thanks for raising the level of this thread a bit, folks.
ambient condition no. 1 that explains something of the drift in this thread.
Quote:
Negative Perception Of Islam Increasing
Poll Numbers in U.S. Higher Than in 2001
By Claudia Deane and Darryl Fears
Washington Post Staff Writers
Thursday, March 9, 2006; A01
As the war in Iraq grinds into its fourth year, a growing proportion of Americans are expressing unfavorable views of Islam, and a majority now say that Muslims are disproportionately prone to violence, according to a new Washington Post-ABC News poll.
The poll found that nearly half of Americans -- 46 percent -- have a negative view of Islam, seven percentage points higher than in the tense months after the Sept. 11, 2001, attacks on the World Trade Center and the Pentagon, when Muslims were often targeted for violence.
The survey comes at a time of increasing tension; the wars in Afghanistan and Iraq show little sign of ending, and members of Congress are seeking to block the Bush administration's attempt to hire an Arab company to manage operations at six of the nation's ports. Also, Americans are reading news of deadly protests by Muslims over Danish cartoons depicting the prophet Muhammad.
Conservative and liberal experts said Americans' attitudes about Islam are fueled in part by political statements and media reports that focus almost solely on the actions of Muslim extremists.
According to the poll, the proportion of Americans who believe that Islam helps to stoke violence against non-Muslims has more than doubled since the attacks, from 14 percent in January 2002 to 33 percent today.
The survey also found that one in three Americans have heard prejudiced comments about Muslims lately. In a separate question, slightly more (43 percent) reported having heard negative remarks about Arabs. One in four Americans admitted to harboring prejudice toward Muslims, the same proportion that expressed some personal bias against Arabs.
Though the two groups are often linked in popular discourse, most of the world's Muslims are not of Arab descent. For example, the country with the largest Muslim population is Indonesia.
As a school bus driver in Chicago, Gary McCord, 65, dealt with many children of Arab descent. "Some of the best families I've ever had were some of my Muslim families," he said in a follow-up interview. "They were so nice to me." He now works for a Palestinian Christian family, whose members he says are "really marvelous."
But his good feelings do not extend to Islam. "I don't mean to sound harsh or anything, but I don't like what the Muslim people believe in, according to the Koran. Because I think they preach hate," he said.
As for the controversial cartoons of Muhammad, he said Arabs seem hypersensitive about religion. "I think it's been blown out of proportion," he said.
Frederick Cole, a welder in Roosevelt, Utah, acknowledged: "As far as being prejudiced against them, I'd have to say maybe a little bit. If I were to go through an airport and I saw one out of the corner of my eye, I'd say, 'I wonder what he's thinking.' " Still, Cole, 30, said, "I don't think the religion is based on just wanting to terrorize people."
A total of 1,000 randomly selected Americans were interviewed March 2-5 for this Post-ABC News poll. The margin of sampling error for the overall results is plus or minus three percentage points.
Americans who said they understood Islam were more likely to see the religion overall as peaceful and respectful. But they were no less likely to say it harbors harmful extremists, and they were also no less likely to have prejudiced feelings against Muslims.
In Gadsden, Ala., Ron Hardy, an auto parts supplier, said Arabs own a lot of stores in his area and "they're okay." But, Hardy, 41, said "I do think" Islam has been "hijacked by some militant-like guys."
Edward Rios, 31, an engineer in McHenry, Ill., said he feels that Islam "is as good a religion as any other" yet vengeance seems to be "built into their own set of beliefs: If someone attacks our people, it is your duty to defend them. . . . I don't think Christianity has anything like that."
James J. Zogby, president of the Washington-based Arab American Institute, said he is not surprised by the poll's results. Politicians, authors and media commentators have demonized the Arab world since 2001, he said.
"The intensity has not abated and remains a vein that's very near the surface, ready to be tapped at any moment," Zogby said. "Members of Congress have been exploiting this over the ports issue. Radio commentators have been talking about it nonstop."
Juan Cole, a professor of modern Middle Eastern and South Asian history at the University of Michigan, agreed, saying Americans "have been given the message to respond this way by the American political elite, mass media and by select special interests."
Cole said he was shocked when a radio talk show host asked him if Islamic extremists would set off a nuclear bomb in the United States in the next six months. "It was ridiculous. I think anti-Arab racism and profiling has become respectable," he said.
Ronald Stockton, a professor of political science at the University of Michigan at Dearborn who helped conduct a study of Arabs in the Detroit area and on views of them held by non-Arabs, said an exceptionally high percentage of non-Muslims feels the media depicts Arabs unfairly, yet still holds negative opinions.
"You're getting a constant drumbeat of negative information about Islam," he said.
Michael Franc, vice president of government relations for the conservative Heritage Foundation, said that the survey responses "seems to me to be a real backlash against Islam" and that congressional leaders do not help the problem by sometimes using language that links all Muslims with extremists.
Polling director Richard Morin contributed to this reporT.
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source:
http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn...802221_pf.html
the driver of this is obvious:
it is a direct function of how the entire "war on terror" has been framed since 2001. it follows from a choice, based on political expediency, made by the bush administration, concerning how best to market itself by marketing a new, vague "war."
the primary function of this "war" is, in the long run, to replace the cold war in providing an ongoing legitimation for reagan style military keynesian economic policies.
which makes of it an instrument in conventional domestic politics--an issue across which resources are diverted by a political party to the social faction that supports it most consistently.
the price of the focus on this vague, worthless category "terrorist" in this context=the structuration of a type of socially legitimate racism.
that the cateogry "terrorist" is a vague composite image of arabs=self-evident.
calls for the transformation of the united states into a state terrorist apparatus, the intermal political regime of which would be dictatorship, rationalized in the name of an absurd "war on terror"=displaced racism.
dictatorship=a political regime that is not bound by law. what folk from teh right above are calling for, whether they see it or not, is the reduction of the united states to a huge terrorist organization militarily. the discourse of "national will" that mojo in particular seems fond of is a rationalization for an (illegal) clampdown on domestic dissent.
the expediencies introduced by this administration--you know, illegal wiretaops and all that=fine with these same folk because they see legal parameters as an obstacle to efective state action. thsi kind ofshit comes directly out of carl schmitt. it si central to his notion of the state of exception, which, for him, requires dictatorship. teh argument, in this end, from schitt=efficiency of dictatorship. you should read some of his work. it is unnerving, particularly if you know the history of its usage as a legal rationale for fascism in germany.
the category "terrorist" is such that there is nothing to be done about it.
the category "terrorist" is about mobilization of political support in the united states for an otherwise wholly bankrupt ideology, and a wholly incompetent administration.
period.
another way: if you think about the world across the cateogry "terrorist" you are looking the wrong way around: this category is only useful if you are trying to explain a modality of political mobilization within the united states. the analytic question opened up via the category "terrorist" is the producton of consent in the united states.
as for conditions that obtain in the world: the cateogry "terrorist" strips any possible meaningful context away from a given action.
it unifies phenomena that have no reason to be unified.
corrolate:
most actions have been carried out by small, unrelated groups.
in some cases, you have continuity of organization--in many you dont.
it follows then that consistency of agency is the exception, not the rule. or is it? this is undecidable, isn't it? how do you fashion a coherent strategy if the most basic aspect of the object against which this strategy is to be directed contains this kind of undecidability at its core?
so even at the most rudimentary strategic level, the cateogry is an obstacle to thinking--not to speak of action.
another way: the category "terrorism" is an editorial position taken as to the content of the actions, not their origin---you cannot easily move from thinking about content to thinking about sources.
another explanation for the cateogry: it reflects the ideology of a vertically organized nation-state style military apparatus, which finds itself in a nearly intractable bind if it is called on to react to an enemy that is not organizationally the mirror image of itself. the strongest strategic element these small groups of militants have going for them is this organizational assymetry.
because nearly all military strategic thinking is predicated on conflict between nation-states....responses that attempt to blur the kind of problem posed by small horizontally organized groups into vertically organized nation-state style organizations results in situations of the blind application of force coupled with a total lack of feedback loops. so information concerning what the military is doing that would be available to the military itself as a mean to modulate its actions---this at the most basic level----would be problematic at best.
conflict would pit a vertically organized military apparatus against an enemy it cannot find.
in this context, recourse to torture is the worst possible move because it generates information shaped by the desires of the questioner--that is, fit to the system requirement that a "real' nation-state style military apparatus lurk somewhere behind the "fiction" of small horizontally organized units.
the outcome of this--moving in a striaght line logically and demonstrated repeatedly since 9/11/2001, is a variant of hysteria---the most likely outcome=death and destruction on a huge scale that would be totally ineffective in terms of stopping "terrorism"--
it is in fact worse than this: the very brutality and incoherence of this type of state terrorist action would function as a great recruiting tool for these organizations--while being worthless (except by chance) in terms of accomplishing a goal of fighting them.
conservative "resoluteness" in a context shaped by this type of ideological incoherence results in the support for state terrorism. period. because incoherent conflict motivated by fear of a phantom enemy that is everywhere and nowhere--particularly when supported by racism---results in nothing coherent, only endless violence.
but conservatives in the states--for whom nothing is materially at stake in all this--feel better.
so the category "terrorist" serves a therapeutic function.
nothing else.
caveat at the end of a long post: i am not saying that the u.s.does not have enemies nor am i necessarily saying that these enemies should not be fought--what i am saying is that nothing--and i mean nothing--coherent can or will happen so long as this idiotic notion of "terrorist" operates at any level in thinking about either these adveraries or conflicts. the thread itself demonstrates this: at each point where a coherent debate/conversation happened above acorss positions, it required a de facto abandonment of the category. that posters reverted to it in the end speaks to the therapeutic function of the category itself--they prefer to feel as though something is being done in the present context. i too think something is being done in this context--a fiasco is unfolding that will make the u.s. less safe---politically less credible----militiarily less imposing--because the outcomes of incoherence ideolgically, militarily play out as theater for the rest of the world. incoherent violence becomes what "we" are.