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The super-on-top-of-it Rachel Maddow reports: She reminds us that the government of Yemen, which has very little money and very little legitimacy in its country (as do many if not most governments), has partnered with the U.S. ever since 9/11 in the war against terrorism, but President Obama, specifically, has dramatically escalated military and surveillance operations in there. Indeed, she also show how Abulmutallab had links to many more countries than just Yemen, and that the U.S. government's focus on Yemen is part of a larger and longer strategy to escalate warfare there.
Pointedly calling al Qaeda terrorists "goons," Maddow makes the important point that these dudes aren't necessarily expert terrorists. Al Qaeda in the Arabian Penninsula's claim that Abulmutallab's attempted bombing was in retaliation for the Yemen bombings is bogus, she asserts, because Abdulmutallab bought his plane ticket on December 16th--BEFORE the recent U.S.-Yemeni military strikes on Dec. 17 and Dec. 24.
These are very important points: We, as the lay public, should be skeptical about anything the media says about "al Qaeda" because both sides--the so-called al Qaeda groups as well as the U.S. government--have mutually-reinforcing incentives to propagate propaganda that paints al Qaeda as a scary, competent, extremely threatening enemy of the U.S. It gives al Qaeda more power (symbolically and in terms of recruitment), and it justifies the U.S. war machine as it bombs and occupies so many countries in the Middle East and South Asia.
That said, I still stand by my original point that Abdulmutallab's attempted bombings must not be taken out of context of, as it's phrased on Democracy Now today, the U.S.'s simultaneous wars in five different Muslim countries, . While maybe al Qaeda in the Arabian Peninsula doesn't even deserve the justice of being quoted, their statement that they are targeting U.S. civilians because U.S. civilians are "supporting the leaders who kill our women and children" is not COMPLETE propaganda. Of course many of us do not support the military strikes (if we even know about them) and none of us have authorized them. Never would I condone these acts of attempted terrorism against American civilians. It's also true that so-called al Qaeda leaders are appropriating real human grief to their own masculinist, warmongering ends, and this is no better than what the U.S. did in co-opting the grief caused by 9/11 to justify war and occupation.
But that grief in Yemen is real. And those men, women, and children WERE slaughtered by a joint operation of the U.S. and Yemeni governments, and many more continue to suffer attacks and the potential threat of attacks every day, especially as the U.S. and Yemeni government plan to escalate military strikes in the coming days.
Can we please get rid of the double standards that paint some people as more human than others?
1 comment:
someone's been reading j.but's lately. keep it up.
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