Muslim vs. White Mass
Murderers
By Matt Peppe
March 31, 2015 "ICH"
- In the early months of 2015, there have
been two separate mass murders inside France
that have generated headlines worldwide for
their brutality and disregard for human
life. In early January, brothers Cherif and
Said Kouachi entered the Paris offices of
the satirical newspaper Charlie Hebdo and
gunned down 11 employees, and shot dead one
police officer on their way out. Last week,
in an act of mass murder with more than 12
times the number of victims, 27-year-old
pilot Andreas Lubitz intentionally guided
the plane he was flying straight into the
French Alps and killed all 150 people on
board. Yet it is only the former murderous
act that has been described by politicians
and portrayed in the media as an existential
threat and an example of terrorism.
The coverage of the Kouachi brothers
downplayed their humanity by describing them
as calculating, rational, indifferent
killing machines. A
New York Times article, titled "From
Amateur to Ruthless Jihadist in France,"
describes "two jihadists in black, sheathed
in body armor" who "gave a global audience a
ruthless demonstration in terrorism." The
"hardened killer(s)" were said to walk "with
military precision," and "nonchalantly" take
a phone call.
The article explains how French security
services were unable to prevent the attacks:
"The brothers appeared so nonthreatening
that surveillance was dropped in the middle
of last year." Yet they had a long history
of being monitored by French authorities,
evidenced by the "thousands of pages of
legal documents obtained by The New York
Times, including minutes of interrogations,
summaries of phone taps, intercepted
jailhouse letters."
It is seen as a failure of the security
services, who presumably should not have let
the brothers out of their surveillance
dragnet. Their "steadily deepening
radicalism .. occurred virtually under the
noses of French authorities, who twice had
Cherif in their grasp."
There is no blame attributed to the French
socioeconomic system, which relegates most
of France's
Arab population to a permanent
underclass of unemployment and poverty. As
racial minorities in a country that holds
few opportunities for people with their
background, the brothers worked dead-end
jobs like delivering pizzas and fish
mongering. They were not able to get jobs at
French investment banks or in the fashion
industry. Certainly this must have produced
adverse mental health effects.
There is no discussion of
whether destitution and marginalization
contributed to the Kouachi brothers'
decision to use violence against people
who, to them, apparently represented a
source of their humiliation.
Neither is there blame on French
foreign policy, which has been
complicit in arming and funding
Al Qaeda for many years in Libya,
Syria and other countries. France's
support for violent extremism abroad
and its potential to create blowback
at home is likewise disregarded in
media analysis.
The murderous Germanwings pilot
received a very different portrait
in
The New York Times. The title of
a profile on Lubitz reads like a
eulogy: "Andreas Lubitz, Who Loved
to Fly, Ended Up on a Mysterious and
Deadly Course."
He has a name and a passion. And
unlike the "ruthless jihadists," who
chose their path as criminals,
Lubitz "ended up on a mysterious
course" as if he was a passenger on
the journey, rather than the
instigator who drove 149 people
intentionally to their death.
In describing the "mystery" behind
Lubitz, the Times says that "the
focus has turned to what had driven
him to such an act - and to whether
the airline industry and regulators
do enough to screen pilots for
psychological problems." As was the
case with Newton elementary school
killer Adam Lanza, the problem is
understood as one of "missed
chances," in the workplace or by
social services, not the police and
security officials.
CNN wrote that Lanza "was an
isolated young man with
deteriorating mental health and a
fascination for mass violence whose
problems were not ignored but
misunderstood and mistreated."
Lubitz had reportedly been treated
by psychotherapists for "suicidal
tendencies" and possibly
suffered from depression.
For white young men like Lubitz and
Lanza, the problem was a failure of
society - parents, teachers,
employers, government regulators -
to recognize and treat mental health
problems. Implicitly they are people
deserving help, not security threats
deserving surveillance and
monitoring. The mental health of the
killers is understood to be a cause
- if not the primary cause -
behind their actions. They were
victimized by their mental health,
whereas the Kouachi brothers were
rational actors responsible for
their actions.
Near the bottom of the New
York Times article, a surviving
Charlie Hebdo journalist is quoted
as saying that one of the brothers
told her "We don't kill women." One
of the brothers also reportedly told
a salesman "We don't shoot
civilians." They clearly did kill
civilians, but unlike either Lubitz
or Lanza, they did spare lives
rather than kill indiscriminately.
Yet only the Kouachis are described
as "hardened killers."
Why such different treatments of the
massacres and the killers
responsible for them? Simply put,
the massacre by the Kouachi brothers
can be attributed to "Islamic
extremism" while the massacre by
Lubitz cannot. Surely the passengers
who "shrieked
in terror" would not have
considered themselves any less
terrorized than employees of Charlie
Hebdo witnessing the masked
attackers with Kalashnikovs.
The Paris attacks were described by CNN, BBC, New
York Times, NBC,
and virtually every major Western
news outlet as terrorism. But the
Germanwings plane crash has not been
called terrorism at all. USA
Today reported that the FBI "has
found no connection of anyone aboard
to terrorism." CNN reported
that Lubitz "was
not known to be on any terrorism
list, and his religion was not
immediately known."
In other words, it was not
immediately know whether Lubitz was
a Muslim, and, by extension, whether
he was a terrorist. This connection
between religion and terrorism, used
in the same sentence in the CNN
article, demonstrates how terrorism
in common usage is understood to be
about who a person is rather than
what he does. Two Muslim brothers of
North African heritage are
terrorists when then murder 12
people, while a white German is not
a terrorist when he murders 149.
Terrorism is perceived as the most
heinous type of crime. Terrorists
are thought to be irredeemable,
subhuman creatures who do not even
qualify as legitimate members of
society with rights. But there is no
commonly accepted definition of a
terrorist, so any terrorist label is
completely arbitrary.
Unsurprisingly, there is a racial
and cultural bias for using such a
label.
Media portrayals of mass murderers
are a representation of the
society's attitudes towards the
subjects they cover. That Muslims
and Arabs engender an irrational
fear is nothing new. As Edward Said
explains in Orientalism, this
has a long history.
"For Europe, Islam was a lasting
trauma. Until the end of the
seventeenth century the ‘Ottoman
peril’ lurked alongside Europe to
represent for the whole of Christian
civilization a constant danger, and
in time European civilization
incorporated that peril and its
lore, its great events, figures,
virtues and vices, as something
woven into the fabric of life,” Said
writes.
This danger still manifests
itself in the disproportionate
reaction of Western nations and its
people to crimes that can be
attributed to Islam and Arabs. Even
if, as is the case with the Kouachi
brothers, they were born and raised
in France, never having stepped foot
in their parents' native country of
Algeria. But "Frenchness" is still
widely understood to be the
exclusive domain of the country's
Catholic population.
As Joseph Massad notes in The
Electronic Intifada, French
colonialists killed millions of
people in Vietnam, Algeria and
Madagascar, practicing inhuman forms
of savagery and torture in the
process. In this context, the
Kouachi brothers and their
accomplice should be compared.
"Despite the horrific magnitude of
the three men's deeds, their crimes
remain numerically modest and pale
in comparison to with the far more
cruel French Catholic and 'laic'
monstrosities that have reached
genocidal proportions across the
globe," Massad writes. "Had the
Kouachi brothers and Coulibaly
lived, however, they would have
still needed many more lessons in
cruelty and violent intolerance
before they could become fully
assimilated into true Catholic and laic Frenchness."
After the Charlie Hebdo shooting,
more than a million people marched
in Paris with 40 heads of state "in
the most striking show of solidarity
in the West against the threat of
Islamic extremism since the Sept. 11
attacks," according to the New
York Times.
The marchers, "people of all races,
ages and political stripes swarmed
central Paris beneath a bright blue
sky, calling for peace and an end to
violent extremism." This in the same
city where six months earlier French
authorities banned
marches demanding an end to
Israel's massacres in Gaza, where
nearly 2,200 people were killed by
drone strikes, tank and naval
shelling, artillery fire, and F16
bombings.
In an farcical piece of irony,
Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin
Netanyahu, who ordered and presided
over the military assault was
standing in the first row of world
leaders demonstrating their "unity
in outrage" during the staged
march.
The framing of the
Charlie Hebdo narrative as an
assault by Islam against Western
civilization misrepresents the
violence
as uniquely Islamic
and uniquely evil. Any
comparison of the media coverage of
mass murderers must recognize that
race and ethnicity drive the way
those crimes are understood and
portrayed. To American and European
whites, Islam has always been
perceived as a force that needs to
be subdued and controlled, usually
through violence. It is no surprise
that crimes by "Islamists" are
depicted by Western media through
this lens, in ways that equivalent
or more serious crimes by whites are
not.
Matt Peppe writes about
politics, U.S. foreign policy and
Latin America on his blog.
You can follow him on twitter.
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