Experiencing the Plight of Refugees

By Gary Berg-Cross

When did refugees become terrorists? Or at least some are like "rabid dogs" - see Ben Carson talks of 'rabid dogs': US refugee debate descends into ugliness.

To say the least the idea of letting scores of Middle eastern (think Syrian, no think Muslim refugees) into the US has stirred up nationalist and xenophobic  emotions. It doesn't help that there are politics and religion involved at times too. Consider:

GOP Politicians Rejecting Refugees Sound Like Racist Internet Trolls (RollingStone) or

Data Show Links Between Fear of Terrorist Attacks, Anti-Muslim Bias

Hate crimes against Muslims are up this year, despite a general trend downward for all such crimes. (US News and World Report) or

Syrian Refugees Are Being Punished by Republican Nativist Hysteria

What the Republicans now rejecting Syrian refugees would have said about Jews a century ago. (Haaretz)

Sure there is some fact checking such US News’ 8 Facts About the U.S. Program to Resettle Syrian Refugees (or the Guardian) where we  learn such things as “refugees have to pay back the money for the plane ticket that brings them to the U.S and how “Refugees are subject to Department of Homeland Security background checks before arriving in the U.S.“ Checks to enter take 18-24 months and include the collection of biometric data, security checks, interviews and background investigations, but also “Refugees are processed in conjunction with nine nonprofits, not solely by the government.” (and there is even more at Vox on how few Syrian refugees have been allowed in.)

On the USNews site you can see where refugees since 2011 have bee settled – 25 are in Baltimore, while 115 are in Houtson.

Since a Syrian passport was reportedly found near one of the assailants in the Paris terror attacks there is heightened fears that Islamic State group terrorists could or are exploit(ing) refugee routes and resettlement programs as a way to prepare for later attacks. And on Thursday, the House passed a bill that would impose additional security measures on refugees from Syria and Iraq. But...

You can read critical articles like “The Big Logical Error Made By Everyone Linking Syrian Refugees To The Paris Attack” which asserts “All the perpetrators of the mass murder in Paris who have been identified are European nationals from France and Belgium.”

The Washington Post added that a passport was found near the slain body of one of the terrorists. It was issued to Ahmad Almohammad, a 25-year-old Syrian national, by officials in Greece on October 4. He had arrived a day earlier on a boat carrying migrants from Turkey. Some view this as evidence that one of the terrorists was a refugee. Authorities, however, have determined that the passport is fake. On Tuesday, November 17, Syrian officials arrested another man at a refugee camp who carried a forged passport with the exact same information. It is now unclear if he is involved in the case.

                                      From inquisitr

It seems unlikely that facts alone may not be determinative with this type of group concern meets a panic reaction for a while. Given political campaigns we are more likely to hear stagements from Republican presidential candidates like Chris Christie who has said his state will not take in any refugees – “not even orphans under the age of five”. Or Carlie Fiorina says 'vast majority' of Syrian refugees are able bodied young men. http://ow.ly/UWk38  (Boo says Politifacat)

But perhaps getting a more personal experience with what refugees experience might provide a richer, human experience. Just last year a movie dramatizing the experience of the Lost Boys of Sudan provides one such theatrical experience that on what US resettlement is like and what some refugees go through before, during and after resettlement. This includes the chill imposed by 9/11 and the plight of families trying to reunite during a freeze in immigration. The story has a Christian immigrant view of things, but the experience is more general given who the real life actors are.

Orphaned by the brutal Civil war in Sudan that began in 1983, these young victims traveled as many as a thousand miles on foot in search of safety. Fifteen years later, a humanitarian effort would bring 3600 lost boys and girls to America

The main characters are played by actual refugees—two of whom we learn were child soldiers.  They are the focus with” uninflected, authoritative performances.” compensate for the feel-good simplifications of (the) script.  

If you want to feel a bit of what child refugees got through in war, what it is like to be torn from family and culture you can watch this movie and along the way learn a bit about a connection to Mark Twain via Huck Finn explain the nature of a Good Lie.

Literal and Propagandistic Views of Terrorism

I see that terrorism and anti-terrorism is in the news again. A Nashville paper reported a protest of > 200 Tennessee Muslims who turned out at the Legislative Plaza to oppose an anti-terrorism bill which they argue grew out of a direct assault against Islam. As first drafted, the so called anti-terrorism bill made it a felony to follow Shariah law. Eventually the references to the Muslin religion were excised but perhaps the spirit driving it is there.

The religious and sometime nationality profiling of terrorism and terrorist got me thinking on how we got to position so irrational that we see a boogie man of Shariah law taking over when other religions seem more front and center in the influence game in this country. This is only a small part of what is probably shaping up to be a loud, finger-pointing debate in the 2012 political season. There are broad issue like terror in Libya and definitions of terrorist acts and groups. For example, is Pakistan supporting Taliban terrorists? Or is this US 'negative propaganda' -http://bit.ly/hXson0? Is the use and the threat of the use of force, that some described as coercive diplomacy, a form of terrorism? In Confessions of an Economic Hit Man John Perkins describes it that way (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Confessions_of_an_Economic_Hit_Man). So I went back to some earlier Progressive writing on the history and of some of the thinking that goes into the terrorist idea.

I didn't need to go very find when I retrieved from my "files" a Noam Chomsky article called International Terrorism: Image and Reality from 1991 which at 10 years before 9/11 seemed a reasonable distance. But as Chomsky notes terrorism became a major public issue back in the 1980s of the Reagan administration. He took office announcing its dedication to stamping out what the was called:

"the evil scourge of terrorism," a plague spread by "depraved opponents of civilization itself" in "a return to barbarism in the modern age" (Secretary of State George Shultz).

The way Chomsky likes to frame this type of terrorism discussion is as a propagandistic approach. The propagandistic exposition of terrorism and terrorist acts is the one that is prevalent in corporate media. Chomsky argues that this is a particular, manufactured construct of the concept of terrorism which can be used, "as a weapon to be exploited in the service of some system of power." We claim some group is terrorist and thus we may do violent things against them to protect ourselves and our values. In Reagan's reign we had a US proxy war against Nicaragua which killed many. Was this support of terrorism? Chomsky's history on this is:

"The State Department specifically authorized attacks on agricultural cooperatives -- exactly what we denounce with horror when the agent is Abu Nidal. Media doves expressed thoughtful approval of this stand. New Republic editor Michael Kinsley, at the liberal extreme of mainstream commentary, argued that we should not be too quick to dismiss State Department justifications for terrorist attacks on farming cooperatives: a "sensible policy" must "meet the test of cost-benefit analysis," an analysis of "the amount of blood and misery that will be poured in, and the likelihood that democracy will emerge at the other end." It is understood that US elites have the right to conduct the analysis and pursue the project if it passes their tests."

When civilians are killed in Afghanistan, Pakistan or Gaza these are judged as not terrorist acts in the light of there being protective acts against groups labeled terrorist.

There is another way to study & understand terrorism - a literal approach. As you might expect Chomksy prefers a literal approach which takes the topic seriously and uses an historical-fact-rational perspective to understand it. Some of the history of the development of the concepts of terrorism is above. You don't have to be a linguist to appreciate Chomsky's rational- literal approach that Socratically asks what constitutes terrorism and then explored instances of the phenomenon teasing out causal relations. Although he has issues with it Chomsky gets great mileage out of using official United States Code definition of "act of terrorism" to mean an activity that --

(A) involves a violent act or an act dangerous to human life that is a violation of the criminal laws of the United States or any State, or that would be a criminal violation if committed within the jurisdiction of the United States or of any State; and
(B) appears to be intended
(i) to intimidate or coerce a civilian population;
(ii) to influence the policy of a government by intimidation or coercion; or
(iii) to affect the conduct of a government by assassination or kidnapping.

Chomsky sees much of this intimidation of civilian populations in our support of the Contras in Nicaragua. His other example of terrorism during pre-Reagan period is Israel's involvements in southern Lebanon going back to the 1970s when the civilian population was first held hostage with the idea that pressuring these populations would force agreement on Israeli arrangements for the region. He cites Abba Eban, commenting on Prime Minister Menachem Begin's account of atrocities in Lebanon committed under the Labor government, in the style "of regimes which neither Mr. Begin nor I would dare to mention by name,"

Eban normally portrayed as a Labor dove describes Israel policy in terms that would fit US and international concept of terrorism (if not aggression). Indeed as Chomsky notes thousands were killed and hundreds of thousands driven from their homes in these attacks as a modern form of terrorism came to the Middle East. Israel's invasion left some 18,000 killed to achieve political ends, as discussed in Israel. We see the consequences of it as terrorism but may not label the sources of it in a literal way. As Chomksy reports:

"ABC correspondent Charles Glass, then a journalist in Lebanon, found "little American editorial interest in the conditions of the south Lebanese. The Israeli raids and shelling of their villages, their gradual exodus from south Lebanon to the growing slums on the outskirts of Beirut were nothing compared to the lurid tales of the 'terrorists' who threatened Israel, hijacked aeroplanes and seized embassies." The reaction was much the same, he continues, when Israeli death squads were operating in southern Lebanon after the 1982 Israeli invasion. One could read about them in the London Times, but US editors were not interested. Had the media reported the operations of "these death squads of plainclothes Shin Beth [secret police] men who assassinated suspects in the villages and camps of south Lebanon," "stirring up the Shiite Muslim population and helping to make the Marine presence untenable," there might have been some appreciation of the plight of the US Marines deployed in Lebanon. They seemed to have no idea of why they were there apart from "the black enlisted men: almost all of them said, though sadly never on camera, that they had been sent to protect the rich against the poor." "

For more on the introduction of terrorism to the Middle East see Chomsky's "Who are the Global Terrorists?" http://www.chomsky.info/articles/200205--02.htm which describes the 1985 Israeli attack on Tunis and the CIA and Saudi car-bombing in Beirut to get a Shi'ite leader accused of complicity in terrorism which didn't kill him but killed 80 people and wounded 256. The Similar violence was noted in Peres's 1996 invasion and who can forget the use of cluster bombs as Obama took office. These relied on US military and diplomatic support. Accordingly, Chomksy notes "they too do not enter the annals of international terrorism."

In light of our more recent "interventions" in the Middle East (how many civilians died in our Iraq War?) it is useful to remember this history and how things were portrayed. We (and our friends) have a history of organizing proxy army to subdue some recalcitrant population. We see this as a legitimate option but it fits the concept of of a terrorism. In Reagan's day Jeane Kirkpatrick argued that "forceful intervention in the affairs of another nation" is neither "impractical" nor "immoral". As Chomsky noted, this doesn't make it legal. It may make it a hot topic for the coming campaign season in late 2011.