Six years later

...around one-third of the United States still believes that Saddam had a hand in 9/11:

On the sixth anniversary of the Sept. 11, 2001, attacks, one-third of the American people continue to believe that Saddam Hussein was "personally involved" in the terrorist assault, according to one recent poll.

Other surveys show that a larger number -- 40 percent or more -- believe that Iraq had some role in the attacks or that Iraq gave substantial support to al-Qaida.

The 9/11 Commission and intelligence experts never found such a connection, but even after six years of reports and news accounts, the myth of a strong Iraq-Sept. 11 link persists.

"It's astonishing those numbers are so high six years after 9/11, that so many people see a strong link," said John Mueller, a political scientist at Ohio State University who has studied attitudes on war and national security. "I would have expected 10 percent or so."

In part, the poll number is a reflection of what many people want to believe, several analysts said. Plus, there is an ongoing campaign by the Bush administration to promote a connection to sell the Iraq war.

"The Bush administration has been extremely clever at suggesting connections without being explicit," Mueller said. "And if you support the war, you want to believe it. You hear soldiers in Iraq all the time say that they're there because of 9/11."

The most recent survey, a New York Times/CBS News Poll conducted last week, found that 33 percent of all Americans, including 40 percent of Republicans and 27 percent of Democrats, believed Saddam was involved in the 9/11 attacks.

...

Last year, one of Kull's polls found that 14 percent believed Iraq was "directly involved" in the 9/11 attacks, 35 percent said Iraq gave "substantial support" to al- Qaida, and 44 percent said they thought the Bush administration had said Iraq was directly involved in the Sept. 11 attacks.

A Zogby poll last year found that 46 percent believed "there was a connection between Saddam Hussein and the 9/11 attacks."

The Bush administration has tried several times to reframe the Iraq war as an integral part of the struggle against al- Qaida and Islamic extremism. Last month, President Bush said the insurgents killing U.S. troops in Iraq "are the same ones who attacked us on Sept. 11."

He was trying to link the wider terrorist network of al- Qaida with al-Qaida in Iraq, which did not exist before the 2003 invasion.

"When you hear those phrases about Iraq and al- Qaida repeated over and over again," Kull said, "the association is hard to break."

In recent weeks, a pro-Bush group, including former administration officials, launched a series of TV ads in support of the war that link Iraq to 9/11. In one ad, veteran John Kriesel, who lost both legs in Iraq, says, "They attacked us before, and they will attack us again. They won't stop in Iraq."

When Kriesel says "they attacked us before," an image appears of the second airliner about to hit the World Trade Center on Sept. 11.

Sam Popkin, a professor at UC San Diego, has studied attitudes on wars from Vietnam to the present. "There's a desperate effort to keep saying about Iraq that these are the guys who hit the World Trade Center," he said.

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Winning hearts and minds

"No blood for oil" is a popular refrain among opponents of the war in Iraq--the idea that we invaded Iraq solely for its rich, precious petrol. I never really believed that; there were other explanations that sounded much more plausible to me. But even if oil wasn't the reason we invaded, it's certainly a priority now. Our top priority, in fact:

David Kilcullen, an Australian counter-insurgency adviser who served on Petraeus's staff...drew up a list of core American interests in Iraq, which he later gave to senior officials at the White House and the State Department. In order of priority, the list contained the following items: maintain the flow of oil and gas in the region; prevent the establishment of an Al Qaeda safe haven in Iraq; contain Iranian influence; prevent a regional war; prevent a humanitarian catastrophe on the scale of Rwanda; and restore American credibility in the region and in the world (which Kilcullen called "the master interest," and which doing all the others would go a long way toward achieving).

As Jonathan Schwarz said,

They do care! Human life is on the list! Right there after their four higher priorities!

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Next we start looking into their past associations. Or are we doing that already?

Not only are they spying on you without a warrant, but they're spying on your friends and family, too:

The F.B.I. cast a much wider net in its terrorism investigations than it has previously acknowledged by relying on telecommunications companies to analyze phone-call patterns of the associates of Americans who had come under suspicion, according to newly obtained bureau records.

The documents indicate that the Federal Bureau of Investigation used secret demands for records to obtain data not only on individuals it saw as targets but also details on their "community of interest" — the network of people that the target was in contact with. The bureau stopped the practice early this year in part because of broader questions raised about its aggressive use of the records demands, which are known as national security letters, officials said.

...

Typically, community of interest data might include an analysis of which people the targets called most frequently, how long they generally talked and at what times of day, sudden fluctuations in activity, geographic regions that were called, and other data, law enforcement and industry officials said.

The F.B.I. declined to say exactly what data had been turned over. It was limited to people and phone numbers "once removed" from the actual target of the national security letters, said a government official who spoke on condition of anonymity because of a continuing review by the Justice Department.

An FBI spokesman felt it "important to emphasize" that they're not doing this anymore, and another official said that community of interest requests "appeared to have been used in a relatively small percentage of the tens of thousand of the records requests each year."
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And every night they steal a few of the cattle from adjacent cages

Remember that zoo in the Congo that was housing a group of African musicians? Well, the Woodland Park Zoo in Seattle is doing something worse: not just housing them, but setting them up as a display.

Who's minding Seattle's Woodland Park Zoo? No one, to judge from the controversy that has greeted its new exhibit, "Maasai Journey: An African Adventure."

Sparking the most outrage is a clutch of imported "Maasai warriors" whose job is to lend authenticity to the exhibit by acting as its "cultural interpreters."

But no one has criticized the exhibition's most disturbing aspect. Set within an "African Village," the Masai warriors, like the animals they daily interpret, are on display.

...

Although zoo officials protest that their good intentions are misinterpreted, their protestations are undercut by the shifting nomenclature they've employed to describe the Masai warriors. An April press release noted their fearsomeness: "They'll tell visitors stories of their frightening encounters with lions and leopards, and of wielding spears to protect their animals." Since the debate erupted, they've become tame "educators."

Yet they were initially dubbed Masai warriors because no group more fully embodies the quintessential Western fantasy about darkest Africa. Their putative violent virility is code for the Other; their alleged primitivism stands in stark contrast to civilization as we know it. Can you imagine these indigenous stock figures, set within a faux savanna, quaffing a grande, no-foam, sugar-free latte from Starbucks?

Of course not, which is why the zoo's representation of Africa is of a piece with late 19th-century European imperialism. Back then, Britain, Germany, and France appropriated Africa's resources and people, sent avaricious "explorers" and zealous missionaries to conquer and convert, and looted ancient sites, and ensnared rare animals for their museums and zoos.

This stereotyping is repeated in the Seattle zoo's strange decision in 2001 to construct an "African Village," and this summer use it as the interpretive stage for its Masai warriors. Why place a "village," which is a human environment, inside a zoo showing imported animals in their native habitat? So that visitors would equate the two, exoticizing each.

Damaging, as well, is how the "African Village" conflates cultures and people, indiscriminately throwing together Masai warriors and Kikuya architecture, a building type drawn from a different Kenyan cultural group. In this improbable setting, the zoo invites visitors to "Meet a Maasai and learn how their lives connect with savanna animals."

To understand this misleading invitation, imagine a zoo in Africa, where visitors are encouraged to "Meet an American and learn how their lives intersect with the large mammals of the Rocky Mountains."

The authors blame imperialism for this, and "U.S. cultural hegemony" for the idea that all African culture is the same (which of course I can't say for certain is really part of the exhibit; the zoo may be careful to point out that this is only Masai, and mention the variety of cultures found in Africa). I think that part of it is also the massive ignorance of the standard American to other cultures--it's certainly not well-covered in school, except perhaps in college-level anthropology courses. I'm not sure what in America there is with the purpose of educating people about other cultures. There's certainly organizations here and there for that, but nothing as national as zoos or museums. The zoo is about the closest thing we've got--as an institution, it devotes itself to informing people about living things that they're not likely to see.

Anyways. The authors of that article also mentions a precedent for this: Ota Benga, a pygmy who was placed in the monkey house of a zoo in 1906. In fact, I found the original New York Times article that they cite ("Man and Monkey Show Disapproved by Clergy", September 10, 1906), and this part of it stood out to me:

Director Hornaday, who recently returned from a trip abroad, was asked last evening whether he saw no impropriety in exhibiting Benga in the monkey cage, and if he was allowing it with the acquiescence of the Directors of the Zoological Society, to which he replied:

"Yes, what is being done in the matter is with the acquiescence of the society. The Scretary, Mr. Madison Grant, was in fact present when I made the arrangement with Dr. Verner for the keep of the little African savage.

Well, if Madison Grant thinks it's not racist, who are we to say otherwise?
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"Lament for a Young Musician"

Madeleine L'Engle has passed away. Thanks to filkertom for letting me know.

This is awfully depressing. L'Engle is one of my favorite authors--for a long period of time I bought as many of her books as I could find.

And so from her book Troubling a Star:
The music is stilled. No sound
Of melody fills the fearsom air.
No chord, no harmony is found.
The sky is high and fair

Taunting our hearts. The price
Of death is high. Tears chilled
By grief are like primordial ice.
The melody is stilled, is stilled.
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Friday Dead Racist Blogging: Defamation Edition

We know nothing about their language, their history, or what they look like. But we can assume this: they stand for everything we don't stand for.

--Zapp Brannigan, "War is the H-Word", Futurama

The one or two of you who read this blog already know that I've been researching the sorts of rhetoric involved in opposition to interracial marriages, so that I could compare it against the modern rhetoric against gay marriages. It shouldn't really come as any surprise that the arguments are almost identical--defaming a certain class of people almost always follows a particular pattern. For instance, John Aravosis of Americablog created a page comparing Nazi anti-semitic propaganda against contemporary anti-gay rhetoric; David Neiwert of Orcinus often compares modern anti-immigrant talk to anti-black actions or anti-Asian sentiments from previous decades; and I have already talked about zombie racism.

And today I'm going to talk about some of the anti-Arab bigotry out there--specifically in this post (via Jonathan Schwarz)--and comparing it to racism against blacks.

First of all, to temper down your bigoted tirades, you deny being bigoted. Consider how often someone you hear "I'm not racist, but..." or "I'm not homophobic, but..." right before launching into a racist or homophobic screed. So this post's second bullet point is: "When you meet them in just the right circumstances, they are a very likable people." See? He likes Arabs, so you can't accuse him of being a racist, now can you? He's just a dispassionate observer, objectively discussing the facts of the situation.

Now, since all conflicts boil down to us vs. them--it's okay to hurt "them" because "they", by definition, are not "us"--you first have to show that "they" are different from "us." A typical way of doing this is saying that they don't share whatever values it is you happen to prize, or that they stand for the opposite of those values (hence Brannigan's speech above). And so this man tells us, as the very first thing, "They [Arabs] don't think the same way we do." And third, "Their values are fundamentally different from ours, their self-esteem is derived from a different source."

In this bullet point, he first off points out that they still have slavery. And so dead racists pointed out that slavery existed in Africa (usually this was to defend enslaving blacks in America). Lindley Spring wrote in The Negro at Home, "All over Africa, man is a slave; a piece of property; the legal tender, the currency of the country. In many places he is an article of consumption, as well as of use and barter."

But the existence of slavery is mostly tangential to this man's point. He wants us to believe that Arabs are lazy--they utterly abhor doing work; and that they do not have familial love. He writes:

The point being, in a slave society, work is not honorable (as De Tocqueville pointed out) and cannot be a source of self-worth.

...

"Of conjugal love they know nothing." (Thomas Jefferson on the French aristocracy.) In a land of arranged marriages, where the whole society is geared towards a strict segregation of the sexes and women are at least semi-chattels, romantic love is rare - and greatly desired. ...

Without honorable work, romantic love or any accomplishments not overshadowed by those the West, their sense of self-worth comes from being the possessors of the One True Religion.

Both of these were common denigrations of blacks. John Fletcher, in Studies on Slavery, approvingly quoted:

"A man thinks as little of taking a wife as of cutting an ear of corn; affection is altogether out of the question."

And later he wrote:

We have before us the testimony of travellers in regard to the indifference felt by the Africans on being sold as slaves; of their palpable want of love and affection for their country, their relatives, and even for their wives and children.

And Judge Thomas Norwood, in his Address on the Negro upon his retirement, wrote:

In Africa, laziness produced sleep and sleepiness has always been the negro's normal condition in Africa. We know that condition is unchanged here.

In Africa he had never worked. The present generation here never works except from necessity, or from compulsion.

The man's next bullet point tells us "Not only can they not build the infrastructure of a modern [read: white --ed.] society, they can't maintain it either." This one is almost too easy, and I've already noted in several posts how people assumed that "civilized" = "white." So Theodore Bilbo wrote in Take Your Choice: Separation or Mongrelization:

The Negro has had just as long as the white man to develop a civilization of his own. Thousands and tens of thousands of years have passed, and the black man has not lifted his people from the darkness of Africa. If the white and black races are equal in ability, then why have they not produced equal civilizations? Or why has not the African exhibited his ability to reproduce civilization and culture after the way has been blazed for him? It is a matter of historical truth that no Negro race has ever initiated a civilization and "only, when it is mixed with some other can it even be initiated into one."

And as for maintaining something they've had handed to them? We can turn again to Lindley Spring, who talks of E. B. Underhill's trip to Santo Domingo:

Of his journey through the island of San Domingo to Port au Prince, he writes, that he passed through many abandoned plantations, the buildings in ruins, the sugar-mills destroyed, and the iron pans strewing the roadside, cracked and broken. Only once did he come upon a mill in use; it was grinding cane, for sirup, of which to make tafia, the intoxicating drink of the country. With the exception
of a few banana gardens, or small patches of maize around the cabins, he found, nowhere, signs of cultivation. He tells us, that in the time of the French occupation "thousands of hogsheads of sugar were produced; now, not one. All is decay and desolation. The pastures are deserted, and the prickly-pear covers the land once laughing with the bright hues of the sugar-cane. The hydraulic works erected at vast expense for irrigation, have crumbled to dust," and "the plow is an unknown implement of culture."

Santo Domingo and Haiti were commonly used to show that blacks were incapable of culture, even if they had almost everything handed to them by whites.

This man continues,

In our civilization, when two men get down, either seriously or just "woofing", what do they say? Some variation of "I'm going to kick your ass." Am I right? Here's what I heard in the Kingdom, "Hey, don't f**k with me, or someday you get a knife in the back." I'm not saying that wouldn't happen to you in the West, but most men would be ashamed to make a threat of that nature. We don't understand that direct shock battle is not necessarily the law of nature. When overwhelming force is brought to bear on them, they become cringing and obsequious. To put it bluntly, they lie their heads off to get you to turn your back on them.

It was often said that blacks were really craven cowards, and that a display of force would have them quaking at your feet. I can't find one right now, but I'll be sure to post a follow-up with a quote to that effect.

This man continues with words to the effect of "Lookit them! They believe such stupid things!" Which I've heard a great deal as applied to blacks, and always amuses me, especially when people ignore the numerous idiotic things that we believe: UFO encounters, ghosts, tinfoil-hat conspiracies, etc. This man mocks Arabs because they believe wild conspiracies (which, of course, no Westerner ever fell for) and believe in djinns (and no-one in America believes in angels). So let's look again at what Judge Norwood had to say about blacks:

Briefly told, the facts are: A white man, named Bell, descended from Ohio, in Liberty county, and proclaimed himself to be Jesus Christ. Two negro churches were nearby, having large congregations with negro preachers. These congregations deserted their preachers and flocked to Bell's standard. He told them that he had come to carry them to the land of Canaan; that they needed no worldly goods. They deserted their homes and camped with Bell in the woods. They sold their cattle, hogs, chickens and crops, brought the money and threw it inside a circle formed with a rope. He told them that he had sent for a cargo of wings for them to fly to the land of Canaan. They believed him. They would not leave the camp for food or sleep lest Bell's start for Canaan would take place during their absence. This state of things continued for weeks. The two preachers being robbed of their congregation and perquisites (which were many), had Bell arrested for vagrancy and employed me to prosecute the case. A son of our great judge, William B. Fleming, was the magistrate for commitment. I advised him that the charge of vagrancy could not be sustained, as Bell was preaching and was supported by two congregations. Bell was released. After a talk with him, I was convinced that he was insane, and I sued out a commission of lunacy. The jury found that Bell was a lunatic and he was sent to the asylum near Milledgeville. The negroes prepared to resist the arrest of their Christ, but he quieted them by assuring them that he could not be confined against his will, and that, like Paul and Silas, he would break the prison bars and return to them. They believed him and remained in the camp.

Then a negro man named McIver, who was born and raised with the other dupes, proclaimed himself to be the Lord God. The dupes of Bell believed McIver and hailed him as their Lord. He stripped naked and paraded within the circle, and phallic worship commenced. McIver was arrested for indecency and put in jail.

Then a female divinity succeeded McIver. She had four children, which, it was said, were bastards. She proclaimed herself to be the Virgin Elizabeth. She established her throne and virgin couch in an old log corncrib on one of the plantations of the late George W. Walthour. She assembled twelve small girls, clothed them in white to sit around her throne as a guard. She would stretch out on her resting place, go into trances and mumble gibberish that her worshippers believed to be inspiration. As this fanaticism had disorganized labor and reduced these worshippers to want, and as stealing and burglary were feared by the white citizens, they sent the sheriff with a posse to the camp and dispersed the crowd. The negroes remained confident of Bell's return with the wings for them to fly to the land of Canaan.

As a side remark I state, that when in Congress, I wrote a full account of this retrogradation of the negro after twenty-five years of freedom and religious instruction by their own race and offered it to Northern papers, but it, was refused on the ground that the Northern people would not believe it, and that it was based upon the prejudices of the white race in the South. A thousand white men and negroes now living in Liberty county know all the facts I have given, and many more which, for brevity, I have omitted.

'Cause, y'know, white people never believe that speaking gibberish is a gift from god.

And finally, because you are setting this up as a conflict between "us" and "them", you have to obviate any middle ground--there can be no reasoning, no "live and let live", no talking. It must be us or them; one must die! So this man writes

Our civilization is destroying theirs. We cannot share a world in peace. They understand this; we have yet to learn it.

Another culturally-imposed blindness we have is the notion that everybody can get along with enough good will. There is absolutely no evidence to support this and a great deal to oppose it.

And so many people believed that whites and blacks could not possibly coexist in the same country. Thomas Jefferson himself wrote "Nothing is more certainly written in the book of fate than that these people are to be free. Nor is it less certain that the two races, equally free, cannot live in the same government." Many people, in fact, demanded the abolition of slavery for just that reason--they didn't believe that blacks and whites could coexist at all, and demanded that blacks be colonized away from whites. A great book on this is Race and the Rise of the Republican Party.

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Should we also report people interested in learning foreign languages?

Michael Chertoff, currently Secretary of Homeland Security and rumored nominee to replace Alberto Gonzales as Attorney General, apparently thinks that colleges should be spying on foreign students:

Now appearing before the U.S. House Committee on Homeland Security, Chertoff has not been asked about or spoken directly on last Friday's indictment of two Egyptian-born University of South Florida students, one accused of trying to aid terrorists.

But under questioning from Rep. Gus Bilirakis, a Palm Harbor Republican, Chertoff discussed in general terms how the government needs the cooperation of colleges and universities to know when foreign students aren't attending programs or classes in which they are enrolled.

Chertoff said some colleges "don't want to see themselves as enforcement tools for the government."

As the article points out, though, there's been no indication that these men were skipping classes anyways.

And how long should they have been in this country to be considered worthy of spying on? The two indicted Egyptian students are here on visas, but Seung-Hi Cho was a permanent resident. Would this include all foreign students, or is "foreign student" simply a euphemism for "Arab"?

Ironically, the student accused of "aiding terrorism" is here on an F-1 student visa, which means that he had to be approved by the Department of Homeland Security.
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Yes, "a moray" sounds like "amore". We get it.

You've probably already heard about the Alien-esque "hidden jaw" of the moray eel. I just wanted to add that PZ has a nice post about that, which includes a diagram, an X-ray, and a movie of the jaw in action. However, he also intimates that this adaptation is unique to the moray eel, which--as several commenters and news articles have pointed out already--is false. Several fish also have such a mechanism.

And the awesomeness of the moray does not end there. From Ichthyic, commenting in PZ's post:

when faced with a prey item that is simply too large to swallow whole, they will tie themselves in a knot, run the knot up their bodies until it reaches their head, and rip off a big hunk of whatever they have their teeth sunk into as they pull their head through the knot.

[Edit] And later, Ichthyic came back with a video of an eel doing just this.
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Boos for Brownback?

Huh. Complete nut Sam Brownback was part of the Fox debate among Republican presidential candidates the other day, and he was apparently booed for supporting a constitutional amendment banning gay marriage:

During the debate Hume cut away to a local restaurant to gauge audience reaction.

A New Hampshire state employee was asked about same-sex marriage and if there should be a constitutional amendment banning it. The woman said no, adding that same-sex couples should be able to marry.

Hume then put the amendment question to Brownback.

"Answer to that is yes. And the reason is, this is a foundational institution. It is a foundational institution,"

At that point there were loud boos from the audience.

"I understand this is a divided audience on this," said Brownback.

I'm surprised to hear this coming from a Fox audience. Is this perhaps indicative of how much support gay marriage is gaining? Or--perhaps more likely--how much people don't want to bother amending the constitution?

At any rate, Brownback's reply is, well, a non-answer. What the heck does he mean by a "foundational institution", and why would it justify discriminating against same-sex couples?
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It's all fun and games

...until somebody loses an eye:

During his junior year at Harvard, William Hickoring Prescott's left eye was blinded, and his right eye permanently weakened, by a crust of bread hurled during a food fight.

--"The Representation of Mexicans and the Transformation of American Political Culture, 1787-1848", p. 236
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