As U.S. bosses use state terror to murder Black workers in cold blood and send drones to massacre workers and children from Pakistan to Yemen, the same capitalists are hypocritically denouncing regional imperialist ISIS (also known as the Islamic State) for its latest wave of slaughters in Turkey, Bangladesh, and Iraq.
The ISIS misleaders are mass-murdering capitalists cloaked as religious fundamentalists, lashing out in a desperate attempt to hang on to the Middle East oilfields they have seized since 2013. Meanwhile, some of the world’s biggest terrorists—U.S. imperialists, their NATO allies, and rival imperialists in Russia—are intensifying their bombing of ISIS-controlled areas to regain control of those same oilfields.
Whoever controls the production and flow of oil in the Middle East, home to the largest reserves of cheaply extractable petroleum in the world, gains a huge advantage over its competition. The region’s workers are caught in the middle of a deadly imperialist chess game.
ISIS: Death and Taxes
On June 28, at Ataturk Airport in Istanbul, Turkey, three suicide bombers killed at least 41 people and wounded more than 200 others. On July 2, in the capital city of Dhaka, Bangladesh, at least 29 people were killed after five ISIS gunmen took hostages in a popular café. On July 3, in the Iraqi capital of Baghdad, ISIS suicide bombs killed more that 200 people and wounded hundreds more in a busy shopping district. On July 4, four suicide bombers attacked three sites in Saudi Arabia, including one near the U.S. Consulate in Jidda.
Assuming ISIS was responsible for all of these strikes, why these particular countries? Turkey bridges Europe, Asia and the Middle East, and is an indispensable member of the North Atlantic Treaty Organization, the main instrument of U.S. imperialist interests against Russia. Bangladesh is a staunch U.S. ally and lies a stone’s throw from China, the third big imperialist power. Iraq contains the third-largest oil reserves in the Middle East. Saudi Arabia is the region’s largest oil producer by far and a strategic counterweight to Russian ally Iran.
As inter-imperialist rivalries sharpen, and a broader global conflict looms, bosses of all stripes are driven to spill more workers’ blood to protect their investments and gain political, economic and military leverage. In the strategically vital Middle East, South and Central Asia, and Horn of Africa, the bosses’ media has focused on the recent violence by ISIS, the Frankenstein’s monster born out of the cataclysmic, 13-year U.S. war against Iraqi workers. Since mid-2014, ISIS’s proclaimed “caliphate” has lost 50 percent of its territory in Iraq and 20 percent in Syria, along with much of its oil revenue. But even as the group has been forced to cut pay to its fighters, eliminate jobs and bribes, and impose harsh taxes in areas it still holds, it has intensified its indiscriminate killing of Muslim and other workers. As Op-Ed columnist Hasan Hasan noted in the New York Times (7/11):
Some people have suggested that this is a sign of the group’s desperation and weakness. In fact, it demonstrates its strength and long-term survival skills.…. Even American officials have told me privately that the political changes necessary to stem the group’s appeal in Iraq and Syria are lagging behind the military advances. The number of members volunteering to blow themselves up is not a sign of a dying group.
The threat is not going away. The group’s ultimate goal remains unchanged: control of the Muslim world.
Workers Caught in Imperialist Crossfire
The second, far deadlier source of terror comes from Russian and U.S imperialism, which routinely slaughters Muslim workers with both piloted and drone airstrikes. (Although China has signaled a willingness to join the Russian air campaign against ISIS, its current focus is to consolidate military control over the South China Sea and to challenge U.S. economic influence in Latin America and Africa.) In Iraq alone, the U.S. state terrorists have killed more than a million workers and orphaned an estimated 800,000 children (Iraqi Children Foundation website).
The future holds only more devastation for the working class. Beyond their callous destruction of workers’ lives, ISIS terror attacks have given the U.S. state terrorists cover to re-escalate their military presence in Iraq. In April, the fragile Iraqi government gave in to a U.S. push to introduce Army Apache attack helicopters, raise U.S. troop presence to more than 4,000, and move U.S. “advisors” much closer to the front lines (CNN.com, 4/18). On July 11, terrorist-in-chief Barack Obama authorized the deployment of an additional 560 troops to assist in recapturing Mosul, the largest city still controlled by ISIS (New York Times, 7/11).
Terrorism Fuels Fascism
Within the U.S., the bosses are attempting to exploit workers’ fears of terrorism to accelerate the rise of fascism. Spearheaded by the Federal Bureau of Investigation, “Shared Responsibilities Committees” have the stated purpose of countering violent extremism in the U.S. Composed of of mental health professionals, social service workers, and religious leaders, among other ruling-class agents, these teams are designed to identify workers who may be “at risk” for committing terrorist acts or joining a terrorist group (Washington Post, 7/5).
The program has already been implemented in communities with large Arab and Muslim populations, like Dearborn, Michigan. Ron Haddad, Dearborn’s police chief, “has a deep network of contacts in the community and makes regular visits to Dearborn’s 38 schools and its many mosques…. At least twice in the past several years, fearing influence from [ISIS] or online propaganda on their children, Haddad says, Muslim fathers have turned in their own sons. In another case, it was students at a largely Muslim high school calling about a troubled peer” (politico.com, 3/24).
All things considered, the big terrorists and little terrorists are more alike than different. All of them exploit, oppress and divide workers to preserve and expand the bosses’ profits. None of them have any qualms about murdering our class brothers and sisters, regardless of race, religion or gender. To overthrow these blood-sucking monsters, the Progressive Labor Party must win masses of workers to fight for international working class unity and mass revolutionary violence. Only then will we smash capitalism and terrorism for all time. Join us!