The Virtual Stoa

According to the BBC, in view of the present crisis,Tory leader Iain Duncan Smith “has offered a virtual suspension of party politics”. It’s a good thing he’s told us; how else would we be able to tell?

Jo wrote [18.9.2001]: Yet another example of the sudden Americanization of British politics. A perfect moment to embrace bipartisanship. Now all they have to do is elect the upper house (or at least go through that performance of whiteness the Americans call an election).

From the BBC:

“Police are investigating a racial attack - in which remarks were made about the atrocities in the US - which left an Afghan minicab driver paralysed. The victim, who now lives in Acton, west London, had picked up three men and a woman in the area before dropping them off in Twickenham on Sunday. Police officers found the 28-year-old man shortly after 3am outside the Prince Blucher pub on The Green, Twickenham. He was taken with serious injuries by ambulance to West Middlesex Hospital, where his condition deteriorated. The victim was transferred to Charing Cross Hospital where he is currently stable in the high dependency unit. He is paralysed from the neck down. …”

Twickenham is just over the river from where I grew up. The attackers have not yet been apprehended.

Bob wrote [18.9.01]: I wish that I could make everyone understand this bit of MLK:

“Darkness cannot drive out darkness;
only light can do that.
Hate cannot drive out hate;
only love can do that.”

Very appropriate these days.

My friend Naunihal Singh has just sent this email around:

“I’m feeling angry. Nobody on TV takes the backlash seriously - that the President’s remarks, once, are somehow enough. Now to add to the people in hospitals from violent attacks, the property attacks on temples and businesses, there is a death. “I’m from New York City. My Prom was held at the World Trade Center. But now I have to face a threat from two directions - a continued terrorist threat, and one from my fellow Americans.

“Please - help spread the word. Try to inject this element into conversations about the recent tragedy. Anti-Arab sentiment is going to get worse before this is all over - and that means that all sorts of innocent Arabs, muslims, and those who just “look like them” will be at risk. I’ll be damned if I let racism destroy my nation. I can’t do much about Bin Laden directly, but I can try to make sure that he doesn’t “win” by destroying those things I value most about America.

“Honor the dead. Fight the backlash.”

Naunihal’s not the only person I’ve heard from today who tells me that the racist backlash is being under-reported and de-emphasised in the US media; he’s also kept me informed about racist WTC-related violence here in the UK and in Australia. And he’s right to be angry: those who use Tuesday’s atrocity as an excuse for racial hatred and violence are wholly despicable.

Michaele wrote [17.9.01]: [i] There was a great news/talk program on the local public radio station on Thursday that discussed the backlash against Muslims and veiled women and people who “look like” they are Arab or Muslim. (Again, I think the fact that I have heard programs like this makes me mildly more optimistic, although of course I am outraged by the reports I have heard and the shootings in Texas). One of the leaders of a US Muslim organization was being interviewed on the show because he had given a press conference that morning expressing regret about the bombings and the like. The interviewer asked why many organizations like his had waited until Thursday to speak out against the attacks. His response was that on Tuesday it wasn’t clear who was responsible, and for Muslim organizations to speak out at that point would have been inappropriate, since there would be no reason for them to be singled out. (We didn’t expect every Protestant organization to make a public statement on Tuesday…) I found it really interesting that Muslim organizations were being very conservative early on about trying to counteract a possible backlash - not that they are in any way responsible.

Similarly, I talked with a good friend of mine Friday night, a Palestinian who is a political theory professor at San Diego State, Farid Abdel-Nour. We had a long talk about how this is affecting him, his Arab and Muslim students, and the community in San Diego. He mentioned that he was getting multiple calls from the press everyday, and was avoiding his office. He assumed that they were calling him because of his name and his position at the university, as he cannot think of any other reason why they would think to contact him for comment. He has been avoiding them because he doesn’t think that he has anything to say. He may change his mind - we’ll see.

I’m not sure what my point here is, other than to suggest that not all of the silence (which I actually _haven’t_ noticed at all) about the backlash is a result of the media, but it is also�caused�by some�cautiousness among members of targeted groups. That being said, there has actually been A LOT of coverage out here, both locally and nationally, about the backlash. I’ve seen lots of people talking about it on CNN, as well as local TV. That’s not enough to keep crazy Texans from becoming racist vigilantes, of course. But I’m not sure what would be. Within 24 hours of the bombing, I had heard A LOT of people on the news talking about the importance of not turning to violence against people on the basis of some presumed religious or ethnic connection to the violence.�

[ii] Where the press went terribly, terribly wrong, I think, was in advertising the Palestinians who were immediately celebrating the attacks. This was the ONLY image of a response from the Arab world in the immediate aftermath of the attacks, and I think that is probably the fault of (a) incendiary press tactics, (b) the slowness of international and in particular Arab public officials’ response to the attacks, and (c) the aforementioned reluctance of Muslim groups in the U.S. to begin speaking out when it was unclear who had perpetrated the attacks to begin with.

[iii] Furthermore, I think that we can be even more critical of Bush than Naunihal’s comments that you quoted suggest. It’s bad enough that he hasn’t repeatedly spoken out against racist violence. The way that he tried to promote unity was through his weird notion of “Judeo-Christianity”. Muslims, he told us the other day, are deserving of our respect because they are a part of “our” “Judeo-Christian” heritage. Aside from the fact that “Judeo-Christianity” is itself a suspect category, which politically is meant to make fundamentalist Christians sound as if they aren’t _really_ anti-Semitic, shouldn’t we reflect on how exclusionary such a category would be, even if it were coherent? Any religious (or non-religious) group that doesn’t fit his “Judeo-Christian” pattern is somehow unequally deserving. Eek!

Naunihal wrote [17.9.01]: The problem is that the coverage is a sideshow. And when a Sikh is arrested on a misdemeanor not related to the attack his face is shown on TV repeatedly; when a Sikh is shot, or beaten with a baseball bat, nobody shows his face.

It is never too hard to find examples of Orwell’s Newspeak dribbling out of the mouths of the governing classes, but the sewage flows freely this week. The tone was set early on by a thoroughly bellicose column in Wednesday’s Washington Post: “We Must Fight This War”. Its author Robert Kagan is, we are told, a “a “senior associate at the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace”.

The British media is not too far behind; the editorial pages of today’s Sunday Telegraph rose to the occasion. Exhibit A was an article by Henry Kissinger (”President George W Bush has wisely warned that the attacks on New York and Washington amounted to a declaration of war”, et cetera ad nauseam); Exhibit B was a leader column (”Only two courses of action are open to Nato: appeasement or war. There is no third way…”, ditto), which approvingly quoted Shimon Peres’s recent remark that “every country must now decide whether it wants to be a smoking or nonsmoking country, a country that supports terrorism or one that doesn’t”.

The author of the first piece is reckoned by many of those who think about these things to be an international war criminal of the first magnitude, for his interventions — most of which can be reasonably described as terroristic — in Cambodia, Vietnam, Chile, Cyprus and East Timor; the man quoted in the second is the deputy prime minister and minister for foreign affairs in the government of Israel, i.e., the number two to prime minister Ariel Sharon, the man indirectly responsible (according to Israel’s own inquiry, no less) for the Falangists’ bloody massacres at the Sabra and Shatila refugee camps in 1982 which left many hundreds of Palestinians dead. (Sharon was the commanding officer in Lebanon, and gave the order which let the militias into the camps, with highly predictable consequences).

We need Robert Fisk in the Independent on Sunday to remind us at a time like this, because no one else will, that today is the nineteenth anniversary of the start of the atrocities at Sabra and Shatila. There was an excellent BBC Panorama programme broadcast on 17 June about Sharon’s role in the massacres: its webpage has a full transcript, and other useful information.

Raj wrote [17.9.01]: AMERICA DECLARES WAR ON WORLD, SELF. AGAIN.

America is a contradictory place to be. Witness Mr Bush on racism: “We must be mindful that, as we seek to win the war, we treat Arab-Americans with the respect they deserve,” Mr Bush said. “There are thousands of Arab-Americans who live in New York City who love their flag,” the President said. “We should not hold one who is a Muslim responsible for an act of terror.”

Compare and contrast with Bush’s white supremacist subtext in the declaration of what CNN is calling “America’s New War”. America’s new war indeed. The US has been fighting racist wars at home and abroad for a while now. Discrimination against Latin@s, through the War on Drugs and more recently Plan Colombia. War against East and South-East Asians with the demonisation first of Vietnam, and now China. The war on African Americans and the poor through “Zero tolerance” and a racist judiciary. The Christian Right’s consistent war on women through pro-life initiatives. The War on Arab Americans has been going on for a while in the media. And now, tragically, America’s New War on the New Enemy Within. America seems to be finding new wars with the frequency and arrogance of Browning’s Duke.

And with equally fatal results.

Oliver wrote [18.9.01]: I was worried by one aspect of your comments about the contents of the Sunday Telegraph. It seems absolutely right to highlight some of the awful truths about Kissinger’s record in government. But when it comes to putting Peres’s quote in context, you have nothing to say about him other than that he is a member of Sharon’s government. You then expound at length on Sharon. It strikes me as unfortunate to taint one with the others actions, especially when they are such different politicians, and especially as so much else on your weblog page concerns bias in the reporting of the terrible racist attacks that have followed in the wake of last week’s tragedy.

Chris replies [18.9.2001]: Peres is not Sharon, true. They aren’t even in the same party. But when Mr Bush talks about refusing to make a distinction between terrorists and those who “harbor” terrorists, I can’t help thinking that the Israeli government is harbouring a rather important one. And while I don’t especially want to get into an argument about whether Israeli government policy amounts to state-sponsored terrorism — given their admitted use of what they euphemistically call “targeted killings” and everyone else calls “assassinations”, and the use of helicopter gunships in reprisals against stone-throwing Palestinians — I tend to think that’s a very plausible construction to place on things. The general point is that it ill becomes any Israeli minister to talk so smugly about a distinction between those countries that sponsor terrorism and those that don’t, because of traditional problems about motes and beams (and barley, O).

The scale of Tuesday’s disaster in New York remains staggering.

I was in living in Boston in December 1999, when six firefighters burned to death in a warehouse fire in Worcester, Massachusetts. The story was reasonably straightforward and gained a certain amount of force from its elemental simplicity: they went into the building believing (falsely) that there were people trapped inside who needed rescuing, and they didn’t come out. The media, local and national, made much of the tragedy: the tabloid Boston Herald, to which I subscribed for its year-round baseball coverage, ran innumerable front pages on the story. It was all very moving, and I was suitably moved. (There was a nasty subtext to some of the media coverage about the relative worth of the lives of the firefighters on the one hand and the homeless people who squatted in the warehouse on the other, but this was, all things considered, only a marginal narrative in the media frenzy). The funeral procession was said to be the largest single gathering of firefighters anywhere in the world, and President Clinton was there, too, and he said a few words.

Six firefighters died in Worcester and big chunks of New England were traumatised. I read today that _two hundred and two_ firefighters were still on the missing list in New York (and they must all be presumed dead by now), together with _fifty-seven_ police officers. They all went into the World Trade Center thinking there was useful work to be done inside, and were crushed to death when the towers came down. And they are only a small fraction of the overall death toll. A hundred other comparisons could be drawn to make the same point: this was, and is, huge; and it was, and is, quite horrible to think about too much.

The comparison with Pearl Harbor is frequently being drawn — America’s “Day of Infamy”. Pearl Harbor did lead to America’s entry into the Second World War, and America did rally around the leadership of its President, FDR, and various other creditable things flowed from the raid, but (lest we forget) America also interned its citizens of Japanese origin in special camps in the months that followed. If this is indeed a second Pearl Harbor it is very important that bigotry towards Arabs, whether American or not, is stamped on very hard. There have already been several reports from the US of violence against Arab-Americans and other Asian-Americans (including Sikhs and Pakistanis), which is disgraceful. For all his palpable faults, Mayor Giuliani has been doing an excellent job in New York in recent days — he has risen to the occasion, unlike W. — and by both speaking and acting promptly to help defuse anti-Arab bigotry, he deserves yet more praise.

Right-wing pundit (and Magdalen graduate) Andrew Sullivan found these words to go in his own weblog. They suit his disreputable political agenda a little better than they suit mine, but I still think they are both haunting and apposite, and I’ll repost them here:

“I sit in one of the dives
On Fifty-second Street
Uncertain and afraid
As the clever hopes expire
Of a low dishonest decade;
Waves of anger and fear
Circulate over the bright
And darkened lands of the earth,
Obsessing our private lives;
The unmentionable odour of death
Offends the September night.”

– From W. H. Auden: “September 1, 1939″

There is a good article in today’s Times (how rarely can you say that!) by military historian Michael Howard. It makes the point that over the last hundred years the three main goals of terrorists have been (i) self-advertisement, (ii) to demoralise governments, and (iii) “to provoke the government into such savage acts of suppression that it forfeited public support and awoke popular and international sympathy for the revolutionary cause.” Given the rhetoric of the US Government and its various allies as they talk of pursuing the people behind this enormity — for once, the word is not being misused by the media — it will be a something of a surprise if they don’t go overboard on the provocation front. Do the American politicians really think that their interests are best served, and that their cities will be made safer in the long run, with all this talk of dividing the world again into “us” and “them” and then waging unceasing “war” on the latter? Let us hope they calm down; and let us hope still more fervently that yet more civilians do not die as a result of the American-led military action which now seems depressingly inevitable.