For over a decade, now, the US has been upholding the image of a hooded (but somehow bearded) Muslim man as the evil that the nation faces on its way to worldwide recognition and stardom as the moral authority of the world.

The United States, as opposed to its people in general, includes the arrogant, moralizing entity known as the White House. Then there is the Botoxified TV media circus that comes turbocharged with retired generals and self-described intelligence and Middle East experts. This is followed by the excruciatingly repetitive official pronouncements from the self-satisfied academic, named Dr. Rice, who organises an army of various orang-utans and marmosets that face the press and come and go with their blasé ignorance about the rest of the world. Unfortunately, a large section of the American population believes in their nation's divine destiny in the world. The rest are contemplative, depressed and cannot believe that the nation with perhaps the best constitution in the world, cannot see reality except through Rumsfeldian lenses.
Does the US have a real fear? Does America really have a "Muslim problem"? America has financed, nurtured and maintained this spectre of a Muslim Terrorist, in the minds of Americans, to replace a much larger fear. What is that fear? Is it really the Muslim Terrorist?

The exercise of popular will! Now that is a fearful predicament!

Let us take the example of India. Elections, as an exercise in that country, repeatedly demonstrate the extraordinary maturity of its people. No smoke and mirrors, no cow-manure, no song and dance, no Bangalore-boom stories can detract the Indian peasant, rural poor and urban slum dweller from the stark fact that the so-called growth of the Indian economy has not filtered down to 80% of its population and over 50 percent of its population lives in abject poverty. The Indian peasant (390 million went through an electronic voting system with very little reporting of chaos, ballot box stuffing, rigging or rioting, that puts the state of Florida to shame) has once again asserted, as they did once before when they pitched Indira Gandhi out, that Indians want to remain a secular nation and not become a Hindu state. 130 million Muslims are citizens of India and they have been in extreme duress during the BJP rule of India. Indians want peace and economic livelihood and "growth" must filter down to the countryside and not stay confined to high-rise towers in Mumbai, Bangalore or some other urban centre. The US had great faith in the Hindu fundamentalist regime of Mr. Bajpayee. It has greater faith in the tin-pot dictatorship in Pakistan of Gen. Musharraf. When popular changes happen, the US gets unsettled. It's People and popular processes the US must fear the most. It's the people of Iraq that pushed America out of Fallujah, an ignominious military defeat in the hands of RPG-wielding Fedayeen guerrillas. Iraqi people do not want to be dominated and occupied and moralized by you, America! It's not hijacked planes slamming into tall buildings, train bombings, suicide blow-ups at the behest of once-nurtured (by you!) fundamentalist Arab billionaires on dialysis machines, hiding in the Khyber Pass that is going to be your nemesis. It's people, who through different means and methods are telling you that you have no business anywhere, except within the confines of your own borders. It's people, who are energized by patriotism, national self-determination and liberation who have fought you, the French in Algeria, the British everywhere and all empires have eventually collapsed at the hands of the people, not some bearded, shadowy figure in a cave.

You fear those who mobilize their people! Not just bearded men!

Of course, Uncle Ho Chi-Minh had a little goatee! Yes, Fidel Castro has a flourishing but greying beard! But these are people who galvanized their entire population through popular resistance (not demagoguery, as you would like to believe). They did not finance and mobilize small bands of terrorists to carry out spectacular acts in isolation from their people. You have made 42 attempts on the life of Fidel and for forty years you have poured billions into the coffers of the Miami Mafioso, to dislodge Fidel. Last week, again, you quietly revamped another program of blockade and encirclement of Cuba with additional millions in funds for your gangsters in Florida. A few days ago 1.2 million marched through Havana's beautiful Malecon area, in front of the offices of the US interests building, stating that they shall not be overcome! Your media and the Canadian press hardly reported on it. Do you believe it or you don't want to know about it? What is your fear, "America"? Is it not people? Do you think 1.2 million people can be mobilized by intimidation and un-democratic practices? Did you think that a father figure like Ho-Chi-Minh coerced his people to send you packing from Indo China in 68,000 body bags? A war you had declared you had won several times over? Do you think that the Algerian maquis had terrorist compunctions when they dispatched the French from their country? "America!" you have a bigger fear than, what you think is coming from the followers of the Prophet Mohammad. The people of Iraq, who had no love lost for Saddam Hussein or the man in the cave in Afghanistan, have slowly but surely organized themselves into a classic partisan resistance force, which you cannot defeat.

You have lost in Indo-China, you are losing in Cuba and guess what! Even the people of China have gotten you in a tangled mess with your economy. The Chinese figured it out long time ago. Unlike the Soviets, they did not believe that they could match you ICBM to ICBM. So they chose a different route. Once again they mobilized their entire nation to deal with your brand of "globalisation" and chose to deliver your household needs, faster, quicker and better than your own factories. You walked into their trap, you chose it, and you fulfilled your own business prophecy.

And guess what! There is something very strange about the fact that these three entities; Vietnam, Cuba and China, do not swear by religion, as such. They swear by someone else, also with a name beginning with M. Irrespective of how much we all hoop and holler about rights and democracy in all these nations; they are not governed by fundamentalists and terrorists or cave dwelling lunatics. In their own way and by their own definitions, ordinarily people continue to support these governments, believe in general about the political philosophies these nations espouse (some brand of socialism, which the old bearded man buried in Highgate cemetery in London, would have ulcers trying to fathom).

Whether it's through the ballot box in India, through armed resistance in Fallujah, through years of fortitude and self-development in Cuba, through dogged resistance in Vietnam and wily "socialism" in China, it is the will of the people and their beliefs that "America" fears the most. The image of the hooded terrorist is simply a smokescreen to manipulate the media-dependent de-intellectualisation of "America". "America" fears people, including its own!