Currently viewing the tag: “Humiliation”
The situation in Syria continues to smolder:
Several deaths have been reported as anti-government protests got under way in several Syrian cities after Muslim prayers on Friday, activists have said. Protest marches against Baath Party rule demanding freedoms broke out in cities in the north and south, including the flashpoint city of Daraa. … Al Jazeera's Rula Amin, reporting from Damascus, said at least four people were killed in the afternoon after government forces started using live fire against the protesters in the Douma suburb.
The rallies, taking place for the third week in succession after Friday prayers, come two days after Bashar al-Assad, the Syrian president, labelled them a foreign conspiracy. Assad defied expectations during his first public address since the protests began that he would announce sweeping changes.
Witnesses in Daraa, a southern town that has been one of the main focal points of rising dissent, said hundreds gathered after leaving a mosque shouting "death rather [than] humiliation" and "national unity".
Enduring America has tons more footage from today.
He was hoping to commit mass-murder on a large scale for Allah. “Stockholm bomber aimed for major targets: prosecutor,” by Patrick Lannin and Niklas Pollard for Reuters, December 13 (thanks to all who sent this in):
STOCKHOLM (Reuters) – A Middle East-born man who died in a blast in Stockholm was wearing an explosives belt and likely aimed to attack a crowded train station or department store when the device went off prematurely, an official said on Monday.
Sweden’s chief prosecutor Tomas Lindstrand told a news conference the man had been well equipped with explosives and he assumed the man had accomplices as the attack was well planned.
“He was wearing a bomb belt and was carrying a rucksack with a bomb. He was also carrying an object that looks something like a pressure cooker. If it had all exploded at the same time it could have caused very serious damage,” Lindstrand said.
A car containing gas canisters blew up in a busy shopping area in central Stockholm on Saturday followed minutes later by a blast nearby which killed the bomber and injured two people.
“It is not a very wild guess that he was headed to some place where there were as many people as possible, perhaps the central station, perhaps (department store) Ahlens,” he said.
He said the man was almost certainly Taymour Abdulwahab, who has been widely named in media reports.
He said Abdulwahab was born in 1981, became a Swedish citizen in 1992 and came from a Middle Eastern country, although it was unclear which. The Swedish immigration service told Reuters he came to Sweden in 1992 and got citizenship in 1998….
The University of Bedfordshire in the southern English town of Luton said a student called Taymour Abdulwahab, a Swedish national, had registered in 2001 and graduated with a degree in sports therapy in 2004….
A post on a Muslim dating website showed Abdulwahab was born in Iraq, was married with two young daughters and looking for a second wife.
Shortly before the blasts, Swedish news agency TT received a threatening letter criticizing Sweden’s troops in Afghanistan, caricatures of the Prophet Mohammad drawn by a Swedish cartoonist and which spoke of a Middle East trip for “jihad.”
“To all Muslims in Sweden I say: stop fawning and humiliating yourselves for a life of humiliation is far from Islam. Help your brothers and sisters and do not fear anything or anyone, only the God you worship,” the letter said.
In the letter, he said to his family: “I never went to the Middle East to work or earn money, I went there for jihad. I hope that you can understand me some time.”…
Oh, I understand you real well.
Drum shrugs:
I think the privacy concerns are close to insane. But I do care about whether we’re spending billions of dollars on technology that doesn’t do us any good. Looking at the pictures the scanners produce, it sure seems as if they’re more effective than standard screening. So can someone please explain why they aren’t?
In practice, I haven’t given a toss when I’ve gone through those things. But like Kevin, I would like to know if they can actually catch someone with some explosives in his taint.
Seth Masket huffs that the chattering class is getting carried away:
Airport security theater does deserve some pushback, and I think it would be great if passengers simply refused to comply with gross violations of their privacy that do nothing to make air travel safer. I doubt too many people will resist, though, since not flying is usually not a realistic option for people who have places to be and have already packed and schlepped everything to the airport. TSA has us, literally and figuratively, by the balls.
That said, this is not the great civil rights battle of our time.
Passengers are not being hauled out of their homes or tortured or placed in prison without access to legal counsel — things that actually have happened to American citizens in recent years in the name of security. Nor are people being turned away from the polls or told they can't unionize or being beaten by police officers — also things that have happened to real live Americans in recent years. What's going on in the airports is simply a form of government humiliation that has hit the professional class.
Noah Shachtman says that the new scanners aren't keeping us safe. He follows up at his blog:
New TSA chief John Pistole says the agency has to shift from a threat-driven outfit into an “intelligence-driven” organization. There are some signs that such a move may be afoot.
On the night in late October that Saudi intelligence tipped the American government off to a late plot to blow up planes using explosives packed in printer cartridges, Pistole got a call from White House counterrrorism czar John Brennan. The TSA was then able to give new marching orders to everyone from air marshals to cargo inspectors. An agency team was even dispatched to Yemen, where the bombs originated. It all seemed shockingly logical for an agency that’s generally appears to be anything but. The quick response to intelligence and targeted security measures could provide a partial template for future action. The next step would be questioning passengers and employing high-sensors when travelers’ behavior or specific threats warrant — instead of making us all get digitally nude.
Cory Doctorow summarizes another incident:
Johnnyedge checked the TSA's website and learned that the San Diego airport had not yet implemented its porno-scanners, so he went down to catch his flight. When he arrived, he discovered that the TSA's website was out of date, and the naked scanners were in place. He opted out of showing his penis to the government, so they told him he'd have to submit to an intimate testicle fondling. He told the screener, "if you touch my junk, I'll have you arrested."
He recorded the confrontation and posted it on YouTube.
Cory Doctorow summarizes another incident:
Johnnyedge checked the TSA's website and learned that the San Diego airport had not yet implemented its porno-scanners, so he went down to catch his flight. When he arrived, he discovered that the TSA's website was out of date, and the naked scanners were in place. He opted out of showing his penis to the government, so they told him he'd have to submit to an intimate testicle fondling. He told the screener, "if you touch my junk, I'll have you arrested."
He recorded the confrontation and posted it on YouTube.
In a jeremiad against the TSA, Will Wilkinson puts them in perspective:
I have found the submissiveness and docility of the American people in the face of the state's pointless molestation incredibly discouraging. I think this is one of those subjects that demands we step back, take a deep breath, and consider with a clear mind just how phenomenally idiotic the government's policy of increasingly invasive degradation really is. Law-abiding travellers, who pose approximately zero risk of terrorism, and offer no ground for reasonable suspicion of wrongdoing, must run this gauntlet of abasement because airplanes were once made the instrument of mass death. The odds of being a victim of terrorism on a flight are approximately 1 in 10,408,947—rather less than the 1 in 500,000 odds of getting killed by lightning.
But nope. Who cares? Doesn't matter! Instead the government ramps up their time-consuming campaign of harassment. Is the idea that if we are not made to feel ashamed, we will not be made to feel safe? I can't figure it out. The TSA is like my dog. Once he spied a rabbit by a tree in our yard as we came in the back gate. Now, whenever we come through that gate, he freezes and stares bullets at the spot by the birch where a bunny once sat. To a first approximation, there is never a rabbit there, and any special effort devoted to detecting one there is wasted. I have tried to explain this to Winston. But the poor dog, a genius of premature inductive inference, just won't believe me. I find this a little annoying, but he's a dog, it only takes a second, and he doesn't fondle my upper thigh.
So, the politically correct solution to terrorism by Middle Eastern radical Muslim men is to invade the private lives of children, mothers, babies, old men and women, pilots, and other average Americans? Can we agree that there is a point beyond which the terrorists implicitly win because we change our behavior to such a freedom-killing extent that the jihadis don’t have to?
Paul Reyes reflects on the foreclosure crisis:
Documenting a foreclosure requires invasion of privacy—an embarrassment shared by the sheriff’s deputy, a trash-out crew, a journalist or photographer. Having spent the last couple of years writing about this crisis myself, I can say that the embarrassment never fades. The sentiment in letters and photographs long abandoned never evaporates completely, no matter how moldered. This sense of invasion, oddly paired with an uncomfortable intimacy, is part of the voyeuristic tension of documenting the homes that people leave behind—sometimes in a rush that scatters toys and trophies and love letters, sometimes with the kind of order and neatness that speaks to a stubborn pride.
But in viewing foreclosure interiors, a curious thing happens: the voyeuristic awkwardness passes, and one begins to piece together the missing characters. We already know the circumstances, generally; but why was a wallet-sized snapshot of children left behind? What left the holes in the wall? Through these questions that flit behind the scanning eye, the portraits become a kind of forensic study.
Janet Malcolm once wrote, "Every journalist who is not too stupid or too full of himself to notice what is going on knows that what he does is morally indefensible. He is a kind of confidence man, preying on people's vanity, ignorance, or loneliness, gaining their trust and betraying them without remorse." There's some truth in that description, which doesn't make the journalist's job any less necessary, especially in times of national upheaval.
I know of few writers more interesting, knowledgeable or as engaged on the subject of the war with Islamist terror as Lawrence Wright, whose one-man play will debut on HBO tonight. And here's an insight culled by Scott Horton from an interview with him that seems to me less examined than it should be:
Humility is a highly valued character trait in Islamic culture. When bin Laden’s followers praise him, they often invoke this quality. The fact that bin Laden is from a wealthy family makes this aspect of his personality all the more appealing.
Humiliation, on the other hand, is imposed from the outside. It is one of the most common words in bin Laden’s vocabulary. For many Muslims who resonate with the term, their humiliation may be cultural or religious in nature—the sense of Islamic societies being overpowered by Western values, mores, and political dictates.
But it is also true that a number of Muslims have been physically humiliated. Ayman al-Zawahiri, for instance, the number-two man in Al Qaeda, the doctor always at bin Laden’s elbow, was imprisoned for three years in Egypt following the Sadat assassination. Like many of his companions, he was brutally tortured. I think the particular appetite for carnage that sets Al Qaeda apart from other terrorist organizations was born in the humiliation such men suffered in those prisons.
I do believe that Islamism, like Christianism, is a response in part to cultural humiliation. The humiliation comes from modernity's triumph. How do you look at modern Europe and America, for example, with their immense wealth, scientific achievement, cultural vivacity, extraordinary diversity … and square it with the notion that our lives would be better off under Sharia or the brittle constraints of pre-Darwinian Biblical literalism or the contrived theoconservatism of the American far right? Yes, yes: I'll repeat once again that there is no comparison in action or intent between the radicals of Islamism and the radicals of Christianism; Christianists have not a smidgen of the record of violence that Islamists have. But the psychological under-pinnings of both are about, it seems to me, the unbearable knowledge of the success of modern liberalism in its battle with primordial theocratic security. And so the pre-moderns are infused with Nietzschean ressentiment – from Wasilla to Quetta. (Yes, that's a core argument in The Conservative Soul.)
Genuine Christianity needs no such ressentiment; you see it almost nowhere in Jesus' words or in the lives of most saints. His kingdom is not of this world. Islam is more complex, in my amateur reading of it, more related to political and territorial and collective unity. But it too has a history of piety and learning as much as politics and violence and the challenge is to support the former while not pushing its moderates toward the latter in an era of WMDs. That's why the neoconservative and Christianist campaign against the Cordoba complex seems to me such a self-fulfilling act of self-defeat. And why, of course, the wicked genius of 9/11 was to provoke the very reaction that would drag even more Muslims into the ressentiment camp. And yes, a central needless rampart of this ressentiment was America's adoption of torture of Muslim prisoners – everywhere in the war, in every branch of the military, as a disgusting illegal act of deliberate policy and betrayal of core values. Its awful consequences – and the refusal of Obama and he Congress thus far to hold the torturers accountable before the world – will reap yet more terror in the years ahead. There are few things more humiliating than being stretched and contorted into agony for hours on end on the order of an American president.
How then to encourage Muslim humility and alleviate the toxic effects of Muslim humiliation? We can do nothing about the former. That is the vital task for Muslim reformers who are, to put it mildly, scarce on the ground in the Arab world. But we can do something – or not do some things – about the sense of Muslim humiliation – and Obama's outreach to the Muslim world, his open respect for Islam, and his dogged determination to forge a settlement in Israel/Palestine are critical parts of this long strategy for winning the war of ideas. That's why I believe the two-state solution in Israel/Palestine is more important than some argue. It will not defang the Islamists; in fact, it may enrage them. But an actual deal, especially forged by Barack Hussein Obama, would alleviate a deep source of humiliation, rubbed raw every time a new settlement is built.
That is the task of this president in this war, as David Petraeus understands: to defend religious freedom at home, to pursue relentless and precise war against the terrorists abroad, and to remove as many obstacles to the transformation of Muslim humiliation toward Muslim humility as we can. It is an immensely difficult and thankless and tough task. It will stretch beyond one generation. But I can see this president trying and I am sick of those who want him to fail for petty or partisan reasons. This is far too grave a struggle for that.
And that also means more Western humility and less neurotic faux-pride. We can and should be proud of our inheritance of freedom and the wealth of all forms that freedom creates; but we need not and should not make the rest of the world resent it more than absolutely necessary. That, one recalls, was George W. Bush's promise as a presidential candidate: a humble America. He subsequently forgot, in a forgivable way after 9/11, what we must always remember.
America's genius is not power. It is example.
Al Qaeda – United States – Islam – Osama bin Laden – Barack Obama
