American Values

Jay Severin, radio talk show host on WTKK-FM (in Boston) was apparently upset to have been left out of my recent Racist Idiot Quiz of the Week. He is clearly determined not to be left out of the next installment, judging by the phone-in segment of his 22 April 2004 show, in which he disagreed with one caller who felt that non-Muslim Americans should reach out in friendship to their Muslim compatriots, and suggested instead: "You think we should befriend them; I think we should kill them."

When challenged about his comments, Severin offered the standard non-apology, saying that he regretted that anyone might have misunderstood or misconstrued his remarks. That is pathetic and insulting: the offensiveness doesn’t lie in how listeners understood or construed the words, but in the words themselves. Severin doesn’t need to apologize for the fact that other people are offended by his suggestion that we should “kill them”, he needs to apologize for saying it in the first place.

He then went on to invoke a second line of defense popular with anti-Arab / anti-Muslim bigots who get caught on tape saying what they really believe: specifically, the “when I said kill them, I really meant kill the bad Muslims, not the good ones” argument. This is what I call the “Armey Defense”, in honor of former House Majority Leader Dick Armey, who pioneered the method as a means of covering his ass after suggesting on national television that ethnic cleansing was his preferred method of resolving the Palestinian-Israeli conflict:

ARMEY: I'm content to have Israel grab the entire West Bank.

MATTHEWS: Well, where do you put the Palestinian state, in Norway? Once the Israelis take back the West Bank permanently and annex it, there's no place else for the Palestinians to have a state.

ARMEY: No, no, that's not--that's not at all true. There are many Arab nations that have many hundreds of thousands of acres of land and--and soil and property and opportunity to create a Palestinian state.

MATTHEWS: So you would transport--you would transport the Palestinians from Palestine to somewhere else and call it their state?

< snip >

ARMEY: That's right...I happened to believe that the Palestinians should leave.

MATTHEWS: Have you ever told George Bush, the president from your home state of Texas, that you think the Palestinians should get up and go and leave Palestine and that's the solution?

ARMEY: I'm probably telling him that right now.

MATTHEWS: Well, just to repeat, you believe that the Palestinians who are now living on the West Bank should get out of there?

ARMEY: Yes.

(Partial transcript from Chris Matthews’ Hardball, MSNBC, May 1, 2002)

The following day - no doubt after a worried staffer or two had pointed out to Armey the awkward reality that he had publicly advocated ethnic cleansing which in international law is a War Crime, also a Crime against Humanity, and potentially an act of genocide - Armey backtracked and insisted that he only wanted the bad Palestinians, the terrorists, to leave. Never mind the fact that that’s clearly not what he said, it was good enough to get him off the hook. What the hell, they’re only Arabs and Muslims.

Severin adopted the same argument in defending his “kill them” comment, claiming that he was referring only to those Muslim terrorists “who are killing us”. Unfortunately, the transcript of Severin’s conversation doesn’t support his excuse any better than Armey’s did. This was no inadvertant omission or slip of the tongue: Severin does not suggest that he is talking about a terrorist minority, but explicitly says that he is talking about "the vast majority" of American Muslims, and he goads his caller three times into defending Muslims, so that he [Severin] can rebut it with his opinion that they should be killed instead:

Severin: "I believe that Muslims in this country are a fifth column. . . . The vast majority of Muslims in this country are very obviously loyal, not to the United States, but to their religion. And I'm worried that when the time comes for them to stand up and be counted, the reason they are here is to take over our culture and eventually take over our country…My suspicion is that the majority of Muslims in the United States, who regard themselves as Muslims first and not as Americans really at all, see an American map one day where this is the United States of Islam, not the United States of America. I think it pays to harbor those suspicions…… Do you think we should befriend them?"

Caller: "Well, I see Muslims in this country, they seem to like freedom."

Severin: "Would you answer my question? Do you think we should befriend them?"

Caller: "I think we should . . ."

Severin (interrupting): “I'm going to try one more time…Do you believe we should befriend them?"

Caller: "Yes."

Severin: "I've got good news for you: We have. …I have an alternative viewpoint. It's slightly different than yours. You think we should befriend them; I think we should kill them."

Well, I guess Severin’s talk show is one snippet of American discourse that won’t get a lot of air time in the programming of al-Hurra , our latest attempt to educate the “brown-skinned peoples” of the Arab world about our democratic, tolerant and implicitly superior ways. And nor will this story about our treatment of prisoners in Iraq, which apparently only came to light because photographic evidence was circulating about what was going on Abu Ghraib prison:

Last month, the U.S. Army announced 17 soldiers in Iraq, including a brigadier general, had been removed from duty after charges of mistreating Iraqi prisoners... The Army has photographs that show a detainee with wires attached to his genitals. Another shows a dog attacking an Iraqi prisoner…. Part of the Army's own investigation is a statement from an Iraqi detainee who charges a translator - hired to work at the prison - with raping a male juvenile prisoner… There is also a picture of an Iraqi man who appears to be dead -- and badly beaten.

…It was American soldiers serving as military police at Abu Ghraib who took these pictures. The investigation started when one soldier got them from a friend, and gave them to his commanders. 60 Minutes II has a dozen of these pictures, and there are many more – pictures that show Americans, men and women in military uniforms, posing with naked Iraqi prisoners.

… According to the U.S. Army, one Iraqi prisoner was told to stand on a box with his head covered, wires attached to his hands. He was told that if he fell off the box, he would be electrocuted….There are shots of the prisoners stacked in a pyramid, one with a slur written on his skin in English. In some, the male prisoners are positioned to simulate sex with each other. And in most of the pictures, the Americans are laughing, posing, pointing, or giving the camera a thumbs-up.

(60 Minutes II, 29 April 2004, Abuse Of Iraqi POWs By GIs Probed )

You can see more of the Abu Ghraib photos online at Democratic Underground. Warning: these photos are explicit and disturbing.

When we launched al-Hurra, Farid Abu Dhuhair (Professor of Journalism and Mass Communication at an-Najah National University in Nablus) predicted that the new channel would fail to win hearts and minds because it was based on the faulty premise that those who hate us do so because they don’t know what we’re really like:

“The Americans think that we hate them because we don’t receive accurate information about the reality of American politics. This is not true. America’s image is ugly because American policies and actions are ugly. America can’t act the way it is acting and expect Arabs and Muslims to love her.”

When I listen to the hateful sentiments about Muslims that Jay Severin can utter on air without even losing his job (try inserting "blacks" or "Jews" instead of "Muslims" into his comments, and ask yourself how long he would last), or look at the photos of how we treat the untermenschen at Abu Ghraib, I wonder who it really is that has the false impression of what the US represents to the world. Since 9/11, we have been treated to an orchestrated fantasy world of flag-waving xenophobia, in which anything we do is right because we are Americans who, by that accident of birth, automatically have a monopoly on justice, freedom, democracy, tolerance and all the other virtues upon which our national mythology is founded. But the 96% of the world’s population that lives outside of our self-congratulatory bubble sees us not as we claim to be, but as we really behave**. Isn’t it scary to think that “they”, and not “us”, might know more about who we really are than we do ourselves?

** Scroll down to 28 Apr 2004 entry.

Comments

[Mohsan]

did this racist radio host know that the director of the US National Institutes of Health is an American muslim ?...
Indeed, Dr Elias Zerhouni, NIH Director who is dedicated to improving the health of ALL Americans, is a muslim and Algerian of origin.

thanks Lawrence for this excellent post.

[blondesense]

Well done post Lawrence.
Thanks.