The Racism That Fuels the 'War on Terror'
A new Gallup poll finds a majority of Americans
oppose the drone-executions of US citizens on foreign soil. Then why do
they support the Awlaki killing?
by Glenn Greenwald
A new Gallup poll released Monday morning has a surprising finding: a majority
of Americans - while supporting air strikes in foreign countries
against foreign nationals suspected of Terrorism - oppose such air
strikes when used to target US citizens who are suspected Terrorists,
whether at home or on foreign soil:
The reason this is surprising is that when the US actually killed a US
citizen on foreign soil on the grounds that he was a suspected Terrorist -
Anwar al-Awlaki - large majorities approved. One poll at the time reported that
"a large proportion of Americans believe the US Government made
the correct decision in killing a US born Islamist militant in a drone
strike last month" - specifically, that "69 per cent of respondents
think the action taken by the US Government to kill Anwar al-Awlaki was
justified" (that included 77% Republicans and 73% Democrats approving).
Another poll at the time reported that Obama's approval ratings on national
security increased eight
points in the wake of the Awlaki killing. Meanwhile, Obama aides ran to
Politico to boast that Awlaki's corpse would be a significant asset in
Obama's re-election bid, leading to this Politico headline:
What can explain this obvious discrepancy? How can it be that a
policy which a majority of Americans oppose (killing Americans on
foreign soil on the grounds of suspected Terrorism) was so popular and
politically beneficial for Obama when it was actually done to Awlaki?
I'm not speaking here about those who support the US Government's right
to kill US citizens on foreign soil without a trial: people who believe
that and support the Awlaki execution are at least being consistent. I'm
focusing here on how it can be that a majority of Americans say they
oppose having Americans so targeted on foreign soil yet still support
the Awlaki killing.
There are several possible factors explaining this discrepancy. It is probably
easier to oppose such killings when considered in the abstract than it is when
asked specifically about a person like Awlaki who had
been subjected to such an intense government and media demonization campaign.
It's also possible that intervening events between these polls -
particularly the Rand Paul filibuster - created unprecedented media
debate about the dangers of Obama's claimed assassination powers and
caused people to re-think their wisdom (that was the ground cited by the ACLU's
Laura Murphy when she praised Paul's protest: "As a result of Sen. Paul's
historic filibuster, civil liberties got
two wins: . . . Americans learned about the breathtakingly broad claims
of executive authority undergirding the Obama administration's vast
killing program").
But it seems clear there is a much more odious factor driving some of this.
Many Americans can (a) say that they oppose the targeted killings of Americans
on foreign soil while simultaneously (b) supporting the
killing of Anwar al-Awlaki in Yemen because, for them, the term "Americans"
doesn't include people like
Anwar al-Awlaki. "Americans" means their aunts and uncles, their nice
neighbors down the street, and anyone else who looks like them, who
looks and seems "American". They don't think those people -
Americans - should be killed without charges by the US government if
they travel on vacation to Paris or go to study for a semester in
London. But the concept of "Americans" most definitely does not include
people with foreign and Muslim-ish names like "Anwar al-Awlaki" who wear the
white robes of a Muslim imam and spend time in a place like Yemen.
The Denver-born American, Abdulrahman al-Awlaki, killed by a US drone
strike in Yemen at the age of 16 (Photograph: Facebook memorial page)Legally -
which is the only way that matters for this question - the
New-Mexico-born Awlaki was every bit as much of an American citizen as
the nice couple down the street. His citizenship was never legally
revoked. He never formally renounced it. He was never charged with, let
alone convicted of, any crime that could lead to the revocation of
citizenship. No court ever considered revoking his citizenship, let
alone did so. From a legal and constitutional perspective, there was not a
single person "more American" than he. That's because those
gradations of citizenship do not exist. One is either an American
citizen or one is not. There is no such thing as "more American" or
"less American", nor can one's citizenship be revoked by presidential
decree. This does not exist.
But the effort to depict Muslims as something other than "real
Americans" has long been a centerpiece of the US political climate in
the era of the War on Terror. When it was first revealed in 2005 that
the Bush administration was spying on the communications of Americans
without the warrants required by the criminal law, a Bush White House
spokesman sought to assure everyone that this wasn't targeting Real Americans,
but only those Bad Ones that should be surveilled (meaning Muslims the Bush
administration decided,
without due process, were guilty):
"This is a limited program. This is not about monitoring phone calls
designed to arrange Little League practice or what to bring to a potluck
dinner. These are designed to monitor calls from very bad people to
very bad people who have a history of blowing up commuter trains,
weddings and churches."
Identically, when the Israelis attacked the Mavi Marmara flotilla in
2010 and killed 9 people including the US-born teenager Furkan Dogan, some
conservatives insisted that he was not a Real American because his parents were
Turkish and he grew up in Turkey ("it is silly to call him an 'American of
Turkish descent'. He, like the other
members of his family, was a Turk"). The stark contrast in reactions between
the sustained fury of the Turkish government over the killing of their citizens
by the Israelis versus the support for those killings given by the US
government was accounted for in part by the blind US support for whatever
Israel
does (including killing Americans), but also by the belief that Dogan
wasn't really an American, not the Real Kind you get upset about when a foreign
army kills them.
This decade-long Othering of Muslims - a process necessary to sustain public
support for their continuous killing, imprisonment, and various
forms of rights abridgments - has taken its toll. I'm most certainly not
suggesting that anyone who supports Awlaki's killing is driven by
racism or anti-Muslim bigotry. I am suggesting that the belief that
Muslims are somehow less American, or even less human, is widespread,
and is a substantial factor in explaining the discrepancy I began by
identifying.
Does anyone doubt that if Obama's bombs were killing nice white
British teenagers or smiling blond Swiss infants - rather than unnamed
Yemenis, Pakistanis, Afghans and Somalis - that the reaction to this
sustained killing would be drastically different? Does anyone doubt that if his
overhead buzzing drones were terrorizing Western European nations rather than
predominantly Muslim ones, the horror of them would be much easier to grasp?
Does it really take any debate to know that if the 16-year-old
American suspiciously killed by the US government two weeks after
killing his father had been Jimmy Martin in Sweden rather than
Abdulrahman al-Awlaki in Yemen, the media interest and public outcry
would be far more substantial, and Robert Gibbs would have been widely
scorned if he had offered this vile blame-the-victim justification for killing
Jimmy rather than Abdulrahman? It is indisputably true that - just as
conservatives argued that Furkan Dogan was not a Real
American - large numbers of Americans believe the same about the
Denver-born teenager named Abdulrahman. This ugly mindset is not the
only factor that leads the US public to support more than a decade of US
killing and rights abridgments aimed primarily at Muslims, including
their fellow citizens, but it is certainly a significant one.
Amazingly, someDemocratic partisans, in order to belittle these injustices,
like to claim that only those who enjoy the luxury of racial and socioeconomic
privilege would care so much about these issues. That claim is supremely
ironic.
It reverses reality. That type of privilege is not what leads one to
care about and work against these injustices. To the contrary, it's exactly
that privilege that causes one to dismiss concerns over these injustices and
mock and
scorn those who work against them. The people who insist that these
abuses are insignificant and get too much attention are not the ones
affected by them, because they're not Muslim, and thus do not care.
The perception that the state violence, rights abridgments and
expansions of government power ushered in by the War on Terror affect
only Muslims long ago stopped being true. But ensuring that people continue to
believe that is the key reason why it has been permitted to continue for so
long.
© Guardian News and Media Limited 2013
http://www.commondreams.org/view/2013/03/25-10
[Non-text portions of this message have been removed]
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