national named Taleb Abdel Mohsen - against a Christmas parade, it emerged rather suddenly that the man in question was an atheist who supported far-right public figures and the Israelis. As this narrative began to spread, X [formerly Twitter] owner, Elon Musk, decided to delete the attacker's account.

Then, like clockwork, Iranian-born Maral Salmassi releases a ridiculous video that is retweeted by Elon Musk and goes viral across a range of social media platforms. Salmassi is the daughter of a former Iranian diplomat under the deposed Shah of Iran - who was overthrown in 1979 - which meant that she would grow up for part of her childhood in places like Jordan and yes "Israel". She emerged out of nowhere during the Israeli genocide against Gaza, spewing pro-Israeli propaganda and speaking against "radical Islam".

After a short stint of interviews and spreading Zionist propaganda, she then re-emerges to claim in her viral video that the Germany car ramming attacker was lying about being an "ex-Muslim" and was in fact, you guessed it, a radical Shia Muslim extremist. Salmassi bases this conclusion on the man’s name alone then continues on to claim that it has been exposed that he is actually connected to another Saudi dissident who once supported a Daesh terrorist attack.

She also claimed that Abdel Mohsen was engaged in taqiyya - a predominantly Shia Islamic concept that allows a person to conceal their faith if their life is at risk or to omit the truth in other limited circumstances - which is why she can ignore the attacker's thousands of tweets and BBC interview, that serves as proof of his true ideology. According to Salmassi, the only time Abdel Mohsen was actually telling the truth was conveniently in his support for another Saudi exile, who is a Sunni Muslim. She ties this together to argue the case that as a Shia Muslim extremist, the attacker was aligned with ISIS; a group that claims to be within the Sunni fold of Islam.

Despite this narrative being ridiculous to the point of rendering an educated viewer in an uncontrollable episode of laughter, the average Western viewer is none the wiser to how ridiculous it would be for a "Shia extremist" to be working to fulfill a joint ISIS conspiracy. Again, this circles back to the beginning of this article and the deliberate miseducation of Western audiences about West Asia, Islamic history, Muslim groups, and their ideologies.

Similarly, following the New Year’s Day car-ramming and shooting attack in New Orleans, videos began to emerge of individuals making rather ridiculous claims about a Muslim conspiracy against the West. One of these people is an ex-CIA agent named Sarah Adams, not only did she work as a US official under the Obama administration, serves as an advisor to an Israeli 8200 Unit (military intelligence) connected company, in addition to being a military and intelligence officer most of her professional career, she now poses as an "outsider" who is being "silenced".

Adams appeared for an interview that has now gone viral, in which she claims that around 1,000 Al-Qaeda terrorists are plotting some kind of coordinated attack across the West, linking this to the Hamas-led October 7 attack. She interchangeably speaks about Hamas and Al-Qaeda, arguing that they are working together, with no evidence to support this whatsoever. She has even claimed that Al-Qaeda knew about and helped plan the October 7 attack, repeating the Israeli mantra of "October 7 was only the beginning".

The information she argues has no basis in fact. Even if she did actually have some kind of insider information on an Al-Qaeda attack of the nature she describes, this would evidently mean that the intelligence work she would be citing could be placed in jeopardy and she would therefore be a whistleblower. 

What she is describing is an attack that would be far more severe than the September 11 World Trade Center attack. Therefore, if she was telling the truth, she would be tipping off Al-Qaeda that they are being monitored, thus jeopardizing the ability of the US security agencies to thwart a devastating assault. However, she hasn’t been arrested and charged with treason yet, so we can assume that her fairytales are no more than mere anti-Islam nonsense. Again, anyone with even a rudimentary understanding of Al-Qaeda, the Arab World, Islamic groups, or general history going back a few decades, can see through this kind of nonsense.

A side-note for right-winger Trump supporters, who overwhelmingly oppose sending US funds to Ukraine: She was recently the Chief of Operations for the Ukraine NGO Coordination Network (UNCN) for two years and only completed this role in January of 2024. 

The Anti-Islam Crusade

The right-wing media that has now replaced "legacy media", is posing as adversarial to power, while its viewers engage in self-deception that enables them to believe that CIA assets, government officials, the world's richest corporation owner, and a string of well-paid Zionists are somehow fighting for the average person in the West.

This is now convincing a new audience, predominantly on the right-wing of the political spectrum, that the Islamic enemy is coming to get them. Enforcing racist stereotypes and anti-immigrant rhetoric, forming a narrative about a "hoard of Islamic extremist invaders", which is non-existent. This conspiracy theory plays on the anxiety drummed up surrounding terrorist attacks and the lack of basic knowledge of Islam and West Asia amongst most Western people.

At a time when Sham (Palestine, Syria, Lebanon and Jordan) is undergoing an uncertain transitional phase, it is likely that the US and other Western militaries will play a larger role in the area and its surrounding region. The possibility of a Daesh insurgency in Syria, later affecting both Lebanon and Iraq, will almost ensure this. 

There is also the possibility that the Israelis will mess up one of the various fronts they have opened and will need the support of their Western allies, especially if a war with Iran is going to be on the table. All of this requires public support for the inevitable bloodshed we will see throughout the region.

Washington and their Israeli allies now seek to break, then reshuffle, the entire region once again and this will require immense levels of violence. This is almost inevitable particularly in Syria.

Whatever the goals are going to be, the Western governments and its Zionist allies will have to adapt, continuing to escalate their use of overwhelming force. On top of this, unrest in Europe can also be blamed on immigrant populations that will be the victims of the conspiracy theories spread about their communities.

The goal is simple: manufacture a fake threat through lies and distortions to justify more war, conflict and exploitation, all while tightening their grip on power. Unfortunately, the propaganda this time around is working as it comes in a different form than it did back in the early 2000’s, yet the goal is the same. More hate, more division and more wars, all while the West’s "saviours" claim to be fighting for freedom.