The rhetoric of hate in “Until we do this, we labour under a curse”

First, let me preface my remarks with a disclaimer. I am opposed to America’s military imperialism across the globe. I am also opposed to Israel’s oppression, abuse, and murder of Palestinian people. Neither do I deny that politicians or shadowy government organizations have been involved in acts of terror. Historical records point to American CIA […]

First, let me preface my remarks with a disclaimer. I am opposed to America’s military imperialism across the globe. I am also opposed to Israel’s oppression, abuse, and murder of Palestinian people. Neither do I deny that politicians or shadowy government organizations have been involved in acts of terror. Historical records point to American CIA assassinations and more recent extraditions and torture. There have also been Nigerian politicians who have been arrested for their connections to domestic terrorists, and I imagine there are more. I am not writing this piece to defend America, Israel, or politicians of any sort, but to confront poisonous totalizing rhetoric that demonizes entire people groups. I will follow the order of Kaminski’s article, which begins with the “9-11 puzzle” and continues with a denial of the Holocaust. I will then go back to Ms. Umar-Yusuf’s preface to show why such rhetoric is so dangerous.

A note on the blogger John Kaminski, whom Ms. Umar-Yusuf calls “foremost 9-11 truth advocate”: Kaminski’s rambling pieces which cite scanty verifiable evidence for their conclusions are regularly published on Neo-Nazi sites, including the “Anti-Theist” page of the Neo-Nazi site Resist.com. In the cached copy of his article “If I were a carpenter” he writes, “Let’s take these nefarious religions—Christianity, Judaism and Islam—one at a time, and obliterate for all time the notion that any of them have any objective psychological legitimacy, although all three are indeed a collection of pathologically projected material[…]”

On the 9-11 attack: As I have described several times in this column, I was in New York on September 11, 2001. I watched from a Brooklyn pier as fire and black smoke roiled out of the gaping wounds left by the planes. I watched as the first tower fell. Conspiracy theorists say that what I saw was a hoax, that it was actually an “inside job,” with planned demolitions. Some even believe there were no planes, and that those passengers who disappeared on the four hijacked planes were secret agents who went into witness protection programmes. Kaminski blames the Jews. Now to believe these theories, remember you are implicating not just American leaders but also thousands of journalists, architects, building engineers, policemen, firemen, other eye-witnesses, and, worst of all, those victims on those planes and their bereaved families. I’m not a fan of the Bush administration, and I was opposed to the Afghanistan and Iraq wars from the beginning, but if you think that otherwise grossly inefficient bureaucrats could have been capable of planning a hoax on that scale and involving that many ordinary people without anyone leaking any information, you’ve been watching too many Hollywood movies. I do not have space to, point by point, debunk these conspiracies, but the Popular Mechanics report “Debunking the 9/11 Myths: Special Report” and the website debunking911.com are useful.

Kaminski goes on to deny the Holocaust, which I suppose one might expect after his claim that even “‘sincere’ Jews” (quotation marks his own) involved in peace efforts are merely trying to distract efforts to find the “truth.” I googled Kaminski’s article, “The Mindlock” that “Another Dimension” re-printed and discovered that Kaminski plagiarized the section on the Red Cross from a pamphlet published by Richard E. Harwood in 1974, that was itself repackaged from an American source. Richard E. Harwood was the pseudonym for Richard Verrall, a one-time deputy chairman of the British National Front, a “whites-only” anti-immigration party that has recently been involved in anti-Islamic activism in Britain. In 1992, the Supreme Court of Canada found that his pamphlet “misrepresented the work of historians, misquoted witnesses, fabricated evidence, and cited non-existent authorities.” In one of the out-of-context quotations that made it into Kaminski’s article, Harwood cites a 1948 Red Cross report saying the organization inspected showers and repaired fixtures. He argues that this is evidence that fake shower facilities had not been used as gas chambers. The problem with this claim, historian Deborah E. Lipstadt points out, is that “the passage” Harwood cites “had nothing to do with German concentration camps: It referred to Allied camps for civilian internees in Egypt.” She notes that Harwood ignored statements in the same Red Cross report that Nazis sent Jews to “death camps” and engaged in “systematic extermination.” The Geneva office of the International Red Cross wrote a response to the booklet in 1979 saying that it made “false allegations” and that the “ICRC has never tried to compile statistics on the victims of the war and has never certified the accuracy of the statistics produced by a third party.” I do not have space to “prove” the Holocaust but the footnotes to the Wikipedia article “Criticism of Holocaust denial” provide links to many of the texts I’ve quoted here.  Remember that denying the Holocaust means believing millions of survivors, who experienced the camps and lost loved ones, were diabolical liars.

So, why should it matter? After all, there aren’t many Jews in Nigeria. Why do I think the article is dangerous enough to respond? What is the result of this dehumanizing rhetoric that demonizes an entire group? 1) Such rhetoric gives you an “other” you can scapegoat for all your problems. No one of your own ethnicity or who claims to be of your own religion can be at fault. If the “others” suffer, it is their own fault. I have heard this used by Christians in Jos, who claim that there is a vast Muslim conspiracy to take over Nigeria and that “90%” of the Muslims in the north sympathize with terrorists. If Muslims suffer, it is their own fault, they say. No Christian has done wrong. Similarly, I have heard Muslims say that there is a Christian conspiracy to destroy the north and that it is “Christian” and “southern” interests who are behind terrorism. There is no such thing as Islamic extremism, these people claim. These rhetorical patterns are also used, on the one hand, to argue that if Americans were killed on 9-11, it was the fault of the Americans themselves, and, on the other hand, to argue that if Palestinians are killed by Israelis, it is the fault of the Palestinians themselves. It is always the fault of the “other,” no one on “my side” bears any responsibility. 2) Such bigoted rhetoric, which lumps together diverse “others” and simplifies complex social relations into binaries, can lead to horrifying results. Boko Haram, which has bombed dozens of churches, has claimed it is targeting all Christians because of injustice against Muslims in Plateau State. Christians in Plateau and Kaduna have murdered Muslim motorists to avenge Christian deaths.  Recently in America, a neo-Nazi, after speaking of a “racial holy war” to friends, attacked a Sikh temple and shot six worshippers. In Norway an anti-Islamic terrorist, after writing an internet manifesto about the dangers of Islam in Europe, shot 77 people. Israel justifies aggression against Palestine because of Palestinian attacks. Hamas justifies attacks because of Israeli aggression. Historical cases of genocide in America, Armenia, Germany, Rwanda, Bosnia, and elsewhere provide other examples of what happens when this dehumanizing rhetoric is used on large scale. The language of hatred can be used to justify anything. If you believe the other side isn’t quite human, then it’s easier to believe that harming them isn’t quite wrong.

Ms. Umar-Yusuf quotes American author William Faulkner as advising “young writers to shed their mindset in order to succeed. He had cautioned that ‘Until he does so, he labours under a curse.’”

I agree, until we change this mindset that demonizes the “other” and exonerates “our own” from any wrongdoing, until we examine ourselves to see if our own attitudes are helping to perpetuate hatred and violence, we will indeed continue to labour under a curse.