Reflections on the US Destruction of Fallujah & American Sniper

 
For anyone interested, there’s a wealth of reporting and commentary on Clint Eastwood’s latest and widely celebrated film American Sniper. Responses to the war drama range from effusive praise of the “genius” of Chris Kyle to more critical condemnations of Kyle’s enthusiastic embrace of violence and the broader societal maladies that his behavior emblematized. While this discussion is definitely worth having, there is a risk that confining the conversation to the criminality or heroism of Kyle distracts from a larger issue, namely what the US bombing of Fallujah looked like from the perspective of Iraqis. After all, the setting for the many kills carried out by “The Legend”, Kyle’s wartime moniker, was this city in Iraq, also known as the City of Mosques. Unlike debate over whether or not Kyle’s actions were justified, there really isn’t much to speculate about in this regard as the deeds of the US military have been voluminously documented by some of the most respected investigative journalists and scholars of the “western” world.

Take for example the work of the unembedded journalist Dahr Jamail. In his book on the US occupation of Iraq Beyond the Green Zone: Dispatches from an Unembedded Journalist in Occupied Iraq he documents, in excruciating detail, the humiliating and devastating human toll that the Iraqi people were made to endure under the onslaught of US weaponry. He opens his chapter on the Second Battle of Fallujah, the assault in which Kyle took part, with a photograph of an exasperated Iraqi. Beneath the photo is a caption that reads “Fallujan refugees at a mosque on Baghdad University campus told of the white phosphorous, cluster bombs, and other weaponry used by the US military in their city. November 2004.”

And this wasn’t the only fact excised from the Hollywood version of the military assault. On the topic of Abu Musab al-Zarqawi, a person who was explicitly named in the film as a threat to US soldiers, Jamail observes “in the United States, most corporate media outlets were busy spreading the misinformation that Fallujah had fallen under the control of Jordanian terrorist Abu Musab al-Zarqawi.” Jamail went on to add “There was no available evidence that Zarqawi had ever set foot inside the city. It was amply evident that the resistance of the city was composed primarily of people from Fallujah itself.” Given this “amply evident” fact that the media ignored one would think that ten years after the implementation of this war crime a more intellectually honest portrait of the siege would prevail. Yet, in the film there’s a scene where this myth is repeated without a shred of skepticism or caution. Neither was there any attention paid to the fact that the US deliberately punished the Iraqi population by blocking access to vital medical aid or as Jamail notes “the humanitarian disaster in Fallujah worsened as the US military continued to refuse entry to Iraqi Red Crescent (IRC) convoys of relief supplies.” The pretext for the blockage was that aid was unnecessary since there were no civilians in the city, an absurd claim immediately debunked after “officials acknowledged that thirty thousand to fifty thousand residents remained in the city.”

Incidentally, it would be instructive to compare the response to this war crime carried out by the US military to a more recent war crime carried out by Syrian forces in their ongoing civil war. After it was discovered that Syrian forces were blocking Red Cross aid to rebel territory in Baba Amr the Australian based Sydney Morning Herald ran an article headlined Outrage as Syria Keeps Up Blockade on Red Cross. “Syria faced world condemnation as it continued to block the Red Cross from delivering desperately needed aid to the vanquished rebel stronghold of Baba Amr in the city of Homs.” No such outrage was perceptible when the US engaged in similar atrocities under comparably dire circumstances during the murderous bombardment of Fallujah. Instead, the moment was characterized by a severe climate of media repression which included an order circulated by a US-backed media commission that all news outlets “stick to the government line on the US-led offensive in Fallujah or face legal action.” Meanwhile, US forces escalated the assault by attacking and occupying the city’s hospital.

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None of this made it into Eastwood’s film, which completely glosses over the fact that this was a vicious military assault on a civilian population in a brief scene where a soldier refers to the “military aged males” in the area who were out to kill US soldiers. A radically different picture is presented in Jamail’s text, where he concludes his chapter on Fallujah with a historical analogue that must, for understandable reasons, be filtered out of any commentary heralding the military assault as valorous and brave, predictable clichés that pass for informed analysis in establishment quarters:

“The second assault on Fallujah was a monument to brutality and atrocity made in the United States of America. Like the Spanish city of Guernica during the 1930s, and Grozny in the 1990s, Fallujah is a monument to excess and overkill.”

Empirical data gathered in the aftermath of the attack conformed to this assessment. “Iraqi medical personnel in Fallujah estimated that of all the bodies they had logged in their database, at least 60 percent were women and children.” If one considers the documentation of the “first medical teams” on the scene, who “collected more than 700 bodies”, the percentage of women and children killed stands at “nearly 80 percent.” Recall this was the second time the US attacked the civilian population of Fallujah, the first time being in April 2004. In the Spring attack an estimated 736 Iraqis were killed with “60 percent of those killed [being] women, children, and elderly.” The film’s omission of any reference to the first attack on Fallujah in April is quite significant as this attack helps to explain the historical context in which the Iraqi resistance developed.

The exclusion of this highly relevant information, as many of the film’s enthusiasts contend, was not intentional. Rather, critics are reading too much into a movie that was not intended to be “political” but a “case study” on the tormented soul of an American soldier. Perhaps this argument could be taken seriously if it were not for other creative flourishes, which call into question this apolitical stance. Are we to believe that it’s a mere coincidence that Eastwood erased many of the morally repugnant realities from Kyle’s life, much of it discussed in his autobiography, while at the same time concocting, out of pure imagination, demeaning and stereotypical caricatures of Iraqis (“The Butcher” never existed)? This is highly doubtful, just as it likely was not coincidental that he dispensed with historical context entirely in his failure to mention the April assault on Fallujah as a prelude to the November assault but somehow managed to imply, in an amazingly brazen propaganda move, that the terrorist attacks of September 11 had anything to do with the Iraq war. Furthermore, neither of these distortions (the dehumanization of Iraqis and the fallacious 9/11-Iraq linkage), were they excluded from the movie, would have undermined Eastwood’s argument that the film was primarily a “case study” of Kyle. In fact, a more historically accurate depiction of the events  probably would have enhanced the film’s impact as a case study. So why the glaring misrepresentations of the historical record?

Presumably, these directorial decisions were made because it was not enough for Eastwood to revise the factual record. He had to invert it. Iraqis weren’t the victims in his portrayal. They were the aggressors. The US military wasn’t engaged in the “supreme crime” of “military aggression” in violation of every conceivable standard of international law. To borrow the language of Chris Kyle’s father, the US military invaded Iraq as “sheepdogs” with the objective to protect the world’s “sheep” from the Iraqi “wolves.” The gap between this jingoistic worldview and reality is vast and will likely grow without a concerted effort on the part of the American public to inform themselves about the war crimes that the US military committed, as a matter of policy, in the city of Fallujah. Outside the most chauvinistic of circles, condemning Chris Kyle is quite easy. It’s alot more difficult to indict the society that produced him and laid the ideological basis for his crimes.

The Reluctant Imperialist: Obama Gets A Boost From the Servants’ Quarters

Suppose some world leader who the US establishment considers “evil”—Vladimir Putin for example—held a closed door meeting with a group of prominent Russian journalists before his invasion of the Ukraine. And imagine in this meeting he informed this group of Russian journalists about his goals in this illegal invasion, which was then circulated in Russian newspapers as Vladimir Putin, The Reluctant Warrior Intervenes in the Ukraine. What would we think of such a display? Without carrying this thought experiment any further, we can safely assume that this would be condemned as an outrageous attack on principles of a “free press” and another sign of “Kremlin” authoritarianism. Well, this scenario doesn’t have to be imagined because it actually happened, but not in Russia or any other “enemy” state. It happened in the United States.

It has now been reported that the Obama administration held a closed door meeting with a group of high profile journalists prior to his speech on how he would “degrade and destroy” ISIS through aerial bombing. While many details of this secret meeting are unknown, the mere fact that this can occur in a purportedly free society should be alarming to anyone with a genuine concern for democracy and adversarial journalism. Furthermore, a thorough review of the reports published by the journalists in attendance at this meeting reveals commentary effusive in praise for Obama’s “caution”, “reluctance”, and “sensible” decision-making skills. None of these characterizations hold up under the most minimal level of scrutiny.

Take for example, New York Times columnist David Brooks. In an embarrassing exhibition of absolute subordination, (the kind of servility that would make Kim Il-sung blush) Brooks compares Obama to leaders from his Holy Book:

“The Bible is filled with reluctant leaders, people who did not choose power but were chosen for it — from David to Paul. The Bible makes it clear that leadership is unpredictable: That the most powerful people often don’t get to choose what they themselves will do. Circumstances thrust certain responsibilities upon them, and they have no choice but to take up their assignment. History is full of reluctant leaders, too. President Obama is the most recent.”

Since Brooks is white and he is defending the violence of a military superpower (and not a “terrorist” organization), he can be spared accusations of being indoctrinated into a “fundamentalist” ideology with an “end of days strategic vision.” One can imagine a different response in the US if he were brown and was making references to the Quran.

And this is only a sample. Other attendees made sure to add their voice to this chorus of apologetics. Washington Post journalist, Ruth Marcus—a reporter who Glenn Greenwald accurately described as someone who “exemplifies everything that’s horrible about the DC media”—observed “However you assess the blame for the menacing disaster that is the Islamic State, Obama’s plan is the most sensible one under the difficult circumstances.”

So “sensible” is the Obama administration’s strategy that he has sought neither Congressional nor UN authorization for his bombing campaign. Incidentally, the question of international law does not arise in a single article among the many attendees at this closed door meeting. This suggests a faith in executive power that, if not interrogated, can lead to disastrous consequences. The possibility that aerial bombing could escalate terrorism has been pointed out by a number of analysts yet this very real danger goes unacknowledged in these reports. In fact, the justification for the war is presumed to be so transparently beneficent that all criticism is confined to how efficacious, and not how legal, the assault will be.

This position was best summed up by New Yorker journalist Steve Coll, who stated rather straightforwardly “the question about President Obama’s resumption of war in Iraq is not whether it can be justified but where it will lead.” Eugene Robinson echoes this pragmatic stance in his article headlined What If This Doesn’t Work Against the Islamic State? Meanwhile, Daily Beast journalist Mike Tomasky goes beyond mere dismissal of any discussion about the justness of Obama’s war, and derides as “ridiculous” those who compare Obama’s use of military force to that of George W. Bush:

“So, another war in Iraq. On this superficial basis, some are saying that Barack Obama is somehow becoming George W. Bush, or that Bush is somehow vindicated. In a town where one frequently hears ridiculous things, I’ve rarely heard anything more ridiculous than this. What Obama laid out in his Oval Office address Wednesday is, within the context of war-waging, pretty much the polar opposite of what Bush did, the antithesis of shock and awe.”

Unmentioned in this criticism is the verifiable fact that the Obama administration is basing his decision to bomb Iraq on farcical legal doctrines concocted by George W. Bush’s lawyer (and author of the infamous Torture Memos) John Yoo. Tomasky’s remarks are designed to draw a sharp distinction between the “bellicose” foreign policies of Bush and the “reluctant” policies of Obama when, in actuality, such distinctions are tactical at best.

As FAIR reported in a recent article which thoroughly debunked this myth, “One clear message from corporate media has been that Barack Obama is unusually reticent about using military force.” David Ignatius of the Washington Post offers perhaps the most unambiguous example of this myth, describing Obama as a “reluctant warrior” whose “innate cautiousness” assures us that “he’ll fight this war sensibly, partnering with allies in the region in a way that doesn’t needlessly exacerbate the United States problems with the Muslim world.”
That Obama’s “innate caution” can be seriously called into question by the fact that he has totally sidestepped the perfectly cautious action of seeking UN (or Congressional) authorization for his latest bombing campaign simply doesn’t occur to Ignatius nor does the fact that Obama greatly “exacerbated the United States problems with the Muslim world” when he resorted to diplomatic sabotage to prolong the civil war in Syria. But documentary evidence is of little relevance to these courtiers of power. What’s more important is that “it would not be tenable for the US and its allies to allow a group rejected by al-Qaeda as too extreme to control large swaths of territory in the heart of the Middle East,” and “our reluctant … president understands this.” (Jeffrey Goldberg in the Atlantic).

Indeed, “our reluctant president” does “understand this.” He also understands that when he wants to carry out blatantly illegal policies in order to secure American hegemony in the Middle East he can rely on the loyal reporters at the New York Times, the Washington Post, and the Atlantic to parrot the necessary myths to ensure the American public embraces them uncritically. Although there’s no proof that this was a coordinated attempt on the part of the commissar class to mold public opinion, the linguistic precision and ideological uniformity of the messaging certainly rivals the output of some of the most sophisticated propaganda agencies.  As journalist Matt Apuzzo stated in response to news of this meeting: “Let’s call it what it is: Using the power of the presidency to influence news coverage without the public ever knowing about it.” Unless these obvious truths are confronted and combated aggressively, the dangerous policies of the Obama administration will continue to inflict untold suffering on people across the world. An energetic and adversarial journalistic culture is needed to undermine these structures of domination, a culture without which all crimes will remain in the dark except as topics of discussion between “reluctant” imperialists and their servants behind closed doors.

UPDATE: In the hypothetical in the first paragraph I refer to Russian President Vladimir Putin meeting with a group of Russian journalists “before his invasion of the Ukraine.” This phrase—“invasion of the Ukraine”—is problematic because according to the Veteran Intelligence Professionals for Sanity “accusations of a major Russian ‘invasion’ of Ukraine appear not to be supported by reliable intelligence.” In simply referring to Putin’s “invasion”, but not this report or others like it which point out the “invasion” did not happen, I was swallowing propaganda.

Here is a link to the VIPS report:

http://consortiumnews.com/2014/09/01/warning-merkel-on-russian-invasion-intel/

Sources:

http://www.washingtonpost.com/opinions/david-ignatius-obama-has-advantages-as-a-reluctant-warrior/2014/09/11/38c7416e-39e0-11e4-bdfb-de4104544a37_story.html

http://www.nytimes.com/2014/09/12/opinion/david-brooks-the-reluctant-leader.html?_r=0

http://www.thedailybeast.com/articles/2014/09/10/obama-s-war-anything-but-shock-and-awe.html

http://www.stltoday.com/news/opinion/columns/eugene-robinson/eugene-robinson-what-if-this-doesn-t-work/article_6cb81aa0-37b3-5e0e-9ce4-6d1f142b4996.html

http://www.washingtonpost.com/opinions/ruth-marcus-dont-duck-an-islamic-state-vote-congress/2014/09/12/2ac3e706-3abd-11e4-bdfb-de4104544a37_story.html

http://www.theatlantic.com/international/archive/2014/09/obamas-realization-theres-no-way-out-of-the-middle-east/380009/

http://www.buzzfeed.com/gregorydjohnsen/obama-will-fight-isis-with-george-w-bushs-legal-theories#31jdyfb

http://fair.org/take-action/media-advisories/four-myths-about-obamas-war-on-isis/

http://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2014/09/08/return-war

http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2014/01/02/glenn-greenwald-ruth-marcus-edward-snowden_n_4533126.html

http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2014/09/13/obama-journalists-isis-speech_n_5816494.html?1410651263

Some Basic Points about Obama’s War against ISIS

Since Obama’s latest speech on the upcoming US war against ISIS there has been a flood of commentary, some of it very cogent and some of it alarmist in the extreme. Based on reports from experienced investigative journalists and scholars, the US war against ISIS clearly runs the risk of inflaming the violence in the Middle East further and heightening the threat of terrorism. In order to grasp these realities an honest appraisal of the origins and development of this conflict must be made, admittedly an ambitious task in a media culture drowning in misinformation and deceptive insinuation. Below are just a few basic points that are worth bearing in mind as the Obama administration escalates this assault.

1. The US is not bombing Iraq to “fix” anything but to sustain US regional hegemony.
   

A common criticism of the US attempt to bomb ISIS is that it will not “fix” the situation in Iraq and Syria. This argument is extremely misplaced for two reasons:

1. The US, as the world’s leading military superpower, is primarily concerned with consolidating economic and political control over other countries, therefore “fixing” situations is only relevant insofar as it secures these goals. Additionally, US policy has absolutely no relation to human rights (see: Israeli occupation of Palestine). In fact, a study was carried out in 1979 by Ed Herman and Noam Chomsky which revealed a correlation between US aid and human rights abuses.

2. There is a diplomatic record that reveals that the US, quite apart from playing a constructive role in negotiations, has actively worked to undermine a peaceful resolution to this conflict. Flyntt and Hillary Mann Leverett’s commentary is particularly instructive on this count. The US role in prolonging the Syrian Civil War has stimulated the rise of ISIS and other retail terrorist organizations that turned the civil war from a conflict internal to Syria to a grave regional security threat.

2. Aerial Bombing Does not Reduce Terror But Encourages It

Numerous reports have been published showing that drone warfare (the Obama administration’s favorite mode of terror) accelerates the threat of terrorism. This is most clearly shown in the US drone campaign in Pakistan where, according to Fawaz Gerges’ Obama and the Middle East, terror has not only increased due to drone strikes but Obama has been informed that it has this effect. The fact that the Obama administration is able to casually disregard this well documented fact shows that the reduction of terrorism is not a strategic priority for US policy makers.

It also must be noted that bombing other countries without UN authorization is an act of military aggression and a serious war crime. Much of the legal discourse over this bombing has confined itself to whether or not Obama will seek Congressional authorization. International authorization matters as well. That this is omitted in conventional narratives suggests that many media commentators have become comfortable with the US status as a rogue state.

3. The Idea that Certain States are Too “Evil” to Work with is Diplomatically Backwards and Politically Dangerous

In addition for being responsible for a great deal of the diplomatic sabotage as it relates to the Syrian Civil war—the US distorted the meaning of the Geneva I communiques so that Assad would be forced to step down—this moralistic stance flatly contradicts official US policy.

The US has a long and sordid history of backing brutal regimes from Saudi Arabia, to Israel, to Egypt and Bahrain. To suddenly feign outrage over human rights violations illustrates a level of hypocrisy that exceeds even regular levels of duplicity (an impressive feat).

For example, the US was perfectly willing to cooperate with Bashar Assad when they kidnapped Canadian national Maher Arar and sent him to Syria to be tortured. To embrace Assad when he commits acts of torture at the behest of the US but to shun him when his cooperation is vitally needed to deal with a regional crisis further reinforces the notion that the US is primarily concerned with sustaining regional hegemony.

As Murtaza Hussain has astutely pointed out in a recent article for The Intercept, the US must work with Iran, and other regional actors, if they have any serious hope of ameliorating this violence. Hussain observes, “Rather than reflexively satisfying an emotional need to ‘do something’ in the face of atrocities committed by ISIS against American citizens, a policy of coalition-building across ideological lines could potentially eliminate the group and perhaps begin to heal sectarian divisions in the region.”

Multilateral initiatives of this kind will not emerge without concerted public pressure to force Washington elites to abandon their unilateral and ultra-militaristic policies. Doing this will create the necessary space for peaceful alternatives to be pursued.

4. ISIS is not a threat to the United States (crawl out from under your bed).

In an incredible display “democratic” values, the servants of power in the free press have managed to induce the necessary amounts of fear and trauma among the American public to get them to support this latest bombing. CNN has published a poll showing approximately 70% of Americans see ISIS as a threat to the United States.

This conclusion is not supported by the judgment of the FBI which has declared that ISIS presents “no credible threat to the US.” Nevertheless, the hysteria of the corporate press and many members of Congress have drowned out this verifiable fact. It’s quite amazing that the unprecedented propaganda offensive that preceded the Iraq war did not motivate those who support this current assault to be more skeptical of these efforts to frighten the American public.

The role of political party tribalism also must not be discounted here. It is not uncommon for so-called liberal Democrats to support criminal wars because a Democrat is carrying out the crimes. The large support for drone strikes among liberals is a graphic example of this unsettling reality.

5. Public Opinion in the Middle East is Solidly Opposed to US Influence
   

The insularity of imperial culture is particularly pernicious in its ability to filter out the viewpoints and opinions of those who reside in the outer reaches of empire. Throughout all the reports on the US bombing of ISIS one would be hard pressed to find any reference to the most current public opinion polls in Middle East.

The Pew Research Global Attitudes Project is informative in this domain. Of the nine countries in Middle East and North Africa polled, all of them, with the exception of Israel, look at the US unfavorably. Similarly, all the countries polled oppose drone strikes (Israel being the exception  again for obvious reasons.)

It’s not known if the civil war in Iraq and Syria affected these numbers but they certainly merit attention as they serve as a vigorous refutation of Obama’s nauseating homages to American exceptionalism or as he put it in his latest speech: “the endless blessings” which obligate us to take on an “enduring burden.” Perhaps the people of the Middle East can conceive of another “enduring burden” recently recognized as the “greatest threat to world peace.” Another statistical irrelevancy.

There are many more dimensions of this conflict —the role of the Gulf States in supporting ISIS, the significance of the Turkish-Syrian border, etc. — that are worth exploring and will undoubtedly increase in complexity as the Obama administration deepens its involvement in the region. What’s most important is that we not lose sight of the Iraqis and Syrians who are sure to suffer the most if the lawless policies of the Obama administration are allowed to be carried out unimpeded.

Source:

https://firstlook.org/theintercept/2014/09/10/americas-incomprehensible-isis-policy/

http://www.pewglobal.org/database/indicator/1/group/6/

http://www.cnn.com/2014/09/08/politics/cnn-poll-isis/

http://goingtotehran.com/is-obama-trying-to-resolve-or-prolong-the-conflict-in-syria

https://xavierobrien.wordpress.com/2014/08/22/retail-realpolitik-washington-the-just-god-the-islamic-state-in-iraq/

A Critique of Sam Harris’ Commentary on “Martyrdom As a Genuine Metaphysical Principle”

Official doctrine requires that those recognized as members of the educated class scrupulously avoid any serious self-reflection. Any crime or atrocity must be traced back to the incurable savagery of the Great Enemy. Today that Great Enemy is “Islamic terrorism.” Much like the “international communist conspiracy” which preceded it, “Islamic terrorism” is meant to strike fear in the hearts of all right-thinking Americans. Any deviation in this arena is troubling a sign of one’s lack of patriotism or, even worse, “anti-Americanism.” In accord with these highly jingoistic narratives, one can easily find intellectuals willing to volunteer their talents in order to sustain this image of the US as a bastion of civilization valiantly resisting the “scourge” of Muslim “extremism.” Among the partisans in this campaign are the so-called New Atheists, in particular neuroscientist Sam Harris. Harris contends that the violence emanating from domains of US control are not the result of decades of imperial policies that has left the region in ruins. Instead, these incidents of sub-state violence demonstrate that Muslims believe in martyrdom as “a genuine metaphysical principle.” Harris made this argument in a 2006 debate with author Scott Atran.

In order to advance this view he relied on the oft-repeated myth of Iranian “human wave” attacks during the Iran-Iraq war. When astrophysicist Niel deGrasse Tyson asked if Muslims resort to suicide bombing because they lack an Air Force and tanks Harris was quick to dismiss it. “How do you get a mother to celebrate the suicidal atrocities of her children,” Harris asked. Absent from this complete fabrication was the fact that Iranians were compelled to engage in the “human wave” tactic because they lacked the military equipment to combat Iraqis by conventional means. This fact was pointed out in Flyntt and Hillary Mann Leverett’s excellent study of Iranian society, Going to Tehran. Here they observe that Iranians “did not have adequate [military] equipment.” Furthermore, “at times some Iranian soldiers did not even have rifles … or protective gear.” So not only was Harris incorrect in his conclusion that the desire for “martyrdom” lay behind the “human wave” attacks, but Tyson’s suggestion—that suicidal terrorism is partly traceable to the radical disparity in military technology—would be reinforced if Harris were more intellectually honest about Iranian history. Even the New York Times highlighted this disparity in a 1987 report on the human wave attacks in their description of “Iraq’s vastly superior military arsenal.” A recent report from Flinders University’s Suicide Terrorism Database undermines Harris viewpoint as well. The report concluded that “more than 90 percent of suicide attacks are directed at an occupying force,” and “Of the 524 suicide terrorists carried out in the past 30 years, more than half of the attackers were secular.”
None of these unacceptable facts are likely to enter into any discussion about the horrors of “Islamic terrorism.” Consequently, Harris joins the chorus of other scholars for empire who, in the words of the Leveretts, “embellished” this historical moment “with colorful but unsubstantiated accounts of plastic ‘keys to heaven’ being distributed to soldiers and actors dressed as Imam Husayn appearing on horseback to inspire frontline units.” Alongside this complete whitewash of the empirical record is a corresponding dedication to obscuring the US role in fueling atrocities in the Middle East. Therefore, Harris can feign moral indignation over mothers who “celebrate the suicidal atrocities of their children,” but this same sense of outrage it nowhere to be found in relation to US crimes. For instance, in the same video where Harris counters Tyson’s comment on how suicide terror may be linked to the disparity in weaponry he portrays the Iran-Iraq war as a conflict in which the US had no role: “Get the US out of this. Look at the war between Iran and Iraq.”

Any moderately informed student of history could easily point out that it’s impossible to “get the US out” the Iran-Iraq war. Not only did the US support Saddam Hussein in his aggression against Iran, but they also supplied him with the critical intelligence needed to use chemical weapons against Iranians (a fact affirmed in a recent Foreign Policy piece which elicited no cries of “barbarism!” from Harris or any of the other New Atheists). Harris’ response was similarly muted in the aftermath of Israeli terror in Gaza. In an article titled Why I Don’t Criticize Israel? Harris states “the onus is still more on the side of the Muslims here,” and “Even on their worst day, the Israelis act with greater care and compassion and self-criticism than Muslim combatants have anywhere, ever.”

One passage of particular interest is when Harris describes how “Muslims”—He doesn’t designate a specific organization. A crucial feature of essentialist narratives—“have committed suicide bombings, only to send another bomber to the hospital to await the causalities—where they then blow up all the injured along with the doctors and nurses trying to save their lives.” In military parlance, these kinds of attacks are called “double taps”, a clear sign that the culprit is engaged in terrorist atrocities. It’s therefore of special interest that Harris has no words to condemn President Obama, who also engages in double taps in his international drone assassination program. The UK-based Bureau of Investigative Journalism has carried out meticulous analysis of this grotesque policy in multiple reports.

If one does a search through Harris’ blog one can only find one passing reference to drone strikes and it’s quite instructive, not only because of its brevity but also its content. On the necessity of drone strikes in Pakistan Harris writes “Yes, our drone strikes in Pakistan kill innocent people—and this undoubtedly creates new enemies for the West. But we wouldn’t need to drop a single bomb on Pakistan, or anywhere else, if a death cult of devout Muslims weren’t making life miserable for millions of innocent people and posing an unacceptable threat of violence to open societies.” Just two months prior to this statement from Harris (August 2013) the Bureau of Investigative Journalism released a report which stated “Across seven attacks, reports suggested the [CIA] had deliberately targeted a mosque with worshipers inside; to have targeted funeral prayers for a victim of a previous strike; and on six occasions, to have deliberately targeted people going to rescue victims and retrieve the dead from the scene of an earlier attack – a tactic also known as a ‘double-tap’ strike.”

As a thought experiment, suppose Islamic State leader Abu Bakr al-Baghdadi responded to criticism of IS by saying “Yes, our fighters behead journalists and this undoubtedly creates new enemies for the Islamic State. But we wouldn’t need to behead a single journalist from the United States, or anywhere else, if a death cult of patriotic Americans weren’t making life miserable for millions of innocent Muslims and posing an unacceptable threat of violence to Muslim societies.” Even if all of al-Baghdadi’s claims were accepted as true—that the US was making life miserable for millions of Muslims—no rational person would accept such a statement as legitimate because it justifies the murder of innocent people. Yet this elementary moral observation is jettisoned when the security of Harris’ “open society” is under threat. Here Harris is endorsing policies which, by his own admission, “kill innocent people” (in fact, kill innocent people in a way strikingly similar to suicide bombers). Perhaps the “moral imbalance” between “Muslims” and “us” is not disturbed by these outbursts of mass murder because the perpetrator of these unspeakable crimes cannot be accused of religious fanaticism or Islamic “dogmatism”, a “psychopathology” exclusive to those with “frontal lobe anomalies.” We also must scrupulously avoid the fact that Obama consults the “just war” doctrines of Christian theologian St. Augustine to put a nice “civilized” gloss on his murders.

What Harris and other like-minded commentators have failed to do is recognize the transparently political character of the violence carried out by those who the US condemns as enemies. Makerere University professor Mahmood Mamdani articulated this reality in his book Good Muslim, Bad Muslim. “Suicide bombing,” Mamdani notes “needs to be understood as a feature of modern political violence rather than stigmatized as a mark of barbarism.” As these samples of imperial apologetics illustrate, Harris would much rather decry the savage “barbarism” of “Muslims” than investigate the roots of this violence or, more importantly, the violence carried out by the so-called leaders of his own country. Such hypocrisy reveals a commitment to power systems that rises above mere tribalism. This is state worship as a “genuine metaphysical principle.”

Sources: 

Good Muslim, Bad Muslim: America, the Cold War, and the Roots of Terror by Mahmood Mamdani

Going to Tehran: Why America Must Accept the Islamic Republic of Iran by Flyntt and Hillary Mann Leverett 

http://www.samharris.org/blog/item/why-dont-i-criticize-israel

http://www.samharris.org/blog/item/no-ordinary-violence

http://www.nytimes.com/1987/07/05/world/human-wave-raid-losses-iran-s-favor.html

http://www.thebureauinvestigates.com/2013/08/01/get-the-data-the-return-of-double-tap-drone-strikes/

http://www.foreignpolicy.com/articles/2013/08/25/secret_cia_files_prove_america_helped_saddam_as_he_gassed_iran

http://www.salon.com/2014/09/06/richard_dawkins_sam_harris_and_atheists_ugly_islamophobia_partner/

The “Newspaper of Record” Gives Mike Brown an Imperial Eulogy

This. Is. Bullshit. Can @NYTimes or @Sulliview explain why anyone who buys the Times should continue to do so? pic.twitter.com/F037gGLVeF

— Africa is a Country (@AfricasaCountry) August 25, 2014

“Throughout history, the powers of single Black men flash here and there like falling stars, and die sometimes before the world rightly gauged their brightness.”
—W.E.B. Dubois, The Souls of Black Folk (1903)

New York Times journalist John Eligon has come under intense scrutiny after he published a profile of slain Missouri teen Mike Brown in which he declared he was “no angel.” Several reports have since been published critical of this description. This report from Vox is of particular significance as it exposes some of the persistent double standards that have long been a part of American media discourse when it comes to how they treat white killers as compared to Black victims.

But more troubling than this one line is the overall theme of Eligon’s piece. As the Columbia Journalism Review aptly noted in their critique of the piece, “Given the circumstances, it’s an easy jump to suggesting that Brown is at least partly responsible for his fate.” This phenomenon of victim blaming, what MIT professor John Tirman calls “victim derogation”, is a central aspect of how Black people, particularly young Black men, are viewed within the US. A simple Google query shows just how pernicious this worldview is. Below are photographs of what Google autofills when one types in the names of three highly recognizable Black teenagers slain by white men followed by the word “was.” The results are revealing as they are instructive:

Notice that each of the Black victims, with the exception of Mike Brown, who shares the name of a NBA coach, is described as a “thug.” The fact that there is no information to substantiate these claims is of little importance. The mere fact that they were Black and male suffices. In contrast, when one carries out a Google query using the names of white killers the results are radically different. Here are the results when one types in the names Jared Loughner, Timothy McVeigh, and James Holmes:

Strikingly, two of these well-known killers are described as “heroes” despite the fact that they did nothing heroic. Other names of white killers produce similar results. For example, the Sikh Temple killer and Neo-Nazi Wade Michael Page is also a “hero” along with the Norwegian terrorist Anders Breivik.

As transparent as this double standard is, some still stand by Eligon’s article. New York Times Public Editor Margaret Sullivan described Eligon’s report as “solid and thorough.” The limit of her critique was that perhaps the timing of the publication was “not ideal” and the choice of words was “a blunder”, a severe understatement.  Meanwhile, Eligon attempted to defend his choice by saying his profile of Brown was a “mostly positive picture”, sharply conflicting with CJR’s observation (which I find more accurate) that “the posthumous profile [focused] overwhelmingly on [Brown’s] personal problems.” Indeed, Eligon focused so singularly on Mike Brown’s “problems” that he mentioned his alleged drug use twice without adding any new information.

In the fifth paragraph he acknowledges that Brown “dabbled in drugs and alcohol.” Then, in the third to last paragraph, he repeats exactly the same point, writing “[Brown] occasionally smoked marijuana and drank alcohol, according to friends.” Perhaps this can be attributed to poor editing or a lack of proofreading, but the effect indisputably elevates this particular claim about Brown over and above some of the more “positive” traits. And the New York Times national editor Allison Mitchell only worsened the official response, assuring readers “There was certainly no hint that this poor young man should have been shot” (note the condescending choice of words: “poor young man”).

Aside from these claims, I personally received a message from the New York Times Labor Correspondent Steven Greenhouse. After posting a Tweet that Eligon’s profile was “the best” he had read of Mike Brown I responded that his statement was “disappointing” and “shameful.” Greenhouse then reinforced his previous assertion, saying that he appreciated the profile because he thought it was “a smart, sympathetic profile that captured whole person, warts & all.” Additionally, “It showed he did well despite huge obstacles.” Quite apart from Greenhouse’s characterization, Eligon’s piece was not “smart” or “sympathetic.”

@Xav711–I thought it was a smart, sympathetic profile that captured whole person, warts & all. It showed he did well despite huge obstacles

— Steven Greenhouse (@greenhousenyt) August 25, 2014

If we are to be honest, Eligon’s profile perpetuated some of the most toxic stereotypes about Black people—violent, marijuana smokers, “vulgar”, thieves, academically below average—in a way that most would find utterly appalling were it applied to someone with power. It’s worth noting the New York Times is the same newspaper that took years to begin calling the crime against humanity that is torture “torture.” But when a young Black man is ruthlessly murdered by a white police officer it only takes a few weeks before he is very matter-of-factly described as “no angel.” Whether conscious or not (I think it’s conscious) this double standard nurtures deeply ingrained prejudices which allow atrocities like the Mike Brown murder to continue with impunity.

Perhaps this is why in a recent study it was revealed that whites generally felt that the Mike Brown investigation was “going fine.” According to a poll published in Vox “there is a huge racial gap in the public’s perception of events in Ferguson.” While 52% of white respondents expressed a “great deal” or a “fair amount” of “confidence” in the Mike Brown shooting investigation only 18% of Black respondents held this view. More revealingly, while 65% of Black respondents said the police in Ferguson “went too far” in their response to the popular protests only 33% of white respondents held this view.

These results are not accidental, but they are the rational outcome of a media industry that systematically undervalues Black life as dispensable or criminally suspect. Interestingly, this is the same ideology at work in Israel-Palestine. When Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu falsely condemned Hamas for using “telegenic” corpses he was attempting to undermine any sympathy for Palestinians.  The New York Times, and other media outlets, produce these degrading profiles of Black victims for the same reason. Just in case anyone had the unacceptable thought that Mike Brown’s life mattered, it was necessary to remind readers he was “no angel.”

It’s difficult to conceive of a journalistic decision more insidious than this because not only does it advance bigoted views, but the bigotry is being directed at someone who cannot even defend themselves. It has become the norm that when dealing with the murder of young Black men and women at the hands of white vigilantes and cops the victim must die twice. First their physical person is killed and then, with equal venom, it’s necessary to kill their character. This was done to Trayvon Martin, Sean Bell, Jordan Davis, Renisha McBride, Oscar Grant and many others. Consequently, the legal convention of “presumption of innocence” is revised for Black victims. For Black victims there’s a presumption of guilt. One’s innocence must be proven.

Margaret Sullivan may prefer to disingenuously refer to this character assassination of Mike Brown as a “blunder”—incidentally, this is the same soft language used to describe the illegal invasion of Iraq—but for those who have been condemned to suffer the cruelty of this system, a system thoroughly permeated with myths of white supremacy and Black inferiority, a different characterization comes to mind. The great sociologist and revolutionary W.E.B. Dubois articulated the predicament of Black people in America in devastatingly precise terms. In his seminal text The Souls of Black Folk he states “The history of the American Negro is the history of this strife—this longing to attain self-conscious manhood, to merge this double self into a better and truer self.” Dubois then presciently adds “he simply wishes to make it possible for a man to be both a Negro and an American, without being cursed and spit upon by his fellows, without having the doors of Opportunity closed roughly in his face.”

Now that Mike Brown has had “the doors of Opportunity closed roughly in his face” the Newspaper of Record has taken up the ignoble task of “cursing” and “spitting” on him. This is how imperial societies eulogize the unpeople trapped within their internal colonies and the New York Times has graphically demonstrated how the colonizers will exert their authority over their subjects everywhere, even into the grave.

Sources: 

The Souls of Black Folk by W.E.B. Dubois

http://www.nytimes.com/2014/08/25/us/michael-brown-spent-last-weeks-grappling-with-lifes-mysteries.html?hp&action=click&pgtype=Homepage&version=HpSumSmallMedia&module=photo-spot-region&region=photo-spot&WT.nav=photo-spot&_r=1

http://www.vox.com/xpress/2014/8/18/6031577/pew-poll-on-ferguson-racial-disparity

http://www.vox.com/xpress/2014/8/25/6066343/new-york-times-michael-brown-no-angel?utm_medium=social&utm_source=facebook&utm_name=share-button&utm_campaign=vox&utm_content=article-share-bottom

http://m.cjr.org/303546/show/be20fc4b28cfd67a5755382e9821bfec/

http://mobile.nytimes.com/blogs/publiceditor/2014/08/25/an-ill-chosen-phrase-no-angel-brings-a-storm-of-protest/

Retail Realpolitik: Washington, The “Just God”, & The Islamic State in Iraq

It’s standard for powerful states to justify the most egregious of crimes by cloaking it in obscure terminology. Torture becomes “enhanced interrogation”, kidnapping is “extraordinary rendition”, and civilian casualties are “collateral damage.” While moderate criminals limit themselves to mere terms, more ambitious crooks embrace entire schools of thought to legitimize their behavior. Take for example what’s called in international affairs scholarship realpolitik. Realpolitik proposes that “foreign policy ought not to be driven by the demands for justice,” and that “a society’s principles, no matter how deep-rooted or heartfelt, [have] to be compromised in the name of international stability.” These are the words of Princeton University political scientist Gary J. Bass in his description of Henry Kissinger. Kissinger employed this concept in his backing of the Pakistani genocide in East Bengal, one of his lesser known contributions to global “stability.”

Perhaps no other doctrine has been applied with as much consistency and rigor and this one. President Obama’s policies in the Middle East offer a textbook example. While providing support to “rebel factions” in Syria, he has authorized airstrikes against the closely associated Islamic State in Iraq. The consequences of these policies have been gruesome. One effect was graphically portrayed in the murder of Global Post journalist James Foley. Captured in Syria in 2012, Foley was beheaded by a member of the Islamic State. According to the killer, the murder was carried out in retaliation against the Obama administration’s decision to bomb Iraq after news surfaced that Iraqi Yazidis, driven from their homes by IS terror, were under siege atop Sinjar mountain.

“No just God would stand for what they did yesterday or every single day,” intoned Obama after receiving news of Foley’s murder. Without a doubt, IS has amply demonstrated their capacity for cruelty and indifference but this is obvious. Less obvious is how they arrived at this point and, furthermore, if Washington shares any responsibility in their rise. This deeply disturbing connection between US policy in the Middle East and the proliferation of sub-state terror has a long history. In symbolic terms, this connection could be discerned in Foley’s attire at the time of his execution. As the New York Times acknowledged in a recent report, “the video shows the journalist kneeling in a desert landscape, clad in an orange jumpsuit — an apparent reference to the uniforms worn by prisoners at the American military detention camp in Guantánamo Bay, Cuba.”

Aside from its transparent illegality, the existence of the Guantanamo Bay prison camp has long been recognized as a “recruitment tool” for terrorism. So unavoidable is this reality that even conservative outlets like the Council on Foreign Relations concede this. In a 2010 “expert roundup” report there was unanimous agreement on this fact. William Yeomans of the Washington College of Law described the prison as “a powerful recruiting tool for terrorists,” adding that a decision not to close the prison “would be calamitous.” Four years have passed since the publication of this report and 149 prisoners (more than half of them cleared for release) remain caged in this penal colony far outside the bounds of international law. And this isn’t the only case of the Obama administration consciously pursuing policies which escalate the threat of terrorism. For years, the Obama administration has ignored statements, even by those within his administration, that his drone assassination program—a campaign of international terrorism unparalleled in global affairs—is heightening the threat of terrorism.

In his penetrating study Obama and the Middle East: the End of America’s Moment? London School of Economics International Relations professor Fawaz Gerges states that “the Obama administration has so far been unwilling to acknowledge the link between escalation of hostilities in Afghanistan and Pakistan and the rising incidence of homegrown radicalization.” When the so-called Times Square bomber cited the Obama administration’s drone campaign as the reason for his attempt to set off a bomb in New York CIA chief John Brennan (then White House counterterrorism adviser) “dismissed the notion,” and “argued that the suspect was ‘captured by the murderous rhetoric of Al Qaeda and TTP [Tehrik-e-Taliban Pakistan] that looks at the United States as an enemy.'” Meanwhile, “in private deliberations, according to Bob Woodward, Obama’s national security team [appeared] to be aware that their policy in Afghanistan and Pakistan [helped] fuel radicalization and terrorism.” Even Pakistani activist Malala Yousafzai, in one of her more overlooked statements, addressed this dangerous linkage when she visited Obama in the White House. Incidentally, these crimes, unlike those of IS, received the blessing of Washington’s deity , presumably because the author of these atrocities internalized the “just war” doctrines of St. Augustine prior to engaging in acts of terror that that have left approximately 3,800 dead in Pakistan alone.
Given this sordid history of terror-generating policies, it’s not the least bit surprising that the New York Times published a story on August 10 headlined US Actions in Iraq Fueled the Rise of a Rebel. Writing on the ascendancy of the Islamic State leader Abu Bakr al-Baghdadi, the Times observed “most of the political changes that fueled his fight, or led to his promotion, were born directly from some American action.” This is but one of many reports highlighting the troubling intersection between US military aggression and the growth of subnational terror. While Global Post journalist Lauren Dean stated IS “was born out of a security vacuum left by the 2003 American invasion”, UK investigative journalist Robert Fisk described the brutality of IS as “the epic violence which our invasion unleashed.” Anyone serious about reversing the influence of IS would not dismiss these reports.

For example, no serious person would look at the US-instigated terror drowning the entire region in blood and urge “sudden”, “swift”, and “surgical” strikes against IS, but this is precisely what retired General John Allen called for in a recent piece published in Defense One. Portraying IS as a grave threat to America and Europe, General Allen implored the Obama administration to act “NOW” (he actually used all capital letters. A tell-tale sign of intellectual sobriety). Moreover, this military action would not limit itself to Iraq. It also would extend to Syria, “a failed state neither capable of acting as a sovereign entity nor deserving the respect of one.” Contrarily, the United States—the “greatest threat to world peace” according to a recent WIN/Gallup poll—is not a “failed state,” but “remains the only nation on the planet capable of exerting the kind of strategic leadership, influence and strike capacity,” to eradicate the IS “scourge.” Consequently, the UN initiative to provide technical support to the Iraqi government to aid imperiled Yazidis atop Sinjar Mountain is, as Gen. Allen describes the border between Syria and Iraq, “irrelevant.” Equally irrelevant is the analysis of distinguished scholars like Flynt Leverett. Appearing on Background Briefing with Ian Masters he remarked that “nothing will rehabilitate [ISIS] like being bombed by the United States.”

This clear record of the US instigating rather than diffusing terror is rarely, if ever, highlighted in the pages of the “free press.” Instead the public is treated with alarmist descriptions of a “the most despicable band of barbarians to plague the world since the Khmer Rouge.” Los Angeles Times columnist David Horsey used these terms to describe IS, a group that has inflicted such extreme levels of violence that “a comparison to the Nazis” would not be “an exaggeration.” Conversely, he describes the US invasion of Iraq—the “supreme crime” of military aggression under the standard of the Nuremberg Tribunal—as a “misguided and frustrating occupation” and a “past mistake.” Notice the problem with the occupation was not that it killed over half a million Iraqis while turning hundreds of thousands of others into refugees. Rather, it was the “frustration” of the occupiers unable to subdue a population by force, a standard view within the American intellectual class.

Quite apart from a “misguided” war, the assault on Iraq was a carefully guided and deliberate war crime. The horrors unfolding in Iraq cannot be properly understood unless this elementary reality is first acknowledged.  It’s worth recalling that Obama hailed the invasion of Iraq as a war that left the country “to its own people.” Omitted from this statement was the long record of state-terror the US has inflicted on Iraq from bombings under the First Gulf War, to the genocidal sanctions of the 1990s, to the 2003 invasion and subsequent destruction of Iraq’s central government. With the commencement of this aerial bombing campaign, Obama has opened another chapter in Washington’s multi-decade torture session of Iraqis. It shouldn’t require stating, but aerial bombing will only exacerbate the nightmare that has enveloped the region. The actions of the Obama administration are not only illegal—he authorized air strikes in violation of the War Powers Act and the UN Charter—but they evade viable, peaceful alternatives that would significantly lower the risk of more violence.

Perhaps this is just another iteration of presidential “realism.” As Harvard University scholar Stephen Walt stated in a recent article which appeared in Foreign Policy magazine “[Obama’s] style as president resembles Marlon Brando’s Don Corleone and Al Pacino’s Michael Corleone in many ways. They don’t make many threats, they never bluster, and they rarely raise their voices. But when the time comes, they dispatch opponents with remorseless indifference and pay little attention to who might get hurt in the process. ‘It’s not personal; it’s strictly business.'” Likewise, IS murdered James Foley with “remorseless indifference.” Moreover, they paid “little attention to who might get hurt in the process.” Did not the “cancer” of IS merely emulate, in a less sophisticated form, the “realpolitik” of their despised foe albeit in a more “personal” fashion? Why then are we rightfully appalled by their heinous crimes, but coldly silent about our own? Perhaps these questions will be contemplated by the more honest among us who remain unconvinced by the harsh moral judgments of President Corleone’s “just God.”

Sources:

Obama and the Middle East: The End of America’s Moment? by Fawaz Gerges

The Blood Telegram: Nixon, Kissinger, and a Forgotten Genocide by Gary J. Bass

http://www.cfr.org/human-rights/should-guantanamo-bay-closed/p21247

http://www.thebureauinvestigates.com/category/projects/drones/drones-graphs/

http://www.nytimes.com/2014/08/11/world/middleeast/us-actions-in-iraq-fueled-rise-of-a-rebel.html?_r=0

http://www.nytimes.com/2014/08/20/world/middleeast/isis-james-foley-syria-execution.html?_r=0

http://goingtotehran.com/flynt-leverett-on-iraqi-politics-iranian-iraqi-relations-and-how-to-think-about-the-islamic-state

http://www.globalpost.com/dispatch/news/regions/middle-east/140820/why-the-islamic-state-still-so-strong

http://www.defenseone.com/ideas/2014/08/gen-allen-destroy-islamic-state-now/92012/

http://www.mcclatchydc.com/2013/10/11/205176/obama-and-first-lady-meet-with.html

https://www.aclu.org/national-security/guantanamo-numbers

http://www.salon.com/2014/01/09/the_top_4_threats_to_global_peace_guess_who_is_number_one_partner/

http://www.independent.co.uk/voices/comment/middle-east-crisis-we-know-all-too-much-about-the-cruelty-of-isis–but-all-too-little-about-who-they-are-9681873.html

http://www.foreignpolicy.com/articles/2014/08/19/is_barack_obama_more_of_a_realist_than_i_am_stephen_m_walt_iraq_russia_gaza?utm_content=buffer23543&utm_medium=social&utm_source=facebook.com&utm_campaign=buffer

http://www.huffingtonpost.com/robert-naiman/obama-iraq-air-strikes_b_5662055.html

http://www.washingtonpost.com/blogs/post-politics/wp/2014/03/26/obama-defends-iraq-invasion-a-little/

http://www.democracynow.org/2014/8/8/as_us_air_strikes_in_iraq

Dismantling the Fiction of “Black Criminality”

Among the many unavoidable facts that have bubbled to the surface since the murder of Mike Brown at the hands of St. Louis police is the deep racial character of the killing and the equally racial character of the police response to the popular protests that followed it. This uncontroversial fact can be perceived in the abundance of media reports exploring the dimensions of Black life in America. One of the more glaring additions to this national discussion occurred on the popular Sunday morning political program Meet the Press. Hosting a round-table on the topic of the “Racial Divide in America,” Jason Riley of the Wall Street Journal remarked that we shouldn’t “pretend that our morgues and cemeteries are full of young Black men because cops are shooting them.” Rather, Riley argued, “the reality is that it’s because other Black people are shooting them and we need to talk about Black criminality.” The two white guests silently nodded in approval, granting Riley’s comment a level of legitimacy it did not deserve. Aside from the clearly degrading and dehumanizing nature of this statement, it has absolutely no basis in fact.

Anyone with a minimal level of intellectual curiosity and a mild tolerance for empirical data (admittedly, an intimidating task for America’s leading cultural managers) would have noticed this. Writing for the Daily Beast, journalist Jamelle Bouie observed that quite apart from some innate drive to kill (the “thug” mythology), internecine killings among Black people can be attributed to the geographic “proximity” of Black communities and the chronic lack of socioeconomic “opportunity.” Further, “racial exclusivity was also true for white victims of violent crime”: “86% of white victims were killed by white offenders.” Bouie also highlighted the crucial reality that “while it’s true that young Black men are a disproportionate share of the nation’s murder victims, it’s hard to disentangle this from the stew of hyper-segregation (often a result of deliberate policies), entrenched poverty, and non-existent economic opportunities that characterizes a substantial number of black communities.”

Given the transparent absurdity of this myth of “Black criminality”, one would think empirical analysis of this kind would suffice. Nonetheless, this myth and its many analogues cannot be meaningfully debunked unless that empirical critique is coupled with a critique of the ideological prejudices on which they are based. Moreover, these cultural stereotypes are not exclusive to domestic politics. They arise in international affairs as well. As Columbia University political scientist Mahmood Mamdani observed in his brilliant study Good Muslims, Bad Muslims “the history of the modern state can also be read as the history of race, bringing together the stories of two kinds of victims of European colonial modernity: the internal victims of state building and the external victims of imperial expansion.” Accordingly, within the dominant discourses about oppressed communities (Black “thugs”, Arab “terrorists”, Mexican “illegals”, etc.) there exists a sharp ideological continuity in the empire’s portrayal of the inhabitants of its internal and external colonies. That ideological continuity consists of three basic components:

1.) Excise the decisive role of the oppressors in stimulating retail violence through policies of wholesale state-violence.

The “Black criminality” myth and its analogues cannot be sustained unless the role of the oppressor is hidden from view. The violence and misery in oppressed communities is supposed to be the product of “bad culture” or “corrupted values”, not the rational outcome of social and economic policies consciously designed to dispossess and disenfranchise an entire group of people. A graphic illustration of this understanding can be found in the mainstream discussion about the Israeli occupation of Palestinian territory. The typical line goes that Israel, the benevolent guardian, “granted” Palestinians territory in Gaza, but Palestinians, due to their backwardness and insolence, squandered this gift and transformed what could have been a shining example of prosperity into a “haven for terrorists.” As NYU Law Professor Thane Rosenbaum asked in a Haaretz article “Unoccupied for nearly a decade, why do Gaza’s people know little else aside from explosives and martyrdom?”

Systematically omitted from this highly deceitful narrative is the fact that Palestinians in Gaza, unlike populations in US-backed petromonarchies, were able to choose their leadership in a democratic election. Furthermore, and this is a crucial fact, the Bush administration punished Palestinians for this crime of democracy. Also excluded from this fairy tale is the suffocating state of siege that Israel refuses to lift, despite clear requirements to do so under international law. Israel is free to control Gaza’s airspace, borders, territorial waters, electromagnetic spectrum, and even the calories that Gazans are allowed to consume (what Israeli official Dov Weinglass chillingly calls “keeping Gaza on a diet”). Rarely is any of this mentioned as a precipitating factor behind Hamas “rocket” attacks. Like Jason Riley’s mythology of “Black criminality”, the Israeli government relies on the mythology of “Islamic terrorism” or Palestinian “child sacrifice”, as author Elie Wiesel described the Israeli murder of Palestinian children in one of his more appreciated hasbara soup recipes.

Other examples of this norm can be found in the US discourse on sectarianism in Iraq. When Islamic State factions moved into northern Iraq commentators were quick to reduce the internal bloodshed to “ancient hatreds”, which had been simmering just below the surface for over a thousand years. This orientalist narrative has been thoroughly debunked by journalist Murtaza Hussain, nonetheless it persists as a potent explanation of Arab “barbarism.” Any reference to the fact that the Bush administration’s criminal invasion of Iraq in 2003 and the subsequent destruction of the Baathist government elicited the sectarian violence is beneath serious consideration in mainstream circles as is the uncontroversial fact that the Obama administration, quite apart from leaving Iraq “to its own people”, was forced out of Iraq after the Maliki government refused to grant the US legal immunity (seriously undercutting claims of US “benevolence”).

2.) Concoct frightening fairy tales about a uniquely nefarious threat with an added racial/religious label or insinuation.

Here propagandists are given free rein to let their imagination run wild. Frightening stories about the evil deeds of a domestic or foreign enemy are concocted to mold the minds of the public into the required shape. As in the first component, Israel excels in this field as well. When Israel commenced its latest round of “mowing the grass” (a euphemism for killing innocent men, women and children) it was necessary to produce elaborate horror stories, all of which were baseless, about the “terror tunnels” that Hamas fighters use to inflict death and destruction on Israeli citizens. “Israelis exchange nightmare scenarios that are the stuff of action movies: armed enemies popping up under a day care center or a dining room, spraying a crowd with machine gun fire or maybe some chemical, exploding in a suicide belt or snatching captives and ducking back into the dirt.” These are the haunting words of New York Times Jerusalem Bureau Chief Jodi Rudoren, a journalist who, in addition to producing vulgar propaganda of this kind, reserves little, if any, time for Palestinians, plausibly because she’s too busy hanging out with imperial cheerleaders like the Anti-Defamation League’s Abe Foxman.

One can document endless examples this culture of demonization from Thomas Jefferson’s condemnation of “merciless Indian savages” to 19th century hysteria surrounding the “Yellow Peril” of Chinese immigrants. In the case of the Yellow Peril, political officials received ample assistance from the intellectual community, foremost Jack London, who envisioned exterminating the entire population of China via bacteriological warfare—“the great task, the sanitation of China”—in his novel The Unparalleled Invasion. Nearly two decades prior to the publication of this genocidal fantasy the Chinese Exclusion Act was passed, effectively banning Chinese immigration. Rutgers University cultural historian H. Bruce Franklin examined this phenomenon of anti-Chinese hysteria in his penetrating study War Stars: The Superweapon and the American Imagination, writing “the snarling racism of the Yellow Peril literature expresses cultural furies that have shaped the ugliest features of American history,” among them the “savage exploitation of ‘coolie’ labor.” At bottom, this language of fear is designed to neutralize any sympathy for the victims of state-corporate power, thus clearing the way for their oppressors to commence the required task of “taming” the unpeople within the empire’s domestic colonies.

3.) Display how much you are overflowing with compassion for the victims of the fratricide.

While the erasure of the oppressors role in the creation of crises and the construction of frightening narratives certainly probes the depths of moral depravity, the third component of this mythology is arguably the most insidious. In addition to maintaining a situation where the role of the oppressor is concealed from view, the feigning of compassion for the victims of fratricidal violence is consciously carried out in order to elevate the oppressor to a moral plane over and above the oppressed. The violence of the oppressor, under this mode of thought, attains a “moral character” (the IDF is the most “moral army in the world”, America is “exceptional”, etc).  As a result, the oppressor is not only blameless for the suffering of the oppressed but their standard of morality hovers so far above that of the victim that their compassion, unable to be contained, extends just as easily to those outside their group. Embedded in this construct is a racist assumption that people of color are so tribalistic and obsessively attached  to their racial identity that any act of murder within their group is irrefutable proof that they are savages. The most common illustration of this doctrine can be found in the regular refrain among the Washington elite about disobedient leaders in foreign countries who kill “their own people.” For instance, the violence of Saddam Hussein was perfectly understandable (if loathed) when it was portrayed as being directed at “westerners” but when he used poison gas against Iraq’s Kurdish population this marked the height of savagery. Unlike violence toward “western” leaders, here he was killing “his own people”, which in the racist mind resonates like watching a warthog kill another warthog or an ape killing another ape. Killing within the group, according to this logic, is the supreme transgression of the tribal norm.
Notice how conspicuously absent this doctrine is when the fratricide is occurring within predominately white countries. Take for example the violence in the Ukraine. How many commentators described the violence between pro-Russian and pro-Ukrainian factions as Ukrainians or Russians killing “their own people”? Incidentally, that phrase would be more appropriate here since both Russians and Ukrainians are of the same race, namely white. This could not be said of Saddam Hussein (an Arab) gassing Kurds (not Arabs).

And political elites in Washington are by no means alone in using this “he-kills-his-own-people” tactic. Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu also indulged this doctrine in a recent speech. Responding to news that the United Nation’s launched an inquiry into Israeli war crimes carried out in Gaza during Operation Protective Edge, he ridiculed the UN committee for “giving legitimacy to murderous terror organizations like Hamas and the Islamic State.” “Instead of checking Hamas’ attacks on Israeli civilians and the use it makes of Gaza’s residents as human shields, instead of checking the massacre carried out by (President) Assad in Syria, or the massacre of Kurds by Islamic State members, the UN has decided to come and check Israel.” He continued by saying the UN committee should “go see the Syrian army,” where “they will find war crimes.”

Much like Jason Riley, who abhors “Black-on-Black crime”, Netanyahu focuses, laser-like, only on those conflicts where the violence is Arab-on-Arab. Even in the case of Hamas he made sure to note that Hamas uses the people of Gaza as “human shields.” Incidentally, it’s Israel, not Hamas, that has a history of using Palestinians as human shields. Israel also uses Palestinians as guinea pigs for their hi-tech weaponry courtesy of US tax dollars. Through this discourse of Palestinian infamy the specter of the Arab “terrorist” looms large alongside that of the Black “thug.” Anyone who objects to their liquidation under the guardianship of their moral superiors can be written off as hopelessly ignorant or utterly oblivious to why the “morgue” is really full of “young Black men” and Palestinian “terrorists.”

Generally, it’s quite easy to erupt in hysterics when confronted with violence among the oppressed. Self-reflection has always been anathema to power systems. This refusal to look in the mirror isn’t entirely irrational as serious interrogation would inevitably render these myths obsolete and undermine the very power systems that they were formulated to defend. The fact that Jason Riley could utter these patent falsehoods despite the color of his skin is a dramatic testament to just how dangerously intoxicating these fictions remain. Still, they don’t have to be accepted. Other lies have been overcome. We no longer nod in approval to descriptions of America’s indigenous population as “merciless Indian savages” nor would we remain silent in the face of racist descriptions of Chinese immigration as an ominous “Yellow Peril.” The same standard should be applied to the mirage of “Black criminality”, “Islamic terrorism”, “Mexican illegals” and other contemporary iterations of this doctrine. Such a level of intellectual honesty is demanded of those who genuinely empathize with the people of Ferguson County and the countless others in America’s colonies (internal and external) who share their tragic fate.

Sources:

Good Muslim, Bad Muslim: America, the Cold War, and the Roots of Terror by Mahmood Mamdani

War Stars: The Superweapon and the American Imagination by H. Bruce Franklin

http://www.haaretz.com/opinion/.premium-1.605297

http://www.thenation.com/article/180783/five-israeli-talking-points-gaza-debunked#

http://www.haaretz.com/mobile/1.610408

http://www.fair.org/blog/2014/06/24/time-on-iraq-war-what-did-we-do-to-deserve-this/

http://www.thedailybeast.com/articles/2013/07/15/the-trayvon-martin-killing-and-the-myth-of-black-on-black-crime.html

What if Mike Brown was Shot in Kiev?

Since the slaying of Missouri teenager Mike Brown at the hands of St. Louis police, scenes of police brutality have dominated the news. Peaceful protesters have been met with overwhelming force in the form of tear gas canisters, armored police vehicles, and militarized police officers toting military grade weaponry. Writing for The Intercept, investigative journalist Glenn Greenwald put it in ominous terms: “Americans are now so accustomed to seeing police officers decked in camouflage and Robocop-style costumes, riding in armored vehicles and carrying automatic weapons first introduced during the US occupation of Baghdad, that it has become normalized.” At times like this it’s critical to examine presidential statements, not for reasons of policy—rhetoric and policy rarely, if ever, align—but because they provide valuable insight into the prevailing ideologies of power systems. Responding to these scenes of police brutality, President Obama proclaimed “Now is the time for peace … Now is the time for healing.” The Washington Post characterized this statement as an attempt to “strike a balance to calm tensions in the St. Louis suburb.” This has become a trademark of the Obama administration. Whenever there’s a legitimate struggle for justice, instead of siding with the demonstrators, Obama produces morally vacuous statements urging “restraint” and “calm.”

The Arab Spring protests provide one of the more recent examples of this pattern. During this revolt the Obama administration lined up squarely behind Hosni Mubarak while feigning “concern” for the non-violent demonstrators. Hillary Clinton even said the Egyptian dictator was “like family.” Given the routine nature of this practice, any deviation should stand out. Three deviations come to mind: the ongoing protests in Ukraine, the February 2014 protests in Venezuela, and the June 2009 protests in Iran. Quite apart from the equivocation and ambiguity that permeates Obama’s statements in response to protests against US-backed power, the Obama administration has vigorously denounced state violence against demonstrators in so-called enemy states.  When Ukrainian security officials forcefully responded to demonstrators in Kiev Obama did not mince words. In addition to saying the Ukrainian government was “primarily responsible” for the violence in Kiev, he stated “we expect the Ukrainian government to show restraint, to not resort to violence in dealing with peaceful protesters,” adding that Washington would be monitoring the events in Kiev “very closely” and there would be “consequences if people step over the line.” In reference to the protesters he stated “ultimately our interest is to make sure the Ukrainian people can express their own desires and we believe a large majority of Ukrainians are interested in an integration with Europe and the commerce and cultural exchanges that are possible for them to expand opportunity and prosperity.”

So not only did Obama side with the protesters in Kiev, but more importantly, he addressed their alleged grievances as legitimate. Furthermore, the demonstrators in Kiev were incomparably more violent than the citizens of Ferguson, Missouri. Russia scholar Stephen Cohen acknowledged the violence of the Kiev demonstrators in a Democracy Now! interview and condemned Obama for inciting social unrest. When asked to respond to Obama’s statement that the Ukrainian government was tasked with “the primary responsibility to prevent the kind of terrible violence that we’ve seen, to withdraw riot police, to work with the opposition to restore security and human dignity, and move the country forward,” Cohen unleashed:

Shame. Shame. He is saying that the responsibility for restoring peace is on the Ukrainian government, and it should withdraw its security forces from the streets. But let me ask you, if in Washington people throwing Molotov cocktails are marching on Congress—and these people are headed for the Ukrainian Congress—if these people have barricaded entrance to the White House and are throwing rocks at the White House security guard, would President Obama withdraw his security forces? … This incites, these kinds of statement that Obama made. It rationalizes what the killers in the streets are doing. It gives them Western license, because he’s not saying to the people in the streets, “Stop this, stop shooting policemen, stop attacking government buildings, sit down and talk.”

Contrast Obama’s incitement of Ukrainian violence with his words to demonstrators in Ferguson: “There is never an excuse for violence against police or for those who would use this tragedy as a cover for vandalism or looting.” Under this warped worldview it’s perfectly fine for Ukrainian demonstrators to use violence in an attempt to overthrow an elected government, but any show of force, irrespective of evidence, on the part of American citizens in the face of an unambiguously racist police force merits presidential condemnation. Similar statements were made during the massive demonstrations in Venezuela. When citizens from an overwhelmingly wealthy sector of the country rose up against the government of Nicholas Maduro Obama was quick to denounce the response of Venezuelan security forces as “unacceptable violence.” To rub salt in Maduro’s wounds, Obama added that Maduro’s government should stop “trying to distract from its own failings by making up false accusations against diplomats from the United States.” Moreover, Maduro was refusing to address the “legitimate grievances” of Venezuelan demonstrators (again invoking a standard of legitimacy that he chooses not to apply to Ferguson demonstrators.)
While the reactions to the protests in Kiev and Caracas were instructive, they pale in comparison to the most dramatic illustration of this double standard, namely the Obama administration’s response to the June 2009 protests in Iran, commonly cited as marking the rise of the so-called Green Movement. Obama Condemns Iran’s Iron Fist Against Protests read the New York Times headline. Not only did the Obama administration trot out the predictable clichés regarding Iranian “repression” and authoritarianism, but he omitted the now uncontroversial fact that there is zero evidence to substantiate the claim that the 2009 elections were rigged. International relations scholars Flynt and Hillary Mann Leverett dispelled this myth in their superb analysis of Iranian society Going to Tehran. Despite repeated claims within the US political class, opposition leader Mir-Hossein Mousavi “never substantiated any of his myriad accusations of electoral misconduct, though virtually all of them, if true, should have been easily documentable.” Among the charges brought against the Ahmadinejad government by Mousavi was that his electoral observers were unfairly treated. When the Iranian Guardian Council found that 5,016 of Mousavi’s 40,676 observers “were not registered because his campaign had ‘failed to provide the required documents,'” Mousavi was not only unable to refute the findings, but his campaign could not “identify a single registered observer who had been excluded from a station or a single station where observers had been excluded.”
Inconvenient facts of this kind, nevertheless, did not interfere with Obama’s mission to paint the incumbent government as a gang of crooks stealing an election. In comments that the New York Times characterized as “more forceful and less ambiguous,” President Obama made it known just how “appalled and outraged,” he was “by the threats, beatings and imprisonments of the past few days.” Additionally, he “praised what he called the courage and dignity of the demonstrators, especially the women who have been marching.” This sentiment was specifically directed at slain Iranian demonstrator Neda Soltani, recognized within US circles as a “martyr” for the movement. As the Leverett’s note, “barely seventy-two hours after her fatal shooting, the White House organized a press conference to give President Obama a platform to talk about her fate and, more broadly, to pivot toward a tougher rhetorical line regarding Iran.”

Contrarily, three days passed before the Obama administration issued a written statement on the murder of Mike Brown, a statement that didn’t even mention the fact that he was killed by the police. 48 hours after the publication of this written statement—a total of five entire days since Mike Brown was gunned down, approaching double the time it took him to rush, watery-eyed, to the podium to condemn Iranian violence—and he finally gave a public statement. Much like the written statement, Obama’s public statement made sure to surgically excise the decisive role of the police in the murder and the subsequent cover-up by withholding the suspected officer’s name. This effort to conceal uncontroversial facts was not lost on intrepid reporters like Kevin Gosztola, who astutely observed that “no specifics were given” in the speech and “his mention of Brown was surrounded by meaningless jargon.” As a result, Obama “could not even bring himself to acknowledge that Brown was shot and killed by police or that he was black and that the fact that he was black may have had something to do with why he was shot and killed …”

To the extent that Obama did criticize the actions of the police, they were confined to the way they “bullied” journalists, which, incidentally, is an awfully innocuous way to describe the indiscriminate launching of tear gas canisters at Al Jazeera reporters (place this alongside other state-terrorist colloquialisms like “we tortured some folks”). This is omitting the fact that President Obama condemning anyone for repressing journalists is the absolute peak of hypocrisy. Following Obama’s statement, the prestigious Columbia Journalism Review published a piece headlined Why Obama’s statement on reporters’ arrest in Ferguson is hypocritical. “Just minutes after the president finished his remarks, a coalition of journalism organizations at the National Press Club in Washington began a news conference condemning the Obama administration’s attempt to compel James Risen, a New York Times reporter, to identify a confidential source,” CJR reported. And Risen is by no means alone as a victim of the The Most Transparent Administration in History™. Doubtless, Obama’s statements in opposition to police “bullying” of journalists in Ferguson would resonate with Yemeni journalist Abdulelah Haider Shaye, who was “bullied” into a Yemeni prison by Washington’s Nobel Laureate after he had the gall to blow the whistle on one of his many drone strikes (acts of international terrorism) in southern Yemen. This particular strike killed 44 civilians (22 of which were children).

Overshadowing all of these unmentionable thoughts is an important question. Why such a double standard? The answer is obvious to any tenth-rate gangster, where this kind of behavior comes naturally. Official ideology requires that imperial leaders feign neutrality in the face of horrors for which they share responsibility. This facade of balance is strengthened through meaningless statements calling for “de-escalation” and “peaceful transitions.” Meanwhile, in the background, they’re supposed to enthusiastically cheerlead the violence by increasing diplomatic, ideological and material support for the aggressors. The recent Israeli massacres in Gaza provide a paradigmatic example of this doctrine at work. Conversely, when horrors unfold which cannot be traced back to Washington the same individual who before was urging “calm” and “de-escalation” miraculously transforms into a dedicated humanitarian whose conscience is repeatedly “shocked” and “outraged” by the oppression of others. On rare occasions, these real crimes can even elicit tears.

So as the militarized police force of St. Louis proceed in their macabre imitation of G.I. Joe, it’s worth asking what the reaction would be if Mike Brown was a citizen of Tehran, Caracas or Kiev. Would Obama be simply “heartbroken” by the “loss” of a “young man” or would he be “outraged” by the brutal murder of a “martyr” who had “legitimate grievances”? Would the violence be narrowly confined to the “bullying” of journalists or would he highlight where the overwhelming portion of the brutality is being directed, namely at the Black bodies of Ferguson County? What if Mike Brown was not Black? Suppose he was a white Ukrainian or a wealthy Venezuelan? Would that make a difference? What if Mike Brown was shot like a dog in the middle of Kiev?

Sources:

Going to Tehran: Why the United States Must Come to Terms with the Islamic Republic of Iran by Flynt Leverett and Hillary Mann Leverett

http://www.nytimes.com/2009/06/24/us/politics/24webobama.html?_r=0

http://www.washingtonpost.com/blogs/post-politics/wp/2014/02/19/obama-on-ukraine-there-will-be-consequences-if-people-step-over-the-line/

http://www.cjr.org/the_kicker/obama.php

http://dissenter.firedoglake.com/2014/08/14/president-obamas-statement-avoids-the-issue-of-militarized-police-in-ferguson/#.U-2z6ZdQI2N.facebook

http://www.whitehouse.gov/the-press-office/2014/08/12/statement-president-passing-michael-brown

https://xavierobrien.wordpress.com/2012/11/15/the-emperor-wears-no-clothes-neither-does-his-mistress-king-davids-not-so-sexy-crimes-against-humanity/

http://www.democracynow.org/2014/2/20/a_new_cold_war_ukraine_violence

http://www.latintimes.com/obama-condemns-unacceptable-violence-venezuela-153746

http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2014/08/14/al-jazeera-ferguson-tear-gas-journalists_n_5678081.html 

Restoring “Quiet” in Missouri’s Internal Colony

Since the brutal murder of Black teenager Michael Brown at the hands of St. Louis County police, there has been a great deal of popular protest and anger, all of which is entirely justified, directed at an institution of “law” enforcement that has systematically oppressed the local Black community. Latest reports show that even journalists have been arrested, one reporting “I’ve been afraid several times while reporting on the ground here in Ferguson.” While reports of this kind certainly provide an unvarnished picture of the arbitrary use of force by county police, it’s worth noting that buried beneath this climate of terror is a history of Black life in America that provides insight not only into historical understandings of race, but how these understandings reverberate in contemporary society.

Paul Finkelman’s scholarly review of the 1857 Supreme Court decision Dred Scott v. Sandford offers a revealing glimpse of this ignoble tradition. The Scott case, Finkelman observed, “symbolized the high point of racism in American law.” This “high point” was chillingly affirmed in the court ruling of 7 to 2, which declared that Scott, a former slave from northern Missouri, was to be denied freedom in opposition to the explicit mandate of the 1820 Missouri Compromise. Chief Justice Roger B. Taney was, by far, the most enthusiastic of the supporters for slavery, stating that the framers of the Declaration of Independence were “great men” who “perfectly understood the meaning of the language they used”, namely that “it would not in any part of the civilized world be supposed to embrace the negro race, which by common consent, had been excluded from civilized Governments and the family of nations, and doomed to slavery.”

Concurring opinions echoed Justice Taney in racist cruelty. Justice Peter V. Daniel, alarmed by the very prospect of free Black people, proclaimed “the African negro race never have been acknowledged as belonging to the family of nations,” and “the introduction of that race into every section of this country was not as members of a civil or political society, but as slaves, as property in the strictest sense of the term.” He continued by advocating the continuation of slavery as necessary for the “preservation of order and social existence.” Emancipation of slaves, Justice Daniel argued, was an illustration of “despotic” power enforced to “arbitrarily invade and derange [the] most deliberate and solemn ordinances.” Therefore, “the injustice and extravagance necessarily implied,” by the “supposition” of free Black people could not “be nationally imputed to the patriotic or the honest, or to those merely sane …” Translation: only an anti-American lunatic would endorse Black liberation.

These opinions live on in the ongoing plague of police violence perpetrated against Black people today. From the murder of Eric Garner to the recent killing of Michael Brown, the idea of autonomous Black people, free from the arbitrary force of State-corporate power, still resounds as a thought overflowing with “extravagance.” Consequently, it’s in no respect surprising to read a report of a Ferguson police officer refer to those who the media misleadingly calls “rioters” as “fucking animals.” This brand of dehumanization is standard in colonial societies. For example, former Israeli Prime Minister Manachem Begin was recorded to have described Palestinian Arabs as “two-legged beasts.” Another much more recent example is Prime Minister Netanyahu’s description of Hamas as “human animals.”

Accompanying this effort on the part of the police department to dehumanize the Black community is a media discourse that all but ensures that this deeply seated culture of racism never rises to the surface in any meaningful way. A paradigmatic example of this journalistic malpractice can be found on CNN, where a discussion was held about what “Black parents tell their sons.” While it’s perfectly fine to explore what Black parents teach their children to do when confronted by racist police officers, this framing completely ignores a much larger question–at least for those serious about reversing police terror and not accommodating it–namely what do white parents tell their sons. It’s simply taken for granted that racist police officers are free to unleash indiscriminate violence and terror on Black communities with absolute impunity.

Accordingly, no questions arise about what their parents told them as children or why American society, despite claims of “post-racialism”, consistently produces generation after generation of police departments that explicitly function as instruments of racial oppression. The plausible answer is that white supremacy, and its institutional expressions, is accepted as legitimate, hence it is above serious inquiry. How nicely this conforms with an overarching two-tiered “justice” system where due process is accorded based on one’s net worth as opposed to their basic humanity. As Glenn Greenwald astutely notes in his penetrating study of the US “justice” system With Liberty and Justice for Some, “one of the ugliest and most toxic aspects of the multi-tiered approach to justice is that those who suffer the most from it are, in extreme disproportion, racial minorities.” Moreover, “at current rates … one-third of all black males will go to prison during their lifetimes.” One would be hard pressed to find any of this in President Obama’s statement on the murder of Michael Brown, which impressively managed not to mention the fact that he was murdered by the police. Incidentally, this decision aligned neatly with previous episodes of moral detachment where another aggressor was insulated from serious public criticism.

If you just read Obama’s statement on the murder of #MikeBrown, you’d never know he was killed by police. pic.twitter.com/kYpf1MR7Qq

— homeland offense (@onekade) August 12, 2014

Much like the external colonies that the US military occupies and destroys abroad–Iraq and Afghanistan are two notable examples–a well managed empire also requires internal colonies and a domestic military (police departments) to suppress what Noam Chomsky accurately termed the “superfluous population”, “superfluous” because they contribute little to elite interests, particularly wealth accumulation. From the NYPD’s spying operations on New York’s Muslim communities and unlawful Stop and Frisk policies to outright murder, the contours of this colonial enterprise are becoming more and more visible. For far too long the Black community has been treated as a testing ground for the most structurally violent and oppressive policies in the so-called “industrialized world.” Even the UN highlighted the “enduring racial disparities in the [US] justice system, including large numbers of black prisoners serving longer sentences than whites”, “racial profiling by police, including the mass surveillance of Muslim communities by the New York police department”, and “segregation in schools,” in its latest human rights report.

Disgraceful realities of this kind highlight just how important a serious interrogation of white supremacy is in the wake of the Michael Brown murder. The refusal to punish–in this case even the refusal to release the identity of the officer who committed the killing–only reinforces this culture of immunity. In this culture the well known doctrine of deterrence is radically inverted. Typically, legal punishment is understood to be a deterrent to crime, but separate standards are invoked for the powerful. For the powerful punishment does not deter crime, but crime, when carried out with sufficient wealth and institutional backing, deters punishment. This is why it would never occur to CNN to ask what white parents tell their sons. Such questions, by elementary imperial logic, are patently absurd because it’s not white, but Black communities that need to change, specifically Black communities that fail to submit quietly to Justice Taney’s ruling that “civilized society” is not “supposed to embrace the negro race.”

Following the Dred Scott decision, the Kansas-Nebraska Act was passed, effectively “[repealing] part of the Missouri Compromise, by allowing settlers in much of the Great Plains territories to decide for themselves if they wanted slavery”; basically, affirming the pro-slavery argument that emancipation was an unjust encroachment on states-rights (the position of Justice Samuel Nelson). Even after the Civil War, which led to the formal abolition of slavery, America’s Black population was re-enslaved in a brutal convict-lease system whereby “convicted people were ‘leased’ by the government to work without pay for private corporations, allowing both government and the owners to rake in exorbitant profits.” Scholar Eugene Puryear documents this phenomenon in expert detail in his book Shackled and Chained noting that “corporate prison bosses, who had acquired their Black labor on the cheap, were more willing to beat, work and starve them to death than the slave-owners decades earlier who invested large sums in their human property.”

This crucial history situates the murder of Michael Brown in the proper social context and helps to explain the “riots” and the militarized response from the St. Louis police department. Images are now emerging of Black men and women with their hands raised above their heads as a symbolic gesture against police brutality. “Don’t Shoot” is the central message. But how to respond to a system that has managed to target and kill, in addition to unarmed Black teenagers, an entire community’s sense of hope for a better future? Questions of this kind aren’t merely familiar to the Black community but has been a core aspect of the Black experience in America. The people of Ferguson, moved to action by an organization of domestic power that is fundamentally unjust, deserve the support of us all. Meanwhile, the ghosts of Justice Taney and his acolytes are free to mourn the “despotism” of free Black people rightfully prepared to bring an end to their “civilized world.”

Sources:

With Liberty and Justice for Some: How the Law is Used to Destroy Equality and Protect the Powerful by Glenn Greenwald

Dred Scott v. Sanford: A Brief History with Documents by Paul Finkelman

Fateful Triangle: The United States, Israel and the Palestinians by Noam Chomsky

Shackled and Chained: Mass Incarceration in Capitalist America by Eugene Puryear

http://www.businessinsider.com/police-militarization-ferguson-2014-8

http://www.washingtonpost.com/news/post-nation/wp/2014/08/13/washington-post-reporter-arrested-in-ferguson/?tid=sm_fb

http://abcnews.go.com/International/israeli-pm-calls-killers-israeli-teens-human-animals/story?id=24367041

http://www.theguardian.com/world/2014/mar/13/us-un-human-rights-abuses-nsa-drones

A Myth Scratched Out of Rock: Friedman and Obama Whitewash the History of Palestine

A partial examination of the history of state formation and global conflict suggests that we can consider it an established truth that most, if not all, nation-states rely founding myths. The founding myth of the United States is that European “explorers” “discovered” a “vast wilderness” sparsely populated with “merciless Indian savages” who, over time, faded away under the march of “civilization.” Today we recognize this as a morally grotesque whitewash of the actual story, namely that the European “explorers” were really genocidal killers who plundered and pillaged their way across the continent under the doctrine of “manifest destiny.” As the late University of Texas professor William Newcomb Jr. observed in his 1974 study on the continent’s indigenous population North American Indians: An Anthropological Perspective, “low population estimates” of the indigenous civilization that preceded the European invasion “had the effect of making the European conquest of North America more palatable to white Americans.” Moreover, anthropologists were of the view that “displacing a million or so Indians North of the Rio Grande and ultimately reducing their population to half that number is far easier to rationalize or ignore than is the extirpation of ten or fifteen times that number.”

The official seal of the Massachusetts Bay Colony captures this murderous ideology perfectly in the illustration of an indigenous man holding a downward pointed spear with a scroll flowing from his mouth bearing the inscription “come over and save us.” Rightly, this kind of imagery and brutality shocks the conscience of ordinary people, yet similar myths abound today about the founding of Israel in 1948. One illuminating example of this can be found in a recent Thomas Friedman interview with President Obama that appeared in the New York Times. Asked what he thinks about Israel, Obama responded “It is amazing to see what Israel has become over the last several decades … To have scratched out of rock this incredibly vibrant, incredibly successful, wealthy and powerful country is a testament to the ingenuity, energy and vision of the Jewish people.” As pleasant and unproblematic as this description sounds, it completely revises the actual events of Israel’s founding, which was not the emergence of a nation “scratched from rock” but the forceful imposition of a another nation atop the ruins of Palestinian villages evacuated in a campaign of ethnic cleansing known as the nakba.

This traumatic confrontation with colonialism, an integral part of the Palestinian experience, is completely ignored in Obama’s response despite the fact that it’s accepted as uncontroversial among credible scholars. As Dr. Norman Finkelstein observes in his brilliant study on Israeli criminality Beyond Chutzpah “today there is a broad consensus among scholars that Palestinians suffered ethnic cleansing in 1948… ” Israeli journalist Amira Hass makes a similar observation. In her book Drinking the Sea at Gaza, she recognizes “the long history of dispossession that had begun in 1948, when more than 700,000 Palestinians (of a population of some 1.3 million) became refugees, forced to leave their land as the Jewish national home came into being.” It’s therefore extremely disturbing to hear Obama ask “How can you preserve a Jewish state that is also reflective of the best values of those who founded Israel.” If the actual historical record, and not the mythology concocted by propagandists, matters these “values” would certainly include massacres of civilians (re: Deir Yasin) and the mass expulsion of indigenous populations. A Times article that appeared in October of 1948 captured the horror of the ethnic cleansing in evocative terms:

“… in Beersheba itself, once a thriving center for camel trading, a few inhabitants remain, and at present members of the Israeli army are systematically looting the houses which survived the bombing. It is perhaps an ancient and tacitly accepted rule of war that troops should make themselves comfortable at the expense of the vanquished … “

How strikingly prescient these words were as Israel proceeded in its colonial project decades after this catastrophe, all “at the expense of the vanquished.” It is with this knowledge that Obama’s evasions of the historical record appear not only intellectually irresponsible but unambiguously immoral. And this immorality is reinforced when he showers the architects of this ongoing tragedy with praises and accolades. Take for example Ariel Sharon, a war criminal who participated in countless atrocities, for example the Qibya massacre and the killings at Sabra and Shatila. President Obama described him as someone who “dedicated his life to the State of Israel.” This is an awfully sanitized way to describe a man who in a 1953 attack on the El-Bureig refugee camp commanded a unit that threw bombs “through the windows of huts where refugees were sleeping.” Furthermore, as the refugees attempted to flee the terrorist assault “they were attacked by small arms and automatic weapons.” This massacre, which is credited for helping to “launch Sharon’s career”, left an estimated 50 refugees dead (Israeli figures). None of these inconvenient facts are highlighted in Obama’s glorification of a state struggling to maintain “its democratic and civic traditions.” Much like the character of Uncle Ruckus from Aaron McGruder’s critically acclaimed television series The Boondocks, President Obama continually goes out of his way to lavish racists and war criminals with praises, all the while perpetuating vulgar stereotypes about the Arab menace. In his interview with Friedman he recycles the racist cliche that Israel is a model of civilization marooned in an ocean of savagery, stating “others can cause Israel pain,” because Israel is in “a really bad neighborhood.”

Language of this kind dovetails perfectly with the ethnocentric and supremacist rhetoric of Israeli leaders repeatedly warning the Israeli public of the looming “demographic problem”, namely too many brown people in a Jewish state. Sentiments of this kind would delight Uncle Ruckus, who finds no shame in “thanking the white man for the sunrise, for the land [he] walks on, and the air [he] breathes.” Ruckus also maintains a shrine devoted to “special white people in his life” like John Wayne (“the great white man who didn’t take no shit from niggas, injuns nor Mexicans”), George Bush Sr., and Barry Manilow. Likewise, Obama maintains his “shrine” to the “special white people in his life.” This shrine is adorned with pictures of people like Shimon Peres, a recipient of the Presidential Medal of Freedom who has lived a life “nothing short of extraordinary.” For instance, it was “nothing short of extraordinary” when Peres followed in the footsteps of Israeli Prime Minister Manachem Begin and upheld the idea that Israel had a “biblically endorsed right of possession” to the West Bank. On the territorial status of the West Bank Peres proclaimed “There is no argument in Israel about our historic rights in the land of Israel. The past is immutable and the Bible is the decisive document in determining the fate of our land.” Perhaps if Peres was an extremist of the Islamic variety who insisted that the Holy Qur’an was the “decisive document in determining the fate our land,” he would have been exiled from President Obama’s hallowed pantheon of “special white people” but this isn’t the case, therefore Washington’s incarnation of Uncle Ruckus is free to hail him as a “true founding father,” to ample applause.

It’s therefore little wonder that Obama was able to boycott the Durban Conference Against Racism under the pretext that the UN was unfairly “singling out” Israel. Apparently, Benjamin Netanyahu, Tel Aviv’s “great white man”, also must be protected.  Apart from Israeli criminals, another luminary in Obama’s sacred shrine is George W. Bush, who exercised “incredible strength and resolve … as he stood amid the rubble and the ruins of Ground Zero, promising to deliver justice to those who had sought to destroy our way of life.” Incidentally, Bush’s position in the shrine may be more elevated than that of Peres since Obama has not only honored him in word, but, more significantly, in deed, primarily through his continuation of the crimes for which his predecessor should have been punished, facts easy to perceive in the President’s recent colloquialism about violating the Geneva Conventions (“We tortured some folks”).

Underlying this enthusiastic embrace of empire and colonialism is a deeply dehumanizing portrait of those on the other side of the gun, in this case Palestinians. Unless these simplistic and racist conceptions are abandoned, these foundational myths will persist as will the intense efforts to excise from historical memory narratives which give voice to the profound suffering and loss of those living under occupation. The indignity and cruelty of occupation make necessary an honest reckoning with these imperial revisions of history and those who stubbornly ignore reality in favor of fairy tales, whether they come in the form of humanitarian killers dedicated to principles of “peace” or an ultra-violent terrorist state “scratched” into existence from a singular rock.

Sources:

The Great War for Civilization: The Conquest of the Middle East by Robert Fisk

North American Indians: An Anthropological Perspective by William W. Newcomb, Jr.

Fateful Triangle: The United States, Israel and the Palestinians by Noam Chomsky

Beyond Chutzpah: On the Misuse and Abuse of Anti-Semitism and the Abuse of History by Norman G. Finkelstein

Drinking the Sea at Gaza by Amira Hass

http://www.nytimes.com/2014/08/09/opinion/president-obama-thomas-l-friedman-iraq-and-world-affairs.html?_r=0

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=LiV22pJYG7M

http://www.whitehouse.gov/blog/2012/06/14/president-obama-honors-israeli-president-shimon-peres

http://www.washingtonpost.com/blogs/post-politics/wp/2013/04/25/obama-heaps-praise-on-bush/