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December 11, 2001
Robert Fisk
Why I Was
Beaten
December 10, 2001
Robert
Dunham
Race
and the Death Penalty:
Partners in Injustice
Andy Kershaw
Chamber of
Horrors
Near the Garden of Eden
John Touchie
Isaac's
on Chomsky
December 9, 2001
Jo Dillon
Journalist:
The CIA Wanted
Me Killed
John Chuckman
High-Tech
Puritanism
December 8, 2001
Laurence Tribe
Military Tribunals
Undermine the Constitution
Patrick
Cockburn
The
End of a Strange War
December 7, 2001
John Troyer
Blacklist Me!
Sen. Edwards
v. Ashcroft
Military
Tribunals
George Naggiar
Occupation
as Terrorism
Hugo von
Sponek
and Denis Halliday
Iraq
the Hostage Nation
David Vest
The Coen
Brothers'
Minstrel Show
Alexander
Cockburn
Sharon
or Arafat:
Who's the Terrorist?
December 6, 2001
CounterPunch Wire
Hampshire
College the First
to Condemn the War
Robert
Jensen
University
Teaching After
September 11
Jack McCarthy
Does
Tom Friedman Read
the New York Times?
Sam and
Leila Bahour
The
Psychology of a Suicide Attacker
December 5, 2001
Edward Hammond
The Only
Real Way to
Prevent Biowarfare
Harvey
Wasserman
Atomic
Treason in the House
Carl Estabrook
America's
Israel
Don Williams
Questions
Barbara Walters Didn't Ask George Bush
Cockburn/St. Clair
Liberals
Hail War as
Return of Big Government
Robert
Fisk
The
Last Colonial War?
Bahour/Dahan
It's About
the Occupation
December 4, 2001
Dave Marsh
A
Plea for Byron Parker
Rep. Ron Paul
Keep Your
Eye on the Target
Susan
Herman
Ashcroft
and the Patriot Act
Tariq Ali
The Afghan
King and the Nazis
November 30, 2001
Jordan
Green
Disappeared
in the Southland
Willliam Blum
Rebuilding
Afghanistan?
November 29, 2001
Phillip
Cryan
Defining
Terrorism
Robert Fisk
We Are the
War Criminals Now
November 28, 2001
Tom Turnipseed
A
Continuum of Terror
Patrick Cockburn
Tribal
Council:
Don't Blame It All on Taliban
Robert
Fisk
At
Last, The Truth about the Sabra and Chatila Massacres
Harry Browne
The Bill of
Rights:
They Threw It All Away
Sunil
Sharma
Suffer
Palestine's Children
November 27, 2001
Paul Coggins
Kafka and
the Patriot Act
Tariq
Ali
Tigris
and Euprhates
November 26, 2001
Robert Fisk
Blood and
Tears in Kandahar
Jeffrey
St. Clair
Boeing's
Sweet Deal
CounterPunch Wire
Human
Rights Abuses and
Nuke Waste Shipments
Alexander
Cockburn
Harry
Potter and Terrorism
A Photographic Journal of Life
in an Afghan Refugee Camp
By Judith Mann
Resources:
100s of Links
About 9/11
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Days That
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Seattle and Beyond
By Alexander
Cockburn
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War Diary
CIA's Assassination Plan a History of
Torture in US Prisons
bin Laden and Bush
Business Connections
Aisha Ikramuddin on the Hidden Hype
of US Food Bombs
Peter Linebaugh on
Pakistan
Christopher Hitchens' Love for Mrs. Thatcher
Jiang Zemin Tells Bush:
Nuke 'Em
Search
CounterPunch
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How the CIA's Backing of the Mujahideen Created the World's Most
Robust Heroin Market and Helped to Finance the Rise of the Taliban
and Osama bin Laden
Whiteout:
CIA, Drugs & the
Press
by Alexander
Cockburn
and Jeffrey St. Clair
The Memphis Blues Again:
Six Decades of Memphis Music Photographs
Photos by Ernest Withers
Text by Daniel Wolff
The New Intifada:
Resisting Israel's Apartheid
Edited by Roane Carey
A Pocket Guide to
Environmental Bad Guys
by James Ridgeway
and Jeffrey St. Clair
The
Phoenix Program
by Douglas Valentine
Al Gore:
A User's Manual
by Cockburn
and St. Clair
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Reviews of Gore:
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December 10,
2001
Race and Visibility:
In the Shadow
of September 11
By M. Shahid Alam
When I crossed the border into United States in
1988, after living in Canada for two years, I had the curious
feeling that my wife, my son and I, still brown-skinned and dark-haired,
had somehow become invisible.
We walked the streets of Hamilton, a
small university town in Central New York, or nearby Utica and
Syracuse, each of them immaculately white, without attracting
any unwanted attention. The motorists did not gawk at us while
we waited at the curb for the walk signal. At restaurants, there
were no heads turning in our direction. The cashiers and shoppers
at stores did not greet our entry with a quizzical, perplexed
look, following our very steps. Even our neighbors left us alone.
I was relieved at this loss of visibility.
It was a signal change from my experience of living in Canada,
both in the recent past and several years earlier, when I was
attending graduate school in London, Ontario. The only time I
felt comfortable stepping outside the campus was in the cold
winter months, when bundled in jacket, hood, scarf and gloves,
I became nearly indistinguishable from every one else. In summer,
when I had to shed these sartorial covers, I ventured out only
at night, under the cover of darkness. I had no wish to invite
racial slurs from teenagers, whether sane or drunk, driving by
in their convertibles, pickups and jeeps.
I enjoyed this invisibility even at my
teaching job at Northeastern University. Yes, there was a little
edginess when I first entered a class, a mild dismay, anticipating
the strange accents and manners of 'another Indian professor'.
For the most part, I managed to lay these fears to rest, and
week after week, my students would concentrate on what
I had to say, undistracted by who said it. But this invisibility
proved to be fragile.
When I began to depart from the scripted
texts, drawing attention to the ideological intent of economics,
its Eurocentric biases, and its disregard for facts, not a few
of my students began to take a harder look at me. Over
time, as I elaborated my critique, it made me more visible. My
ethnicity and origins, my brown skin and dark hair, their density
and opaqueness, began to obstruct the view. I became proof of
the absurdity of my critique. I felt like the Negro carpenter
whose comments on the uxorial problems of white clergy invited
a sharp rebuke from the philosophic Kant. He declared, "this
fellow was quite black from head to foot, a clear proof that
he was stupid."
Then, all of a sudden, September 11 introduced
a new dynamic. The nineteen hijackers of Arab and Muslim background,
their planes crashing into the twin towers, had unleashed a fury
that would overthrow many governments, abridge many liberties,
and rearrange many lives, here at home and abroad. This first
massive attack on Americans on American soil had shaken America.
And America shaken was America united-in grief, anger and indignation-against
anyone connected to the perpetrators of this undeserved
and 'unprovoked' act of violence. Almost instantly, I could sense
from my little corner of the world, that this anger, volcanic
and intense, would reorder the world in a hurry.
And so it did. Almost as soon as I walked
into the Attleboro station to catch the 6:30 AM train, I noticed
a change. One by one, the heads, the eyes, the glances turned
to me, as they would towards a suspect, towards a face you recognize
from a poster for the most wanted. The commuters, many of whom
had taken this train with me for years, now felt uncomfortable
at my presence. In their new-born sense of insecurity, they had
sensed a connection between me and the hijackers. My Pakistani
ethnicity was indistinguishable from the Arab background of the
nineteen hijackers. A crust of visibility began to thicken around
me. I was back in Canada.
The events since have revealed a rigorous
working out of the logic im-manent in the attack of September
11. The world was quickly painted in two unmistakable colors,
white and black-no shades of gray tolerated. George Bush had
enunciated a new doctrine. 'You are either with us or
you are with the terrorists.' Ergo, if you are not with us, you
are black-and that makes for great visibility. This would be
a global war, a Manichaean contest, between United States, symbolizing
infinite justice and enduring freedom, and Osama, with his global
terrorist network, commanding the evil hordes of Islamic totalitarianism.
Instantly, Pakistan was given "a
second chance" to prove itself-and, without losing a moment,
the military generals took up the challenge. The attack on Afghanistan
was soon unfurled: the mightiest concentra-tion of military power
in human history deployed against a war-ravaged, famine-stricken
country. The smart bombs, the cluster bombs, the daisy-cutters,
the bunker-busters began to descend on Afghanistan. And not a
few fell on villages, hospitals, mosques, and Red Cross warehouses.
Two additional fronts were opened up.
The Al-Qaida network would have to be starved of funds. Two lists
were issued of political parties, financial institutions, charities
and individuals suspected of links to Al-Qaida: their assets
frozen. More ominously, America began a descent into a Hobbesian
state: where the liberties of some Americans and all
aliens are being quickly traded against the security of other
Americans.
The attack of September 11 led to an
instant boom in racial targeting directed against persons of
Arab, Pakistani and other Islamic ethnicities. This has produced
a growing number of arrests and detentions; but when their numbers
crossed 1000, the count became a state secret, unavailable to
the public. New laws and edicts were passed allowing the FBI
to tap phones, to enter into homes without notice. Now aliens,
both legal and illegal, could be held without trial for as long
as a year. Any person suspected of terrorism could be tried in
secrecy by military courts, and hanged without a unanimous jury.
I am thankful in these dangerous times
to be on sabbatical-away from my students, who would be spared,
at least for a while, all my talk about the toy economies that
falsify reality, abstract from history, and elevate the interests
of particular classes and particular nations (USA, among others)
to the category of the Universal Good. My sabbatical had freed
me at the right time from the unpleasant task of curtailing my
own speech. Cloistered in my academic cell, I could become invisible.
I did, however, in the first weeks after
September 11, put up a red, white and blue flag on my office
door. The inspiration for this came from my wife when she began
plastering the front door, windows, mailbox and her car with
six-by-ten flags. When a colleague commended me for my patriotism,
I answered that I was only exercising my right of free speech-or
what was left of it. It was a comic gesture, attempting to regain
the invisibility that I had lost in the aftermath of September
11. CP
Shahid Alam
is a professor of economics at Northeastern University.
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