To Bush, the Arab is always the villain

West's historic attitude to Arabs inculcated the contempt we have seen in Abu Ghraib, writes Joseph Wakim.

George Bush insists that the crimes committed by United State military guards inside Iraqi prisons were an aberration of American values. He fails to see that they are a culmination of his own indoctrination.

Indeed, many in the Arab world were not as shocked as George Bush at these crimes, given the history of Western Orientalism that long preceded Arab terrorism.

<snip>

After more than two years of beating the drums of war, and expanding the definition of terrorists, can the fatigued US soldiers be blamed when the battlelines start to blur - between Iraqi terrorists and Iraqi civilians, between those "with us" and those "against us", between good and evil?

When all the Iraqis start to look the same, like the angry terrorist that has been drummed into their imaginations, can the US soldiers be blamed when they (mis)treat their Iraqi captives as "targets of American justice"?

The dehumanising of the enemy and the fantasy of bringing home a trophy were echoed in comments made by peers of Lynndie England: "A lot of people here think they ought to just blow up the whole of Iraq... If you're a different race, you're subhuman... Every season here, you're hunting something. Tormenting Iraqis would be no different to shooting a turkey."

But long before the young soldiers were psyched up by Bush, the anti-Arab predisposition was already there. A steady diet of Hollywood films invariably cast the Arab as the quintessential villain. This generation of US soldiers would have been exposed to blockbusters such as Delta Force (1986), True Lies (1995), Executive Decision (1996), The Siege (1998) and Rules of Engagement (2000). In each conquest, the American heroes reduced the terrorist Arabs to incarceration or incineration. And in each conquest, Arabs were the villains because they were uncivilised and intrinsically evil.


http://www.theage.com.au/articles/2004/05/10/1084041332245.html

Yes, indeed, the royal ancestor, aside from expelling the Jews from England, spent his princehood trying to free the Holy Land from the cursed Islamists who profaned the holy Christian sites.

He was also lousy at it.

(Yes, this is the ancestor Bush shares with Kerry--the king had 19 children.)

including the bin Ladin family. :shrug: