{"id":57038,"date":"2015-04-27T12:00:13","date_gmt":"2015-04-27T11:00:13","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.transcend.org\/tms\/?p=57038"},"modified":"2015-05-05T21:25:49","modified_gmt":"2015-05-05T20:25:49","slug":"the-key-war-on-terror-propaganda-tool-only-western-victims-are-acknowledged","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.transcend.org\/tms\/2015\/04\/the-key-war-on-terror-propaganda-tool-only-western-victims-are-acknowledged\/","title":{"rendered":"The Key War on Terror Propaganda Tool: Only Western Victims Are Acknowledged"},"content":{"rendered":"
\"Photo<\/a>

Photo of Mustafa Qadri, a Pakistan researcher at Amnesty International (Susan Walsh\/AP)<\/p><\/div>\n

24 Apr 2015 – <\/em>In all the years I\u2019ve been writing about Obama\u2019s\u00a0drone killings,\u00a0yesterday featured\u00a0by far<\/em> the most widespread critical discussion in U.S. establishment journalism circles. This long-suppressed but crucial fact about drones was actually trumpeted as\u00a0the lead headline\u00a0on the front page of\u00a0The New York Times <\/em>yesterday:<\/p>\n

\"nytheadlines-540x294<\/a><\/p>\n

The reason for the unusually intense, largely critical coverage of drone killings yesterday is\u00a0obvious: the victims of this strike were Western and non-Muslim, and therefore were seen as\u00a0actually human.<\/p>\n

Pakistani\u00a0lawyer\u00a0Shahzad Akbar, who represents 150 victims of American\u00a0drones and was twice denied entry to the U.S.<\/a> to speak about them, told my\u00a0Intercept <\/em>colleague Ryan Devereaux<\/a>\u00a0how two of his child clients would likely react to Obama\u2019s \u201capology\u201d yesterday:<\/p>\n

\u201cToday, if Nabila or Zubair or many of the civilian victims, if they are watching on TV the president being so remorseful over the killing of a Westerner, what message is that taking?\u201d The answer, he argued, is \u201cthat you do not matter, you are children of a lesser God, and I\u2019m only going to mourn if a Westerner is killed<\/strong>.\u201d<\/em><\/p>\n

The British-Yemeni journalist Abubakr Al-Shamahi\u00a0put it succinctly<\/a>: \u201cIt makes me angry that non-Western civilian victims of drone strikes are not given the same recognition by the US administration.\u201d The independent journalist Naheed Mustafa said<\/a> she was \u201chugely irritated by the \u2018drone strikes have killed good Westerners so now we know there are issues with\u00a0drones\u2019 stories.\u201d The Washington Post<\/em>\u2019s Eugene Robinson this morning observed<\/a>: \u201cIt is all too easy to ignore \u2026 the dubious morality of the whole enterprise \u2014 until the unfortunate victims happen to be Westerners.\u00a0Only then does \u2018collateral damage\u2019 become big news and an occasion for public sorrow.\u201d<\/p>\n

This highlights the ugliest propaganda tactic on which the War on Terror centrally depends, one in which the U.S. media is fully complicit: American and Western victims of\u00a0violence by Muslims are endlessly mourned, while Muslim victims of American and Western violence are completely disappeared.<\/p>\n

When there is an attack by a Muslim on Westerners in Paris, Sydney, Ottawa, Fort Hood or\u00a0Boston, we are deluged with grief-inducing accounts of the victims. We learn their names and their extinguished life aspirations, see their pictures, hear from their grieving relatives, watch ceremonies honoring their lives and mourning their deaths, launch campaigns to memorialize\u00a0them. Our side\u2019s victims aren\u2019t just humanized by our media, but are publicly grieved as martyrs.<\/p>\n

I happened to be in Canada the week of the shooting at the Parliament in Ottawa, as well as a random attack on two Canadian soldiers days earlier in a parking lot in Southern Quebec, and there was non-stop media coverage of the victims, their families, their lives<\/a>:<\/p>\n

Thousands of mourners packed a church and lined adjacent streets in industrial Hamilton, Ontario, on Tuesday for the funeral of the soldier shot dead in last week\u2019s attack on the nation\u2019s seat of government. \u2026 Canadian Prime Minister Stephen Harper told mourners at the church that [Corporal Nathan] Cirillo had inspired and united Canadians. He choked back tears in a rare public display of emotion when addressing Cirillo\u2019s five-year-old son.<\/em><\/p>\n

\"The<\/a>

The coffin of Cpl. Nathan Cirillo, Oct. 28, 2004. (Frank Gunn\/The Canadian Press\/AP)<\/p><\/div>\n

But as I noted in a speech I gave in Ottawa<\/a> two days after the Parliament shooting, the victims of Canada\u2019s own violence \u2014 in Afghanistan and Iraq\u00a0\u2014 and of its sustained cooperation in the U.S. War on Terror campaign, are completely ignored. While all of Canada knew the name of\u00a0Corporal Nathan Cirillo,\u00a0only the most minute fraction of Canadians could name even a single one of the many innocent victims killed by their own government and military. They simply don\u2019t exist.<\/p>\n

This is the toxic tribalism that repeats itself over and over throughout the West. Western victims are mourned and humanized, while victims of Western violence are invisible and thus dehumanized. Aside from being repugnant in its own right, this formula, by design, is deeply deceptive as propaganda: It creates the impression among Western populations that we are the victims but not the perpetrators of heinous violence, that terrorism is something done to us but that we never commit\u00a0ourselves, that \u201cprimitive, radical and\u00a0inhumanely violent\u201d describes the enemy tribe but not our own. (It\u2019s the same tactic that explains why we hear so much about American journalists imprisoned in adversary nations such as Iran and North Korea, but almost nothing<\/a> about Muslim journalists imprisoned\u00a0for years\u00a0without charges<\/em> by the U.S. government, thus deliberately creating the false impression that only those Bad Countries, but not us, do this.)<\/p>\n

To see how systematically the U.S. dehumanizes foreign Muslims, just think about that above-posted New York Times<\/em>\u00a0drone headline. The full headline is even more descriptive:<\/p>\n

\"nytimes.drones-540x276<\/a><\/p>\n

This \u201cuncomfortable truth\u201d has been obvious for so long. So often, the U.S. government\u00a0shoots missiles at buildings, cars and homes outside of \u201cbattlefields\u201d\u00a0without having any idea<\/em> who it will kill. Despite this fact \u2014 that not even the government itself knows who it is killing<\/em> \u2014 the U.S. media routinely and reflexively describes victims of U.S. drone strikes as \u201cmilitants<\/a>.\u201d Democrats and progressives, who to their eternal disgrace overwhelmingly support<\/a> Obama\u2019s drone killing program, will declare \u201cwe are killing The Terrorists!\u201d to justify all of this\u00a0even though the Obama administration itself, let alone these cheering progressives, have no idea who their government just killed.<\/em><\/p>\n

How can people killed by the U.S. government regularly be described as \u201cmilitants\u201d or \u201cterrorists\u201d when nobody has any idea who they are? Part of it is classic authoritarianism: My government says the people they are killing are Terrorists, so therefore, they are Terrorists.<\/p>\n

But the deeper, more troubling answer is equally clear: Foreign Muslims are so dehumanized, so invisible, that they are just equated<\/em> with\u00a0Evil Threats even when nothing is known about them. Indeed, Obama officially re-defined <\/em>the term \u201ccombatant\u201d<\/a>\u00a0to mean \u201call military-age males in a strike zone.\u201d\u00a0<\/strong>In other words, as The\u00a0New York Times<\/em> reported in 2011,\u00a0all males between\u00a018\u00a0and (roughly) 54 killed by U.S. drones are presumed<\/em> to be combatants \u2014 terrorists \u2014\u00a0\u201cunless there is explicit intelligence posthumously proving them innocent.\u201d That mentality is the ultimate in dehumanization.<\/p>\n

There are so many heinous stories of U.S. drones blowing up children and innocent adults. Obama used cruise missiles and cluster bombs<\/a> to kill 14 children and 21 women in a Yemeni village (weeks after winning the Nobel Peace Prize), while a 2012 drone strike<\/a> attacked a Yemeni wedding convoy and \u201ckilled 12 passengers in the vehicle, including three children and a pregnant woman.\u201d Except for those who watch shows like\u00a0Democracy Now<\/em><\/a>\u00a0or certain Al Jazeera shows<\/a>, virtually no Americans ever learn the name of any of those victims, or even hear that they exist at all.<\/p>\n

It shouldn\u2019t take the drone-killing\u00a0of an American citizen to enable a mainstream discussion of how much deceit and recklessness drives these killings. But it does. And that fact, by itself, should cause a serious examination of the mindset behind all of this.<\/p>\n

________________________<\/p>\n

Email the author: glenn.greenwald@theintercept.com<\/a><\/em><\/p>\n

Go to Original \u2013 firstlook.org<\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

24 Apr 2015 – In all the years I\u2019ve been writing about Obama\u2019s drone killings, yesterday featured BY FAR the most widespread critical discussion in U.S. establishment journalism circles. The reason for the unusually intense, largely critical coverage of drone killings yesterday is obvious: the victims of this strike were Western and non-Muslim, and therefore were seen as actually human.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":4,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[65],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-57038","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-anglo-america"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.transcend.org\/tms\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/57038","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.transcend.org\/tms\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.transcend.org\/tms\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.transcend.org\/tms\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/4"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.transcend.org\/tms\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=57038"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.transcend.org\/tms\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/57038\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.transcend.org\/tms\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=57038"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.transcend.org\/tms\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=57038"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.transcend.org\/tms\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=57038"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}