Either for us or against us – words with history

AFTER the terrifying events of September 11, 2001, when airplanes flew into the World Trade Center in New York City and the Pentagon in Washington DC, the world was saturated with news and information about Islam and Muslims. The religion and its true believers, from Turkey to Afghanistan, Nigeria to Mindanao, were in the cross-hairs of everyone who believed that “Western civilisation” was under attack.

George W. Bush set the boundaries of acceptability, and orthodoxy, with his statement (the official line) that “you’re either with us or against us”. Benjamin Netanyahu has made similar either/or statements, to which we will return below.

With or without intent, Bush drew on a body of Islamophobic and orientalist texts, like the work of Bernard Lewis, who evoked threats by Islam to Western civilisation. This “threat” was refined, as it were, by the clash of civilisations theory, which would, I think, bleed into more recent discussions of civilisational states. I should write about this on another occasion. For a primer, the reader may want to consider the article by the right-wing libertarian Steven Pittz, which I do not agree with entirely.

Beyond surface forms

After those attacks on the US in 2001, very many of us, Christians, Jews, Muslims, Buddhists, humanists, leftists and critical thinkers who were outside the orthodoxy of European thought, sought to make better sense of it all. We were driven, at least in my case, to look beyond surface forms of equality and justice to reveal more structural and historical causes of conflict, injustice and inequality.

We would reflect on the secular/political and geo-political (and historical) causes and origins of the attacks on New York and Washington. It was not as if a murderous group of people woke up one day, threw a dart at a map of the world and went on to cause death and destruction wherever the dart had landed ….

In the decade or more that followed those attacks, we saw the killing of journalists, beheadings, the destruction of heritage sites, of libraries, suicide bombings, rape and starvation as weapons of war, indiscriminate and unlawful bombings by foreign invading forces in Iraq, a promise to bomb places back to the stone age and, evidence showed that invading forces also targeted electricity-supply infrastructure. Britain and the US were among the worst perpetrators of apparently merciless and indiscriminate aerial bombing.

“The United States attacked al-Nasiriyya 400 kV Electrical Power Transformer Station on March 22, 2003, with a carbon fiber bomb designed to disable power. The city lost power for thirty days.” (A typical news item with this caption to a photo published by Human Rights Watch.)

Amid all of the death and destruction that followed the attacks on New York City and Washington, we were expected to believe only reports or images of beheadings, suicide bombings, destruction of the library at Timbuktu – and reports of rape as a weapon of violence by Boko Haram in West Africa. A clear line was drawn. We had to choose.

The only acceptable response to the horrors of September 11, 2001, was that “those Muslim terrorists” and “Islamist terrorists”, people who hated democracy and freedom were responsible for the worst crimes. The images sent out to the world were of menacing Muslims, and the US, in particular, went in search of terrorists, drew up “kill lists” and carried out drone strikes around the Muslim world. (Barack Obama oversaw an estimated 10 times more drone strikes than Bush).

You were either entirely with the US, or you were a terrorist.

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First holocaust of the 21st century

Fast forward to the first holocaust of the 21st century, and you’re either with the state of Israel (completely), or you are a terrorist. Day after day, every statement caught on social media teaching children to “kill arabs”, promoting and defending  rape as a weapon of war, and presenting evidence of the destruction of cultural institutions (places of worship and of education), is dismissed as either “Hamas propaganda”, or as “antisemitic”.

It’s hard to make sense of this senselessness. It is all, of course, nothing new. Almost every act of violence against the people of Iraq and Afghanistan by “the West” after 2001, was accepted as permissible and justified or (unsurprisingly) as being in defence of Western civilisation. Offensively going to war becomes defence, and a moral right.

Israel, too, has sanctified its action and presents its military as the most moral. Israelis, we are told, were chosen by God.

George W. Bush believed that he was on a mission from God. Bush’s statement was not new, nor original. According to the New York Times in 1991, his father, George H.W. Bush, believed that the US was on a moral crusade. The Iraqis were at the time led by an “evil incarnate”, the New York Times opined on February 3, 1991. Never mind the cruelty of the West’s attack on people who were fleeing from the conflict along The Highway of Death.

These last points are significant. Since last year there has been a flood of images and reports of people who were trying to walk to safety and were killed by the Israeli army along the Passages of Death in the current wave of killings of Palestinians. As with the Bush wars, this has a precedent. Between July 23 and 25, 2014, the Israeli military also killed civilians fleeing from conflict.

Journalists should never be at the centre of news about a conflict. The victims of war are more important and need greater attention. It is almost impossible to report on mass killing by Israel and its march to Greater Israel, without being accused of being antisemitic, being a shill for Hamas, a communist, hating the West or a terrorist.

War had become genocidal

This is an echo of those claims made since at least 1958 that anyone opposed to US invasions and interference was anti-US, during the assassination of Iran’s democratically elected leader and the invasion of Lebanon; John F. Kennedy’s invasion of Cuba and Vietnam, which saw mass destruction of vast areas of Laos with carpet bombing; the brutal dictatorship with Western support, especially by the US, of Indonesia’s Suharto during which at least 500 000 people were killed …

Official archives in the US have confirmed: “The US actively supported the Indonesian military’s killing of as many as 1 million suspected communist sympathisers in the mid-1960s despite concerns about the reasons behind the massacre, according to newly declassified American documents.”

All of these strands can be pulled together to form a picture of the dividing line that the West and its allies have drawn between what they believe, what they want everyone to believe, and what our eyes and ears tell us. Very recently, Israelis and their supporters around the world have likened a scarf, the ubiquitous keffiyeh, to the Nazi swastika. Mere mention of the word “Palestine” invites violent attacks.

It’s unsurprising that Israeli spokespeople have started wearing lapel badges of yellow ribbons, an adornment made fashionable among US foreign war veterans, but with a deeper history among those men on horseback who ventured into the lands of indigenous people in North America – as part of the genocide against native Americans.

The West, notably the British and the Americans, have long applied the worst forms of violence among themselves (not to mention against dark-skinned others). In his exceptional book, War and Genocide, Martin Shaw reminds us that:

“Unlike the Nazis’ killing of the Jews [during the Second World War], the killing of Germans and Japanese by the Allies were not an end in itself, but a means to the military defeats of the Nazi German and the Imperial Japanese States. Nevertheless, British and US (as well as German and Japanese) air strategies involved the deliberate mass slaughter of civilian populations on the basis of their nationality. This killing was quite as intentional as the Nazis’ overtly genocidal policies, even if the rationale was clearly different. It is … difficult to avoid the conclusion that in these actions, war had become genocidal in a fundamental way … Allied strategic bombing defined a new standard for barbarity ...”

Consider the ongoing destruction of Israeli aerial bombing, and remember Western (Nato) aerial bombing campaigns in the former Yugoslavia, and the more than 2 million tons of bombs the US dropped on Laos – which could take 100 years to clear. It’s hard to think of this as anything other than being the Western way of war.

Genocide defined by the victors

The point Shaw makes in War in Genocide that stands out today given the International Criminal Court arrest warrants for Benjamin Netanyahu and Yoav Gallant (and Mohammed Deif of Hamas) and especially US opposition to the decision, is this: “In international law and politics, however, genocide was defined by the victors, in a way that reified the line that separated their own policies from those of the losers.”

The US effectively made international law, at least the post-Second World War institutions that underpin the law, such as it is, and clearly insists that its own policies and actions, and those of Israel have to be separated from the policies and actions of others.

If international law were to be applied justly and equally to all countries, every state would be held accountable for its crimes against humanity, for genocidal destruction and for the holocausts of the 1940s and today.  

As things stand, though, the world is divided. It’s Israel or the terrorists and antisemites. It’s the USA or the terrorists; its Western civilisation or others, Russian civilisation, Chinese civilisation, or Indian civilisation.

♦ VWB ♦

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