The screening of The Muslims I Know at the Church of Assumption, in Fairport, went extremely well last night. It was a full house, in spite of it being held on a weekday at 7pm, and the response to the film was delightfully enthusiastic, even though we had some technical glitches. People stayed for the Q&A, which could have gone on for at least another hour, but it was 9 pm and we had to wind things up. Many in the audience understood the reality of misinformation/miseducation and questioned msm. I was happy to share a list of alternative media with them.
The only pushback I got was from a woman who kept arguing that bombing Muslim-majority countries must have some benefits. She came up with this position after I mentioned the 26,000 bombs dropped on 7 Muslim-majority countries in 2016 and asked people to look at blowback coming from these sites of instability, which we have created, within that context. First she mentioned Boko Haram (which she mispronounced dramatically) and how we needed to bomb Somalia to curb their violence. Then she said something about acid attacks and how we had to do something.
I told her that bombing and destroying entire societies results in the genesis of groups like Boko Haram, not the other way around. In fact, The Muslims I Know goes briefly into the war against the Soviets in Afghanistan and how the Taliban were produced.
I also gave her an example: we are all agreed that American violence against Black communities is shockingly consistent in this country. It started with slavery but continues to this day – we hear news of killings by white supremacists or the police almost every other day. Would that constitute a large scale human rights violation? She said yes. Obviously, the US has not been able to curb this reprehensible violence against a minority. Should China bomb us because they feel obligated to “do something”? Would the bombing help us deal with these crimes? Or would movements such as #BLM, which are homegrown and fighting the system from within, be more helpful?
When I talk of another country bombing us (since we believe so strongly in humanitarian imperialism) people always become disconnected. American exceptionalism makes it impossible for them to see any connection b/w what we do and what we would feel like if we ourselves were bombed.
We view Boko Haram as evil but not the Ku Klux Klan or neo-Nazis or other armed white supremacist hate groups. We feel the scourge of acid throwing intensely (although it’s not limited to Muslim-majority countries, in fact Muslims were attacked with acid in the UK not too long ago), but we feel less enraged about the stunningly high incidence of rape on American college campuses or the use of torture on Brown and Black bodies in Guantanamo.
American superiority is so embedded in our society, so programmed into how we study history and politics, that it’s impossible to penetrate that glossy, vacuum-packed, plastic veneer and begin to measure other human lives by the same standards.