How a Canadian Legitimately Sees Hysterical America — Excerpts from His Insightful Article — and My Supporting Comment

24 April 2013

Citation

Murtaza Hussain, US cable news fostering a climate of fear — Major news outlets have only fanned the flames of hysteria following the Boston bombings, Al Jazeera (23 April 2013)

A land of weaponized loons?

Toronto (Canada) writer Murtaza Hussain noticed that the Boston Marathon bombings fostered self-profiting viral hysteria on the cable news networks. A sanity-damaging phenomenon that I addressed here and here.

Damaging because, as Mr. Hussain wrote:

In their 2010 report for Foreign Affairs, John Mueller and Mark G Stewart constructed a comparative analysis of terrorism compared to other potential causes of death to Americans.

What the results showed was that the average American on an annual basis is more likely to be killed by one of their home appliances, drowning in a bathtub, or in a car accident involving a deer, than they are to be killed in a terrorist attack.

This is to say nothing of the threat of ordinary violent crime, which poses a greater threat by several orders of magnitude than that of terrorist violence and continues to churn on at an industrial scale throughout the country.

© 2013 Murtaza Hussain, US cable news fostering a climate of fear — Major news outlets have only fanned the flames of hysteria following the Boston bombings, Al Jazeera (23 April 2013) (paragraphs split)

The price of misplaced fears

It is (arguably) aesthetically unbecoming to run around like a demented loon, prioritizing danger in the wrong places.

It is self-destructively worse to overreact by allowing our disproportionate paranoia to bury our Constitutional protections:

Viewed in this light it is easier to reconcile how tens of thousands of gun deaths a year can be taken in stride as "the price of freedom", while a single bombing can prompt calls for the suspension of the once-cherished civil liberties granted to citizens by the American Constitution.

There are also the associated personal costs, which Americans blithely ignore because they are happening to people who “ain’t white”:

On April 18, 17 year-old high-school student Salah Barhoum woke up to find his image plastered on the front page of the New York Post along with the suggestion that he was in fact the perpetrator of the Boston Marathon bombing.

The directionless chaos and hysteria provoked by the media's designation of an amorphous "brown-skinned suspect" had led internet forums to circulate Barhoum's own brown-skinned visage as a potential threat - something which the Post had no qualms about reporting as fact in order to gain a scoop on a major story.

The allegation turned out to be completely unfounded, as Barhoum was merely an innocent bystander whom Boston Police had never viewed as a suspect in the crime; but the damage to him was nevertheless done.

Despite acknowledging his innocence, the Post refused to apologise for the reputational damage and potential danger they have put Barhoum in by falsely identifying him as the perpetrator of a crime which provoked the anger and fear of an entire country.

Consider the obvious absurdities involved in the media’s “brown-skinned” description

The foolishness of characterizing someone only as “brown-skinned”, in a polyglot world, should strike anyone, who has even a partially functioning brain.

During my police years, for example, I frequently noticed how many suspect descriptions were characterized solely by the words “black male”, as if that phrase were useful to Patrol cops.

Glancing around, I always noticed just how many black males there were, even in our then predominantly white jurisdiction.

Had black men somehow forfeited their human right to be unmolested, simply because they were (a) born with dark skin and (b) white-skinned victims of crime couldn’t recall anything else about their victimizer?

The unwarranted prejudice, that expands a two word racial description to imply nastily more, was idiotic then and even more so now. The human tribe has expanded from the days in which clans were comprised of similarly colored skin. “Clan America” is emphatically not white.

A more subtle form of irrationality, combined with abysmal ignorance — media references to and insinuations about Chechnya

The idiocy of the “brown skinned” imputation was compounded, when television news outlets learned of the alleged “Bombing Brothers” Tsarnaev’s purported ties to Chechnya:

Tamerlan and Dzhokhar Tsarnaev, suspects in the Boston marathon bombing, spent some of their formative years growing up in the Chechen diaspora community in Kyrgyzstan.

How their family happened to move from Russia’s restive southwest to this faraway former Soviet republic in Central Asia is part of a bigger story:

The Soviet Union expelled tens of thousands of Chechens from their home to Kyrgyzstan in the 1940s. According to Radio Free Europe, the Tsarnaevs were part of that forced migration.

They went home in the early 1990s, after the Soviet Union dissolved.

But, like some other Chechens, they returned to Central Asia after the start of the First Chechen War, a failed bid for independence from Moscow.

They later tried again to go home, or at least a little closer to it, moving to the Russian region of Dagestan, just next to Chechnya. From there, they left for the United States.

Nothing in Max Fisher’s account is unusual, given the huge population displacements evidenced throughout history. Nor is it unusual background for immigrants into the United States.

Pertinent here is the fact that most Americans do not have a clue about Chechnya, Kyrgyzstan, or Dagestan — where those nations/cultures are, much less “who” is there. Pinning down a nationally or culturally representative “Who” is, of course, pretty much impossible.

Journalist Fisher tried to remedy our ignorance in regard to Chechnya and Dagestan:

The most basic answer is that they’re two federal subdivisions of Russia, both in the country’s far southwest [and sandwiched between the Black and Caspian Seas].

They’re small, mountainous, predominantly Muslim and have been marked by years of conflict and independence movements.

The regions are known for their diversity and scenic beauty, but they’ve also sadly become famous as flashpoints of internal Russian conflict.

In the early 1800s, Russian Tzar Nicholas I led an invasion of the Caucasus, including the regions we now know as Chechnya and Dagestan. After decades of fighting, they were incorporated into Imperial Russia, and have been under some form of Russian rule ever since.

Chechnya, and to a lesser extent Dagestan, have periodically rebelled against Moscow in a sometimes-violent effort to secure independence.

Some of this violence has been led by separatists and some by “jihadists” who profess an extreme version of Islam.

More precisely, there have been three recent wars involving Chechnya:

First Chechen War — December 1994 to August 1996

Invasion of Dagestan by the Islamic International Brigade based in Chechnya — August and September 1999

Second Chechen War (an outgrowth of the Dagestan War) — August 1999 to April 2009

Today, Chechen elements remain part of a more general North Caucasus insurgency, which includes Dagestan, the Republic of Ingushetia, and the Kabardino-Balkaria Repulbic.

Given this history, and the media’s typical stir-the-pot orientation to news — the Tsarnaevs’ ties to Kyrgyzstan, Dagestan (where their parents still are), and reportedly Chechnya — was enough to promote suspicion that “these guys” were of Caucasus terrorist mind and anti-American. Which certainly:

(a) overlooks the Tsarnaevs’ personal reasons for doing what they allegedly did

and

(b) grossly oversimplifies the spectrum of individualized thinking that characterizes the People(s) living in the Caucasus (or anywhere else).

The media promote stupidity by feeding us more of it.

An aside on perspective — turning the mirror on ourselves

Given that the United States has been at (i) virtually perpetual war since the beginning of our involvement in the Vietnam conflict and (ii) awash in gun deaths domestically — can we imagine how foreign news outlets would categorize our representative Who-ness?

The moral? — Ignorance, sensationalized paranoia, and bigotry make a distasteful cocktail

Murtaza Hussain’s take is accurate and useful.

Too bad that we will predictably ignore anything that a ”furriner” with “that kind” of name has to say.

PeteFree.com

How a Canadian Legitimately Sees Hysterical America — Excerpts from His Insightful Article — and My Supporting Comment