July 23, 2005
not really
This Tandberg cartoon kinda captures John Howard's understanding of the connection between the US/UK/Australian invasion and occupation of Iraq and the London bombings:
Robert Pape, a professor of political science at the University of Chicago and author of Dying to Win: The Strategic Logic of Suicide Terrorism, counters this. He says:
The war on terrorism is heading south. The key reason is that the West's strategy for this war is fundamentally flawed. It presumes that suicide terrorism is mainly a product of an evil ideology called "Islamic fundamentalism" and that this ideology would produce campaigns of suicide terrorism wherever it exists and regardless of our military policies. This presumption is wrong, and is leading towards foreign policies that are making our situation worse.
He adds that the principal factor driving support for suicide terrorism among British Muslims was not an evil ideology, but deep anger over British military policies on the Arabian Peninsula.
That brings multiculturalism to the foreground doesn't it.
In returning there we encounter the conservatism of Miranda Devine's account of fundamentalism in the diaspora:
The increasing permissiveness of Western culture, coupled with a multiculturalism that encourages ethnic ghettoes, can only fuel the inner conflicts of alienated young Muslim men.
Wow.
By 'increasing permissiveness of Western culture' she means an erasing of the:
"..long-established culture of Australia, permanently rooted as it is in the Judeo-Christian tradition, and replacing it with vapid, secularist nothingness is not going to help. It simply creates a vacuum for radical Islam to rush in and fill.
Gee, we'd better not mention Derrida at this point. Do not the cultural conservatives accuse Derrida of being a foreign agent who has destroyed the humanities; taken the "human" out of the humanities: reduced everything in the world to texts and signifiers, and erased the subjectivity of the individual.Even worse, Derrida has reduced the world to language, to the relativity of linguistic signs—---thereby making the world "meaningless," and so promoting nihilism. Why, Derrida stands for nothingness, in this conservative discourse that would like to see the humanities purged of the "postmodernist cancer."
And by multiculturalism Devine appears to mean "the unreasonable demands of intolerant minorities trying to impose their will on the majority." A secular liberalism is fingered as the problem. Saying that a political and cultural liberal culture is sick and infected, and so lies at the center of the storm, is far more strident than Pauline Hanson ever was.
Posted by Gary Sauer-Thompson at 04:09 PM | Comments (5) | TrackBack
July 17, 2005
a new non-liberal world dawns
'Tis a new everyday world that has formed as a result of 'the war on terrorism', and its domestic use by conservatives to legitimate the national security state:
Matt Golding
The conservatives are playing politics with terror. John Richardson over at Webdiary describes this politics as a fear meme, in which:
"...our political warriors employ the best of darkest-hours rhetoric to paint the enemy as fundamentalist Islamic jihadists: barbarian hordes at the gate; savages determined to destroy our freedom and liberty."
The fundamentalist Islamic jihadists want to wind back the gains of the enlightenment and to destroy our civil liberties and freedoms.
Ted Lapkin, director of policy analysis at the Australia/Israel and Jewish Affairs Council, runs this conservative discourse about the destruction of western civilization with its 'we will never concede defeat to terrorism' etc. However, he links the war against the barbaric enemies abroad with up the enemies at home, with phrases like 'appeasement', 'anti-Americanism' and 'refusal to recognize the existence of the conflict' to highlight the 'radical left's blindness and stupidity in linking terrorism to the war in Iraq.
No doubt we will shortly hear about more proposals to lessen our liberty in the name of the state of emergency, because of the cancerous cells of traitors residing within the body politic. And more talk about the end of multiculturalism, the blind embrace of moral relativism, and dismissal of the liberal tolerance of non-Western values because it provides excuses and rationales for terror.
A state of emergency is required because we Australians are caught up in a war of necessity to defend western society from those in an alien civilization who 'despise our values and want to destroy 'our way of life'. Liberty needs to be sacrificed to ensure security in this endless war. So speaks conversatism.
Update: 20 July 2005
It didn't take long for the move against freedom of speech. The tabloids (eg., Daily Telegraph) attention is firmly focused on Islamic bookshops in Sydney and Melbourne selling extremist,inflammatory literature (such as a book carrying an endorsement by Osama bin Laden on the cover). Attorney-General Philip Ruddock is now talking about possible new measures against bookshops.
Hate books they are called. Hate books promoting terror acts. We are that far from fascists burning of books they didn't like. Liberalism is under the gun from the conservative tabloids., who seem to have fogotten that they are supposed to be defending the values of a free society.
Posted by Gary Sauer-Thompson at 12:12 PM | Comments (4) | TrackBack
July 14, 2005
a different narrative
The political rhetoric of empire in response to the July 7 London bombings:
I listened to John Howard on the airwaves this morning. It was a replayed segment of this interview on the ABC's 7.30 Report. The PM was using the caricature of al-Qaida fanatics to run the quiet political stirring about possibilities and 'could be's' about homegrown terrorists and suicide bombers living in Australian Muslim communities. It was about us becoming alert and alarmed.
The tabloid Murdoch media takes the cue. Andrew Bolt dumps on any Muslim cleric who links the bombings to US/UK policy in the Middle East, or questions that policy, as wrong. The scaremongering with its language of social sickness, vile perversion, nests of violent extremists infesting our communities, monsters lurking with in, soft liberal ideology, is rolled out by the Daily Telegraph. Piers Ackerman is on the integrationist meme with his 'Vipers who live off our warmth' column directed at Australian multiculturalism.
The strategy of the One Nation conservatives is to divide Australians one from another.
The on-the-ground reality in the UK is that the suicide bombers were cleanskins with no convictions or known terrorist involvement.They were foot soldiers who do not fit the standard caricature of 'al-Qaida fanatics'. Madeline Brunt says:
It must be an agonising moment to be a British Muslim. This has been their worst nightmare come true: British-born young men from families who were well established in this country committing a suicide bomb attack... the actions of these four men have thrown British Muslims into the biggest crisis of their community’s history. It makes of the 7/7 atrocities a completely different narrative to those of Madrid or New York: our enemy is in our midst. It puts the British model of multiculturalism - which until now has been the source of considerable, quiet admiration across Europe - under unprecedented scrutiny. It was always obvious that British multiculturalism had some major inadequacies - 70% of all Pakistani and Bangladeshi children grow up in poverty and nearly 40% leave school with no qualifications - but never before have we had to consider whether it has failed. And if so, in what way?
As Madeline Bunting observes the strategy of an intrusive, aggressive state tearing into local Muslim communities of British/Australian citizens, who mostly favour reform and liberal democracy, is not going to work.
The One Nation Conservative response ignores how the Islamic diaspora in Britain and Australia has largely rejected radicalism, extremism, and jihadism of al-Qaeda. The latter, just like our One Nation Conservatives, understands the debate between Islam and the West in terms of the clash of civilizations, with its inevitable conflict between the West and Islam, of war and mistrust and fear.
Posted by Gary Sauer-Thompson at 11:15 AM | Comments (2) | TrackBack
July 11, 2005
Muslim diaspora
One theme in the media discourse around the London bombings over the last day or so is that the most likely perpetrators were Muslim British subjects with UK passports, rather than al-Qaeda. The vulnerable and defensive Muslim diaspora is being fingered: the diaspora has radical Islamists, who believe in Islam as an ideology of political and social transformation and the use of violence under special circumstances to achieve their objectives. These radicals are seen as equivalent to neo-fundamentalist terrorists.
Little evidence is given for this Muslim diaspora claim. What it does do is block and deny the real political connection between the London bombings and the UK invasion and occupation of Iraq and Afghanistan.
The message is that there are cells of radicals and neo-fundamentalists within the country we live in and that we need to flush them out. Hence we have a state of emergency on our hands.
Behind the media flows you can find the neocon military drum beat: we have to do everything it takes to crush the terrorists in Iraq, Afghanistan, Europe and elsewhere. We have to deter or remove regimes that co-operate with terrorists. We cannot be seduced by the call to surrender as the Spirit of Madrid mobilizes. This truth behind this sophistry is that the state of exception is no longer a state of emergency. It is a normal state in the global struggle (light) against terrorism (darkness).
After reading that rhetoric from the war party, you can do yourself a big favour and read this report about how Britain and the US are privately planning to withdraw most of their forces from Iraq by early next year. Maybe the Australians can help out? As President Bush said when he laid down the gauntlet: you're either with us or with the terrorists.
It is dawning on the British state that an imminent strategic defeat is looming in Iraq. That throws a new light on the Weekly Standard's war rhetoric doesn't it.
The best strategic move is to give back Iraq to the Iraqi people.
Posted by Gary Sauer-Thompson at 02:58 PM | Comments (2) | TrackBack
July 09, 2005
London bombings+ war on terror
We should mourn the loss of civilian life and express deep sympathy with the injured and the bereaved who have lost family and friends:
The security analyist account is that Iraqi resistance forces have taken their insurgent military operations to enemy territory, Britain. The "chickens were coming home to roost" for US and UK politicians who continue to obscure the nature of the al-Qaeda struggle by maintaining that the organization attacks the West because "they hate our values" and not because of specific western policies, such as US/UK military occupation of Afghanistan and Iraq or US/Uk support for Israel against the Palestinians.
Should we not try to avert or avoid greater civilian tragedy by starting the serious and difficult process of rethinking the conduct of this "war on terror"? Is that not a better response to the bombings than flexing the muscles, or saying we won't be intimidated, we need to show solidarity with the Bush administration in order to strengthen the US-[fill country in as required] security alliance, etc, etc.
Let's look at this editorial from Murdoch's Australian, entitled 'Standing firm in the face of Terror'.
It says:
What deserves universal horror is the way they presumed the right to take life, and all its promise, from people who were going about their business in London on Thursday morning. This was more than an attack on London, it was an assault on the billions of people around the world who share Londoners' values, and today sympathise with their suffering....These attacks are the work of misanthropes who have no faith in humanity, no hope for the future, outcasts who compensate for their own inadequacies by killing innocent individuals who have done them no harm. The attacks are all the more monstrous for the utter absence of any achievable objective...This was a senseless slaughter, another attack in the terror war perpetrated by people whose only objective is to kill, and to keep on killing - because it is the only way they can assuage their odious anger with all who will not bow to their will.
Something has been forgotten here. Fallujah.
The sustained assault employing extraordinary firepower that left a city with a good deal more than 1,000 people killed or injured, half the dwellings wrecked, almost every school, mosque or public building destroyed or damaged, and most of the population fleeing the city as refugees.
The Australian refuses make the connection between the two realities. It says that "any argument that Iraq and Afghanistan are the catalyst for this, or any other attack, is a nonsense." It's pathway is one of endless war that will involve thousands more civilian deaths and tens of thousands of ciivlians maimed. The Australian, as the voice of the war party, recommends that we stand firm and strong on our democratic faith amidst a bitter cycle of ever increasing violence.
We citizens should make the connection between London, Madrid and Bali on the one hand, and Iraq and Afghanistan on the other.
Posted by Gary Sauer-Thompson at 09:56 AM | Comments (11) | TrackBack
July 08, 2005
London bombs & G8
It's grotesque in a baroque kind of way, but notice the premonination:
Steve Bell
The Baghad Bomb Suprise was not a question of if, but one of when and how. It is a counter reprisal to the "war against terror" being waged by the UK; a war that sanctions the use of state terror---bombing raids, torture, countless civilian deaths---in Iraq. It shows the reach of the Islamo fundamentalists in a global world.
It happened in the form of a coordinated terrorist bomb attack on morning commuter trains in the London underground. The attack was timed to coincide with the G8 summit in Gleneagles. The whole of multicultural London's underground system was shut down for the day, London was in gridlock as people left work, around 60 people are dead, and over 700 injured.
An unknown al-Qaida cell called 'The Secret Organisation of al-Qaida' in Europe said that it had carried out the series of blasts in London in retaliation for Britain's involvement in Iraq and Afghanistan. Italy and Demnark were given a warning. Australia was not mentioned. It is assumed by western counter terrorists that those who carried out these attacks are linked to al-Qaida. They are also clear about the intent: to kill and maim many people and to do so on the opening day of the G8 summit in Scotland for maximum international impact.
As Ken Livingston, the Mayor of London, observed the tube bombing was not a terrorist attack against the property of the mighty or the powerful for waging war. It was aimed at ordinary working-class Londoners. That indiscriminate killing of the innocent is what makes the bombing terrible and shocking.
It is quite different from the IRA' bombings that London experienced and it has similar hallmarks to the deadly rush-hour bombings by al-Qaeda terrorists against commuters in Madrid last year. Al-Qaeda never issues a warning and the intent is to kill and injure as many innocent people as possible.
The other side to this is that United States-led forces have disposed of oppressive regimes in Afghanistan and Iraq; around 200,000 foreign troops are now deployed there fighting the insurgencies that have since developed; at least 40,000 people have been killed in the two countries, most of them civilians; many thousands of people are in detention without trial; and rigorous new anti-terror laws have been brought in by many countries including Australia.
Meanwhile G8 leaders continued to work through the day with officials putting the 'feel good' communique on climate change together. The meeting on Africa is tomorrow but a deal on deal on trade and aid may prove impossible to achieve in Gleneagles as it involves the G8 cutting subsidies to their farmers. I cannot see the US or Europe doing that.
The G8 is in the process of becoming irrelevant as a policy making body. Bush has said that he has increased US aid to Africa. What he did not say was that to qualify, recipients had to adopt democratic reform and a free market economy, protect US investment, lift barriers to US goods, and provide a friendly environment for US policies.
Bush continues to promote a US big business agenda. That is the approach of the G8 is it not?
Update: 8.7.05
We have lots of fine Churchillian stoical rhetoric that diplaces the Arab leaders condemnation of the killings. Alas, little mention is being made of this in the western media, despite the frequently drawn distinction between fundamentalist terrorists and moderate Islam, to show that the "war on terror" is not a crusade against a civilization.
Posted by Gary Sauer-Thompson at 02:53 AM | Comments (10) | TrackBack
January 27, 2005
Auschwitz & Remembrance
We should remember the liberation of Auschwitz, sixty years ago, in January 1945 as it a clear symbol for the modern loss of faith in progress. We should remember the history of the Holocaust by listening to the stories of the survivors as their experiences of grief and suffering express many different and complex emotions.
The survivors and their children may well have have different memories and narratives of past and present persecution to the narrative of the State of Israel.The latter is a heroic epic representation of the Holocaust. It is about a heroic Jewish resistance in the Ghettos involving great sacrifice and hardships, and the dire, terrible struggle against the Nazi regime against overwhelming odds. The narrative is about it happening again--even in Australia-- with the destined to wander as perpetual outsiders until they return to their homeland where they belong.
We should also remember that Auschwitz was a killing machine, whilst the death camps were run in accord with the ethos of the enlightenment's conception of a value-free instrumental reason. It is the machine and camps not just the place that we should remember.
We should also remember that anti-semitism means hatred of Jews, not being anti-Zionist; not being opposed to Likud policies for a Greater Israel; nor anti the expansion of Israeli settlements in the occupied territories.
We should remember the differences between Jews living in Israel and those in the diaspora. In a multicultural Australia we should remember the differences between those who talk in terms of English, French, Australian or American Jews; and those who say that there are only Jews living in England, France, Australia or America. These differences give rise to different identities.
We should remember that not every Jew is, or need be, a Zionist or that they need accept the Zionist narrative as the historical truth.
Consider the very fine article by Julie Szego in The Age that I linked to earlier in the post. Julie writes that:
Even more frightening for most Jews is Israel's vexed place in the world. Sixty years after Auschwitz, the Jew among nations is the target of a virulent and menacing form of anti-Semitism in the West. ... It would be nice to brush this off as the product of angry youths, but such sentiments are gaining resonance among Western intellectuals. It is almost fashionable these days to attack Israel's legitimacy, to scorn and demonise.
We do not need to accept the traditional Zionist national narrative of the birth of Israel as a nation state; a narrative built around the myth of "a people without a land and a land without a people". This narrative has a structure of a past Eden when there was a state and people; of the diaspora as the fall; of the Holocaust as the culmination of the error of way of life of the diaspora; and the foundation of the state of Israel as the redemptive moment.
In the Zionist narrative the answer is Israel. As Julie Szego puts it:
Israel is the ultimate insurance policy against another Holocaust...Israel symbolised the new dawn after a long night in hell; the end of the Jew as sitting duck.
We do not need to accept the Zionist narrative because there are non-Zionist narratives of history.
How then is Auschwitz relevant to Australia?
One suggestion is that Australians need to remember that the Holocaust should be a concern for Christians as well as Jews. The fact that a world that had become fully Christian, that gave us a Christian civilization unchallenged by any other religious tradition (for the war against Islam was won by the beginning of the 20th century), could deteriorate into the idolatry/paganism of the Nazis is a significant challenge to any form of Christianity, which holds that the duty of Christians as Christians is to act in the world. For Christians, especially Catholics, the Holocaust is, or at least should be, a central concern.
Posted by Gary Sauer-Thompson at 06:07 AM | Comments (0) | TrackBack
Andrew Sullivan on torture
If you have a moment this article is a good read. It is a review of two books by Andrew Sullivan in The New York Times on the US use of torture in Iraq. Sullivan is a neo-con in foreign policy, was a cheerleader for Irag the war and a libertarian yet he is critical of the use of torture as standard operating procedure in the war on terror.
Referring to the photos of Al Ghraib prison Sullivan says:
But the photographs lied. They told us a shard of the truth. In retrospect, they deflected us away from what was really going on, and what is still going on. The problem is not a co-ordinated cover-up. Nor is it a lack of information... Whatever happened was exposed in a free society; the military itself began the first inquiries...I confess to finding this transparency both comforting and chilling, like the photographs that kick-started the public's awareness of the affair. Comforting because only a country that is still free would allow such airing of blood-soaked laundry. Chilling because the crimes committed strike so deeply at the core of what a free country is supposed to mean. The scandal of Abu Ghraib is therefore a sign of both freedom's endurance in America and also, in certain dark corners, its demise.
The photos are the counterpoint to President Bush's 2nd inaugural speech arguing the cause of freedom around the world as they highlight the unfreedom of techniques, such as waterboarding, forced nudity, threatening the death of family members, use of dogs to induce stress, use of electric shocks, beating to a pulp, hooding and rape etc.
There is little wriggle room on that contradiction. The apologists try with a variety of dodges and there is a history of Congress going along with Presidents to put in place an extremely narrow definition of torture in the U.S. criminal torture statute.
As Marty Lederman points out Sullivan misses the central role of the CIA in the current legally sanctioned regime of highly coercive interrogation--interrogation that borders on torture. Marty Lederman points out that:
...the Bush adminstration Administration has worked assiduously to preserve the legal authority of the CIA to engage in highly coercive, often inhumane interrogation techniques against suspected Al Qaeda operatives at secret locations outside U.S. jurisdiction.
The Bush Administration has talked in public about how it is committed to treating detainees "humanely," whilst it has fought tooth and nail to be able to treat detainees inhumanely, i.e., in a manner that would be unconstitutional if done in the U.S. Hence it has fought to preserve the CIA "loophole" of using torture to treat detainees inhumanely outside the US.
Here we have what some political theorists call a state of exception,
Posted by Gary Sauer-Thompson at 06:07 AM | Comments (0) | TrackBack
November 21, 2003
US hegemony under challenge
Contrast this with this. The former says that Al-Qa'ida is all but finished. So says the US ambassador for counter-terrorism J. Cofer Black, who is currently in Australia. The latter is the worst terror bombing in Turkey's history. It was organized to coincide with US President George W. Bush's trip to Britain.
I would suggest that the terrorist bombing in Istanbul that targeted the British consulate and the London-based HSBC bank (and last week's synagogue bombings in Istanbul, and the bombing in Saudi Arabia the week before that), indicates that Al Qaeda has managed to regroup and rebuild its operational capabilities in the Islamic world. Rather than Al Qaeda being on the defensive it is on the offensive. Al Qaeda is capable of politically challenging the hegemonic power of the US.
I would also suggest that these attacks make evident the limits of America's capacity to create a benign world as espressed its conception of its manifest destiny to promote democracy and freedom in the world.
A. Dyson
The militant Islamists cannot win militarily, ie. defeat the US empire, but then they are not trying to. The strategy is to challenge US hegemony by destablising Turkey, Saudi Arabia and Afghanistan----and Pakistan and Indonesia. If, as Owen Harris suggests, Iraq is the testing ground for implementation of the manifest destiny of the imperial presidency; then it is hard to disagree with George Paine's sober account:
'I see a continued American occupation causing a gradual — or not so gradual — slide into anarchy in Iraq. I see it causing the deaths of more and more American soldiers — these deaths are already becoming "routine" in the eyes of the media — and the oppression and death of even more Iraqis. I see a continued occupation continuing a not-so-gradual radicalization of the Iraqi population and world community while causing the accelerated growth of anti-American sentiment.'
In London the imperial president's visit was greeted with a carnival of protesters. He gave this speech. It is a more substantive speech than the one he gave in the Australian Parliament.
Posted by Gary Sauer-Thompson at 11:05 AM | Comments (1) | TrackBack