The Legal Principles of Bethlehem & Operation Timber Sycamore: The “Islamist Winter” Pre-Emptively Targets “Arab Life” by Hiring “Arab Barbarians”
https://www.mdpi.com/2075-471X/10/3/69
Abstract:
The following legal-historical research is critical of “Islamist” narratives and their desacralized reverberations claiming that Arab-Muslim receptivity to terror is axiomatic to “cultural experiences” figuring subjects conforming to Arab-Islamic philosophical theology. The critique is founded on deconstructing—while adopting a Third World Approach to International Law (TWAIL)— the (im)moral consequences resulting from such rhetoric interpreting the Arab uprising of 2011 from the early days as certainly metamorphosing into an “Islamist Winter”. This secular-humanist hypostasis reminded critics that International Law and International Relations continues to assert that Latin-European philosophical theology furnishes the exclusive temporal coordinates required to attain “modernity” as telos of history and “civil society” as ethos of governance. In addition, the research highlights that such culturalist assertation—separating between law and morality—tolerates secular logic decriminalizing acts patently violating International Law since essentializing Arab-Muslims as temporally positioned “outside law” provides liberal-secular modernity ontological security. Put differently, “culture talk” affirms that since a secular-humanist imaginary of historical evolution stipulates that it is “inevitable” and “natural” that any “non-secular” Arab protests will unavoidably lead to lawlessness, it therefore becomes imperative to suspiciously approach the “Islamist” narrative of 2011 thus deconstructing the formulation of juridical doctrines (i.e., Bethlehem Legal Principles) decriminalizing acts arising from a principle of pre-emption “moralizing” demographic and geographic alterations (i.e., Operation Timber Sycamore) across Arabia. The research concludes that jus gentium continues to be characterized by a temporal inclusive exclusion with its redemptive ramifications—authorized by sovereign power—catalyzing “epistemic violence” resulting in en-masse exodus and slayed bodies across Arabia
The (secularhumanist) principles not only endorsed the Bush Doctrine of pre-emptive defense strategy (PEDS), but also legalized a redemptive operation known as Timber Sycamore claiming it rational andlegal to hire death squads(i.e., war-machines) as the ideal agents of creative chaos required to transform an “old” Arab world characterized as temporally disorderly and premodern, to a “new” orderly and civil Arab world.
In the context of the CIA calling the operation Timber Sycamore, the following passage is gripping: “He gave their crops to the grasshopper, the fruit of their labor to the locust. He killed their vines with hailstones and their sycamore-figs with sleet. He abandoned their cattle to the hail and their livestock to bolts of lightning” (Psalm 78–47). The ficus sycomorus is commonly found in the Arab world, including Yemen, Syria, Libya, and Egypt–all overlap with high levels of covert deadly actions conducted by Western intelligence agencies (Dostal 2018, p. 370). More interestingly isthe name of the hired death squads in the operation referred to using the acronym of ISIS. In the ancient world of Egyptian and Greco-Roman religion up until the 4th and 5th c. AD, Isis was a worshipped goddess that helped the dead enter afterlife. Also, the New Kingdom of Egypt had an elite paramilitary force serving as desert scouts protecting valuable areas such as the Theban Necropolis or the Valley of the Kings. Therefore, the death squads in ISIS/ISIL can be esoterically perceived as a group of elite mercenaries that seek to purify and/or transform impure dead Arab bodies aiding them in “entering” modern life.