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Our Shooting Double Standard: How Do We Decide Which Madmen Are Terrorists? |
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Sunday, 11 May 2014 15:14 |
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Kamali writes: "Despite the strikingly parallel narratives of both men forever linked as Fort Hood shooters, who were both ruled out as terrorists by law enforcement, the media coverage of Lopez and Hasan has been markedly different."
Nidal Hasan, Ivan Lopez (photo: AP)
Our Shooting Double Standard: How Do We Decide Which Madmen Are Terrorists?
By Sara Kamali, Salon
11 May 14
Fort Hood was the site of two awful rampages in recent years. But the two shooters were described very differently.
 ast month,U.S. Army Spc. Ivan Lopez killed three people and wounded 16 in a shooting rampage at Fort Hood, Texas. Four years earlier, U.S. Army Maj. Nidal Malik Hasan killed 13 people and wounded more than 30 others at the same sprawling Texas Army outpost.
Despite the strikingly parallel narratives of both men forever linked as Fort Hood shooters, who werebothruledoutas terrorists by law enforcement, the media coverage of Lopez and Hasan has been markedly different. Specifically, Lopez, like many other non-Muslims who have used firearms to kill, has been classified as “mentally ill,” while only Hasan has had the label of “terrorism” attached to his story.
Both men were transferred to Fort Hood only a few months before committing their atrocious acts: Lopez moved to Fort Hood in February of 2014, and Hasan transferred there in July of 2009. Both were increasingly disconnected from their fellow soldiers. Lopez felt some in his unit had not treated him appropriately and Hasan felt similarly alienated and discriminated against. Both also held deep grievances against the U.S. Army. Lopez was upset about a denied leave request and Hasan did not want to deploy to Iraq despite orders to do so on Nov. 28, 2009.
Both also sought mental health treatment: Lopez for post-traumatic stress disorder after serving four months in Iraq in 2011, and Hasan for his distress as an Army psychiatrist listening to others’ accounts of service in Iraq and Afghanistan.
A sampling of national headlines immediately after the shooting shows the development of Lopez’s story arc as one of cause and effect. Because Lopez suffered from untreated depression and anxiety, the narrative goes, he snapped. The opening line from the CNN article, “Fort Hood Shooter Was Iraq Vet Being Treated for Mental HealthIssues,” is:“Spc. Ivan Lopez’s friendly smile apparently gave no hint of a history of depression, anxiety and other psychiatric disorders.”
The beginning of the NBC News article “Fort Hood Gunman Was Treated for Depression and Anxiety” also follows the same thread:
The gunman in the Fort Hood shooting was an active-duty enlisted soldier who served four months in Iraq and was being evaluated for PTSD, military officials said Wednesday night.
And in yet another headline, this time from a CBS News article, “Gunman ID’d as Ivan Lopez, Treated for Depression,” U.S. Army Spc. Ivan Lopez is once again portrayed as a man in despair and anguish, left alone to suffer in silence, and, finally, to kill as a cry for help:
Army officials say they believe this attack is not terror-related. The Army said the soldier was suffering from behavioral and mental issues, CBS News homeland security correspondent Bob Orr reports. He was being treated for depression and anxiety.
The main media outlets handled the “Fort Hood Shooter Ivan Lopez” narrative as one of medical oversight, a man whose mental health had suffered in service to his country. Conversely, the headlines of “Fort Hood Shooter Nidal Malik Hasan” held no such concern for the state of his mental well-being, despite his similar search for counseling.
The cover of Time magazine on Nov. 23, 2009, had a portrait of Hasan with the word “terrorist?” in bold blacking his eyes, the windows to his soul. Within the cover story, “The Fort Hood Killer: Terrified … Or Terrorist?” the opening made clear his religious (read: Islamic) rationale:
What a surprise it must have been when Major Nidal Malik Hasan woke up from his coma to find himself not in paradise but in Brooke Army Medical Center, deep in the heart of Texas, under security so tight that there were armed guards patrolling both the intensive-care unit and checkpoints at the nearest freeway off-ramp. This was not the finalé he had scripted when he gave away all his earthly goods — his desk lamp and air mattress, his frozen broccoli and spinach, his copies of the Koran.
Though classified as an incident of “workplace violence” by the Obama administration, the asymmetry in media treatment of Muslim American Hasan versus that of Lopez is apparent in an article in the New York Times, published Nov. 5, 2009, the same day as the shooting. Though it could not be confirmed “that the writer was Major Hasan,” the article repeated anyway an Internet posting by a man who called himself Nidal Hasan, who”compared the heroism of a soldier who throws himself on a grenade to protect fellow soldiers to suicide bombers who sacrifice themselves to protect Muslims.”
Rather than focus on his mental instability, as in the media treatment of Ivan Lopez, headlines dissected his religious life. The first lines from a CNN.com article, “Fort Hood Suspect’s Religion Was an Issue, Family Says,” reiterate his faith:
The bumper sticker reading “Allah is Love” was torn off and the car was keyed. A police report was filed in the August 16 incident involving Maj. Nidal Malik Hasan’s Honda, and a neighbor was charged with criminal mischief. But what kind of impact that incident, and possibly others, had on Hasan remains a mystery.
In another article, this time in the Los Angles Times, Hasan’s purported religiosity is reiterated:
Over the last few weeks, Maj. Nidal Malik Hasan drove off the vast Army base at Ft. Hood, Texas, at least a dozen times to enjoy seafood dinners with Duane Reasoner Jr., an 18-year-old he was mentoring in the ways of Islam.
Ivan Lopez is not the only non-Muslim American who committed an act of violence relegated to the ranks of “mentally ill,” nor is Nidal Malik Hasan the only Muslim American insinuated to be a terrorist. There are many more examples to show how the asymmetry when it comes to national dialogue of which gun-wielding murderer is “mentally ill” and which is a “terrorist,” including the following:
1) Terry Ratzmann, then a 44-year-old member of the Living Church of God Sabbath in Wisconsin, shot 12 people, killing seven, during service on March 12, 2005, because he was “very angry with his church.” Though police conceded they were focusing on religion as a motive for the murders, the media labeled him as a “church shooter.”
(2) Jared Lee Loughner, then a 23-year-old who went on a shooting spree near Tuscon, Arizona, on Jan. 8, 2011, that left six dead and 14 wounded, including U.S. Rep. Gabrielle Giffords. He was on the cover of Time magazine with the headline “Guns. Speech. Madness,” with a picture of him, and a maze on his forehead, at the center of which was a question mark, as if to say that his mind is a troubling morass of nonsensical whims.
(3) On July 20, 2012, James Holmes killed 12 people at a Century movie theater in Aurora, Colorado, during a screening of the film “The Dark Knight Rises,” yet his insanity defense has been accepted by the judge.
(4) On Dec. 14, 2012, Adam Lanza brandished a semi-automatic rifle and used it to kill his mother as well as 20 children and six staff members at Sandy Hook Elementary School in Newtown, Connecticut. Lanza has not been described as a terrorist in the media, but as a troubled individual with Asperger’s.
Yet, when John Allen Muhammad allegedly killed 10 people and wounded three (he maintained his innocence) along with Lee Boyd Malvo, during three weeks in October 2002, his acts were determined to be “part of an act of terrorism.” The designation of terrorism was given despite Muhammad’s lawyer, John Sheldon, describing his client as “a severely mentally ill man who also suffered from Gulf War Syndrome.”
Conflating Muslim Americans and Islam with home-grown violent extremism and terrorism has not only occurred in the national dialogue and media coverage, but has also been present in rhetoric at the highest levels of government. In a much-anticipated speech on drone strikes given at the National Defense University in Washington, D.C., on May 23, 2013, President Obama used examples of individuals portrayed as “mentally ill” gunmen in the media to perpetuate the notion that the only type of terrorist threat the United States is that in the name of Islam:
And finally, we face a real threat from radicalized individuals here in the United States. Whether it’s a shooter at a Sikh Temple in Wisconsin, a plane flying into a building in Texas, or the extremists who killed 168 people at the Federal Building in Oklahoma City, America has confronted many forms of violent extremism in our history. Deranged or alienated individuals — often U.S. citizens or legal residents — can do enormous damage, particularly when inspired by larger notions of violent jihad.
What was left out of his speech was that the references were all of non-Muslim, white Christian right activists. The “shooter at a Sikh temple in Wisconsin” was Wade Michael Page, a neo-Nazi U.S. Army veteran who killed six Sikhs and wounded four others on Aug. 5, 2010, after they had finished their worship service. The “plane flying into a building in Texas” was not under the direction of a militant Islamist inspired by the tragic events of 9/11, but of Christian right patriotAndrew Joseph Stack III, who waged a suicide mission against the U.S. government by flying a plane into an IRS office in Austin, Texas, on Feb. 18, 2010, killing himself and another person, and injuring 13 others. Lastly, “the extremists who killed 168 people at the Federal Building in Oklahoma City” were none other than Christian Identity adherent Timothy McVeigh and his accomplice, Terry Nichols, who committed the single deadliest act of terrorism by an American to date. On April 19, 1995, 168 people were killed by a truck-turned-bomb at the Alfred P. Murrah Federal Building in Oklahoma City, Oklahoma.
That President Obama used these examples of Christian right militants to support the narrative that the United States is primarily threatened by home-grown violent “jihad”/militant Islamism — the concept of which is a misnomer in itself as “jihad” means struggle and “qital” is actually used to mean warfare in the Quran – is a testament both to the definitional double standard when it comes to who is a terrorist, as well as the entrenchment of Islamophobia in global consciousness. Perpetuating the notion of Islam as a religion equivalent with hatred and violence and Muslims tantamount to terrorists will only alienate (and, some argue, potentially radicalize) the Muslim American community – the very same community whose insight and support is needed to combat the threat of home-grown violent extremism.
Ultimately, not only is the definition and application of who is a mentally ill gunman versus who is an actual terrorist an issue of national security, but also an issue of civil rights and liberty for people of all faiths.
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Leonard Cohen and 'A Broken Hallelujah' |
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Sunday, 11 May 2014 15:10 |
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Rosen writes: '"'A Broken Hallelujah' is more of an exploration of the literary and spiritual traditions that shaped Cohen, as well as a portrait of a person who could be cocky and arrogant, witty and ironic, angry and tender, and quite often, the unfailingly polite gentleman."
Leonard Cohen in Paris. (photo: Joel Saget/AFP/Getty Images)
Leonard Cohen and 'A Broken Hallelujah'
By Ruth Rosen, TruthDig
11 May 14
“A Broken Hallelujah: Rock and Roll, Redemption, and the Life of Leonard Cohen”
A book by Liel Leibovitz
 here are surely some Americans who have never heard of Leonard Cohen. Then there are those who remember his early songs, like “Bird on a Wire,” popularized by Judy Collins in 1968, but who dismiss him as a poet/songwriter of despair and depression. Finally, there are the millions of fans, and I count myself among them, who experience his music and lyrics as authentic expressions of their own lives.
Liel Leibovitz, with “A Broken Hallelujah: Rock and Roll, Redemption, and the Life of Leonard Cohen,” has written an elegant, beautifully crafted book that Cohen’s fans will instinctively understand. It is not a biography, though he does recount Cohen’s loss of his father at age 9, his lifelong struggle with depression, decades blurred by alcohol and drugs, his life in Cuba just days before the revolution began, his efforts to sing and lift the spirits of Israeli soldiers during the 1973 Yom Kippur War, the five years he spent in a Buddhist monastery, and his astonishing comeback in his mid-70s as a global troubadour whose concerts, held in huge arenas around the world, have given him a stardom he never expected.
Nor is it a discography, though Leibovitz uses newly available private letters and journals to explain the ups and downs of Cohen’s remarkable career in studio recordings and promotional tours. Rather, “A Broken Hallelujah” is more of an exploration of the literary and spiritual traditions that shaped Cohen, as well as a portrait of a person who could be cocky and arrogant, witty and ironic, angry and tender, and quite often, the unfailingly polite gentleman.
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Greenpeace Director: Climate Action Is an All Hands on Deck Situation |
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Sunday, 11 May 2014 15:05 |
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Schwartz writes: "If you know the name Annie Leonard, it’s probably because you are one of the tens of millions of people who have watched her short film, The Story of Stuff. Now we’d like you to know her for another reason: she’s Greenpeace USA’s new executive director."
Greenpeace director Annie Leonard. (photo: Erin Lubin/Greenpeace)
Greenpeace Director: Climate Action Is an All Hands on Deck Situation
By Jason Schwartz, EcoWatch
11 May 14
 f you know the name Annie Leonard, it’s probably because you are one of the tens of millions of people who have watched her short film, The Story of Stuff. Now we’d like you to know her for another reason: she’s Greenpeace USA’s new executive director.
This is actually a reunion for Greenpeace USA and Annie. She was a toxics campaigner for Greenpeace International starting in 1988. After leaving, she went on to campaign all over the world for the environmental and justice movements. It all culminated with the The Story of Stuff Project and its eight great movies.
In this exclusive interview, we let Annie do the talking.
Greenpeace: The National Climate Assessment came out this week. It states what many already take as a given: that the effects of climate change are occurring now, that they are human-caused and that the solutions lie with people. The jury’s out on how our leaders will lead on the particulars. As a cultural and environmental leader yourself, what does leadership on climate look like?
Annie Leonard: It looks a lot of different ways. This is an all hands on deck situation. We need to be doing what we can in our own communities to reduce our carbon use, but we’re going to get much more done if we can focus more on engaging as citizens and forcing our political and business leaders to take action.
I worry that the paralysis of government makes us focus our attention on small, individual things like composting and recycling and changing our light bulb and riding our bikes. I often say those are a good place to start but a terrible place to stop. Of course we need to do things in our own lives to lessen our impacts.
GP: It seems like to do that, we need to be focused as a movement on building of community. That’s something that Greenpeace has been doing for a long time, and it’s something we have reinforced through a number of our initiatives. But we all know the way to do it is changing. What is the role of on-the-ground community building in the digital age, and how is it changing?
AL: Community building is really key to this. Stronger communities are going to be able to withstand environmental changes better. Also, the more we have strong communities, the more we can reduce our carbon output and meet our needs through community and sharing rather than more and more consumption.
Greenpeace provides information and inspiration. People can’t be engaged citizens without either of them.
But we also have so much room to broaden what it means to be part of our community for supporters. Our supporters provide much needed, crucial financial support, which allows us to not be beholden to any government or corporation. But there are a lot of other ways GP supporters can support our campaigns, from writing letters to attending community meetings to taking direct action and marching in the streets. I’d love to see us call upon our supporters more and to help them expand their understanding of what it means to be involved. In that way, we can support them in their work of strengthening their communities.
GP: It’s important to emphasize that the story of stuff is not about no stuff. In fact, you’re kind of a materialist.
AL: I am not against stuff. I would actually say I am pro stuff. I want us to look at our stuff and pause for a second and have some reverence for all the materials and effort and energy that went into it, and to cherish our stuff so that it lasts longer.
Nobody rational could be against consumption—we all need to consume food and water and we all need to be clothed and to experience art and music. I’m concerned about consumerism, with our seeking meaning and purpose by buying more stuff.
GP: So taking on the kind of consumerism that treats buying and flaunting stuff as a mark of status or values—how does Greepeace fit in? What does Greenpeace offer the struggle against consumerism?
AL: People buy stuff because we think somehow it’s going to make us happy. But when you look at the studies about what really provides lasting happiness, the answers are consistent across nationalities, ethnic groups and income levels.
Once your basic needs are met, what most contribute to your sense of happiness and well being are not new objects but having a strong social fabric, having a sense of purpose beyond yourself, and the act of coming together with people to work toward shared goals. That might be sports, or religion, or PTA, or reclaiming a vacant lot to turn it into a garden.
If you think about it, being involved in Greenpeace campaigns provides all those things. I mean how fortuitous is that?
The more that Greenpeace can inspire people to get involved in making environmental and social change, the better we can help them create meaning and purpose that is greater than the logos on their shirts.
And the more we can get people off couches and out into their communities, the more we can be involved in expanding and strengthening their social fabric and that total high that comes from working with others toward shared goals.
AL: I have to say, THAT is the thing I’m most excited about. My mind is just spinning as I think through all the unlikely partners we haven’t worked with before. I think it’s going to require us deepening our systemic analysis. And by that I mean: it’s easy to focus on what our passions are. But it’s not enough.
My passion has always been pollution, environmental justice and waste. Others’ might be climate, or forests or oceans. It’s so easy for us to focus on our passion areas, because that’s what turns us on. But the better we uncover how all the issue areas we’re working on are symptoms of a deeper problem, the more we can see our success is interdependent with a broad range of groups on the progressive side.
If we can see the connections between our environmental concerns and the concerns of, for example, inequality campaigners, we see that a collaboration is not just a tactically better thing. It’s a much, much deeper acknowledgment that we really are going to fail or succeed together.
I also think it’s important to realize that our movement is diverse. We have to offer a diversity of ways to be involved. Some people might want to chain themselves to a fence or tree. Other people might want to provide childcare for the people chained to fences or trees. Some people might want to act on social media to get the word out about the fences and the trees and organizing childcare.
Finally, we have to have room for everybody in our movement, and that requires thinking more broadly about what it means to participate and embrace people for whatever they can contribute.
There’s this great quote from Bernice Johnson Reagon of Sweet Honey in the Rock that says, essentially, “If you like everybody in your coalition, then your coalition isn’t big enough.”
GP: You have proven experience establishing narratives that are inclusive, that permit lots of people to inhabit a movement and see it as theirs. As Greenpeace moves forward, it has got to find ways of harnessing that kind of inclusivity. What must we watch out for as online activists to make sure we’re being inclusive?
AL: Environmental campaigns have a tendency to talk past people. We have to be sure we’re taking the time to think deeply about who our audience is, and then we have to experiment.
For people who are feedback hungry— and I think everybody at Greenpeace is feedback hungry, because that’s how we get smarter — social media platforms offer us so many ways to get feedback about what parts of our communications strategies are working and what aren’t. Too often environmental campaigns get stuck waving our data and charts in front of people, and when they don’t respond we just yell louder or reprint it in color instead of black and white.
We sometimes think the responsibility and failure is with people out there, when what we’re not understanding is that the responsibility lies with us if we’re not making it relevant.
GP: Permitting yourself to fail, to say: “Oh well, that didn’t work. Let’s move on,” that’s not an easy posture in a fast-paced media environment.
AL: I think that it is absolutely crucial that we are innovative and experimental. What we always said at The Story of Stuff— and I’d love to bring this culture with me to GP—is, “We embrace failing, but we have to fail quickly and cheaply.” It’s only a failure if you didn’t learn something from it, or if you take too long to change course.
My goal is to work smarter rather than harder.
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FOCUS | Matt Bai, Liberal Bloggers and Benghazi, Benghazi!, BENGHAZI! |
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Written by <a href="index.php?option=com_comprofiler&task=userProfile&user=11104"><span class="small">Charles Pierce, Esquire</span></a>
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Sunday, 11 May 2014 13:35 |
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Pierce writes: "This was the most dubiously elected president since Rutherford Hayes. Still, as soon as the planes hit the towers, the entire country rallied around him. (Dan Rather offered to salute!)"
George W. Bush and Dick Cheney in 2007. (photo: Win McNamee/Getty Images)
Matt Bai, Liberal Bloggers and Benghazi, Benghazi!, BENGHAZI!
By Charles Pierce, Esquire
11 May 14
 ear lord, what a smorgasbord of Beltway goodness we have today. Take a tray and come down the line carefully.
1) Here's Matt Bai, informing us once again that C-Plus Augustus was such a nice feller that his good intentions should obviate everything that died on his watch, including all the people, any credibility we had in foreign policy, the truth, and the national economy.
But as is the way in modern Washington, it was never enough for Bush's political opponents that he was miscast or misguided. He had to be something worse than that - or, more precisely, a lot of things worse. He had to be the most catastrophic president ever, in the history of ever. He had to be a messianic war criminal. Or a corporate plant looking to trade blood for oil. Or a doofus barely able to construct a sentence.
See also, "Fk, Oh, for the love of." This was the most dubiously elected president since Rutherford Hayes. Still, as soon as the planes hit the towers, the entire country rallied around him. (Dan Rather offered to salute!) Even the palpable intelligence failures that contributed to the attacks largely were soft-pedalled. (The National Security Advisor who presided over the worst national-security failure in the country's history got a chance to help lie the country into a war and got promoted to be Secretary Of State.) The country re-elected the man, for pity's sake. He was considered a "catastrophic" president because his eight years were studded with catastrophes. And he was a doofus barely able to construct a sentence, or else our children isn't learning the way he is supposed to. He is considered an abject failure, and an object of ridicule, because he failed abjectly. Telling us that he was an unsuccessful president in your lede doesn't absolve you from the rest of this. That's the nicest thing you can say about his administration.
2) And now we have one of the junior Fourniers at the National Journal expressing amazement that liberal bloggers defend the administration and that the administration might court their support. Next, why the Potomac is wet.
While the bond between presidential administrations and friendly opinion-shapers goes back as far as the nation itself, no White House has ever enjoyed the luxury that this one has, in which its arguments and talking points can be advanced on a day-by-day, minute-by-minute basis. No longer must it await the evening news or the morning op-ed page to witness the fruits of its messaging efforts. Credit the explosion of social media, the fragmentation of news, the erosion of the institutional press. Fortuitously for the president, the modern media landscape not only provides ample space for the expression of pure partisanship, it actively encourages it. Backing your friends and belittling your enemies is a healthy business model, one rewarded by a torrent of clicks, retweets, "likes," and links. "The incentives are to play ball," says one former liberal blogger, "not to speak truth to power. More clicks. More action. Partisanship drives clicks. "
The "former liberal blogger" is an accessory to idiocy before the fact. I think the argument here is that the president was lucky to come into office when social media was in full bloom. Because, if it's not, if the author thinks he can write an entire piece about how the liberal blogosphere has the president's back without mentioning, oh, shoot, I dunno, Fox News without looking like a dunce, he's sadly mistaken.
3) Don't fill up yet, because we haven't gotten to the real piece derp resistance, cooked up by Master Chef Peggy Noonan, while cleaning out the cooking sherry. This one is about how Benghazi, Benghazi!, BENGHAZI! is worse than the Iran Contra scandal because Reagan. Let's start with a little nibble.
A Democratic former senator noted to me a few months ago that veterans and their families feel a simmering sense of betrayal. They deserve to know what happened and why.
Anyone want to guess that perhaps this fellow's name rhymes with, "Blow Blieberman"?
Now, though, she gets into Iran-Contra, and the chewy, nutty flavor is there to be savored.
The Iran-Contra affair did not spring from low motives. There was no hope of partisan gain, it wasn't a political play. All involved were trying-sometimes stupidly, almost childishly-to save lives, and perhaps establish a new opening with Iran. They had good reasons, but the actions were bad, and everyone involved paid a price.
This is beyond moronic. (Leave aside her history of the Reagan administration's reaction to the scandal, which is so thoroughly sanitized that it might have been smuggled out of the White House in Fawn Hall's brassiere. One note -- some hostages were released after some of the missiles got to the mullahs. Several more were almost immediately taken because the people who took hostages knew a sucker when they saw one.) There was nothing lofty about what was being done with the money. It was coming from one nation that was sponsoring terrorism in the Middle East to a nation that was sponsoring terrorism in Latin America. It was to finance a policy that resulted in American nuns being raped and murdered, an archbishop gunned down while saying mass, and horrors in the jungles that the people there still are trying to sort out.
And let us not forget that Iran-Contra was a series of criminal acts. Even Ed Meese, who pretty much drove the getaway car, believed that the White House had committed impeachable offenses. Poppy Bush issued pardons on his way out of town, largely to cover his own ass.
This is just spectacular. Just chew slowly and wait an hour before you go swimming.
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