Bin Laden's Beneficiary
Another 9/11 anniversary.
We mourn the dead, as we should. We remember people who took courageous actions, as we should. An anniversary like this one is best spent in this way. There isn't anything which could be considered in the realm of healing or moving forward without it.
Today, eighteen years later, this isn't all it should be anymore. It's controversial, but the reality of the other 364 days of the year have come to demand it. Of course this would be the day to remember the dead, to honor them. That we don't have much of a conversation concerning aftermath of 9/11 is why it's necessary to intrude on that process. The rest of the days in these previous eighteen years haven't been involved in a sober appraisal of the efficacy of our real response and reaction.
Part of what has become the ritual of the 9/11 anniversary has been to also mourn 9/12 and the veil of unity we hang over it. "We were all just Americans that day." This isn't strictly true. There was a certain single mindedness which arose on 9/12, a crossing of barriers which otherwise seemed impenetrable on 9/10 and have come to seem impenetrable again. What we came together around was a simple, central point of division, more than it was a genuine unity. We became "not Muslim Americans" and Muslims. What is left out of the narrative of unity is that the hate crimes began on 9/11. Muslim, Arab, Sikh... anyone who the general consensus of American culture might suspect was Muslim came under threat.
The trickle of hate crimes that began on 9/11 became a wave in the months that followed. Mosques were threatened, vandalized and burned, and individuals who were Muslim or were simply suspected of possibly being Muslim were subjected to violent attacks, including murder. Two wars would be undertaken. One with an actual connection to Osama Bin Laden and Al Qaeda. The other with a one of the more poorly constructed fabrications in American history. A wholesale fabrication was put upon the public, directed by the plainly craven, xenophobic and greedy, and sold to the public with the help of some of the most respected institutions we have. A secular nation, one whose most ardent enemies were the twisted fundamentalist strain of Islam which had orchestrated the attack on the US, was said to be in possession of weapons of mass destruction it was going to somehow magically come to a compromise to provide those same enemies with. The phantom of dirty bombs being released in American cities became a regular part of the news cycle. Panels discussed the possible death tolls, the number of years it would take to reclaim geography from radiation, etc. Anyone reading or interested in the news became more well informed about chemical weapons than they'd ever thought to want.
The protests against this subterfuge were unanimously ignored and undermined, even as they were among the largest in our short national history. Plausible deniability being necessary, there were public platitudes about the American spirit, and what makes a good American, extending from the bully pulpit the definition which suggested "good Muslims" who were eager to help law enforcement should be free from the desire for retribution. These were coupled with phrases like, "A clash of civilizations." The entire weight of US law enforcement was then brought down on all Muslims, "good and eager to cooperate" or not. On their backs a surveillance apparatus the likes of which the most ghoulish and murderous authoritarians in world history couldn't have even begun to wish for was built. New enemies were made fugitive because of the exposure of the scope and breadth of both the demonstrated desire and capability for it to be used to vacuum up the information and communications of even "ordinary Americans" by its ever watchful eye. The exposure of extra legal barbarity in the name of security made others fugitive or criminal. Chelsea Manning sits in a jail cell now. Reality Winner does as well. Guantanamo Bay still houses prisoners. That we've come to call our current moment a "post fact era" has direct relation to this.
This focused Islamophobia wasn't just fostered by the usual suspects of American white supremacy either. The caricature of drawling Southern bigot was given new brethren. Self professed or promoted celebrity intellectuals among the "tolerant left" would join in. The budding movement of New Atheism would find itself squarely buttressed by the plainly xenophobic and more bizarrely given the established enmity between them, the ultranationalist strains of American Christianity. Whiteness was coalescing around a new enemy, and new people to be identified as severely unwhite, but also not American Black. The previously worshipped Western legal tradition related to privacy was quickly set aside in the rush to systematize the otherness of Muslims, with every attempt to create the artifice of not being superficially hateful.
A political career began then, which has now overturned the entirety of US political norms and a good deal of its social norms, was born in marrying anti-black racism with Islamophobia when Donald Trump became the braying buffoon of a celebrity spokesperson for the Birther Movement. The Black guy with the funny name was running for president, and not only could he not be a real American, but that funny name has the spice of Muslim sound to it. Trump, being quite experienced in the fact free reality of his overprivileged existence, spent the decade before his presidential campaign ensconced in the "secret Muslim" world conspiracy. The rest of us turned around and acted as if a Black man attending a church based in Black liberation theology was some kind of shocking revelation and spoke ill of his character and fitness. It was as if Black liberation theology wasn't one of the most enduring Christian movements in American history. We suddenly chose to decide there was no reason for it to exist. For whiteness in America, the history of being Black in America ended with a presidential candidate and his election.
The centrality of whiteness to American mythology and culture was reaffirmed when it coalesced around Islamophobia. Donald Trump was just the right kind of con man to recognize it's relationship to the long history of anti-black racism, and the potency of the union of the two. At the time of Barack Obama's election, Islamophobia and anti-black racism ran neck in neck as Americans bigotry of choice. On November 5th, 2008 the websites for American hate groups experienced the busiest day in their history. After once again solidifying around Islamophobia and reaffirming it's centrality, whiteness had a new threat to combat, Blackness in a US president, who was probably a secret Muslim as well.
In the same way the previous decades of "black on black crime," "welfare queens" and "super predators" would have their racist foundations swept away, the now more blatant monkey memes and racist chain emails would be treated as the usual partisanship, the necessity to ignore the constant presence of coded racism as part of the American political tradition becoming paramount, in tandem with the need to obscure the centrality of whiteness at all costs. The historically solid political divide among racial groups not being enough, this emergence of a more open and blatant bigotry couldn't possibly be enough to name as fact that there has always been a political coalition focused on stoking the racial animus of a single group, white Americans. The attempts to address the evidence as reality devolved into a sniveling, bickering, empty rhetorical debate among the privileged about the nature of "identity politics."
And still, as the online activities of patriarchal white supremacy became clear, hate groups multiplied and hate crimes rose, the whole of American law enforcement was doggedly pursuing American Muslims. The whole of that properly awe inspiring surveillance apparatus continued to focus almost exclusively on an American community of people who had produced nowhere near the death count of Saudi Muslims, even as the Saudi's continued to both be the major funding source for international terrorism, and an ally with whom the US government maintained a "special relationship." The comparatively rare instance of radicalization of American Muslims was pretty quickly overtaken in number by the radicalization of white Americans. The rise of political violence committed by devotees to patriarchal white supremacy in the US was completely ignored by federal law enforcement, while the growing threat was clear to anyone with an internet connection, a little curiosity and an hour or two use Google's search.
As Donald Trump began his campaign, he did so with another call to the centralization of whiteness, by targeting immigrants, most specifically at the time, Mexican immigrants. The clarion call was heard, and the patriarchal white supremacist movement further ignited behind a political figurehead. Revelations about previous law suits having found him guilty of racial discrimination just added to their romance. That he is incompetent enough to have bankrupted a casino didn't matter. Each new victim of sexual harassment or abuse that came forward solidified the belief that he was exactly the kind of man they were looking for, and the Access Hollywood tape just gave them a mantra to weaponize. His open disdain for John McCain, whose career was steeped in racial animus cloaked in policy, helped Trump further, because McCain had done the unthinkable by offending the centrality of whiteness when he told a town hall attendee Barack Obama wasn't actually a Muslim. Not that it would be acceptable or even a sign of meeting our values for a Muslim to run for or be president, but that this particular person wasn't a Muslim, and couldn't be disqualified from sufficient American-ness for that particular reason. This was the same election cycle which McCain used to unleash the personification of weaponized ignorance that is Sarah Palin, and sang a little ditty about bombing Iran. Even those achievements in whiteness weren't enough to overcome the hatred that created was not sufficiently othering the Black Muslim with the funny name and lead in the polls.
In the midst of the Trump campaign, Unite The Right was announced. The night before the rally was supposed to happen, 300 or so young white men march onto the grounds of University of Virginia, with lit torches, chanting "Jews will not replace us." The MAGA hats were plentiful. They proceed to assault a group of students, faculty and activists, while police stand around and watch.
The following day is a mass of violence. Nazis, white supremacists, chauvinists, all of the most despicable parts of right wing historical ideology are represented, again, marching around chanting "Jews will not replace us." Throughout the day, they clash with both non-violent counter protesters and anti-fascist protesters. As we all know, the day ends with the attempted murder of dozens, and the successful murder of Heather Heyer. Again, there was a multitude of MAGA hats shouting racist bile.
In his initial statement, Trump referred to "fine people on both sides," which then set the tone for the entirety of right wing politics to do everything possible to not declare an outright condemnation of their newly minted street gangs. In order to appear "objective" even plenty of politicians, pundits and other political personalities find it hard to muster the personal or political courage to just say, "Nazi-ism and white supremacy can not be tolerated because, as they demonstrated at Unite The Right, theirs is a murderous ideology." Full stop.
Instead, we were treated to months of exquisite soft shoeing, doublespeak and two stepping around to make sure it was clear that "serious, reasonable people" didn't just blame Nazis and white supremacists for the violence which has erupted whenever and where ever they have existed in numbers, throughout the history of both ideologies. Of course, the people who'd been watching this entire process take place since 9/11, warned of it's consequences and tried to prevent them until that point, were somehow just as responsible for the violence of Nazi's and white supremacists, despite their existence, organizing and being quite public about their warnings, in the decade prior. Those people, who'd been dedicated to non-violently attacking the rise of Islamophobia, white supremacist sentiment, organizing and policies, were suddenly transformed into a blood thirsty mob, more than a decade into that exhausting work. This was one of the more amazing acts of pretzel logic in a process so beset by irrationality the public today seems to have lost it's grasp for anything other than this surreal circus of belligerence and ignorance.
Hate crimes expanded the rise they'd already been experiencing and too took an even sharper rise in the months after Trump's election. They just continue, now including synagogues and temples. The political wing of the American right turning to its familiar and useful friend, Islamophobia to provide cover for it's now growing anti-Semitism. Journalists exposed the administrations policy of child separation where immigrant families are concerned. Children are still being held in deplorable conditions in makeshift camps. The now regular occurrence of mass shootings is unmistakably connected to far right, patriarchal white supremacist beliefs at this point. Not that it's the only ideology responsible, but it certainly has significantly outpaced the rest in both occurrences and number of people injured and killed. Trump has begun publicly floating the idea of building institutions so that the mentally ill might be rounded up and contained, "Until we know what's going on" (the exact phrase he used when referring to detaining immigrants in his campaign), instead of addressing the connection between patriarchal white supremacy and attempted, planned or executed mass casualty attacks. Just this week he began referring to the idea that the federal government should step in and deal with the epidemic of homelessness in California by beginning to take the homeless into custody.
As all of this is happening, Trump is doing everything humanly possible to further enrich himself as a result of occupying the Oval Office.
We don't talk about 9/11 and its aftermath in the other 364 days out of the year because if we were to begin to take a hard look at the process of how we got here it would be clear the majority of what Osama Bin Laden wanted to accomplish has been brought about by our response. He believed the attack would antagonize the United States into bankrupting ourselves financially and ripping our society apart with racism, classicism and religious fervor.
To that end, so far, he was right in his prediction of how we would react. We've spent billions on two wars, one of which is now the longest running military engagement in United States history. That's quite an accomplishment when we consider how little of our existence has been spent without being involved in military conflict somewhere in the world. As economic and racial inequality continue to show new and horrible effects on society (as well as the litany of old reliable effects), we keep throwing hundreds of millions of dollars at a military machine and it's surveillance brethren while starving our social safety net as if none of that is happening. Our institutions are faltering, often from lack of funding, and if not, from the self dealing and corruption of a political class minted in the post 9/11, post truth world. Hate crimes are only becoming more frequent and more deadly, and spreading across the full spectrum of communities white supremacy and fascism have always targeted. Federal and local law enforcement have, by their own admission, spent so much time dedicated to surveilling and tracking the Muslim community in the United States, they have been caught flat footed as they now realize a homegrown terrorist ideology has become not only immentantely operational, but ascendant. The whispers of continuing on this overall trajectory ending in civil war are becoming more frequent.
No one, not a single soul on earth has benefitted more from the legacy of Osama Bin Laden than one Donald J. Trump. No one. Second to him are the adherents to the patriarchal white supremacy he installed himself as figurehead for. Tomorrow, we'll forget about 9/11 again, even as we post our "Never forget" memes today. We'll go right back to narrative which is deliberately incapable of taking it's real consequences into consideration, because it would be uncivil to make the very obvious connection that a violence obsessed monster like Bin Laden was a master at understanding how to create a violence obsessed, cult like following, and that he succeeded in doing so in the United States. The difference being he never meant to be its leader. He was well aware there was no shortage of Americans thirsty to take up a position of power like that, all he had to do was create the right conditions. Because we have been unable to prevent ourselves from listening to the same violence obsessed, domination and patriarchy obsessed instincts of those of Bin Laden and Al Qaeda, we've gone right along, every step of the way.
It's undeniably true the factors which allowed Trump to ascend to the presidency go back as long as US history. Nothing was so instrumental in arraying those factors in so surreal a fashion that it could be Trump to ascend, as 9/11. Let's all congratulate Donald Trump on being the beneficiary of Osama Bin Laden's monstrous legacy.