Knives, Cameras, Terrorists

So it’s been a busy week of politics both here in London and also back home.  Hillary Clinton’s big speech, etc.  Maybe I’ll write about that sometime but it seems a bit done to death at the moment.  What is there left to say?  In any event, the talk of London politics nowadays comes on two topics: 1) knife crime and 2) the proposed 42-day limit on government detentions.

As an American, both of these debates are rather charming and quaint.  Knife crime.  Isn’t that what Americans were concerned about in the 1700s?  We are SO far ahead of the Brits on this one.  What they need to do is legalize guns and then BANG!  Your knife crime problem is gone. 

In all seriousness, this totally puts the lie to the National Rifle Association’s arguments in the States that if you ban guns only criminals will have guns.  They won’t.  They’ll have knives.  And between you and me, I’d rather face someone with a knife than a gun (although I’d rather face someone with a tray of cupcakes than either).  Now, knife crime is definitely a problem here and I don’t want to belittle that.  It’s actually quite shocking, some of these stabbings that are reported almost daily.

In that story linked above there was reference to the CCTV cameras that are a mainstay of the fight against crime and terrorism here in the UK.  I myself actually don’t have a lot of problems with the CCTV, which is funny because if they were put up in America I would likely go nuts.  But, it’s funny that when you move to another country you open yourself up to all kinds of different possibilities.  That being said, doesn’t this Transport for London poster seem a trifle Orwellian?

Still, it seems like this debate about extending the detention of suspected terrorists from 21 to 42 days has perhaps stretched public credulity to the limit.  Yesterday I saw the Home Secretary on the Andrew Marr Show and he tore her a new one.  Her arguments essentially fell back on the ‘infinite security’ argument, whereby the Government needs all the tools it can think of to fight terrorism.  When confronted with the fact that cops don’t actually think this is a good idea she just steamrolled right through.

So what’s quaint about this?  The fact that you’re debating it (I say you, because I’m not allowed to vote).  Brown should have taken a page from President Bush and just instituted it.  If Brown loses this vote, he’ll know he should have just followed the Bush plan: flout national and international law and just keep it all a secret.

Un-Extraordinary Rendition

Today the Guardian broke the story about the US practice of keeping prisoners from (as Borat put it) the ‘War of Terror’ imprisoned onboard US naval vessels.  Of course, the US denies this, but given the US government’s track record denying their well-documented practices associated with extraordinary rendition, I think it’s safe to say that at least the main thrust of the story is probably true.  It even makes intuitive sense – as the US has been trying to wind down Camp X-Ray in Guantanamo Bay because it is a public relations disaster, they have to keep the prisoners somewhere (since it’s not like the US is actually conceding the point that detentions are illegal and immoral).

Why make the shift to the ships?  Well, as Derek Gregory has argued, Gitmo offered a place in which the US was not technically sovereign (since the land is leased from Cuba) but in which the US had full jurisdiction.  This ’space of the exception’ gave the US a space to contravene international law.  Denied this, it makes sense for the US to fall back on US navy ships, which are technically sovereign territory of the US but nevertheless have nobody around to rat them out (at least nobody who is outside the chain of command).  It’s worth mentioning that Diego Garcia, the island in the Indian Ocean mentioned by the story, is itself something of a ’space of the exception’.  It’s British territory, leased by the United States.  The US wanted it for a naval base in the 1970s so the local population was forced from their homes and since then the island has been used as a refueling site for US flights of extraordinary rendition.

The sad thing is that this story is so totally non-shocking.  We’ve arrived at a point in history where we expect this out of the United States.  It’s shameful.  This isn’t even on CNN.com’s main page at the moment.  Who cares? 

On the Ironies of ‘Islamo-Fascism’

The term islamo-fascism has mostly died a quick and dirty death despite the efforts of unlikely bedmates Christopher Hitchens and David Horowitz to make it stick, but it is worth for a moment considering what it purportedly meant.  In the words of Steven Schwartz:

I admit to a lack of modesty or neutrality about this discussion, since I was, as I will explain, the first Westerner to use the neologism in this context.

Later in the same article:

Fascism is distinguished from the broader category of extreme right-wing politics by its willingness to defy public civility and openly violate the law. As such it represents a radical departure from the tradition of ultra-conservatism. The latter aims to preserve established social relations, through enforcement of law and reinforcement of authority. But the fascist organizations of Mussolini and Hitler, in their conquests of power, showed no reluctance to rupture peace and repudiate parliamentary and other institutions; the fascists employed terror against both the existing political structure and society at large.

With that definition in mind of ‘fascism’ it is now worth turning our attention to Michelle Malkin, who led a campaign threatening boycott of Dunkin Donuts over the appearance of over-mediated chef Rachael Ray in an ad, wearing a scarf that might have looked like something an Arab would wear.  Oh horror.

The keffiyeh, for the clueless, is the traditional scarf of Arab men that has come to symbolize murderous Palestinian jihad. Popularized by Yasser Arafat and a regular adornment of Muslim terrorists appearing in beheading and hostage-taking videos, the apparel has been mainstreamed by both ignorant (and not-so-ignorant) fashion designers, celebrities, and left-wing icons.

The key moment here is when Malkin writes “has come to symbolize”.  This is not just a statement of fact, but rather a moment of creation (can you hear the angels singing?) — the moment when Malkin covers over the history of xenophobes stigmatizing Arabs as being nothing but a race of “Muslim terrorists” (note the quick jump from Arabs to Muslims, as if they’re the same thing) and instead inserts herself as just a passive observer of the very process she has moved along through her support of, among other things, “Islamo-fascist Awareness Month” on college campuses (another term that elides the differences between two very different groups).  What’s next?  Is hummous the well-known food of Yasser Arafat?  Maybe we should give up algebra, too – it is, after all, popularized by guys who dress suspiciously like terrorists (we all know what they look like).  This is just the kind of intimidation and cultural stigmatization that might be associated with, oh I don’t know, if only we had a term for groups that did this kind of thing.