Propaganda is to a democracy what the bludgeon is to a totalitarian state . - Noam Chomsky, American linguist.

Blessed are the peacemakers (Matthew 5:9)

Propaganda at the highest level requires countless repetition of half-truths and deceits. The mind en masse need to be numbed using strategies like Pavlov's classical conditioning or Malaysia's Biro Tatanegara's pogrom of mind bending, so that the target audience can continue to salivate for more twisted information to be mutated into 'globalising truth' that will universalise.

The pope and the president of the United States were performing the act of making the global masses salivate. This is done perhaps not only to commemorate the fifth anniversary of the attack on The Word Trade Center, and to remind the world that the 21st century will not only be a "Wolfowitz-ing" century for America but also a renewal of the "crusading past" trajectoried into newer forms of symbolism.

Politics need symbolisms of half-truths and deceits, just like revolutions need their madmen and martyrs, and nations need myths and selective history.

How could this leader of billions of peaceful followers of the Prophet Isa Ala Hissalam (Jesus, peace be upon him) be wise enough to send a message of renewed hatred that was supposed to have been buried during the Renaissance period; a period in which Europe owed so much to the legacy of Prophet Muhammad (SAW/peace be upon him)?

Where was Europe during the Dark Ages? How does one explain the Inquisition; was it in the teachings of the Prophet Isa (peace be upon him) son of Mariam (peace be upon her) that "evil and inhuman" acts are to be performed by the Catholics onto the Protestants? Was it in the teachings of the great prophet from Nazareth that the practice of "indulgences" that corrupt the pre-Reformation churches of Europe are to be rationalised?

How could the pope's resolve and conviction be similar to that of the president of the United States whose intelligence, let alone wisdom, has been under scrutiny since the beginning of his campaign of destroying the Iraqi people for oil? Americans, especially those whose children were sent to the killing fields of black roses, cannot wait to elect a more intelligent president who not only can speak well but also can string logical sentences and reasoning together. Americans want their children home safely now and are fed up with this propaganda of the Bush regime's theocratic state run by war-mongering neo-cons.

How could the pope be unaware of his own intention of sending the message to those German professors when that message is also meant for Catholics the world over? What sort of wisdom does he possess when the impact of the controversy over the sub-intelligent Danish cartoonist is still fresh in the mind of the Muslims?

The real terror network

Muslims are patiently sick and tired of the sophisticated linking of the word "terror" with the peacefulness that embodies the teaching of the Prophet Muhammad (PBUH); teachings that did not bring anything new but renewed the peaceful messages of the prophets of Allah Jesus, Moses, David and Abraham (peace be upon them) included.

So, who is terrorising who? What actually is - the war on "terror"?

The war on terror should have been fought a long time ago against European powers itself beginning from the Age of Exploration and Discovery to the Age of the American Empire.

It was the royally-sanctioned European members of the armada that rape, plunder, mutilate and devastate the cultures of peoples they deem less noble than human beings; those "noble savages" and "little brown brothers".

It was a systematic program of "mercantilist state-sponsored" terrorism that brought the Italian Christopher Columbus and daVerrazzano, the Spanish Juan Ponce deLeon, Hernando Cortes, and the Englishmen Francis Drake, Henry Hudson, and James Cook to the "new worlds" in order to find riches and enslave others in the process of building empires.

The massacre of tens of thousands of Arawak Indians in the "discovered" land called America was an act of terror in antiquity. So was the systematic elimination of the Indian population as a result of terrifying diseases brought by Europeans as well as by the extinction of the bisons.

That was the beginning of the real terror network. The Middle Passage was the epitome of the crime against humanity committed by the "emerging states" of America, under the governing aegis of the Southern colonies of the early 13 American colonies.

Had the pope or the president of the United States read history of colonialism and the history of US interventions in the Third World, they would have found numerous incidences of "state-sponsored" terrorism as in the case of the fall of governments such as those in Indonesia, Kampuchea, Iran, Nicaragua, and Chile.

The real terror network of the new and globalising world continues in the form of the structural, systematic, and subliminal violence installed and institutionalised out of the work of European, American, and east Asian transnational corporations that profit from the unequal exchanges in the global economy.

The real terror network lies in the proliferation of arms sales, the control over energy resources, the militarisation of space, and the work of the World Bank and the International Monetary Fund.

The terrorised inhabitants of this earth are those who have become dispossessed, alienated, marginalised, victimised and criminalised by the largest, stateless, borderless and heartless corporations that work in synchrony with the military and cultural industrial complexes of the so-called "free world"; the free world that is shoving democracy down the throat of these impoverished nations so that both global and local elites can co-plunder the state economies.

The pope's speech should have addressed the topic of the inquiry into the wealth of nations, instead of installing postmodern hatred, geneaologied from a medieval passage on hate.

Violent language games

Muslims, at the eve of the 21st. century are being criminalised, victimised, incarcerated and decimated not only by the real terror networks of "state-sponsored terrorism" that bulldoze their homes, rape their women and children, kill their men, blow up their masjids, fragment their individual lives, steal their property, humiliate their prisoners, and leave their people to be systematically destroyed all in the name of the war against terror.

This is a war that is so bankrupt of its ideology and so destructive in its intent and consequences that the greatest empire that lives and breathes on it the United States of America has not only bankrupted itself but also leave its own people disillusioned, frustrated, fooled and angry.

Is this the notion of "war on terror" that the Pope - the most exalted figure of the representation of the teachings of the Islamic Prophet Isa (Jesus peace be upon him) - is also carrying in his speeches, in order to remind the world that the Crusades must continue? The president of the United States, at the eve of the second destruction of Baghdad (Desert Storm II) alluded to the crusade in his rationale for his unilateral decision to quagmire into another Vietnam in the Arabian desert.

After almost 3,000 deaths and almost 20,000 injured of the sons and daughter of Uncle Sam, after almost 50,000 Iraqi civilians dead and thousands maimed, and missing children of Iraq, and a war cost now amounting to US$318.5 billions of American taxpayer dollars - what has this American jihad achieved? Yes, that amounts to US$318,500,000,000.00 American taxpayers money.

The pope did not make a mistake. Nor had the speech writer erred in choosing the best passage to quote from a "dialogue" set in the Middle Ages; perhaps inspired by the Italian poet's Dante Alighieri depiction of Prophet Muhammad (PBUH) and Saiddina Ali (Radhiallahhuanhu) in his Divine Comedy.

As in the infamous Danish cartoon episode, these statements made by the pope are produced and broadcast to further humiliate the already humiliated Muslims who wish to not be further aggravated - until divine justice begets peace at the end of this ecclesiastical history plagued with conflicting notions of Good versus Evil.

Any religious leader must be elected from his/her good and wise breed of scholars who can think with the heart, mind, and spirit - and not with the straightjacket of paranoia or the mask of deceit.

The pope's apology is not enough. He must not parrot the message of the current American president.

Blessed are the peacemakers those from all faiths and denominations.