War on Terrorism

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"Dehumanization on a Vast Scale"

An excerpt from ""They Dare to Speak Out" by Paul Findley, pp. 356 - 358

Why, in the wake of 9/11, did no one ponder the question "why?". Why did America and its leaders remain silent about Arab and Muslim grievances?

Perhaps it was partly, if not mostly, because Muslims are often considered "different", if not dangerous, by the general public - most of whom, I must add, have never knowingly met a Muslim or read a verse from the Qur'an. In research done for my book, Silent No More, I learned that Muslims were unfairly linked with terrorism long before 9/11. misperceptions of Muslims as being less than human were nurtured by heavy television coverage of the suicide bombings in Israel that were carried out by individual Palestinian Muslims, while scenes of Palestinian suffering and death seldom reached American homes. Few Americans seemed aware that Palestinians had no weapons to defend themselves against heavily armed Israeli forces marauding through the West Bank and Gaza.

From its founding in 1948, Israel's government has treated Palestinians as inferior human beings that it was entitled to subjugate. Years ago, Israeli Prime Minister Golder Meir even denied that a Palestinian nationality existed. Her denial buttressed the fiction that Israel came into being in 1948 in "a land without people", a false notion that has been kept alive ever since in Israeli schoolbooks. Even the Palestinians, who can vote in Israeli elections, are set apart from Jewish citizens: Their cars display distinctive license plates. They are denied important social services. They have difficulty buying any real estate, in effect, can live only in restricted residential areas. They are rarely able to secure construction and remodeling permits, while Jews receive them without delay.

This process of colonial domination and intellectual brutality advanced the destruction of the Palestinian national identity in the perception of the American people: Palestinians are not viewed as human being struggling for freedom, they are portrayed as anti-Jewish terrorists who hate freedom. Columbia University professor Edward Said, born in Palestine, called Israel's treatment of Palestinians "dehumanization on a vast scale". He added, "The intellectual suppression of the Palestinians that has occurred because of Zionist education has produced an unreflecting, dangerously skewed sense of reality in which whatever Israel does it does as a victim... This has nothing to do with reality, obviously enough, but rather with a kind of hallucinatory state that overrides history and facts with a supreme unthinking narcissism." By helping Israel subjugate Palestinians, the U.S. government advanced this dehumanizing process. The president frequently expressed concern about security for Israelis but never about security for Palestinians. This bias reinforced the notions among Americans that, because Palestinians are ungovernable radicals, the Israeli government must impose harsh treatment in order to keep them under control. Uri Avnery, an Israeli peace activist and former member of the Israeli Knesset, concluded that the real aim of Sharon's March 2002 invasion of the West Bank was nothing less than "the destruction of organized Palestinian society itself".

The U.S. media played a role in America's failure to explore and address Arab grievances. After 9/11, several television commentators rejected as "appeasement of terrorists" steps that would take Arab grievances into consideration. Their reasoning for this was the invariably uttered sound bite "That is exactly what the terrorists want us to do." To the commentators, responding to legitimate grievances would be tantamount to caving in to the enemy. Except for a few dissenting voices, the misinformed American people seemed to agree.

The additional fear of being marked as anti-Jewish was another reason that Arab grievances were ignored. Any gesture of fairness to Arabs were ignored. Any gesture of fairness to Arabs would be widely misconstrued as hostility toward Israel, and this, in turn, would lead to accusation of anti-Semitism. Speaking up for Arab rights could lead to all kinds of personal losses - businesses, friendships, even social standing. Almost everyone could find an excuse to stay quietly on the sidelines.


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