MIA in the USA

An Oscar for a Bin Laden next?:

Ru Freeman

A few hours ago, two aircraft flown by a terrorist group, LTTE, recognised as such by the US, were foiled in their attempt to attack the Sri Lankan capital of Colombo. Though both planes were shot down, two civilians were killed and 46 others injured.

In an article in the New Yorker, (Jane Mayer, ‘The Hard Cases,’ New Yorker, 2/23/09), argues that the Obama administration faces the tough choice of closing Guantanamo Bay and other detention centers holding so called enemy combatants who have never been charged with a crime, and being accused of going easy on future terrorists.

Old argument

There is the old argument that it is entirely possible to take an ordinary civilian and transform them into a terrorist simply by treating them as such, for what else but revenge might occupy the mind of an innocent human in solitary confinement for five years. But that is hindsight. The task now is to proceed with cautious speed toward justice and that requires the reassessment of definitions of ‘enemy combatants’ and the multiple layers of incarceration, torture and prosecution that defined the Bush era.

America’s checkered past viz-a-viz its own minorities has made it both capable of massive collective goodness (i.e. two and a half years of working toward the election of a man with solid foreign-resident credentials and a name that echoes America’s chosen anti-Christ, Bin Laden)

But as Neal Katyal, the new Principal Deputy Solicitor General in the Justice Department (i.e. the person authorised to represent the Government before the Supreme Court), and the President find their way toward the surprisingly broad line that separates the terrorist from the person or group with a justifiable grievance, there is another issue that Americans as a whole, particularly American liberals, need to confront: their relationship to minorities, particularly as it pertains to the classification of terrorists.

America’s checkered past viz-a-viz its own minorities has made it both capable of massive collective goodness (i.e. two and a half years of working toward the election of a man with solid foreign-resident credentials and a name that echoes America’s chosen anti-Christ, Bin Laden), and equally all-encompassing myopia.

Unquestioned support

Liberal Americans have, for decades, made the usually, but regrettably not reliably, flawless argument that minority status confers upon that minority the right to unquestioned support and a corner on the market on truth. President Obama, himself fairly and squarely a minority, owes his success not merely to the fact that he has done what most minorities have to do in order to achieve the kind of respect he enjoys, i.e. be above reproach in terms of his integrity and intellect, but also to the fact that he has had the courage to disassociate and even condemn those aspects or arguments of a minority group which he finds to be untruthful.

But the rest of America is still catching up, and none slower than its mainstream media, which has been awash with a new found enthusiasm for throwing the word ‘genocide’ at the Sri Lankan Government. Sri Lanka, an island off the coast of India, comprises of a Sinhalese majority, and Tamil, Moslem and mixed-race (of European descent), minorities.

Harmony

Sri Lankan schools are required, by law, to teach each child his/her own religion no matter the denomination of the school, and Sri Lankans live, study, work and exist in harmony in the entire island (about the size of Maine), except in a small area controlled by the Tamil Tigers, a separatist terrorist organisation. To be absolutely clear, the Tigers (LTTE), are a group of Tamils, but all Tamils are not members nor supporters of the LTTE and 95 per cent of all Tamils live among Sinhalese and Moslems away from the LTTE.

But none of these facts were part of a series of articles in the Boston Globe. Not in the one calling for the Obama Administration to ask for a UN Council Resolution to call for a cease-fire and for Asian powers to stop funding the Sri Lankan government. Nor the one it ran about an expatriate kid fasting American style (with the help of Gatorade and vitamins), to bring attention to the ‘plight of Tamils in Sri Lanka’. Nor the opinion piece salaciously titled ‘Genocide in Sri Lanka,’ by Bruce Fein, a former deputy attorney-general, who claimed that the state department lists Sri Lanka as a ‘potential as an investigatory target in the Office of War Crimes’, but forgot to mention that the same State Department lists the LTTE as a terrorist organisation, moved to freeze the assets of LTTE operatives here in the United States, imposed that decision as recently as last week on yet another American front for the LTTE, and, by the way, shut down all funding from Americans and Canadians to the LTTE, all moves which forced the LTTE to suddenly begin peace talks in 2002.

Swift on the heels of all this was a PBS Tavis Smiley segment (he for whom Obama was just not black enough), dedicated to Mathangi Arulpragasam, the niece of Vellupillai Prabhakaran, the leader of the LTTE, and daughter of Arula, the leader of a secondary LTTE organisation, both criminals and terrorists condemned by the international community. Tavis Smiley ought to have known what was coming, but that would have entailed actually doing some research, and not make the assumptions, as most liberals do, that a person speaking from a minority perspective must automatically be right.

The United States

Mathangi Arulpragasam, who goes by the name MIA, has been denied a visa to enter the United States in the past due to her terrorist connections, but is now a resident of Bedford Stuyvesant in Brooklyn. MIA was nominated for a Grammy and an Oscar for her song on the current flavor of the month, ‘Slumdog Millionaire’, which is traveling at breakneck speed toward an Oscar flush.

Ru Freeman is an author and activist. Her political journalism and cultural criticism has appeared internationally. Her novel ‘A Disobedient Girl’ will be published in English and in translation in July, 2009. This article first appeared on www.commondreams.org.