{"id":76940,"date":"2016-08-01T12:00:38","date_gmt":"2016-08-01T11:00:38","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.transcend.org\/tms\/?p=76940"},"modified":"2016-07-28T16:55:12","modified_gmt":"2016-07-28T15:55:12","slug":"nice-munich-and-the-terrorism-of-the-west","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.transcend.org\/tms\/2016\/08\/nice-munich-and-the-terrorism-of-the-west\/","title":{"rendered":"Nice, Munich and the Terrorism of the West"},"content":{"rendered":"

It\u2019s safe to say that there is indeed ‘terrorism everywhere’ – and that the media helps to propagate it.<\/em><\/p>\n

\"French<\/a>

French police officers in the Urban Supervisory Control Centre (CSU) in Nice, southeastern France, on 26 April, 2016 (AFP).<\/p><\/div>\n

25 Jul 2016 – <\/em>From my base in southern Italy this month, I got to experience Italian television coverage of the aftermath of the 14 July lorry attack in Nice, France, that killed 84 people.<\/p>\n

Predictably, coverage entailed headlines like \u201cIslamic Terrorism Everywhere\u201d, which prompted Italians in my midst to unleash lively Muslim-directed curses involving references to various human anatomy and to hyperventilate about how in Europe it was no longer possible to even walk outside without being blown up or otherwise Islamically terrorised.<\/p>\n

In certain other parts of the world, of course, it has for years often been a crapshoot of sorts to walk outside – or engage in any number of other mundane activities like playing football<\/a>, attending weddings<\/a>, attending funerals<\/a>, sleeping<\/a>\u00a0–\u00a0without attracting the attention of projectiles belonging to the United States or Israel, to name two of the top offenders.<\/p>\n

It bears mentioning, on this front, that Italy is itself no minor accomplice to global killing patterns given its service as loyal military ally of the US and launching pad<\/a> for drone missions. But terrorism by drone doesn\u2019t factor into Eurocentric concerns.<\/p>\n

Following the Nice attack, Italian TV not only less-than-subtly transmitted the message that Islam is in fact the problem; news reports also zoomed in repeatedly on the identity card of attacker Mohamed Lahouaiej-Bouhlel to give viewers an up-close-and-personal view of the latest face of terror, of concentrated evil.<\/p>\n

What the combination of the general Islamic-terror-everywhere narrative and the zoomed-in, spotlighted individual brown face does is to endow certain physiognomies with a fundamental terrorist essence. It\u2019s an approach that is far from unique to the Italian media, and that simply begs for ever more enhanced racial profiling and xenophobia.<\/p>\n

This is not, obviously, to put forth some absurd argument according to which images of such attackers shouldn\u2019t be disseminated. Rather, it is to point out that the singular victimisation, vilification and hysteria that attend such attacks in the West don\u2019t gel with reality. Where are the zoomed-in identity cards of, for example, George W. Bush, Barack Obama, or Benjamin Netanyahu, so that we might excruciatingly scrutinise them for clues as to how these characters became sociopathic killers?<\/p>\n

Not to make light of the terrible and tragic attack in Nice, of course, but it is presumably no more terrible to have one\u2019s body levelled by a lorry than to have it blasted to smithereens<\/a> by American and\/or Israeli munitions. The latter variety of slaughter will, however, continued to be justified on account of the fact that it is conducted by the ostensibly legitimate military and security forces of recognised states, their sociopathic credentials notwithstanding.<\/p>\n

Moral of the story: if you happen to exist in the vicinity of Arab\/Muslim formations, you\u2019re legitimate collateral damage – and you don\u2019t stand a chance of being humanised post-mortem in the fashion of the Nice victims. In fact, it\u2019s unlikely that even an iota of your history as a human being on this earth will be permitted to cross the threshold of Western consciousness.<\/p>\n

Eighty-four lives lost in Nice is an atrocity of extreme proportions, no doubt. But what of the estimated half a million Iraqi children wiped out via US sanctions in the 1990s, before we even got down to serious business via the war on terror? Back in 1996, then-US Secretary of State Madeleine Albright was asked by television journalist Lesley Stahl for her thoughts<\/a> on the sanctions that had killed \u201cmore children than died in Hiroshima\u201d.<\/p>\n

Albright\u2019s opinion: \u201c[W]e think the price is worth it.\u201d<\/p>\n

To be sure, half a million gradually extinguished young lives is not as conducive to media sensationalism as a rampaging lorry in France that spontaneously extinguishes 84. But still, where is Albright\u2019s zoomed-in identity card? Where is the ID card of former US Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice, who lauded the carnage<\/a> of Israel\u2019s 2006 war on Lebanon – in which some 1,200 people were obliterated – as the \u201cbirth pangs of a new Middle East\u201d?<\/p>\n

Why don\u2019t CIA-orchestrated car bombs<\/a> that kill more than 80 people in Beirut qualify as terrorism or at least a global tragedy, but vehicles that kill more than 80 people in France do?<\/p>\n

It has already become tiresome to point out the institutionalised hypocrisy and discrepancies, but there\u2019s not exactly an alternative – particularly when the very function of the Western establishment media is to fuel an anti-intellectual, anti-analytical, anti-empathetic approach to current events that furthers the political aims of dominant powers.<\/p>\n

In the aftermath of the recent shooting<\/a> at a Munich shopping centre, in which nine persons were killed, the Italian media were true to form – as were media counterparts across the West.<\/p>\n

Watching coverage of the attack from southern Italy, I was repeatedly informed by the television set that, although there was no evidence whatsoever that this was an instance of \u201cIslamic terror\u201d, there was no discounting the fact that it at least resembled<\/em> an instance of Islamic terror.<\/p>\n

In other words, it doesn\u2019t matter who the attacker is or what the precise circumstances are – everyone should still engage in one big anti-Muslim freak-out session. Which naturally serves to validate further punitively racist measures at home and lethally racist measures abroad.<\/p>\n

In the end, it\u2019s safe to say that there is indeed \u201cTERRORISM EVERYWHERE\u201d – and that the media helps to propagate it.<\/p>\n

_________________________________<\/p>\n

\u00a0Belen Fernandez<\/em>\u00a0is the author of<\/em>\u00a0The Imperial Messenger: Thomas Friedman at Work, published by Verso. She is a contributing editor at Jacobin magazine.<\/em><\/p>\n

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

If you happen to exist in the vicinity of Arab\/Muslim formations, you\u2019re legitimate collateral damage – and you don\u2019t stand a chance of being humanised post-mortem in the fashion of the Nice victims. Eighty-four lives lost in Nice is an atrocity of extreme proportions, no doubt. But what of the estimated half a million Iraqi children wiped out via US sanctions in the 1990s, before we even got down to serious business via the war on terror?<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":4,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[48],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-76940","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-in-focus"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.transcend.org\/tms\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/76940","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=76940"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.transcend.org\/tms\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/76940\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.transcend.org\/tms\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=76940"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.transcend.org\/tms\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=76940"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.transcend.org\/tms\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=76940"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}