Blinded By Tribalism

On January 26, the New York Times claimed that “a CIA drone strike in Yemen. . . . killed three suspected Qaeda fighters on Monday.”

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That NYT article did cite what it called “a member of Al Qaeda in the Arabian Peninsula” (AQAP), who provided the names of the three victims, one of whom was “Mohammed Toiman al-Jahmi, a Yemeni teenager whose father and brother were previously killed in American drone strikes.”

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The U.S. media just got done deluging the American public with mournful stories about the Jordanian soldier, Moaz al-Kasasbeh, making him a household name. As is often the case for victims of America’s adversaries, the victim is intensely humanized. The public learns all sorts of details about their lives, hears from their grieving family members, wallows in the tragedy of their death.

By stark contrast, I’d be willing to bet that the name “Mohammed Tuaiman al-Jahmi” is never uttered on mainstream American television. Americans, by design, will have no idea that their government just burned a 13-year-old boy to death and then claimed he was a Terrorist. If they do know, the boy will be kept hidden, dehumanized, nameless, without the aspirations or dreams or grieving parents on display for victims of America’s adversaries (just as Americans were swamped with stories about an Iranian-American journalist detained in Iran for two months, Roxana Saberi, while having no idea that their own government imprisoned an Al Jazeera photojournalist, Sami al-Haj, in Guantanamo for seven years without charges).

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It’s worth considering the extreme propaganda impact that disparity has, the way in which the U.S. media is so eagerly complicit in sustaining ongoing American militarism and violence by disappearing victims of U.S. violence while endlessly heralding the victims of its adversaries.

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Does one really need to blame a radical version of religious dogma to understand why people get really angry when they hear – yet again – that the children of their nation have been extinguished – incinerated – by another American drone?

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Consider how much American rage and violence was unleashed by a single-day attack on American soil 13 years ago.

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What’s confounding and irrational and inscrutable isn’t that people react by turning to “radicalism” and violence. It’s that many journalists and officials in western nations seem to think that they can go around for decades invading, occupying, imprisoning without charges and dropping bombs on multiple other countries around the world, regularly killing innocents, including children, and then act shocked and surprised when people in those countries, or who identify with them, want to bring violence back in return. That is a sentiment grounded in deep irrationality, blind nationalism, and primitive tribalism.

  Glenn Greenwald

Dick Cheney & Cheneyites reply: “So?”