What's with the name-calling?

Professor Tan Sri Dato' Dzulkifli Abdul Razak
Learning Curve: Perspective
New Sunday Times - June 29, 2016

United States President Barack Obama lashed out after being accused as “soft on terrorism” for allegedly failing to characterise the enemy as “radical Islam” — a phrase that Obama has “refused” to use.

This has opened up debates on not just winning strategies over “terrorism”, but perhaps, more importantly, who will win the coming US presidential elections. When he asked, “What exactly would using this label accomplish? What exactly would it change?”, an editorial (The Wall Street Journal, June 15) was quick to provide some hint citing what other US presidents had done. For example, “Dwight D. Eisenhower routinely spoke of ‘international Communism’ as an enemy. Franklin D. Roosevelt said ‘Japan’ or ‘Japanese’ 15 times in his 506-word declaration of war after Pearl Harbor”.

What was left out, intentionally or otherwise, was the fact that Roosevelt, a Democrat, also ordered in February 1942 a relocation of all Americans of Japanese ancestry to concentration camps in the US interior on suspicion that they, too, could be the enemies. Worst still, at the urging of Albert Einstein, Roosevelt set in motion the killing of tens of thousands of innocent (Japanese) lives — perhaps fully convinced that they were no less enemies who needed to be cowed.

Consequently, two atomic bombs were detonated over Hiroshima, then Nagasaki within a three-day grace in August 1945. In recent times, similar dangerous rhetoric and hateful messages are continuously aired in the run-up to the US presidential elections, this time replacing the “yellow peril” with other hues as the targets to garner votes and stir up emotions.

The editorial was also silent about the Vietnam War (1955-1975), where the enemy was labelled as Viet Cong by the West (not limited to just the US president) as a kind of derogatory term in desperate denial of the hugely popular broad-based National Liberation Front (NLF), namely the People’s Liberation Armed Forces in South Vietnam (PLAF) and in Cambodia, including many non-military cadres, village chiefs and schoolteachers.

Unlike the two selective examples in the editorial, the Viet Cong eventually emerged as the victor, underlying the fact that giving names, albeit falsely, is not sufficient, if not a distraction as claimed by Obama. It is well acknowledged that the defeat of the mighty invading Allied Forces had something to do with the arrogance that was imposed on the enemy beginning with the (mis)labelling of the Viet Cong casting them as pushovers.

This time, it could well be the case of arrogantly attaching labels to the so-called “enemies and their variants” while missing the mark by a wide margin. But, that is for the presumptive presidents to figure out!

What is interesting, though, is the comparison with neighbouring Canada, being hospitable to far more Muslim refugees than the US — some 10 times more as of November last year. On record, Canada, with more than three per cent Muslim population, against only one per cent for the US, does not witness massacres like the recent one in Orlando or San Bernardino in December, as observed by Nicholas Kristof in his article aptly entitled, “Confronting Our Own Extremist” (New York Times, June 18).

Indeed, over the last two decades, he noted that Canada had eight mass shootings, in contrast to 20 in the US just this month alone. The question then: why is there no interest in finding out who the culprits of the other 19 killings are, and label them? Surely not all, not even the majority of them, are related to “radical Islam”. So, what’s in the name-calling?

The reality, however, is that it is “not unusual for dozens of Americans to be killed by guns in a single day”, and this level of violence makes the US an “extremist” of sorts when measured against the experience of other advanced countries (Financial Times, June 14). No other materially rich country has “advanced” so much as the US.

That the accused murderer is a Muslim (radical or otherwise) does not negate the fact that he is an American — a home-grown “extremist” as some put it. Calling attention to his Islamic faith and ignoring his American nationality is rather sinister, if not prejudicial, as reminded by the same issue of NYT, citing a prominent headline, “West Street Massacre”, that took place in New York more than 35 years ago. It is about gay “bar patrons being gunned down where they stood” as narrated by David W. Dunlap, who drew many interesting points vis-à-vis the Orlando incident.
Foremost, it has nothing to do with “radical Islam”, rather it involved one Ronald K. Crumpley who “made it plain to the police that he would have been satisfied with a higher toll”. He was quoted as saying: “I’ll kill them all — the gays — they ruin everything.” Crumpley, 38, a former transit police officer, was later found not “responsible by reason of mental disease or defect”. He died in psychiatric hospital at 73, which could have been the fate of the Orlando killer, too, since according to reports by FT (June 14), he “was probably a deranged lone gunman who simply took the IS name as a badge rather than being a trained operative of the group”. In fact, Federal Bureau of Investigation director James Comey said investigators had found no sign that the deadly attack was directed by an organised terror cell.

Indeed, this notion is well summed up in a Letter to the Editor of the same NYT, when Andrew Leaf wrote: “We know that for many decades, the Ku Klux Klan burned homes and churches, and brutalised and murdered black Americans. They often did this under the sign of burning crosses and in the name of Christianity.” Like many, Leaf wondered if “it would be accurate, politically appropriate and socially helpful to designate the Ku Klux Klan as ‘radical Christians’ and their hateful ideology as ‘extremist Christianity’”.

A case in point is when in the middle of last year a 21-year-old Dylann Storm Roof allegedly felt that “black people were taking over the world” and that “the white race needed to do something about it”, and decided to gun down nine black parishioners, including a senator, at the historic Emanuel African Methodist Episcopal Church in Charleston, South Carolina, while pretending to join in the prayers.

This eventually led to the controversial banning of the Confederate flag, to which the KKK remained defiant, holding a pro-Confederate flag rally at the South Carolina state house as a remembrance of white ancestral valour. During this episode, at no time was the word “radical” ever invoked, as if the massacre of the blacks mattered little.

Such erratic behaviours raise pertinent questions as to why despite knowing the identity of the “enemy” at close range, radical white supremacists like the KKK, dubbed as America’s first terrorists grouping founded 150 years ago in 1866, and its allegedly “invisible empire”, are still lurking around and remain active? In fact, in 1870, a federal grand jury reportedly determined that the KKK was a “terrorist organisation”, and issued hundreds of indictments for crimes of violence and terrorism, but to no avail.

More perplexing is when the 44th anniversary of Angela Davis’s acquittal on charges of murder, kidnapping and conspiracy was celebrated on June 4. Davis, well known for her militant and radical ideas as a Black Panther, gained “celebrity” status by being a “radical” (that word again!).

Ironic as it seems, in 1979, she won the Soviet Union’s Lenin Peace Prize and was bestowed the 2016 Sackler Center First Award, “honouring women who are first in their fields”. She was a tenured professor (now retired) at the University of California, Santa Cruz, and since then, a distinguished professor emerita. Meanwhile, the Black Panther has morphed into a “black racist hate group” called the New Black Panther, mimicking that of the KKK, complicating the “radical” issue even further.

In hindsight, Obama is right when he asked the two pertinent questions about the wisdom of attaching labels selectively as a trump card to achieve greater selfish ambition.

Dzulkifli Abdul Razak is the chairperson, board of directors of Universiti Sains Islam Malaysia (USIM) and an honorary professor at University of Nottingham