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Terrorist Attack on Britain
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<blockquote data-quote="LoveBeingAMuslimah" data-source="post: 63145935" data-attributes="member: 323708"><p>I think the answer lies in the very first sentence Sullivan wrote when responding to my column: "I really have to try restrain my anger here." It's an intensely emotional reaction, not a rational one. <u><strong>He, and so many others, are deeply invested on a psychological and personal level in protecting the narrative that Islam is a uniquely violent force in the world, that Muslim extremists pose a threat that nobody else poses, and that the US, the West and its allies (including Israel) are morally superior and more civilized than their adversaries, and their violence is more noble and elevated. </strong></u></p><p></p><p></p><p></p><p><u><strong>Labeling the violent acts of those Muslim Others as "terrorism" - but <em>never our own </em> - is a key weapon used to propagate this worldview.</strong></u> <u><strong>The same is true of the tactic that depicts <em>their</em> violence against us as senseless, primitive, savage and without rational cause, while glorifying our own violence against them as noble, high-minded, benevolent and civilized (we slaughter them with shiny, high-tech drones, cluster bombs, jet fighters and cruise missiles, while they use meat cleavers and razor blades).</strong></u> <strong>These are the core propagandistic premises used to sustain the central narrative on which the War on Terror has depended from the start (and, by the way, have been the core premises of imperialism for centuries). That is why those most invested in defending and glorifying this War on Terror become so enraged when those premises are challenged, and it's why they feel a need to use any smears and distortions (he's justifying terrorism!) to discredit those who do.</strong> As Sullivan's reader perfectly put it in his email:<p style="margin-left: 20px">"The emotional intensity with which you demand that the London attack be described as 'terrorism' (as opposed to 'horrific act of violence,' 'killing,' 'hack to death,' 'barbaric and horrendous act,' etc., as Greenwald writes) only <em>confirms</em> Greenwald's point that it is important to define what 'terrorism' means, particularly because certain folks have an emotional, political and/or legal reason for insisting on its usage. What free thinker would want to shout down that discussion? Respectfully, that is 'very hard to understand, let alone forgive.'"</p> <p style="margin-left: 20px"></p><p>But as was clear from the furor that erupted after the<a href="http://www.guardian.co.uk/commentisfree/2013/apr/03/sam-harris-muslim-animus" target="_blank"> debate over the anti-Muslim views of Sam Harris and company</a>, and as is demonstrated again by Sullivan's unhinged reaction here to what I wrote,<strong> the need to maintain the belief that Islam is a uniquely grave danger in the world - and that western violence against them is superior to their violence against the west - is one that is incredibly deep-seated and visceral. </strong>That seems to be true for several independent reasons. </p><p></p><p></p><p></p><p>First, it's a by-product of base tribalism.<strong> Americans and westerners have been relentlessly bombarded with the message that We are the Noble and Innocent Victims and those Muslims are the Evil, Primitive, Savage Aggressors, so that's what many people are trained to believe, and view any challenge to that as an assault on their core tribalistic convictions.</strong> The defining tribalistic belief that Our Side is Superior (and our violence thus inherently more noble than theirs) has been stoked by political leaders since politics began to sustain support for their aggression and entrench their own power. It's a potent drive - something humans instinctively want to believe - and is therefore one that is easily manipulated by skillful propagandists.</p><p></p><p></p><p>Second, all sorts of agendas are advanced by maintaining these premises in place. As the scholar Remi Brulin <a href="http://www.salon.com/2010/03/14/terrorism_20/" target="_blank">has documented</a>, <u><strong>"terrorism" in its recent incarnation was designed by the US to justify all of the violence it wanted to do in the world from Central America to the Middle East, and by Israel to universalize the vicious and intractable conflicts it has with its Arab neighbors (<em>our wars aren't just our fights with them over land; it's a global struggle to stop a plague that is also your fight: against Terrorism</em>).</strong></u> A <a href="http://www.amazon.com/Disciplining-Terror-Experts-Invented-Terrorism/dp/1107026636/ref=sr_1_1?ie=UTF8&qid=1369483682&sr=8-1&keywords=lisa+stampnitzky" target="_blank">great new book</a> by Harvard's Lisa Stampnitzky makes the argument indicated by its title: "Disciplining Terror: How Experts Invented 'Terrorism'". <strong>The functional meaninglessness of the term "terrorism" and its highly manipulative exploitation are vital to several political agendas.</strong> <strong>That fact renders the guardians of those agendas furious when the conventional and highly emotional understanding of the term is questioned, and especially when it's suggested that anti-western violence isn't best understood as the by-product of unique pathologies in Islam but rather in the context of decades of western aggression toward that region</strong>. </p><p></p><p></p><p></p><p>Indeed, most of the responses to my argument ignored the questions I posed about the definition of "terrorism" and instead rested on pure irrational rage: <em>this was a Muslim who used a knife to kill a westerner; of course it was terrorism</em> (or, as Sullivan put it, "If we cannot call a man who does that in the name of God and finishes by warning his fellow citizens 'You will never be safe' a terrorist, who would fit that description, apart, of course, in Glenn's view, Barack Obama?").<strong> Or, alternatively, critics of what I wrote simply fabricated what I argued (<em>he blames the west and thinks the Terrorists have no agency!</em>), or spewed outrage at the mere suggestion that anything the west does is comparable to the violence we saw on the London street.</strong> As his emailer put it about the rational discussion Sullivan allowed himself about whether the Benghazi attack was terrorism: "Imagine if someone then responded to you pointing out that fact (like Greenwald did) with the type of sanctimonious outburst that you showed here. Would you have even taken it seriously?" </p><p></p><p></p><p></p><p><u><strong>Third, and I think most significantly, there is a very potent human need to deny responsibility for our own actions and avoid being shown the worst attributes of our own behavior, and a corresponding "kill-the-messenger" impulse aimed at those who want to focus on (rather than hide) all of that. </strong></u>It's not irrelevant that Sullivan (along with <a href="http://harpers.org/blog/2008/05/journalism-ethics-lessons-from-the-iraqi-wars-chief-salesman/" target="_blank">Jeffrey Goldberg</a>, Tom Friedman and Christopher Hitchens) was one of the world's most vocal, most passionate, and most effective media cheerleaders for the attack on Iraq (which he yesterday acknowledged was "a criminal enterprise and strategic catastrophe" even while justifying it on the ground that it "removed one of the most vicious mass murderers of Muslims on the planet"). But Sullivan was not only that: he also led the way (along with Hitchens) in implanting in the public mind the idea that the US and the UK were leading a Grand Civilization War, and he spouted some of the <a href="http://www.eschatonblog.com/2012/04/[bless%20and%20do%20not%20curse][bless%20and%20do%20not%20curse][bless%20and%20do%20not%20curse][bless%20and%20do%20not%20curse][bless%20and%20do%20not%20curse][bless%20and%20do%20not%20curse]-of-decade-2nd-runner-up.html" target="_blank">most repellent rhetoric of demonization</a> against anyone who uttered any protest. </p><p></p><p></p><p></p><p>Sullivan, to his credit, has since apologized for his leading public role in all of that. But as his response to me (and <a href="http://dish.andrewsullivan.com/2013/04/22/the-greenwald-harris-debate/" target="_blank">other recent posts</a>) make clear, the Civilization Warrior who accuses people of being sympathetic to The Terrorists is still always lurking close to the surface ("Islam's fanatical side &#8211; from the Taliban to the Tsarnaevs &#8211; is more murderous than most", he wrote last month). I don't think it's hard to see why he, along with so many others, clings so fervently, even instinctively, to these precepts.</p><p></p><p></p><p><span style="font-size: 10px"><u><strong>No matter how many evil things your government does, no matter how many innocent people are killed by the political leader you deliriously adore, no matter how much blood you have on your own hands for exploiting your media platform to publicly cheer for mass violence and slaughter, all of that can be redeemed, or at least mitigated, only if there is Someone Else Over There who you can point to as The Supreme and Unique Evil. </strong><strong>Sure, we make mistakes and do some bad things. But we're not like <em>them</em>: the Ultimate Savages. The Primitive Islamic Hordes. <em>The Terrorists</em>. That's why it's urgent that these designations of special evil (Terrorist) be reserved exclusively for Them: only then can we elevate ourselves.</strong></u></span></p><p></p><p></p><p>Once that framework is implanted, then our violence is understandable, noble, well-intentioned, necessitated by their pure evil. By stark contrast, their violence is sub-human, senseless, and utterly unrelated to anything we do. Just marvel at the visceral and psychologically revealing language that Sullivan, after ennobling western violence, uses for the London attack [his emphasis]: "terrorism in its most animal-like form, created and sustained <em>entirely</em> by religious fanaticism which would find <em>any</em> excuse to murder, destroy and oppress Muslims and non-Muslims in the name of God." <strong>This is the very personal need that bolsters this worldview and prompts such rage when it is challenged: the need to view oneself in a better light, to avoid the reality of what one supports and enables.</strong></p><p></p><p></p><p>I used to wonder how people like Sullivan and other Americans and westerners, who continuously justify any manner of violence and militarism by their own side, could possibly spend so much time pointing to <em>others</em> and depicting <em>them</em> - those people over there - as the embodiment of violence and savage aggression. But at some point I realized that<strong> <u>it's precisely because they continuously justify so much violence and aggression from their side that they have such a boundless compulsion to depict others as the Uniquely Primitive and Violent Evil. </u>That's how they absolve themselves. It's how they distract themselves from the reality of what they support and what their governments do in the world.</strong> And it's why few things produce quite as much personal resentment and anger than demanding that they first gaze into a mirror before issuing these absolutist denunciations about others.</p><p></p><p><a href="http://www.guardian.co.uk/commentisfree/2013/may/25/andrew-sullivan-distortion-terrorism-woolwich?INTCMP=ILCNETTXT3487#start-of-comments" target="_blank">Andrew Sullivan, terrorism, and the art of distortion | Glenn Greenwald | Comment is free | guardian.co.uk</a></p></blockquote><p></p>
[QUOTE="LoveBeingAMuslimah, post: 63145935, member: 323708"] I think the answer lies in the very first sentence Sullivan wrote when responding to my column: "I really have to try restrain my anger here." It's an intensely emotional reaction, not a rational one. [U][B]He, and so many others, are deeply invested on a psychological and personal level in protecting the narrative that Islam is a uniquely violent force in the world, that Muslim extremists pose a threat that nobody else poses, and that the US, the West and its allies (including Israel) are morally superior and more civilized than their adversaries, and their violence is more noble and elevated. [/B][/U] [U][B]Labeling the violent acts of those Muslim Others as "terrorism" - but [I]never our own [/I] - is a key weapon used to propagate this worldview.[/B][/U] [U][B]The same is true of the tactic that depicts [I]their[/I] violence against us as senseless, primitive, savage and without rational cause, while glorifying our own violence against them as noble, high-minded, benevolent and civilized (we slaughter them with shiny, high-tech drones, cluster bombs, jet fighters and cruise missiles, while they use meat cleavers and razor blades).[/B][/U] [B]These are the core propagandistic premises used to sustain the central narrative on which the War on Terror has depended from the start (and, by the way, have been the core premises of imperialism for centuries). That is why those most invested in defending and glorifying this War on Terror become so enraged when those premises are challenged, and it's why they feel a need to use any smears and distortions (he's justifying terrorism!) to discredit those who do.[/B] As Sullivan's reader perfectly put it in his email:[INDENT]"The emotional intensity with which you demand that the London attack be described as 'terrorism' (as opposed to 'horrific act of violence,' 'killing,' 'hack to death,' 'barbaric and horrendous act,' etc., as Greenwald writes) only [I]confirms[/I] Greenwald's point that it is important to define what 'terrorism' means, particularly because certain folks have an emotional, political and/or legal reason for insisting on its usage. What free thinker would want to shout down that discussion? Respectfully, that is 'very hard to understand, let alone forgive.'" [/INDENT]But as was clear from the furor that erupted after the[URL="http://www.guardian.co.uk/commentisfree/2013/apr/03/sam-harris-muslim-animus"] debate over the anti-Muslim views of Sam Harris and company[/URL], and as is demonstrated again by Sullivan's unhinged reaction here to what I wrote,[B] the need to maintain the belief that Islam is a uniquely grave danger in the world - and that western violence against them is superior to their violence against the west - is one that is incredibly deep-seated and visceral. [/B]That seems to be true for several independent reasons. First, it's a by-product of base tribalism.[B] Americans and westerners have been relentlessly bombarded with the message that We are the Noble and Innocent Victims and those Muslims are the Evil, Primitive, Savage Aggressors, so that's what many people are trained to believe, and view any challenge to that as an assault on their core tribalistic convictions.[/B] The defining tribalistic belief that Our Side is Superior (and our violence thus inherently more noble than theirs) has been stoked by political leaders since politics began to sustain support for their aggression and entrench their own power. It's a potent drive - something humans instinctively want to believe - and is therefore one that is easily manipulated by skillful propagandists. Second, all sorts of agendas are advanced by maintaining these premises in place. As the scholar Remi Brulin [URL="http://www.salon.com/2010/03/14/terrorism_20/"]has documented[/URL], [U][B]"terrorism" in its recent incarnation was designed by the US to justify all of the violence it wanted to do in the world from Central America to the Middle East, and by Israel to universalize the vicious and intractable conflicts it has with its Arab neighbors ([I]our wars aren't just our fights with them over land; it's a global struggle to stop a plague that is also your fight: against Terrorism[/I]).[/B][/U] A [URL="http://www.amazon.com/Disciplining-Terror-Experts-Invented-Terrorism/dp/1107026636/ref=sr_1_1?ie=UTF8&qid=1369483682&sr=8-1&keywords=lisa+stampnitzky"]great new book[/URL] by Harvard's Lisa Stampnitzky makes the argument indicated by its title: "Disciplining Terror: How Experts Invented 'Terrorism'". [B]The functional meaninglessness of the term "terrorism" and its highly manipulative exploitation are vital to several political agendas.[/B] [B]That fact renders the guardians of those agendas furious when the conventional and highly emotional understanding of the term is questioned, and especially when it's suggested that anti-western violence isn't best understood as the by-product of unique pathologies in Islam but rather in the context of decades of western aggression toward that region[/B]. Indeed, most of the responses to my argument ignored the questions I posed about the definition of "terrorism" and instead rested on pure irrational rage: [I]this was a Muslim who used a knife to kill a westerner; of course it was terrorism[/I] (or, as Sullivan put it, "If we cannot call a man who does that in the name of God and finishes by warning his fellow citizens 'You will never be safe' a terrorist, who would fit that description, apart, of course, in Glenn's view, Barack Obama?").[B] Or, alternatively, critics of what I wrote simply fabricated what I argued ([I]he blames the west and thinks the Terrorists have no agency![/I]), or spewed outrage at the mere suggestion that anything the west does is comparable to the violence we saw on the London street.[/B] As his emailer put it about the rational discussion Sullivan allowed himself about whether the Benghazi attack was terrorism: "Imagine if someone then responded to you pointing out that fact (like Greenwald did) with the type of sanctimonious outburst that you showed here. Would you have even taken it seriously?" [U][B]Third, and I think most significantly, there is a very potent human need to deny responsibility for our own actions and avoid being shown the worst attributes of our own behavior, and a corresponding "kill-the-messenger" impulse aimed at those who want to focus on (rather than hide) all of that. [/B][/U]It's not irrelevant that Sullivan (along with [URL="http://harpers.org/blog/2008/05/journalism-ethics-lessons-from-the-iraqi-wars-chief-salesman/"]Jeffrey Goldberg[/URL], Tom Friedman and Christopher Hitchens) was one of the world's most vocal, most passionate, and most effective media cheerleaders for the attack on Iraq (which he yesterday acknowledged was "a criminal enterprise and strategic catastrophe" even while justifying it on the ground that it "removed one of the most vicious mass murderers of Muslims on the planet"). But Sullivan was not only that: he also led the way (along with Hitchens) in implanting in the public mind the idea that the US and the UK were leading a Grand Civilization War, and he spouted some of the [URL="http://www.eschatonblog.com/2012/04/[bless%20and%20do%20not%20curse][bless%20and%20do%20not%20curse][bless%20and%20do%20not%20curse][bless%20and%20do%20not%20curse][bless%20and%20do%20not%20curse][bless%20and%20do%20not%20curse]-of-decade-2nd-runner-up.html"]most repellent rhetoric of demonization[/URL] against anyone who uttered any protest. Sullivan, to his credit, has since apologized for his leading public role in all of that. But as his response to me (and [URL="http://dish.andrewsullivan.com/2013/04/22/the-greenwald-harris-debate/"]other recent posts[/URL]) make clear, the Civilization Warrior who accuses people of being sympathetic to The Terrorists is still always lurking close to the surface ("Islam's fanatical side – from the Taliban to the Tsarnaevs – is more murderous than most", he wrote last month). I don't think it's hard to see why he, along with so many others, clings so fervently, even instinctively, to these precepts. [SIZE=2][U][B]No matter how many evil things your government does, no matter how many innocent people are killed by the political leader you deliriously adore, no matter how much blood you have on your own hands for exploiting your media platform to publicly cheer for mass violence and slaughter, all of that can be redeemed, or at least mitigated, only if there is Someone Else Over There who you can point to as The Supreme and Unique Evil. [/B][B]Sure, we make mistakes and do some bad things. But we're not like [I]them[/I]: the Ultimate Savages. The Primitive Islamic Hordes. [I]The Terrorists[/I]. That's why it's urgent that these designations of special evil (Terrorist) be reserved exclusively for Them: only then can we elevate ourselves.[/B][/U][/SIZE] Once that framework is implanted, then our violence is understandable, noble, well-intentioned, necessitated by their pure evil. By stark contrast, their violence is sub-human, senseless, and utterly unrelated to anything we do. Just marvel at the visceral and psychologically revealing language that Sullivan, after ennobling western violence, uses for the London attack [his emphasis]: "terrorism in its most animal-like form, created and sustained [I]entirely[/I] by religious fanaticism which would find [I]any[/I] excuse to murder, destroy and oppress Muslims and non-Muslims in the name of God." [B]This is the very personal need that bolsters this worldview and prompts such rage when it is challenged: the need to view oneself in a better light, to avoid the reality of what one supports and enables.[/B] I used to wonder how people like Sullivan and other Americans and westerners, who continuously justify any manner of violence and militarism by their own side, could possibly spend so much time pointing to [I]others[/I] and depicting [I]them[/I] - those people over there - as the embodiment of violence and savage aggression. But at some point I realized that[B] [U]it's precisely because they continuously justify so much violence and aggression from their side that they have such a boundless compulsion to depict others as the Uniquely Primitive and Violent Evil. [/U]That's how they absolve themselves. It's how they distract themselves from the reality of what they support and what their governments do in the world.[/B] And it's why few things produce quite as much personal resentment and anger than demanding that they first gaze into a mirror before issuing these absolutist denunciations about others. [url=http://www.guardian.co.uk/commentisfree/2013/may/25/andrew-sullivan-distortion-terrorism-woolwich?INTCMP=ILCNETTXT3487#start-of-comments]Andrew Sullivan, terrorism, and the art of distortion | Glenn Greenwald | Comment is free | guardian.co.uk[/url] [/QUOTE]
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