After several years of wretched doubletalk and twisted arguments, the US government has finally admitted that waterboarding was used on some prisoners, and this being a form of torture, the practice was illegal both under US and international laws. This episode was but one in a number of practices that have resulted from the September 2001 attack on the United States. Concurrent with waterboarding came racial profiling which was also a questionable practice.
When studied together these two practices lead to a wealth of insights on the subject of modern communication especially as it is handled in the United States at this time.
Let us consider this statement: "I shall neither confirm nor deny that we do waterboarding because I do not want to telegraph to the enemy what we are up to." This sounds straightforward and reasonable enough. Now let us consider this other statement: "Because the acts of terrorism against us were committed by brown skinned Muslim young men, we profile this group of people at our airports." This too sounds straightforward and reasonable.
There is no doubt that each of these statements by itself makes sense. In fact, given the power that is packed into them, each may fit a bumper sticker and thus carry the punch of the one-liner. However, the reality is that the statements were not made in a vacuum but were meant to refer to an existing situation. When juxtaposed and seen in the context for which they were made, they become the ingredients for an explosive mix that does not even go off properly but proves to be a dud.
Let us see how this can be: "I shall neither confirm nor deny that we do waterboarding because I do not want to telegraph to the enemy what we are up to. On the other hand I am telling the enemy to avoid sending brown skinned Muslim young men to our airports because this is the kind of people we profile." Puff! The thing goes off like a thud.
This is where racial profiling is seen to be the farce that it is. The more you think about it the more you realize that the practice was adopted not to stop terrorists but to use terrorism as an excuse to advance a different agenda, one that is more dangerous to America than terrorism. And so the question poses itself: how can a situation like this develop and how could it have gone on for so long despite the criticism that was leveled against it?
Perhaps the answer lies in the fact that there is two kinds of writing therefore two kinds of expression; fiction and non-fiction. When you write non-fiction and there exists someone to scrutinize your facts and propositions, you cannot stray too far or you will be corrected. And so, to go farther than non-fiction will allow you; perhaps as far as your imagination will take you without being hindered, you must consider writing fiction. Here, not only will you avoid meeting any sort of resistance; you will be praised for the power of your imagination and encouraged to imagine more so as to delight your audiences.
But be careful of the temptation because if you write fiction, pretend it is reality and manage to get away with it once, you will have discovered that you possess a potent way to persuade people of what you are advancing. The trouble is that you can pull a stunt like this only a limited number of times and only if you already enjoy such standing in the community that people will trust you with something they cannot verify. But sooner or later someone will want to verify what you say, the truth will come out and you will lose your credibility.
Still, the statements concerning the practice of waterboarding and racial profiling have lasted a long time even though they were non-fiction, absurd and were met with a great deal of opposition. Why did they last? The reason was that someone had the ability to monopolize the public forums, shut up the opposition and pretend that the system in which they operated was democratic. In short, the secret for the success of the farce concerning racial profiling depended on the success of another farce, the playing of the democratic con game.
Look what powerful impact the following smart-alecky remark can have on the audience: "An 80 year old lady from Sweden is less likely to highjack a plane than a young Muslim male from the Middle East." When a version of this statement is played over and over but never challenged, it has the effect for which it was designed which is to make the audience believe that racial profiling will make America safe.
But why is it that the absurdity of that statement did not jump out of the newspaper pages or out of the television screens to hit the audience in the face? Why did the audience not realize that those who want to harm America will by virtue of that discussion decide to send terrorists who do not fit the expected profile? The answer is a bit complicated, and to get to it in the shortest possible way, I must begin with an illustration and follow with the discussion.
A number of years back I found myself spending two weeks in the hospital of a small town waiting to be transferred to a city hospital where they did heart bypasses. Other patients came from all over the region for the same purpose, and the hospital held four men at a time in a spacious and comfortable room. Since none of us looked too juvenile to want to monopolize the remote control, we decided to rent one television set among us.
We developed a kind of camaraderie not only among ourselves but also with the families and friends of each other. The result was that we had a number of people visiting at any given time, all eager to keep us company and to service us beyond what the hospital staff would do.
One Sunday morning we watched the talking heads on television. And there was this head who opined that a young male from the Middle East is more likely to hijack a plane than an old lady from Sweden, and the statement sparked a discussion among patients and visitors. What I usually do at a time like this is keep my ears open and my mouth shut to get a sense of what the others think without influencing the discussion myself. So I grabbed the remote control, turned the sound to very low and listened to the people around me.
At first they danced around the subject without hitting on the essential point which was that this sort of talk told the terrorists to avoid sending people who fit the profile of a terrorist. Eventually, a patient offered the view that one of the talking heads looked more Jewish than the other panelists and may be trying to push an agenda that will make life difficult for the Arabs living here. Another patient agreed then followed with the name of that talking head: Charles Krauthammer, he said, upon which the eyes of a young woman sitting beside him opened wide.
The father of this woman was a patient who stayed in a bed next to mine, and I knew quite a bit about him. He had come to Canada from Holland right after the war having joined the resistance there where he was wounded, captured and imprisoned by the Nazis. The man gave his wide eyed daughter a loving look knowing that she was going to react, and I could only imagine what was racing through his head.
The woman looked to the person who mentioned the name of the talking head and repeated: "Krauthammer, you said? Well, he certainly has a nose like a hammer but his head is not that of a Kraut," by which she meant that Krauthammer looks more like a Semitic Middle Easterner than he does a blue eyed German, the type that was preferred by Hitler and by the SS. And we all had a big laugh.
It turned out that the woman taught history and she explained to us that if the white supremacists take over America, the first to be led to the gas chamber will be those who look like Krauthammer. The discussion turned even nastier when it was revealed that not only the man has the wrong look but is handicapped and sitting on a wheelchair. The woman said he would be useless to the grand design of a master race and would be done away with before he had the time to ask for a glass of water because to acquiesce to his wish would be the needless wasting of a valuable resource.
And then it happened that someone suddenly realized Krauthammer had just told the terrorists they can avoid getting caught at the airport by changing their looks. And we are now faced with a new question: why did it take this long for someone to see something that is this obvious and that simple?
My view is that there is a great deal of truth in the old saying: Necessity is the mother of invention. A more generalized form of the saying can be formulated like this: Motivation is the generator that powers the brain. I believe that the natural state of the brain is to be lazy but the brain will spring into action and search for a solution when danger becomes apparent.
We call motivation that which triggers the brain to respond to a threat or a need, and it took the people in that hospital time before they hit on a good idea because the motivation to identify the problem and search for a solution was lacking at the beginning of the discussion. In turn, the motivation lacked because there were no honest discussions on the subject in the North American media given that all discussions concerning the Middle East were monopolized by the Jewish lobby whose sole agenda was to trigger a clash of the Civilizations.
That clash has come and has fizzled without yielding something useful to the Zionists except that they did something evil and something satisfying to their twisted sense of what it means to be fulfilled. Two consequences of this episode, waterboarding and racial profiling, will become a footnote in the history of America but will figure as a full chapter in the book on Talmudic Horrors.