|
My Town - April 26, 2008
Parsing terrorism
by Larry Sakin
It doesn’t take a genius to figure out that President George W. Bush is losing the so-called ‘war on terrorism’. If anything, anti-Western forces have garnered multitudes of adherents since the ‘war’ was declared and their leaders have entrenched themselves upon the world’s stage. However, the Bush administration has now created a new front in the war on terrorism, this time targeting language. From the small confines of his very fuzzy logic, Bush has decided the words we use about terrorism speak much louder than the contemptible actions he has resorted to in response to terrorism.
It’s a fascinating development. According to this new list of linguistic paradigms, we’re not to call Al Qaeda a ‘movement’ nor describe extremists as “jihadists” or “mujahedeen”. According to Bush, such language only fosters impressionable young Muslims to join Al Qaeda. You see, it’s not our constant saber rattling against Muslim powers like Iran and Syria, or our loathsome destruction of Iraq and our strangulation of her people that is making recruits for Al Qaeda, but the language we use to describe them.
On a recent trip through the Western United States, I found myself watching a satellite TV network called the Military Channel. This particular morning featured a documentary on American soldiers guarding prisoners in Iraq who routinely torture, wrestle and harass Iraqi’s accused of various crimes. If such images are readily available to audiences in the US, I’m fairly sure they’re also available to Muslims across the globe. Perhaps I’m wrong, but it occurs that such images, with their commercial interruptions advertising Western goods, might be among the reasons why Al Qaeda and other insurgent groups are gathering more people to their cause.
I also wonder why the three seasoned politicians now competing for the highest office in our nation have yet to address this issue. Certainly John McCain, who has made much of the torture he endured as a POW during the Vietnam years, would be a strong advocate against such pictures being shown on a commercial network. Barack Obama, who has rallied millions of progressive voters to his call for change in America, could be a powerful ally in convincing large corporate sponsors of programs like this to point their advertising dollars in another direction. Hillary Clinton has electrified her base by taking the Bush Administration to task for their incompetence and pathological war mongering.
Yet, none of the presidential candidates are addressing disconnect between the damage the Bush Administration has done to the Muslim world and their haphazard attempts at damage control. Clinton and Obama are engaged in a dogfight for the Democratic nomination, slinging mud at one another as often as they can. Wouldn’t it be more prudent for each to point out the idiocy of trying to parse terrorism and how quickly our nation has forgotten the lessons of Abu Ghraib?
No. Instead, we’re told that the newly released Bush document, and another internal memorandum entitled “Words that Work and Words that Don’t: A Guide for Counterterrorism Communication” will be distributed this week by the State Department to all US embassies throughout the world. “It’s not what you say, but what they hear” the memo’s say in bold italic lettering. I’m sure diplomats using the new language will make Muslims feel much better about America’s dogmatically imposed control of their lives. With just a few well placed words, they’ll stop worrying about our quest to seize their natural resources and our bloody pursuit of dominating their political and cultural structures. Yeah, right.
It would be nice to report that some American leader out there understands terrorism from a broad perspective, but that just isn’t the case. Bush’s language protocol is nothing more than a flimsy bandage on a gaping gunshot wound and sadly, whichever miniscule presidential candidate gets elected will not have the ability to treat this wound properly, leaving it to fester more.
http://www.mytown.ca/ev.php?URL_ID=123143&URL_DO=DO_TOPIC&URL_SECTION=201
|
