When Long-Simmering Bloodlust Boils Over

CW: Extremely racist imagery

Sometimes, it's important to take a step back and realize how bad things have actually gotten. Feb. 2, in particular, was a huge day for racism in news media. Two pieces, published hours apart by two major US news media brands, showed that the bloodlust and jingoism of the early 2000s remains near completely unchanged.

The first piece, from Thomas L. Friedman at the New York Times, was titled "Understanding the Middle East Through the Animal Kingdom." In it, Friedman declares the US to be like a lion, and Netanyahu as a lemur. Hamas is "the trap-door spider." He compares multiple Middle Eastern states to insects. Lebanon, Yemen, Syria and Iraq are caterpillars, while Iran, the "parasitoid wasp" lays eggs inside the host. "We have no counterstrategy that safely and efficiently kills the wasp without setting fire to the whole jungle," Friedman writes.

Essentially, Friedman is arguing for a major-scale war against multiple countries in the region.

The screed reminded me of a piece of US propaganda manufactured during WWII that I learned about in a university history course. This particular portion of the class evaluated the US front against Japan, alongside the use of DDT as a useful insecticide.

This image flashed in my mind as I read Friedman's words:

Then, mere hours later, Steven Stalinsky at the Wall Street Journal published "Welcome to Dearborn, America's Jihad Capital." This hateful Islamophobic tirade also reminded me of something, perhaps flippantly: the Crusades.

"Thousands march in support of Hamas, Hezbollah and Iran," the piece begins, before citing shouts of "Intifada" "From the river to the sea, Palestine will be free" and "America is a terrorist state." He also links to a 24 minute video of a collection of clips, the first being an Imam giving a speech at the Henry For Centennial Library in the city.

The rest of the video he links certainly includes religiously charged speeches aimed at the state of Israel. But the fact he waits to quote any particular passage is priming readers that any Imam speaking against Israel seems worthy of the antisemitism label. How could it not, when calling the US a terrorist state and demanding Palestine's freedom qualifies as representative of what it's like to live in a non-white nation?

You can feel Stalinsky shudder as he writes the final sentence of the paragraph. "This isn't the Middle East. It's the Detroit suburb of Dearborn, Mich."

The rest of the piece is a collection of pearl-clutching anecdotes that people view Israel as the settler-colonial apartheid state it has been since its inception. Stalinsky conflates the terms Zionist with Jewish, with Israel. When he finally quotes the Imam's speech alluded to earlier, he refers to his praising of the attack on Oct. 7 as "honorable."

At this point, he's successfully conflated any pro-Palestinian action with far-right religious fundamentalism. He even quotes a 2001, post-9/11 police assessment in pointing to Dearborn as a threat to national security! According to Stalinsky, the most famously Islamophobic period in US history has lessons to teach us, in the middle of the Palestinian genocide.

Stalinsky concludes, "What's happening in Dearborn isn’t simply a political problem for Democrats. It’s potentially a national-security issue affecting all Americans. Counterterrorism agencies at all levels should pay close attention."

Tens of thousands of people gather at pro-war, pro-Israel rallies chanting no to a ceasefire, while thousands of Gaza civilians are killed in air strikes. This, rightfully, does not mean that large Jewish communities are a dangerous threat to be feared. But selectively, while thousands march against genocide, a few choice voices are used to paint them all as terrorist sympathizers. Stalinsky, and other far-right propagandists, are cultivating an environment in which Dearborn is a target for white nationalist violence. Indeed, shortly after the piece was published, Dearborn increased police presence at places of worship, following "an alarming increase in bigoted and Islamophobic rhetoric online targeting the city of Dearborn." Mayor Abdullah Hammoud directly cited the Wall Street Journal piece as the motivating factor.

In the current political climate, I refuse to believe Stalinsky doesn't know what he's doing.

Though these two pieces mark notable heights in war hawk rhetoric that has arisen since Oct. 7 in the West, it's merely the next step of hateful bloodlust. Canada is no different when examined with a critical eye. The difference is that, most of the time, the rhetoric is hidden behind a veneer of respectability.

The Breach, in particular, has shown how little Canadian media cares about Palestinian lives. From CBC News saying the killing of Palestinians doesn't warrant the terms "brutal" or "murderous," to Canadian opinion pages showing near-unanimous support for Israel, our news media simply isn't saying the quiet part loud. Meanwhile, the federal government refuses to say anything negative about Israel throughout the ICJ process, but when 12 out of 30,000 UNRWA workers are accused of being affiliated with Hamas, Canada pulls funding.

This general attitude among our elected leaders came into acute focus recently in BC.

BC NDP Minister Selina Robinson said in a talk with B'nai B'rith Canada that Palestine was a "crappy piece of land" before the Zionist project was created.

They don't even understand that Israel was offered to the Jews who were misplaced-displaced. Um, so they have no connection to how it started. They don't understand that it was a crappy piece of land with nothing on it- you know there were several hundred thousand people- but other than that it didn't produce an economy. It didn't have- it couldn't grow things. It didn't have anything on it.

Firstly, who, exactly, offered Israel to "the Jews"? It was the British, who had planned to hand the land over to Zionists. In a 1917 letter from then-Foreign Secretary Arthur James Balfour, of the Balfour declaration, to the leader of a Jewish community in Britain, he wrote: "His Majesty’s government view with favour the establishment in Palestine of a national home for the Jewish people... I should be grateful if you would bring this declaration to the knowledge of the Zionist Federation" At this time, Palestine was part of the Ottoman Empire, but that would soon change.

In Robinson's apology, she said the comment was "disrespectful," but continued to defend her views that its value was purely economic. "I was referring to the fact that the land has limited natural resources."

This comment gives the game away. It's hardly pertinent that Palestine was an established land with its own culture, people and history. No, Robinson's chief concern is that Israel came in to provide economic value. This, of course, is still wrong, but her point is that Israel provides economic value to its geopolitical allies, such as Canada.

The apology was enough, for BC NDP leadership, apparently. Initially, Premier David Eby said that Robinson will remain in cabinet after her remarks. Important to remember that when then-ONDP MPP Sara Jama called for a ceasefire on Oct. 10, she was ejected from the party and censured.

After significant pressure against Eby and the BC NDP, Robinson stepped down from her cabinet position. She will remain in the NDP, but will not run in the next election. Even after mounting public pressure, Robinson still faced less punishment than Jama.

The full-throated lust for brown people's blood that the two US articles discuss is the logical through-line our news media and political system have shown in recent months. It's become painfully apparent the lives of Palestinians don't matter to them. The only analysis allowed to be applied to the Palestinian struggle is the history since Oct. 7 and the framework of religion. When you add the entrenched Islamophobia that has been a staple of Western political thought since 9/11, dehumanization is the only path that allows a coherent worldview. A weekend report by The Guardian proves that these views constitute instructed policy at big news agencies like CNN.

When viewed through this analysis, what other logical conclusion can be pulled other than dehumanization and racism? From examining Oct. 7 in isolation, viewing the genocide as a war between religions and Islam being painted as ontologically evil for the past 20+ years, the usual difference is that the conclusion remains unsaid.

The National Council of Muslims gestured to this framework when they cancelled a meeting with Prime Minister Justin Trudeau. "It has become clear that we seem to only get a sliver of policy reform when our lives, or our safety, is destroyed," chief executive Stephen Brown said.

This is not a good sign for where we are as a society. Not only because a genocide is being proudly livestreamed, by its perpetrators, for the world to see. Not only because our leaders and media have shown nothing but support for those committing these crimes. But, through all this, the current climate has allowed the most hateful views to be brought back to the mainstream.

Legacy news media prior to this point was hardly anti-racist. Anything remotely close to that sentiment exists in another reality. But there's a difference between racism that lurks in the background as it colours biases, and this level of open, unrepentant bigotry.

Calling Middle Eastern countries insects is now a view that can get you published in the New York Times. Declaring an area with outsized support for a free Palestine "Jihad Capital" gets you space in the Wall Street Journal.

It may not be new, but it shows how openly racist our society has become in recent months. Conversely, it also shows how hard we have to push back.