disaggregating the foreigners
  On the antiwar.com/blog we learn that at least a couple of anti-war journalists are alive today because of Google.com. Seems the kidnappers googled the journalists' names, read their articles and let them go.
(Though one of the journalists was tortured a bit -- you know, just on general principle.) |
So I mentioned to my wife that technology helps the Arabs disaggregate the presumably-white westerners. I wondered aloud why we high-tech westerners seem intent on lumping all the Arabs together.
She replied that she'd listened to an interview on the radio this evening with a small-town Republican woman talking about how she supported President Bush's war and how we just had to invade Iraq after 9/11. The reporter told her that there was no evidence of any connection between 9/11 and Iraq. The woman replied, "Oh I don't care. Just kill them all!"
I don't know why it took me so long to realize that the hawks don't care what the official rationale for the invasion was. No WMDs? No problem. It's us against the ay-rabs, whatever fancy packaging that gets put in.
It's an almost overtly racist war. That's not an accusation I make lightly, since I know how over-used and plenty-abused the race card is. But how else can you explain it?
A clash of civilizations, blah blah blah. OK, so maybe it doesn't matter that their skin is brown. Maybe it's some form of bigotry other than racism, but the point is that a big chunk of the world's population is all lumped together. Collective guilt on a massive scale. And the hawks don't give a damn how crazy that sounds.
Kill 'em all. Let Allah sort 'em out.
2 Comments:
It is a racist war, but Americans of many rightist and evangelical factions have been conditioned to hate the Arabs for many years, by identifying with Israel and the narrative the Israelis have been peddling since their first conflicts with Arabs. I agree with Naomi Klein about very little, but I think she had an important insight in this column: The Likud doctrine Americans were prepared to accept the "War on Terror" and the lame excuses for the invasion of Iraq because they'd already suspended rational inquiry for years on the subject.
Klein: It's not simply that Bush sees America's role as protecting Israel from a hostile Arab world. It's that he has cast the US in the same role in which Israel casts itself, facing the same threat. In this narrative, the US is fighting a never-ending battle for its survival against irrational forces that seek its total extermination.
Oh, damn Blogger to hell. I forgot to sign my post because Blogger has this dumb registration thing that makes people create a blog on Blogger in order to have signed posts.
tex from UnfairWitness and AntiWar.com Blog
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