Alton Nolen is a fake-ass Muslim
Posted: October 3, 2014 Filed under: Islamophobia | Tags: Alton Nolen, beheading, false claiming, Oklahoma 3 Comments
If you think the actions of Oklahoma beheader Alton Nolen say anything about “Islam,” you’re fucking stupid. He was emotionally disturbed and criminally antisocial long before he began playing Muslim—and he wasn’t playing it well. The few times he attended a mosque, they had to keep reminding him not to lay his fucking Quran on the floor.
The New York Times reports (as quoted from Lou Proyect of The Unrepentant Marxist):
Law enforcement officials said Mr. Nolen was a recent convert to Islam. A Facebook page that appeared to be his indicated that he was calling himself Jah’Keem Yisrael, and is filled with criticism of American culture, and dire warnings about coming judgment for those who do not follow that religion. “This is the last days,” he wrote in his most recent post, on Tuesday.
Writes Lou:
Wonder why he picked a last name like Yisrael. He might as well called himself Mohammad Cohen or Ali Bernstein. Clearly he was a bit *off*.
Indeed.
Reflections on the racist murder of Jordan Davis by the racist Michael Dunn [REVISED]
Posted: October 2, 2014 Filed under: racism | Tags: Jordan Davis, justice, let 'em know, Michael Dunn, Stand Your Ground, we need a black fatwa Leave a commentMichael Dunn was just found guilty of first degree murder in the “loud music” shooting death of 17-year old Jordan Davis in Florida.
Dunn had already been convicted of four lesser charges in February. However, that jury deadlocked on the murder charge. Prosecutors chose to retry him on that charge alone and were successful. This of course is great news, unless you’re a cracker or a dipshit.
Jordan Davis is dead because he was black
When I say Davis was murdered for being black, I’m not being hyperbolic or speculative or inferring inductively from similar cases.
Consider: While this case has been branded as a fight over “loud music,” Dunn’s wife testified that Dunn took issue with the genre, rather than volume, of Davis’ music—calling it “thug music.” It’s no great secret that racist whites in the “post-racial” era use “thug” as code for “young, male and black.” But even giving Dunn the benefit of the doubt, in letters from prison, he uses the term interchangeably with “black.” And genre aside, he labeled the boys in the car with the synonymous term “gangsters.”
Consider further: Jordan Davis appeared to Dunn from the neck up, much as he does in this by now well-known pic:
Now ask yourself: If this is a “gangster,” precisely which features of this image would we need to change—apart from the substitution of white skin for black—in order to disqualify it from “gangster” status? Was Jordan supposed to wear a priest’s collar? Smoke a Sherlock Holmes pipe? Don a top hat and a fucking monocle? If not that, then what exactly, apart from white skin, was the issue?
Let’s be honest. Blackness alone qualified Davis as a “gangster,” and it marked him for death.
Stand Your Ground, again
Though it hasn’t been emphasized in the reporting, it was the defense’s choice to pursue a Stand Your Ground (SYG) strategy in the first trial that delayed justice. Eight out of ten jurors indicated that, but for the judge’s direction to heed this defense, they would probably have voted to convict in the first degree.
Florida’s SYG law specifies: A person may use force, “including deadly force[,] if [he] reasonably believes it is necessary to do so to prevent death or great bodily harm to himself ….” It includes an explicit “no duty to retreat,” having replaced the prior ‘deadly force’ law which allowed use of force only if retreat were impossible.
The law does state that the suspect’s belief that he is in mortal danger has to be “reasonable.” In principle, this part of the law could play a robust role. But unfortunately, (a) what counts as “reasonable” is nowhere specified in the law; and (b) for reasons not entirely clear to me, the “reasonable” clause is being ignored in application of the law.
In the Dunn trial, the “reasonable” qualifier was omitted in numerous jury instructions by the judge, emphasizing instead the “no duty to retreat” clause. The defense followed suit, arguing that what matters is “only if [Dunn] believed, right or wrong,” that his life was in danger.
There is reason to suspect this truncation of the law is commonplace is FL courtrooms. This omission has the effect of fetishizing the offender’s own perception of imminent danger—however grossly mistaken this perception may be. This is a serious matter: Three decades-plus of scientific study shows that whites like Dunn, even those who hold no overtly racist ideas, are likely to perceive black men like Davis as more threatening than they really are, and to manufacture ‘perceptions’ and even false memories to support that view. (See sect (2)(b) of my earlier post for the evidence.) The failure to examine the legal “reasonableness” of perceptions of threat makes an already shitty law worse; it vacates the chance to identify and account for any latent racism at work in both the defendant’s perceptions and the jury’s own beliefs.
Dunn was not in fear of his life
That said, Dunn never really had a good SYG defense, truncated version or not, and jurors were wrong to think he did. I say this because: Even if Dunn did face an imminent mortal threat in Jordan Davis, there is abundant evidence that he did not in fact perceive himself to.
The essence of SYG is that, even if defensive options short of deadly force (e.g. retreat) are available, one is legally free to ignore them. But there this knife has another edge: Failure to take one of these lesser options can itself be evidence that one did not perceive an imminent threat in the first place. That is, if Dunn’s safety would have been clearly better served by a retreat—that is, if “standing ground” was clearly more dangerous than leaving—this counts against his claim that he faced a mortal threat to begin with.
This possibility is implicit in the language of the law but so far absent from its application. But consider:
Dunn claimed that Jordan brandished a shotgun and threatened to “kill him.” Dunn responded to this “imminent threat” by asking for verbal clarification of the threat—“What did you say to me?—then ambled to his car to retrieve (and possibly load) a pistol from his glove compartment, then physically returned to the “threat” and began firing, finally chasing the “threat,” still shooting, as Davis squealed away in fear. Dunn had to know that simply leaving was more likely to keep him safe. But he stood and fought anyway. This isn’t the behavior of a “mortally scared” person; it is the behavior of a homicidal aggressor.
Witnesses heard Dunn say, “You’re not going to talk to me like that,” before (or rather as) he attacked. Really, is this how one responds to a verbal threat one takes seriously?—to emphasize its form rather than content? No way. If someone breaks in my house and holds a knife to my throat, I don’t get fucking offended about his churlish tone of voice. I get scared for my life. Dunn didn’t get scared; he got the vapors.
In the end, Stand Your Ground couldn’t protect Dunn. But it almost did. And someone else will get a chance to try it on, and soon. And the most likely beneficiary of this defense, when it works, will be a white killer of a black victim. The fact that these outcomes are patterned amounts to no less than state sanctioning of these deaths. And this has effects prior to and outside the courtroom. Quite frankly, it sends a message.
Dunn’s sentence is a victory and I’m not going to hate on it. But it is a rare one indeed, and for a reason.
Justice! (such as it is) for Jordan Davis, who was murdered for being black
Posted: October 1, 2014 Filed under: Uncategorized Leave a comment[Analysis to follow. I leave you with this sentiment in the mean.]
My gloss on Reza Aslan’s refutation of Maher, etc. on “naughty Islam”
Posted: October 1, 2014 Filed under: imperialism, Islamophobia, sexism | Tags: CNN, Deepa Kumar, misogyny, Pamela Geller, Reza Aslan, sexism Leave a comment
Aslan is correct to press that what Islamophobes like to think of as “Muslim problems” (e.g. sexism) are better seen as regional-cultural ones. (He’s also sharper and more polemical than in his last (albeit still very punchy) viral takedown. Keep ‘em coming, holmes.)
These naughty elements aren’t even nearly correlated with “the Muslim world.” Indonesia has more Muslims than anywhere else and sees legal and social equality between the sexes.[1]
The mismatch is not only geographical, but historical. Aslan might have added: “Islamic sexism” is mostly an import from Christianity. Deepa Kumar in “Islamophobia and the Politics of Empire”:
As Islam spread, it adopted the cultural practices of various empires, including those of the neighboring Persian and Byzanine empires. The Christians, who populated the Middle East and the Meditteranean had more rigid customs associated with women. In the Christian Byzantine Empire, the sexes were segregated. Women were not to be seen in public, were veiled, and were given only rudimentary education. As the expanding Islamic empire incorporated these regions, it also assimilated these cultural and social practices. In other words, the particular misogynistic practices that Islam came to adopt were largely inherited from the Christian and Jewish religious customs of the neighboring societies Muslims conquered. The…point here is that sexist attitudes toward women, far from being unique to Islam, were prevalent among Christians and Jews as well.
By rank accident of history, Western imperialism has executed a ‘chilling effect’ on some aspects of some parts of the “Muslim world,” which have—long story—benefited unequally from the advent of political liberalism. This, more than anything ‘in the Quran’, Pamela Geller, is the story of “Islamic sexism.”
________________________________________________________________________________________________________
[1] OK, not quite. Patriarchy is endemic to every nation, “Muslim” and Western alike. I should have said: The criticisms which conservative Islamophobes make about Islam vis-a-vis sexism would not apply to Indonesia. Of course, we should strive for a higher standard for treatment of women than that set by conservative Islamophobes. [t/y Eric F.]
Thinly-disguised white supremacy fest coming to my backyard
Posted: September 30, 2014 Filed under: white nationalism | Tags: corny ass mofuckers, Pulaski, racism, Stormfront, TN, where are all the intellectuals on the right?, white nationalism 2 CommentsOn October 25, something called the “European American Heritage Festival” will be shitting on my state (and in the same Grand Division, no less). Despite the innocuous title, its purpose is to plug the supremacy of the white race and the imperative to cleanse the darkies of the future Caucasian homeland. (I’m not speculating here. The event has been held for 30 years. We have transcripts of the speeches.)
With all respect to the good people of Pulaski, given that the event’s organizers have zero connection to the area, it is clear the site was chosen for its distinction as birthplace of the Ku Klux Klan.
Indeed, one of the official event sponsors is The Knights Party, the AR Klan group run by Thomas Robb. Previously called the Knights of the Ku Klux Klan, it was rebranded by Robb as part of a campaign to soften the group’s racist image. It appears, however, the change extends no further than the name—and barely that far. The main TKP website (linked at the fest site) retains the domain name kkk.bz. The group also owns a landing page—which is not linked at the fest site—at kkk.com. This page is actually the first Google result that comes up for the search term “Ku Klux Klan.” It opens with this banner:
Our friends at The Lamp have supplied a detailed breakdown of all the sponsors and their ties to white nationalism (WN) here. In general, they comprise an incestuous glob of grouplets and other enterprises centered around (if not containing) Robb and the man the Toronto National Post called “one of Canada’s most notorious white supremacists,” Paul Fromm. The SPLC has write-ups of all these guys too (links also at The Lamp).
If any doubts remain as to the nature of the event, another sponsor is Stormfront, easily the world’s largest WN/white supremacist discussion forum. Founded by ex-Klan leader Don Black, its registered usership is responsible for the murders of 100+ people in the last five years.
Oh! And music will be provided by the young duo Heritage Connection, pictured here:
Heritage Connection, the poor man’s Prussian Blue
* * *
I leave with these general thoughts:
WNs love to hold WN events under the banner of Pan-European “heritage,” or as a jejune celebration of some “white” historical figure like Columbus or Leif Erickson. Part of this is probably PR (muting the sting of unsavory ideas), but it also reflects the contradictions inherent in the concept of white nationalism itself.
There simply is no such thing as “white culture” which could serve as the basis for a separate “white nation.” Clearly, race doesn’t automatically imply culture; if it did, the idea of a civic national identity (the way e.g. “French culture” designates the citizens of France, not just the ethnically Gaulish ones) would make no sense. And maybe WNs think it makes no sense. But then, what are the cultural markers—language, religion, cuisine, social habits, songs, art, dress, myths—that circumscribe only US-American (or even Southern American) whites and no others? This entity has yet to be defined even weakly. And yet, only a very clear and robust definition could have the moral force to underwrite the WN program, whose implementation would certainly fuck over a lot of people.
In the end, WN has to reduce to either (a) race—but then, why talk of “culture” or “heritage” at all?—or to (b) one or more specific European national identities—national identities, mind you, which the blockheads attending EAHF have only the most tenuous and cosmetic connection. (Notwithstanding the “flag march”—which is adorable, btw—there are few Irish and German and Danish participants at “heritage” events, at least in the way that indisputably Irish and German and Danish people would understand that).
Last year’s “Cavalcade of other white people’s flags”
As a result, at these events you always get a mix of this Pan-European talk, which nobody there takes very seriously, mixed with the open white power shit; neither of which can serve as a rational basis for a “white nation.” (Just as the plural of “anecdote” is not “data,” the plural of “nation” is not “other nation” or “new nation.” It’s just a bunch of different nations stuck together.)
I’m sure I’ll say more about this shit as time goes by. Spelunker also has info on the fest.
If Islam creates terrorists, how come the terrorists aren’t all that “Islamic”?
Posted: September 28, 2014 Filed under: Islamophobia | Tags: Arun Kundnani, Pamela Geller, radicalization thesis Leave a comment[Continuing the theme of the last post.]
The following is not about Hamas specifically, but this quote is prescient:
That religious arguments are used by Hamas to legitimize its ceasefires as much as they are used to legitimize its violence suggests that religious ideology does not provide an adequate explanation of its behavior. -Arun Kundnani
* * *
Turns out two British men convicted for “terrorism-related offences” prepared for their Syrian ‘jihad’ by purchasing “Islam for Dummies” and “Koran for Dummies.” Any decision to take Islam seriously came after the decision to hurt people; it couldn’t have been the cause. At best, religion provided a language in which to express their anger over world events and discrimination at home.
The evidence suggests the British “dummies” are the norm. In his book, The Muslims are Coming!, Arun Kundnani examines every high-profile ‘Islamic’ terrorist attack on US and British soil in recent memory. Behind each he uncovers a narrative similar to the above. It appears the average “Islamic terrorist” is a religious outlier-turned-wannabe with fundamentally political gripes.
To my knowledge (which is of course expansive), every serious study of the issue reinforces this conclusion. For a sampling:
(1) MI5, the British intelligence agency, performed exhaustive case-studies on “several hundred individuals known to be involved in, or closely associated with, violent extremist activity” (2008). It found that most “Islamic” recruits are “religious novices” from relatively unobservant households; nor are they operating under the guidance of any or radical extremist cleric. Many “are involved in drug-taking, drinking alcohol and visiting prostitutes” (so much for hating our freedoms). The report found “evidence that a well-established religious identity actually protects against violent radicalization.”
(2) A 2010 report by the UK think tank Demos profiled more than 200 Islamists throughout Europe. Some were convicted terrorists, while others held radical beliefs but hadn’t turned to violence. The study found systematic differences between the two groups: The actual terrorists “had a simpler, shallower conception of Islam than radicals—that is, their degree of interest in the actual teachings of the Koran was fairly minimal.”
(3) A 2008 Gallup poll of Muslim attitudes worldwide found no correlation between religious devotion and favorable views toward “jihad”-style violence. The 7% of Muslims classified as “radical”—defined in part by their sympathy for the 9/11 attacks and hostility toward the US—were found to be no more religious than the rest of the population surveyed. The same year, Pew Research replicated the basic results, finding that Muslims who believe “attacks on civilians can be morally justified” are no more observant than those who oppose such attacks.
And so on. (Seriously, I could go on and on here.)
All of this undercuts the view of Pam Geller-style Islamophobes, who see terrorist violence as issuing forth more or less automatically from Islamic holy texts and the “ideas” contained therein. In this view, those “moderate Muslims” who don’t engage in violence against us kafirs are simply not reading their Quran closely enough.
This opinion is more than wrong; it is dangerous.
Kundnani concludes his book with a story about “Boston Bomber” Tamerlan Tsarnaev. (Like the “dummies,” the Tsarnaev brothers weren’t particularly religious before considering a turn to violence. In his famous “boat scribble,” and later to the police, the surviving brother Dzokhar attributed their motivation to US foreign policy.)
Three months before the attack, Tamerlan, angry about US military action in Afghanistan and Iraq, interrupted the imam of his mosque in the middle of Friday prayer service. The topic was a celebration of Martin Luther King, Jr., who Tamerlan accused of being a sell-out for limiting himself to non-violent tactics. The imam silenced the outburst by kicking Tamerlan out.
Kundnani writes:
Since 9/11, mosque leaders have been under pressure to eject anyone expressing radical views rather than to engage with them and seek to challenge their religious interpretations, address their political frustrations, or meet their emotional needs. That policy has been forced on mosques by the wider climate of excessive surveillance. It has made mosque leaders wary of even having conversations with those perceived to be radicals for fear of attracting official attention. They fear that every mosque has a government informant listening for radical talk.
Continuing:
The Tsarnaev brothers were said to be angry about US foreign policy in Afghanistan or Iraq…[b]ut because discussions of foreign policy have been off-limits in mosques since 9/11, they were unlikely to have had their anger acknowledged, engaged, challenged, or channeled into nonviolent political activism.
The issue goes beyond mosques. The Islamophobic obsession with “radical ideas” has led Muslim community leaders to eschew engagement with these ideas on any level. Salma Yaqoob, former Birmingham (UK) councilor, traces this policy to its ultimate conclusion. As quoted by Kundnani:
If Muslims organizations are reluctant to provide the space for sensitive discussions for fear of extremist’s accusations, where are these young people to go? Where will their views and concerns get an airing? The answer is obvious. They will be expressed in private and secret, with the genuine extremists keen to provide listening ears and simplistic solutions.
Pam Geller’s shitty bus campaign is back
Posted: September 27, 2014 Filed under: Islamophobia | Tags: AFDI, dumb shit, Islamophobia, Pamela Geller, Quran 2 CommentsSo Pam Geller’s/AFDI’s shitty bus campaign is back in NYC. There is much to be said about this all around. But this particular ad is telling:
Geller is the leading exemplar of the ‘text-centric’ style of Islamophobia. “It’s in the Quran” is basically her mantra. The idea is that naughty-sounding things in the holy texts of Islam more or less mechanically spawn naughty things (Islamic anti-Semitism, terrorism) in real life.
Never mind that:
(a) She interprets these texts—Martin Luther sola scriptura-style—as no Muslim scholar has in 1500 years of religious commentary;
and
(b) If her interpretations are correct, there are approximately zero self-identifying Muslims who actually abide by what’s “in the Quran.” Of course, the preponderance of “moderate Muslims” gives her no pause. They simply need to read “their own book” more closely. (Actually, she does acknowledge the moderates, calling them “secular Muslims”—who are basically apostates. My own view is that, if they are indeed less than “true Muslims,” they are exempt from all of her injunctions against Islam; and if so, she’s got, in statistical terms, almost nobody left to direct these injunctions against. But I digress.)
* * *
Geller’s view is a less sophisticated version of something called the “radicalization thesis,” examined at length in Arun Kundnani’s The Muslims are Coming! Shared by virtually every state actor prosecuting the War on Terror, this is the idea the root cause of anti-Western terrorism is some version of Islamic belief.
The thesis comes in conservative and liberal flavors, depending on whether you think Islam is essentially radical, or that radical interpretations are a perversion of “true Islam.” (Geller of course falls squarely in the conservative camp.) In either scenario, violence is cast as a product of “radical ideas.”
The problem with this theory is two-fold:
(1) Among those Muslims who share extremist ideas, statistically speaking very nearly zero of these ever attempt any sort of violence.
Conversely:
(2) Among those few Muslims who do turn to terrorism, there is simply no correlation between this decision and radical interpretations of Islam. Absolutely none, as evidenced across a couple decades of serious study. Whatever makes “the terrorists” tick, it isn’t something they read “in the Quran.” (Though religious language is typically employed to express those grievances—mostly political—which do make them tick.)
* * *
Granted, I started out talking about anti-Semitism, and ended up talking about terrorism. My reasoning there is that terrorism is simply easier to track. It’s more dramatic and quantifiable. Point being, if we can see that the “Islamic” terrorist threat is negligible, the “Islamic things” we can’t as readily see (anti-Semitism and all the rest) are probably negligible too.
[More on the “radicalization thesis” in my next post, specifically the evidence for (2) above.]
–JBG
Mike Brown vs. Darren Wilson: We don’t need to “wait for all the facts to come out” before taking sides
Posted: September 19, 2014 Filed under: Uncategorized Leave a comment[Jase Short at The Ansible argues that if police violence is systematic and legally-entrenched, self-defense is warranted. The following builds on that thesis, with my thanks.]
It is undeniable that police kill and injure at a higher rate than the civilian population. This is typically defended on grounds of special workplace hazard: It isn’t that the cops are so homicidal and injurious; they just spend so much time dealing with all the other people who are.
But this fails as an explanation. For one, it can’t explain why cops kill and injure more in their civilian capacities too. (It isn’t the stress, either. Other high-stress jobs don’t show this.) Nor does it explain why police are arrested, prosecuted and convicted at a lower rate than the rest of the population when they act out. Moreover, these trends are stable across periods of greater and lesser crime, and across all variety of policy changes designed to abate the trend. Presently, the average officer is literally, mathematically more likely to provoke a deadly incident than to prevent one.
The problem is, of course, concentrated in poor communities of color (especially black) like Ferguson, MO. In the US, a black man is summarily executed by a police or security officer at a rate of about one every day and a half.
But violence is only the most dramatic expression of a generalized climate of harassment: Last year, the city of Ferguson issued ten thousand more arrest warrants than there are actual people living there. This is almost entirely for frivolous crimes: tinted windows, underpaying a parking ticket by $20, or using a trash pickup service other than the one designated for one’s area. The municipal court system has to pump these cases through at an average of one every 12 seconds.
Over the years, the city has replaced an increasingly large percentage of tax revenue with income from civil fines—to the point where now, they have to harass to meet the budget. The abuse has become—in the most literal sense—institutionalized.
Again, this falls mainly upon Ferguson’s black citizens, who are detained, ticketed, fined and arrested in numbers far outpacing their population share. They are far more likely to be pulled over than whites, while far less likely to be found with anything illegal.
(Note: In “high-stop” areas like Ferguson, or New York City under “stop and frisk,” the percentage of detentions that actually lead to arrest and conviction for any crime are exceedingly low. This should tell us something about the police shootings, where “the facts” are often murkier: If we know the average victim of “soft” police harassment is innocent, then, is it reasonable to assume that the average victim who is killed by police was guilty—that is, was shot with good reason? Not likely.)
* * *
Unless this is the grandest web of coincidence in history, white cops are targeting the black citizens of Ferguson. It isn’t a matter of uncharacteristic “bad apples,” but systematic.
Some observers have likened this kind of police presence to a foreign occupying army. One way to test if this comparison is true, or just hyperbole, is to ask: If it isn’t an occupying force, how would an occupying force behave differently? If we can’t answer, the “resemblance” is one of identity.
* * *
To paraphrase The Ansible: It follows that the black citizens of Ferguson are entitled to self-defense, up to and including that of physical resistance; and the more “fervent” responses of the protesters should be assessed in this light.
But I would add two points to this assessment:
(1) It also follows that Michael Brown’s own behavior, leading up to his death, should also be viewed in this light. (Whatever that behavior may have been.) This is why it doesn’t matter whether Mike Brown attacked Darren Wilson first. The Ferguson protests are not solely about the actions of Darren Wilson; so the justness of the community response doesn’t depend on “the facts” of this particular shooting death. Resistance is justified apart from this incident, and was justified the day before it happened. And that goes no less for Michael Brown. Whether he understood it as such, an attack on Wilson would have constituted self-defense in a larger sense.
(2) The “facts” we already know about Brown’s shooting tell us quite enough. The Ferguson police department has admitted Officer Wilson fired at least once on Brown (missing the target) while the latter was running away. No matter what happened before or after—even if Wilson was later justified in killing Brown—this is a crime. This is attempted murder. Wilson may be guilty of more, but he cannot be guilty of less.
–JBG
The critical error behind almost all reasoning about “racial profiling” for terrorists
Posted: February 18, 2014 Filed under: Uncategorized | Tags: 9/11, Ann Coulter, ethnic profiling, Islamophobia, racial profiling, racism, religious profiling, Sikhs are not Muslims, stormfront dicks, TSA 1 Comment
Proponents of racial (ethnic, religious) profiling for terrorists inevitably begin by citing the same demographic comparison. In the words of notorious racist Ann Coulter,
“The perpetrators [of terrorist attacks on Americans since 9/11] have all had the same eye color, hair color, skin color and half of them have been named Muhammad…This is not racial profiling; it’s a description of the suspect.”
Cheekiness aside, the argument is simple: A terrorist is more likely to come from x-racial-ethnic-religious group rather than groups y or z; therefore, we are warranted in searching for terrorists among persons who are (or appear to be) from that group particularly. This might entail singling out men fitting this description for baggage or ID checks in subways, or funneling them through a separate check-in line at airports.
For the sake of argument, let us assume that Coulter’s data on terrorists is correct—that most terrorists come from this Arab/Muslim sector (though in fact they don’t). Let us also assume there are no logistical or moral obstacles to profiling (also dubious).
My objection, rather, concerns the form of the argument. In short, Coulter’s numbers could be 100% sound, and it still wouldn’t make racial profiling an effective technique for finding terrorists.
* * *
The problem is the profiling argument gives way too much weight to the (statistical) relationship of ethnic groups to one another—that is, to the percentage of terrorists within one group as compared to the percentage in each of the others. I contend this relation—the very lynchpin of the profiling argument—has precisely zero relevance to the business of hunting terrorists. If we’re thinking properly, what should matter instead is the statistical relationship of terrorists to their own racial groups.
To put this visually (proportions not accurate):
The ‘profilers’ only care about how the beige sliver on the left compares in size to the sliver on the right: If the right is bigger, they say, we should search A for terrorists, rather than C. But this comparison is irrelevant. What matters is not which sliver is larger but how large—in absolute terms—the larger slice actually is.
Put another way, the most this kind of comparison by itself could tell us is that terrorists are unevenly distributed among ethnic groups. What it cannot tell is whether terrorists are represented in any one ethnic group highly enough to make profiling a viable technique for finding them. Just as only knowing your meal is bigger than your neighbor’s will not tell you whether it is big enough to satisfy you. (For both meals could still be very small.)
Testing profiler logic: Two analogies
Some everyday examples of similar reasoning should further clarify.
Analogy #1: Children from “broken homes” are by some percentage more likely to become serial killers later in life than children from two-parent homes. This hardly means that shaking down a bunch of people with divorced parents would be a wise deployment of police resources. Even if 100% of serial killers had divorced parents, those products of divorce who actually commit serial murder are such a tiny minority among all children of divorce that the strategy would still be suspect.
Clearly, the key statistic isn’t (i) how many offenders come from divorce, but (ii) how many people who come from divorce actually turn out to be offenders. Focusing on the first stat only tells us that one set of odds is greater than some other set of odds; it tells us nothing about how good the second set of odds—the one we are banking on—actually is. We may as well say that buying two Powerball tickets has a greater chance of winning millions than buying just one; that’s true, but it doesn’t make buying one or buying two very likely to yield a winner. Likelier is still miles away from likely.
* * *
Analogy #2: Imagine we have a haystack which has some probability of containing a needle. (Let’s say, there is some probability that one of the straws is a needle.) Let this equal the probability that a given, random person fitting the “terrorist profile” is a terrorist; that is, drawing a random straw is as likely to yield a needle as detaining a random “Muslim” is likely to yield a terrorist. Let us assume this method of finding needles is ineffective, counterproductive, even (somehow) immoral; also, that we have some far better method of finding needles in haystacks—using magnets, X-ray, floating the straw on water so the needle sinks, etc. We still want to root out needles, but have long abandoned the strategy of drawing random straws.
Now, imagine we discover that all along there has been a second haystack nearby which has an even lower probability of yielding a needle than our haystack. Perhaps we discover several more, each with some probability of success lower than the original, but still greater than zero.
It has become clear that a needle is more likely to come from the first haystack than from any of the others. Still, it would be irrational in the highest to conclude that we should, on this basis, resume our random straw-draws. The simple fact that a less promising haystack exists does not magically make checking this stack a good idea, if it wasn’t a good idea before. If an activity’s probability of success is extremely low, it isn’t made better just because there exist other activities whose probability of success is even lower. (That’d be crazy, right?)
Conclusion
Profiling advocates are confusing better odds with decent odds. The simple fact that terrorists are more likely to come from Arab/Muslim men than from some other group doesn’t mean that the likelihood of randomly finding terrorists among Arab/Muslim men is very good at all. And that is the real question.
So: Just how good is that that likelihood? I haven’t exactly crunched the numbers; you can do the math if you like. (The burden of proof is on the profilers anyhow.) But there are millions of persons in the world who fit Coulter’s “profile,” and the number of these who commit terrorist acts against Americans is, in relative terms, very nearly zero. Even fewer do so in those stereotypical ways that profiling would address. Fewer yet operate in the U.S., where ours laws can actually penetrate.
Clearly, we are dealing with numbers akin to those “children of divorce” who commit serial killing. It is quite likely that if we incarcerated every other Muslim male in the world, it would register nothing in practical terms to diminish the odds of the next terror attack. Yes, we can theoretically halve a .000003% chance of something. Getting married later in life will halve one’s chances of committing suicide someday. Hell, there is shit you could do right now to seriously diminish your chances of being brainwashed by a cult or eaten by a mountain lion. I mean, Who gives a shit? Differences of this infinitesimal grade do not drive anybody’s consideration of anything in the real world; far less should they drive national security policy.
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Bonus: The above aside, profiling is still a shitty idea
This is not to mention that radical Islamists come in all “colors” and (duh) will easily work around any profile we make.
In addition, ethnic profiling is counterproductive; it alienates the very communities which are most critical for intelligence on (and testimony against) the potential attackers that move and live among and gain cover from them. As social psychologist Tom R. Tyler masterfully argues in his seminal Why People Obey the Law, individuals who feel they are singled out unfairly by law enforcement tend to avoid contact with the latter as much as possible; at the same time, they internalize this treatment, minimizing their stake in the system, giving them less incentive not to offend.
Finally, as with finding needles in haystacks, we have alternative strategies for fighting terrorism that are superior to profiling. Granted, jihadists will cite a number of gripes against the US if you ask them. Some of these concern cultural factors like women’s liberation and sexy music and movies. But according to the evidence, these aren’t the “root” reasons they turn to terror. As I’ve argued elsewhere, the violence is above all a response to US foreign policy in and toward Muslim countries and populations. Bin Laden, for instance, clarified his grievances across many years in interviews with Robert Fisk.
Michael Scheuer’s Imperial Hubris: Why the West is Losing the War on Terror summarizes nicely the main Islamist concerns; to paraphrase:
- U.S. support for Israel’s occupation of Muslim Palestine
- U.S. and other Western troops in every state of the Arabian peninsula
- U.S. support for Russia, India, China, Phillipines and Uzbekistan against their Muslim populations and militants
- U.S. pressure on Arab energy producers to keep oil prices low
- U.S. military and economic sanctions on Muslim nations (sometimes through the U.N.): Syria, Libya, Iraq, Sudan, Pakistan, Iran, Indonesia, Somalia
- U.S. support for apostate, corrupt, and despotic Muslim governments (often a vehicle for the above concerns)
- And now, via the WOT: U.S. occupation of Iraq and Afghanistan; incarceration without trial of thousands of Muslims suspected of being mujahideen; pressure on Muslim governments to track, control and limit Muslim’s donations to charitable organizations; pressure on these governments to tailor school curricula to give a more pro-Western brand of Islam
Thankfully for us, these concerns are quite reasonable, technically solvable, and are morally “overdetermined”—that is, they should be met for a host of reasons even aside from fighting terror.
Debunking “Che Guevara, racist” again
Posted: February 8, 2014 Filed under: Uncategorized | Tags: apartheid, Cuba, Humberto Fontova, Nelson Mandela, South Africa, stormfront dicks Leave a commentA tertiary effect of Mandela’s death has been the reactivation of right-wing criticisms of Che Guevara, the Argentine-Cuban revolutionary hero. In an effort to slur both, the South African leader has been liberally quoted praising the latter. Critics have drawn their own seedy parallels between the two legacies, some dubbing Mandela “the Che Guevara of Africa.”
The “Che as mass-murderer” trope has long been an anti-communist staple. Only more recently are critics eager to establish that Che was also an anti-black racist. From what I can tell, this conceit is directly traceable to the “scholarship” of Humberto Fontova, a Cuban expat numbskull whose sources are almost entirely reducible to (a) Che’s travel diaries, predating his revolutionary turn, and (b) “shit some Cuban person told me.”
The evidence for Che’s racism is a single sentence from those diaries—one which, by the way, Fontova typically misquotes. As recounted (correctly) by Che’s biographer:
“The black is indolent and fanciful, he spends his money on frivolity and drink; the European comes from a tradition of working and saving which follows him to this corner of American and drives him to get a head, even independently, of his own individual aspirations.”
So. What to make of this?
In context, this is a young man’s single, private impression on seeing black people for the first time. Note that these are particular black persons; there is no evidence Che would extrapolate from his localized experience in a Caracas slum to “the black race” in a general sense. As a diary entry, it was a thought which happened to be written down, unfiltered, unedited, unintended for publication. While chauvinistic, naive and snooty in a vein typical of the writer’s upper-class Argentine background, the quote is not particularly nasty. (As with Barbara Bush’s observation that the Superdome was a nice vacation for the Katrina refugees, it isn’t clear the speaker has bad feelings toward his subject.) It was written—for fuck’s sake—in 1952, two years prior to Brown vs. Board of Education formally ended segregation in the US.
Most importantly, to repeat, the quote is all we ever get. From this alone Fontova and his appropriators deduce Che’s racism. They thereby summarize the man as “a racist”—not “an ex-racist,” not “a man capable of bad ideas about race.”
Is that enough, though? Is the quote (is any quote?) so bad that there is absolutely nothing the speaker might have conceivably gone on to think or say or do in his remaining years which might have atoned for or mitigated it? Is there nothing else that matters—that could matter?
We can debate the severity of the statement. The important point is that, whatever it means, Che changed his fucking mind. We know that he went on to condemn racism explicitly, privately and publicly, and in terms far less ambiguous than the above “affirmation.” He went on to lead one of the most effectively “unracist” lives in history:
In his 1964 address to the UN, Che railed against color segregation in the American south, which persisted despite the recent passage of the Voting Rights Act. Arguing the federal government hadn’t done enough to restrain the KKK:
“Those who kill their own children and discriminate daily against them because of the color of their skin, those who let the murderers of blacks remain free—protecting them, and furthermore punishing the black population because they demand their legitimate rights as free men…How can those who do this consider themselves guardians of freedom?… The time will come when this assembly will acquire greater maturity and demand of the United States government guarantees for the life of the Blacks and Latin Americans who live in that country, most of them U.S. citizens by origin or adoption.”
In the same speech, Che called slain Congolese president Patrice Lumumba a “hero” for resisting the white Belgian colonists; lauded the black singer Paul Robeson, who brought the Negro Spiritual into American pop culture and who was persecuted by American intelligence for socialist ties; and condemned South African apartheid when nobody in the West was yet talking about that issue.
Following the military success of the Cuban revolution, Che aided the African independence struggle in the Congo. He led an all-black contingent of a dozen Cuban soldiers and native Congolese against the colonial forces, requiring him to shoot at white South African mercenaries. Later, Che met with leaders of Mozambique’s independence struggle, offering similar help to the black FRELIMO army (which was declined). (Of course, as Cuba’s own population is largely black, Che’s assistance to that revolution falls in the same category as the above.)
Che with his Congolese army
Che also led the integration of Cuban schools, beaches and other facilities years before the island’s American neighbor. Finally, at risk of playing the “some of my best friends are black” card, Che’s most constant companion during the revolution (and consequently his personal bodyguard) was Harry “Pombo” Villegas, who was, like almost all the men in the units Che led, a black Afro-Cuban. Pombo is still living and has in his memoirs attested to Che’s anti-racist credentials. (In this assessment, he joins black leaders like Malcolm X, Nelson Mandela, and Stokely Carmichael.)
* * *
The charges of racism are laughable enough. But equally so, the straining uses to which this fantasy is put. The slander is clearly an effort to discredit not just the man but his entire legacy and those global efforts which continue to draw inspiration from it. This amounts to a clownish hyper-idealism by which the man’s inner feelings are lent the power to taint whatever he may have touched. Not only, as we have seen, is a diary blurb not “Che”; but neither is Che himself “the Cuban Revolution.” Whatever unsavory ideas Che might have carried around in his head, the Revolution effected real, tangible progress on race in an historical sense—no small thanks to Che’s own actions:
The greatest literacy bump in human history occurred after the Revolution. Illiteracy went from nearly a quarter of the population to less than four percent in under a year. This mostly affected rural Cubans of color.
The Revolution instituted an immediate 50 per cent reduction in rents and subsequently granted tenants full ownership of these houses. As a result, more blacks per capita own their homes in Cuba than in any country in the world.
Cuba’s revolution is well known internationally for its aggressively anti-racist foreign policy. Most impressive was Cuba’s role in the helping end the racist South African apartheid regime. From late 1975 to 1988, 300,000 Cuban internationalist volunteers participated in the war in Angola, routing the invading South African armed forces, thereby hammering a final nail in the coffin of apartheid. Angolan textbooks will forever teach this episode to elementary school children.
Finally, just as we cannot equate a youthful, renounced journal scribble with “Che,” neither can we equate Che, nor his Revolution, with “socialism.” It is certainly possible for either to have wronged and the socialist project remain theoretically viable. To this end, who gives a shit what Che thought, or even did? Those things are an interesting historical aside, but they don’t bear the load his critics want them to. Social science and activism isn’t religion; condemning the prophet has no power to indict the theory, or anyone else’s practice of the theory.
* * *
I will briefly address the other peg of the right-wing assault, the “Che killed a bunch of people” modality. In truth, nobody has sound figures on how many “loyalists” died in the Cuban Revolution—sure as hell not Fontova’s dumb ass. In any case, Che did run a prison for a brief time, and some people were tried and executed there. Unless these critics are against the death penalty in every conceivable case whatsoever, they must give us more here. They must critique the trials themselves, the evidence used and so forth.
Note also the death penalty was largely applied, and summarily so, as a humane preventative to the locals’ mobbing the prisoners—their former brutalizers—limb from limb. This is acknowledged by the most unsympathetic historians of the episode.
Justifiably or not, however, none of this business amounts to “Che killing people.”
john brown's ghost 