The Suicide Bombers: The Sacred and the
Profane
Reconciliation between
the Anglo-American and Islamic and Arab people can be achieved through a
war crimes tribunal, similar to the Nuremburg Trials after the Second
World War. The practitioners and proponents of crimes against humanity
beginning with the President of the United States and the Prime Minister
of Great Britain should be brought to trial and accorded exemplary
punishment to prevent recidivism.
By James Petras
Posted by Bulatlat
Introduction
One of the least
discussed but most important aspect of the ‘suicide bombers’ (SB) attacks
is the Angle-American (AA) systematic and profound degradation of that
which the Islamic religion holds most sacred: its code of ethics, its mode
of spiritual practice, its religious rituals, its sacred texts and its
respect for the observant believer.
The neo-conservative,
liberal and pro-Israel propagandists, both journalists and academics focus
on what they choose to call the “pathologies” of young Muslims, the
fanaticism of their beliefs, their gratuitous violence, the “generational
anger”, the “frustration” of living in “failed states” and a long litany
of irrational behaviors which exonerates the AA and Israeli violence and
torture.
A progressive school
of thought emphasizes the “reciprocal nature of violence” – Anglo-American
wars, invasions and occupations which engender Arab or Islamic terror as
part of a spiral of violence. In some versions – the religious element is
subordinated to the political concern for self-determination in explaining
the behavior of SB.
While the latter
approach has the advantage of advancing beyond the vitriolic psychobabble
of the neoconservative and Zionists “experts” of the “Arab Mind”, it fails
to account for the depth and scope of the suicide bomber phenomena,
especially the sharpening intensity during the occupation.
Beyond the general
mayhem induced by Anglo-American wars, invasions and occupations, there
are two forms of violence derivative from the general conception of war,
which stand out as the direct determinants of suicide bombing.
The AA have theorized
and put in practice the idea of “total war” - a war without legal, moral,
geographic, temporal or spatial boundaries. As Bush, Rumsfeld and the
Pentagon Zionists (Perle, Wolfowitz, Feith and Company) declared, this is
a different war in which the “enemy” is everywhere and attacking at all
times. The final solution is to search and destroy them, their
sanctuaries, their accomplices, their neighborhoods, families, religious
institutions and any who might offer material or spiritual support,
protection or encouragement. The theory and practice of “total war”
obliterates the distinction between combatants and civilians, between
military installations and civilian facilities, between military
infrastructure and civilian transports systems, between the sacred and the
profane.
The AA have imposed
new norms of warfare and new practices for engaging the enemy which have
been increasingly taken up by sectors of their adversaries. If AA
imperialism can act with unrestrained violence against all military and
civilian targets, so can the resistance – including the suicide bombers –
whether they are Islamists or secular, poor or middle class. What
determine the reaction of the adversaries of AA imperialism are their
rules of warfare – the notion of “total war.”
Total war: Content and consequences
There are different
forms of imperial conquest. In one variant the purpose is to work through
local elites who become the tribute collectors and gendarmes of the
colonial powers, which gain control of the agro-mineral wealth and finance
their privileged position via local taxes.
In another variant,
the imperial powers destroy the pre-existing society and governing system,
frequently uprooting the population and in the process physically
annihilate its members and culture in the course of seizing its wealth.
The degradation of the sacred is a prelude to attempts to impose a new set
of beliefs more conducive to submission and exploitation.
A third variant is a
combination or a sequential process of destruction, degradation and
exploitation followed by efforts to “reconstruct” a colonized military,
police and political structure willing and able to repress and contain
anti-colonial resistance.
The U.S. invasions of
Iraq and Afghanistan follow the third variant. In the initial phase, the
imperial armies engage in total occupation, unrestrained pillage of
historical sites, utter degradation of the population, destruction of
cultural institutions, and the systematic assassination of leading members
of the local political, civil service and professional classes. Following
the growth of massive resistance by secular and religious forces, uprooted
and divorced from their essential everyday living, under constant physical
and spiritual assaults, the AA occupation regime moves toward the
“reconstruction” of a colonial repressive apparatus and governing bodies -
beyond the walls, barbed wire enclosures and watch towers of the colonial
army.
“Total war” doctrine
continues to wreck havoc with minor concessions to enclaves of
collaborators, most of whom are “dual citizens”, exiles whose loyalties
are first and foremost to the empire, whose homes, pensions and even
families (not to mention bank accounts and English rose gardens) are
located in the cities of the imperial countries.
Total war and the Resistance
The practitioners of
“total war” borrow heavily form the practice and doctrine of the Israeli
colonial occupation of Palestine: practices of collective punishment,
erasure of historical sites, destruction of homes, eradication of orchards
and productive farms, bombing of small factories, building of ghetto
enclosures (walls), massive forcible evictions, and especially torture and
interrogation techniques designed especially to violate Islamic beliefs
and the Arab identity. These techniques have been transmitted via Israeli
advisers and training sessions to U.S. interrogators and incorporated into
their manuals. It is precisely the common methods of both Israeli and
Anglo-U.S. interrogation-torture techniques linked to the doctrine of
“total war”, which has led to the common practice of SB against them.
Insofar as the
interrogation-terror techniques strip their victims of all that is
essential to their “spiritual self”, they also force upon the victims and
their sympathizers a “new morality”, one that no longer abides by the
older moral-religious precepts. In its place the “new morality” is the
mirror image of the practitioners of “total war”. The SB act without
concern for civilians, locations, time and circumstance. Like their
interrogators, they seek to inflict the maximum damage to the “Western
mind” – exposing their weakness, increasing their anxiety and fears, while
undermining everyday routines. The key to the conversion of Islamists and
even the secular opposition to suicide bombing and the practice of the
“new morality” is not merely the political-military colonial occupation
and war, but the resort to the specific practices of degradation inflicted
on the colonial victim.
Degradation: The logic of total war
The Israelis have
practiced torture by degradation for decades and have a powerful army of
overseas supporters - professors, neo-cons officials, liberals, bankers,
professionals, artists, journalists, and media moguls - providing
justifications in the form of “ameliorating circumstances” and “moral
equivalences”.
The Anglo-American
practitioners of total war, impressed by the power of Israel to sustain
its colonial occupation of Palestine and its impunity, overlooked the
negative effects: the SB phenomenon, and Israel’s repugnancy to the
non-European world (and even among many Europeans).
Degradation is
specifically designed to “break” the “Arab” or “Islamic” Mind – as the
Israeli psychological war experts labeled it – and secure an army of
informers, agents and docile, terrorized released prisoners who would
serve as exemplars to other would-be resistance fighters. While a few
prisoners were “turned” through torture and blackmail and others were
released as “broken” men and women incapacitated by profound psychological
disorders, millions react with indignation, anger, and violence - and in
some cases have taken the form of SB. The word from the victim-survivors
of Israeli brutality and visual images provides a terribly graphic reality
of systematic degradation of all that Arabs - Islamist or secular - hold
sacred.
The perception of the
victims, their families, their people, their fellow believers, and their
nation is that degradation of Iraqi prisoners is the technique authorized
and approved by the highest levels of power and executed by the terror
experts, from elite psychologists down to the lowest jailers. Nobody can
claim, “they didn’t know”. Nobody, in a volunteer army, can claim they
were just obeying orders. Citizens in electoral systems who voted for the
imperial executioners cannot claim innocence.
The
technique of degradation: The larger meaning
The book of virtuous
living for the Islamist and even, to a lesser degree, the secularist is
the Koran. It is the “divine book”, which provides a moral guide and
existential meaning to life. The torturers defecated and urinated on the
Koran. They stomped on the Koran with muddy army boots. They flushed
pages, held most sacred by the victims, down the toilet. They violated
the most sacred single source of moral life.
The torturers
systematically denied their victims water to clean themselves before
prayer. Instead they defiled them with filth, scantily clad female
interrogators smeared fake ‘menstrual’ blood on bound prisoners, forced
them to defecate on themselves and ridiculed their victims’ intense
religious distress. They violated every taboo, every norm, including the
deepest held moral codes. They forced (and photographed) deviant sex,
prolonged nudity, raped men and women with cattle prods and other torture
devices. They wrapped prisoners in the Israeli flag.
Such humiliating
techniques have lifetime psychological consequences preventing the victims
from ever marrying and maintaining normal family relations. The torturers
specifically told their victims that the films and photos of their
degradation would be shown to their families and neighbors to intensify
the anguish after their release. The torture techniques specifically
focused on Moslems and Arabs, but in general defiling all normal men and
women’s sense of modesty. They used gross sexual humiliation designed to
break all political bonds between the colonized people and the degraded
victims. Women prisoners in Abu Ghraib reportedly sent out messages
begging the resistance to kill them in their cells by mortar attacks.
Mosques were destroyed or turned into slaughterhouses; wounded men huddled
in the sacred halls were executed at point blank range.
The AA political
leaders promoted Christian evangelical military chaplains who incited the
executioners to “fight Satan” as they encircled and destroyed the city of
Fallujah.
Jewish and Christian
“terror experts” (often in the behavioral sciences) provided the emotional
vitriol in pseudo-scientific jargon by transposing the psychopathic
behavior of the executioners to the victims. The political psychologists
as war criminals …as creators of the Suicide Bombers…
Political consequences of defiling the sacred
The profound
systematic effects of “total war” and its derivative defilement of the
sacred has far-reaching effects on Muslims and Arabs, including
secularists, in terms of geography, political practice, intensity of
reflection and feeling about the practitioners, their government and their
“civilization”. The impact of defacing the sacred is strongest on those
collectivities, which share the same ethnic, religious and cultural values
as those who are violated. The degradation of the sacred texts and
religious sanctuaries impinge on the spiritual and physical existence of
the groups and individuals whose lives have been guided by the defiled
texts. The message relayed to millions by the torturers and their leaders
is that ‘nothing is sacred’ – everything and everybody is equally an
acceptable instrument for conquest, domination and control. The whole
process of degradation from the indiscriminant bombing of civilian
communities, to the usurpation of public space, to the pillage of a
cultural heritage, to the arbitrary arrest and assassination of passersby,
culminates in utter depravity or literally turning the spiritual symbols
and texts and moral guides into trash.
The denial of what is
sacred to the oppressed is inherent to the process of creating a
hierarchical chain – the greater the degradation of the “other” the
greater the power and self-esteem of the torturers. The lower the stature
of the torturers – (those who, outside the torture chambers, have no
access to the real spoils of conquest, the war profiteering, the
“reconstruction” racket or the military officers who can “cream” the
contracts) – the greater the inducement to achieve “superiority” (symbolic
rewards) by debasing the shackled and manacled, the naked and the
humiliated, to please their superiors with tidbits of irrelevant
“intelligence”. Much of this is documented in General Antonio Taguba’s
report.
The chain of command
dictates the license to torture; the word of the imperial executive
informs the practitioners of degradation. The celebrants of imperial
“Judeo-Christian” values flaunt their impunity in the security of their
technological and military might. The “special people”, the chosen
nations, aggravate the experience of degradation. Imagine Rumsfeld and
other officials and senators reviewing General Taguba’s report describing
the young son of an Iraqi Army officer stripped, smeared with filth and
abused before his captive father (Seymour Hersch describes the shrieks of
young boys being raped) -- and projecting their own perversities on to the
victimized people.
Suicide bombers: A response to the desecraters
Some of the more
intelligent of the generally benighted claimants of “expertise” in
terrorism have discovered that the SB are not necessarily poor, not
necessarily “direct victims” of imperial invasions, and are not
necessarily Islamic fundamentalists. Most of them resort to psychobabble,
citing “alienation”, “generational conflict”, and other behavioral
pathologies. These Anglo-American and pro-Israeli “experts”, who
pathologically ignore the monstrous crimes committed against the essential
values and beliefs of the oppressed, see themselves, with all solemnity,
as fit to diagnose the ills of others. A handful of the “experts” claim
that the terrorists, the SB, are political people and that these acts are
“political” – a response to the Anglo-American war, invasion and
conquest. Closer to the truth, but still inadequate, some add the
“humiliation of a conquered people”.
What drives the SB is
an effort to redeem the Sacred from the Desecraters. The “Sacred”
includes, but goes beyond, the material destruction inflicted by the
Anglo-American invaders and Israeli colonists. Degradation and defilement
of the sacred texts, the deep inner values and the disciplined customs
produces a class of individuals who sense the bonds of humanity have been
irrevocably broken.
The SB believes that
spiritual wrath can counter the desecraters of the sacred. For the future
SB, resistance, marches, protests, strikes, civil disobedience, even
resistance in the homeland does not restore the “Sacred”. The conflict
rages in their neighborhoods, their houses; markets and transport are
destroyed. The SB believes that only by reversing the violence, bringing
it “home” to the invaders will they redeem themselves, and respond in kind
to the “total war” advocates, apologists and innocent victims.
Recognition of the licensed defilement of the sacred is now out of the box
– whether it continues in one form or another, videoed or hidden in
military archives, it is now embedded in the minds of tens of millions –
it is their very cultural – psychological – moral existence. Everyday
life has been put to the test.
Conclusion
From the “Shock and
Awe” bombing of cities, to the killing, maiming and destruction of
millions, to the torture and profanation of the sacred, the orders have
come from distant, faceless Generals, Presidents, Secretaries of War and
have been executed, face to face, by average people, workers, employees,
clerks…who “elected” these leaders. The many faces of the enemy in the
eyes of the SB are concentrated in the faces and acts of those who degrade
the sacred and attempt to destroy what gives meaning to their everyday
life.
To the SB, “the face
of the enemy” is the face of “the people” – rich and poor, powerful and
powerless, General and foot soldier. Hence the suicide bomber, whose
bonds with the sacred and moral have been broken by systematic
degradation, feels no compunction in attacking ordinary people, going
about their everyday tasks in office buildings or subways.
Our analysis suggests
a close relation between the Anglo-American practice of “total war” and
its derivative policies of systematic degradation and the emergence of
“suicide bombers” – one of the forms of rejection. If this analysis is
correct, the demise of suicide bombers is most likely to occur when the
practice of “total war” is ended. This can only come about through a
defeat of the “colonial revivalist” strand of imperialism in both its US,
European and Israeli variants. The question is how long it will take for
domestic and external political discontent to coalesce a political
alternative capable of formulating a strategy of military withdrawal and
abiding by international law.
Reconciliation
between the Anglo-American and Islamic and Arab people can be achieved
through a war crimes tribunal, similar to the Nuremburg Trials after the
Second World War. The practitioners and proponents of crimes against
humanity beginning with the President of the United States and the Prime
Minister of Great Britain should be brought to trial and accorded
exemplary punishment to prevent recidivism. Peace and reconciliation is
only possible if justice is meted to the architects and practitioners of
total war and human degradation. Posted by Bulatlat
August 15, 2005
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