Darkness Within
By Mowahid Hussain Shah
Hiding behind democracy quite often is oligarchy. Within oligarchs is embedded a criminal component. Movie maestro Martin Scorsese makes this point tellingly in his magnum opus, “The Irishman”, which depicts a true-crime American saga through the perspective of a mob hit man.
Unlike the “Godfather” trilogy, largely fictional although drawing upon real Mafia families in New York, “The Irishman” digs deep into the life and still unexplained disappearance/murder of Teamster boss Jimmy Hoffa 45 years ago. Hoffa consolidated local trade unions of truck drivers and workers into what became one of America’s most powerful trade unions, procuring better salaries, benefits, and lives for the nation’s truckers. Hoffa famously said: “If you got it, a truck brought it.”
Organized crime has always carried allure in American folklore. The manufacture and sale of alcoholic drinks in the US was banned by the 18 th Amendment to the US Constitution, in effect from 1920 to when it was repealed in 1933, a period of time known as the Prohibition. During the Prohibition, an illegal industry grew of supplying liquor to customers and clandestine bars, aided by the Mob, which itself grew in size and influence.
The “Irishman” movie says that JFK’s father, Joseph Kennedy, profited from the illicit sale of liquor during Prohibition. Further, the movie attributes JFK’s Presidential win over Richard Nixon in 1960 to Mob intervention. The movie also suggests that there was a Mob hand in the slaying of JFK on the alleged grounds that, while being a beneficiary of Mob largesse, his younger brother, then Attorney General Robert Kennedy, was cracking the whip on erstwhile benefactors. The movie shows how organized crime was traumatized over the loss of Havana – a Mob stronghold of casinos and hotels in the 1950’s and a cash cow for its financial operations – only to be shattered by Fidel Castro’s overthrow of the Batista government on January 1, 1959.
The nucleus of the Mob originated from Sicily, which at one time in the medieval era, was a Muslim stronghold. The concept of Jihad gained traction during Muslim rule in Sicily, according to William Granara’s 1986 University of Pennsylvania PhD dissertation, “Political Legitimacy and Jihad in Muslim Sicily.” The words “mafioso” and “mafia” derive from a Sicilian word for a fearless arrogant bully, and originally may have come from Arabic.
It takes around 40 years after a major event for the political dust to settle, explaining why it took that long for the disappearance of Hoffa to merit celluloid scrutiny.
To believe even now that JFK was gunned down by a lone gunman is to take leave of common sense. Just as it is to hold fast to the asinine theory that Liaquat Ali Khan’s momentous slaying on October 16, 1951 in Rawalpindi was the handiwork of a lone disgruntled Afghan gunman and not a cabal, which had the means to cover up and stood to benefit.
The populist anti-Muslim wave sweeping the globe is one indication how easy it is to dupe the masses, be it in India with its state-sponsored Muslim hate, Europe or the Western Hemisphere with its escalating anti-immigrant sentiment. It even prompted discredited Nobel laureate Aung San Suu Kyi of Burma (recent defender of genocide at the ICJ) to meet Hungarian leader Viktor Orban on June 5, 2019 at Budapest, exchanging notes on their mutually shared Muslim animus.
One of Bill Clinton’s alleged paramours, Sally Perdue, went public with their affair on a TV show in July 1992, just as Bill Clinton won the Democratic Party’s nomination for President. A month later, she says she was threatened by a Clinton associate that, if she wasn’t a “good little girl,” her legs would be broken. Mainstream media bypassed the story.
When Trump launches a tirade against what he characterizes as a “rigged and corrupt” system, he may be on to something in that, as a business magnate, he has had full exposure to the dark underbelly of American society and polity.
When expats crib and bitch about misdoings in their homelands, perhaps they are oblivious that the society where they live may not be so lily white.
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