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That bloody exploitative little POW
Sep. 5th, 2008 12:43 amNot content with yelling POW!!! At every crease and turn, the Mccain campaign decided that the best thing that they could do tonight, under the theme of peace, is to use 9/11 as a fucking political springboard. Oh yes, they did.
Oh yes, let's scare the fuck out the American people, so that they'll elect that big strong war hero POW John McCain!
Lets lie like a mofo about the Muslim people the brown menace jihadist religious fundamentalists Muslims who HATE OUR FREEDOMS are coming!!! Vote McCain cause he was a POW and he will keep us safe!!!!
Lets disappear and further marginalize Americans who happen to be Arab and/or Muslim for political gain!
Lets use dead Americans as a fucking political ad for the candidacy of the Presidency.
Lets lie, lie, LIE about the history of colonialism and the United States involvement in fucking up the Middle East.
oh yeah.And apparently during that video, only whites and a few blacks were affected by Sept 11.Right then.
And in all of this please note "Its all okay if you are a Republican. If Dems had tried this, they would have lost the election right then and there. But Republicans? Oh they are just establishing their national security cred.
The Accidental American
Bin Laden's Soft Support
Oh yes, let's scare the fuck out the American people, so that they'll elect that big strong war hero POW John McCain!
Lets lie like a mofo about the Muslim people the brown menace jihadist religious fundamentalists Muslims who HATE OUR FREEDOMS are coming!!! Vote McCain cause he was a POW and he will keep us safe!!!!
Lets disappear and further marginalize Americans who happen to be Arab and/or Muslim for political gain!
Lets use dead Americans as a fucking political ad for the candidacy of the Presidency.
Lets lie, lie, LIE about the history of colonialism and the United States involvement in fucking up the Middle East.
oh yeah.And apparently during that video, only whites and a few blacks were affected by Sept 11.Right then.
And in all of this please note "Its all okay if you are a Republican. If Dems had tried this, they would have lost the election right then and there. But Republicans? Oh they are just establishing their national security cred.
The Accidental American
AT 8 A.M. ON SEPTEMBER 11, 40-year-old Fekkak Mamdouh was asleep, having worked the previous night’s late shift from 4 p.m. to 12 a.m. His wife, Fatima, lay beside him; she had dropped off their daughter at kindergarten four blocks away and then climbed back into bed. For six years, Mamdouh, whom everyone knew by his surname, had been a waiter at Windows on the World, the luxury restaurant on the 107th floor of the North Tower. He had started working there in 1996 when Windows reopened after the 1993 terrorist bombing in the World Trade Center basement. Mamdouh’s wide brown eyes and the round apples of his cheeks gave him a disarming look of innocence. These mellow features hid the scrappiness that had made him a beloved, though sometimes controversial, union leader.
The first call came from Mamdouh’s sister Saida, who lived in Italy. She told him to turn on the TV. The second call was from his brother Hassan, who lived down the street. “Listen, brother, there was a plane that just crashed through the Twin Towers,” Hassan said. “Guess what? You’re not going to have a job for a couple of months while they fix the place.”
Mamdouh and Fatima turned on the TV thinking of terrible accidents when the third call came—their neighbor telling Fatima to get their girl out of school. Fatima hurried to retrieve her daughter Iman. When she got back, Mamdouh was still transfixed by what was flashing across the television screen. He said, “You watch. They’re going to say it’s Muslims.”
Fatima asked him why he thought so.
“Because they did it in ’93,” he said, referring to the earlier attack.
Without eating, Mamdouh left their house in Astoria, Queens. He went to 8th Avenue and 44th Street, the offices of his union, Local 100 of the Hotel Employees and Restaurant Employees. He and other union members made two lists: one of all the workers who would have been catering breakfast for Risk Management employees that morning, and another of all the places they might be found. Then teams of shop stewards and union organizers set off to search for the workers and track their families. Mamdouh paired up with a colleague, an Egyptian immigrant and now former captain at Windows. The two started out at hospitals, asking who had been brought in. They met many families of people who had worked at the World Trade Center, but they found no actual casualties of the attacks. They worked their way down Manhattan’s west side, where all its hospitals are located. After the fourth one, Mamdouh’s companion, who had been crying steadily, said he couldn’t take any more. He went home, while Mamdouh headed to the morgue on First Avenue and 30th Street, staying there until 3 a.m.
The next night, Mamdouh gave an interview to a cable news channel. One of his friends, another Moroccan, saw the interview and called him the next day to ask why he hadn’t said that Muslims—meaning regular, real Muslims like them—hadn’t done this thing. Mamdouh said that people already knew.
For the next five days Mamdouh ate and slept very little. He spent hour after hour circling the morgue’s lobby carrying a sign: “If you know anyone who worked at Windows or if you worked at Windows, please call the union.” Mamdouh was able to cross barback Mario Peña’s name off the missing list on September 12, and he found cashier Faheema Nasar a full week later, but in the end, 73 of his co-workers weren’t coming back.
...
Collective traumas always take place within a larger context, and that context influences the collective response. Optimists expect survivors to band together, to help each other, and to unearth the event’s larger lesson for humanity. Survivors do indeed band together, but the nature of their bonding is heavily influenced by the political and social context.
In times of globalization, when the reassuring anchors of national identity lose their heft, the dominant response to group trauma is to create a sacred memory of the event in ways that seem to restore that identity. Philosophers call this “sacralizing” a memory. The formation of a community of survivors—which can take place on scales both large and small—often constitutes closing ranks, building a wall around those who experienced the trauma.
The sacralization process relies on storytelling. The story is told often enough to be frozen into the status of the sacred, unassailable by contradictory, or even just more complex, accounts of our reactions to the original event. The group forms around the act of remembering as much as it does around the memory itself, and one’s relationship to the trauma becomes part of the core of one’s identity. Joining the group means passing a series of litmus tests, usually defined by the act of remembering the event in a particular way.
Cultural critic Barbara Misztal says that this reaction tends to require obedience to the interpretation from other people: “This type of memory… is characterized by the sacred and fixed vision of the past and demands loyalty and regulates obligation.” When a group formed through this process attempts political action, it often focuses narrowly on its own self-interest, isolating itself from others or even demanding that others subordinate themselves to the group’s interests.
Inevitably, there are people who are left out of this sacralized narrative, or worse, unfairly vilified by it. These people might form a counter-memory, interpreting the event through a different story that extends the sympathy of survivors toward others, rather than withholding it: “In contrast to [the] uncompromising position of the first type of memory, the second type of memory does not impose such exclusive practices and assists people to articulate wider meaning and to cultivate links with a larger community,” writes Misztal. The counter-memory group will keep some elements of the dominant narrative—grieving for the dead and maintaining the innocence of individual victims, for example. But other elements get a new treatment, as the counter-memory group fights for an interpretation that allows more people into the community.
For 40 years before 9/11, American identity had been increasingly challenged by global trends. Economic globalization and migration had made many people less financially secure while changing the country’s demographics. Policies that freed corporations to move around the world in search of the largest profit margin, along with advances in technology, had transformed our industrial economy into one focused on its information and service sectors. After our immigration laws removed national preferences for Europeans in 1965, immigrants of color began to arrive and settle in large numbers, not just in big cities, but also in rural and suburban areas. While we can see a less racist immigration policy as a more positive development than economic globalization, these things together nevertheless had a profoundly destabilizing effect on American communities.
September 11 is now the collective trauma of record for the United States. The attack itself was brutal enough to break thousands of families and destroy one of the most prominent elements of New York’s cityscape.
Manhattan took on the character of a disaster site, with toxic dust flying across rivers and into neighborhoods. New Yorkers, disturbed by the sight of the hole in the ground where the World Trade Center had stood, struggled to return to their customary collective self-confidence. The event also had an enormous economic impact that stretched from New York City throughout the nation. The mainstream national response to the event sacralized it, relying on trusty, racialized archetypes of Americans as white and native-born, and foreigners as a dangerous, dark threat. The sacralization process, complete with racist stereotypes, merged with the immigration debate, pitting Americans and foreigners against each other and bolstering the idea that the United States should limit the entry of other people.
These archetypes, so prominent in the post–September 11 political discourse, had a narrowing effect on the subsequent immigration debate.
Even the most compassionate responses to the crisis reinforced economic and racial hierarchies. The intention to discriminate isn’t necessary—the pull of the dominant story, and the existing context will create the effect.MORE
Bin Laden's Soft Support
Our polls show that the anger Muslims around the world feel towards the United States is not primarily directed at our people or values—even those who say they support bin Laden don’t, for the most part, “hate us for our freedoms,” as President Bush has claimed. Rather, what drives Islamic public opinion is a pervasive perception that the United States and the West are hostile towards Islam. This perception, right or wrong, is fed by a variety of American actions, from the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan to the overarching global war on terror. These actions are seen as profoundly disrespectful and humiliating because they amount to America forcing its will on the Muslim world.
A good illustration comes from our most recent survey of Saudi Arabia. It showed that among the highest priorities for Saudis are free elections and a free press. Yet it also showed that the least popular American policy is the U.S. push to spread democracy in the Middle East. The point is that Saudis want to determine their own affairs and not have the United States impose its values, even when they share those values.
Significantly, however, our polling indicates that there are steps that the United States can undertake that could dramatically reverse anti-American attitudes born of this sense of disrespect—if we ask first, rather than thinking we know what’s best. Indeed, these steps are relatively easier to take than more fundamental changes, such as an immediate withdrawal from Iraq or Afghanistan.
For instance, six out of every ten Pakistanis who have a favorable view toward bin Laden and al-Qaeda said their opinion of America would significantly improve if the United States increased educational, medical and humanitarian aid to Pakistan, as well as the number of visas available to Pakistanis to work or study in the United States. In fact, more bin Laden and al-Qaeda supporters said their opinion of the United States would improve with such American policies than did non-bin Laden supporters. Not everyone would change their mind: One in ten bin Laden and al-Qaeda supporters said that their opinion of the United States would not change no matter what America does. This is al-Qaeda’s real, far smaller core of fervent and intractable support.
The same trend holds in Saudi Arabia, which, of course, borders Iraq. While the leading step that would improve opinion of the United States would be an immediate withdrawal of American forces from Iraq, this was closely followed by a desire for the United States to increase visas and free trade. Like their fellow citizens, 88 percent of Saudis who have a favorable opinion of bin Laden cited U.S. withdrawal from Iraq as a policy change that would significantly elevate their view of the United States. Three-quarters cited increased visas to and free trade with the United States. And more than half of both supporters and non-supporters of bin Laden said that these actions would improve their opinion of the United States a great deal.
The prospect of the United States brokering a comprehensive peace between Israelis and Palestinians is distant, but if it became a reality, our surveys suggest that this would significantly change perceptions of America in the Muslim world, especially among Palestinians and Syrians. But right now in Saudi Arabia, less than a quarter of Saudis believe that a successful peace process would improve their opinion of the United States a great deal. By contrast, twice as many Saudis said that increased trade and visas would improve their disposition towards the United States a great deal. And Muslims who live further away from the Middle East place even less importance on the peace process. When Indonesians and Bangladeshis, for example, were given a menu of choices for future American policies, including increased educational scholarships, direct medical assistance, free trade, and stronger American support for resolving the Palestinian- Israeli conflict, the latter finished last or next to last.
This last finding shouldn’t be surprising. While people everywhere may care strongly about the suffering of their coreligionists in foreign lands, they are naturally more focused on the problems they face at home. Consequently, it is often easier to win them over with actions that affect their lives and those of their countrymen directly. If the United States demonstrates that it respects people by helping to make tangible improvements in their daily lives, even the anti-American attitudes of those who have a positive opinion of al- Qaeda are likely to change dramatically as well.MORE
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