Boston bombings produce revealing reactions

There’s not much to say about last Monday’s Boston Marathon attack because there is virtually no known evidence regarding who did it or why. There are, however, several points to be made about some of the widespread reactions to this incident. Much of that reaction is all-too-familiar and quite revealing in important ways:

(1) The widespread compassion for yesterday’s victims and the intense anger over the attacks was obviously authentic and thus good to witness. However, it was really hard not to find oneself wishing that just a fraction of that compassion and anger be devoted to attacks that the US perpetrates rather than suffers. These are exactly the kinds of horrific, civilian-slaughtering attacks that the US has been bringing to countries in the Muslim world over and over again for the last decade, with very little attention paid.

My Guardian colleague Gary Younge put this best on Twitter: Juan Cole this morning makes a similar point about violence elsewhere. Indeed, just yesterday in Iraq, at least 42 people were killed and more than 250 injured by a series of car bombs, the enduring result of the US invasion and destruction of that country. Somehow the deep compassion and anger felt in the US when it is attacked never translates to understanding the effects of our own aggression against others.

One particularly illustrative example I happened to see yesterday was a re-tweet from Washington Examiner columnist David Freddoso, proclaiming: Idea of secondary bombs designed to kill the first responders is just sick. How does anyone become that evil?”

I don’t disagree with that sentiment, but I would bet a good amount of money that the person saying it — and the vast majority of other Americans — have no clue that targeting rescuers with “double-tap” attacks is precisely what the US now does with its drone programme and other forms of militarism. If most Americans knew their government and military were doing this, would they react the same way as they did to the Boston attack? That’s highly doubtful, and that’s the point.

There’s nothing wrong per se with paying more attention to tragedy and violence that happens relatively nearby and in familiar places. Whether wrong or not, it’s probably human nature, or at least human instinct, to do that and that happens all over the world. I’m not criticising that, but one wishes that the empathy for victims and outrage over the ending of innocent human life that instantly arises when the US is targeted by this sort of violence will at least translate into similar concern when the US is perpetrating it, as it so often does. Regardless of your views of justification and intent: Whatever rage you are feeling towards the perpetrator of this Boston attack, that is the rage in sustained form that people across the world feel towards the US for killing innocent people in their countries. Whatever sadness you feel for the Boston victims, the same level of sadness is warranted for the innocent people whose lives are ended by American bombs. However profound a loss you recognise the parents and family members of these victims to have suffered, that is the same loss experienced by victims of US violence. It is natural that it will not be felt as intensely when the victims are far away and mostly invisible, but applying these reactions to those acts of US aggression will go a long way towards better understanding what they are and the outcomes they generate.

(2) The rush, one may say the eagerness, to conclude that the attackers were Muslim was palpable and unseemly, even without any real evidence. The New York Post quickly claimed that the prime suspect was a Saudi national (while also inaccurately reporting that 12 people had been confirmed dead). The Post’s insinuation of responsibility was also suggested on CNN by former Homeland Security adviser, Fran Townsend (“We know that there is one Saudi national who was wounded in the leg who is being spoken to”). Former Democratic Representative Jane Harman went on CNN to grossly speculate that Muslim groups were behind the attack. Anti-Muslim bigots like Pam Geller predictably announced that this was “Jihad in America”. Expressions of hatred for Muslims and a desire to conduct violence were then spewing forth all over Twitter (some particularly unscrupulous partisan Democrat types were identically suggesting with zero evidence that the attackers were right-wing extremists).

Obviously, it is possible that the perpetrator(s) will turn out to Muslim(s), just like it is possible they will turn out to be extremist right-wing activists or left-wing agitators or Muslim-fearing Anders-Breivik types or lone individuals driven by mental illness. However, the rush to proclaim the guilty party to be Muslim is seen in particular with such events. Recall that on the day of the 2011 Oslo massacre by a right-wing, Muslim-hating extremist, the New York Times spent virtually the entire day strongly suggesting in its headlines that an Islamic extremist group was responsible, a claim other major news outlets (including the BBC and Washington Post) then repeated as fact. The same thing happened with the 1995 Oklahoma City bombing, when most major US media outlets strongly suggested that the perpetrators were Muslims. As FAIR documented back then: “In the wake of the explosion that destroyed the Murrah Federal Office Building, the media rushed almost en masse to the assumption that the bombing was the work of Muslim extremists. “The betting here is on Middle East terrorists,” declared CBS News’ Jim Stewart just hours after the blast on April 19, 1995. “The fact that it was such a powerful bomb in Oklahoma City immediately drew investigators to consider deadly parallels that all have roots in the Middle East,” ABC’s John McWethy proclaimed the same day.”It has every single earmark of the Islamic car-bombers of the Middle East,” wrote syndicated columnist Georgie Anne Geyer (Chicago Tribune, 4/21/95). “Whatever we are doing to destroy Mideast terrorism, the chief terrorist threat against Americans, has not been working,” declared the New York Times’ A.M. Rosenthal (4/21/95). The Geyer and Rosenthal columns were filed after the FBI released sketches of two suspects who looked more like Midwestern frat boys than Mujahideen.

This lesson is never learned because, it seems, many people do not want to learn it. Even when it turns out not to have been Muslims who perpetrated the attack but rather right-wing, white Christians, the damage from this relentless and reflexive blame-pinning endures.

(3) One continually encountered expressions of dread and fear from Arabs and Muslims around the world that the attacker would be either or both. That is because they know that all members of their religious or ethnic group will be blamed, or worse, if that turns out to be the case. That is true even though leading Muslim-American groups such as CAIR harshly condemned the attack (as they always do) and urged support for the victims, including blood donations. One tweeter, referring to the latest earthquake that hit Iran, satirised this collective mindset by writing: “Please don’t be a Muslim plate tectonic activity.”

As understandable as it is, that is just sad to witness. No other group reacts with that level of fear to these kinds of incidents, because no other group has similar cause to fear that they will all be hated or targeted for the acts of isolated, unrepresentative individuals. A similar dynamic has long prevailed in the domestic crime context: When the perpetrators of notorious crimes turned out to be African-American, the entire community usually paid a collective price. But the unique and well-grounded dread that hundreds of millions of law-abiding, peaceful Muslims and Arabs around the world have about the prospect that this attack in Boston was perpetrated by a Muslim highlights the climate of fear that has been created for and imposed on them over the last decade.

(4) The reaction to the Boston attack underscored, yet again, the utter meaninglessness of the word “terrorism”. News outlets were seemingly scandalised that President Barack Obama, in his initial remarks, did not use the words “terrorist attacks” to describe the bombing. In response, the White House ran to the media to assure them that they considered it “terrorism”. Fox News’ Ed Henry quoted a “senior administration official” as saying this: “When multiple [explosive] devices go off that’s an act of terrorism.”

Is that what “terrorism” is? “When multiple [explosive] devices go off”? If so, that encompasses a great many things, including what the US does in the world on a very regular basis. Of course, the quest to know whether this was “terrorism” is really code for: “Was this done by Muslims”? That is because, in US political discourse, “terrorism” has no real meaning other than violence perpetrated by Muslims against the West. The reason there was such confusion and uncertainty about whether this was “terrorism” is because there is no clear and consistently applied definition of the term. At this point, it’s little more than a term of emotionally manipulative propaganda. That has been proven over and over and it was against yesterday.

(5) The history of these types of attacks over the last decade has been clear and consistent: They are exploited to obtain new government powers, increase state surveillance and take away individual liberties. On NBC with Brian Williams last Tuesday night, Tom Brokaw decreed that this will happen again and instructed Americans that they must meekly submit to it: “Everyone has to understand tonight that, beginning tomorrow morning early, there are going to be much tougher security considerations all across the country and however exhausted we may be by that, we’re going to have to learn to live [with] them and get along and go forward and not let them bring us to our knees. You will remember last summer, how unhappy we were with the security at the Democrtic and Republic conventions. Now I don’t think we can raise those complaints after what happened in Boston.”

On Chris Hayes’ MSNBC show, an FBI agent discussed the fact that the US government has the right to arrest terrorism suspects and not provide them with Miranda warnings before questioning them. After seeing numerous people express surprise at this claim on Twitter, I pointed out that this happened when the Obama administration exploited the attempted underwear bombing over Detroit to radically reduce Miranda rights over what they had been for decades. That is what the US government (aided by the sham “terrorism expert” industry) does in every single one of these cases: Exploit the resulting fear to increase its own power and decrease everyone else’s rights, including privacy.

At the Atlantic, security expert Bruce Schneier has a short but compelling article on how urgent it is that people in America not react to the Boston attack irrationally or with exaggerated fear and that they remain particularly vigilant against government attempts to exploit fear to impose all new rights-reducing measures. He notes in particular how the more unusual an event is (such as this sort of attack on US soil), the more our brains naturally exaggerate its significance and frequency (John Cole makes a similar point).

In sum, even if the perpetrators of last Monday’s attack in Boston turn out to be politically motivated and subscribers to an anti-US ideology, it will still be a very rare event, one that poses far less danger to Americans than literally countless other threats. The most important lesson of the excesses from the 9/11 attacks should be this one: That the dangers of over-reacting and succumbing to irrational fear are far, far greater than any other dangers posed by these type of events.

— Guardian News & Media Ltd