The Imperial Tactics of Torture That Stole the Lives of Countless Muslims Also Took George Floyd's Life
By
Shaheen Nassar
04 July
2020
The modern
lynching of George Floyd struck a global nerve. The image of a white officer
crushing the neck of a Black man triggered a collective trauma that resonated
in more than 50 countries and on six continents.
George
Floyd repeatedly told the police officers who detained him that he could not
breathe
----
People
poured into the streets and transmuted rage and raw emotion into a movement
unseen in the United States for half a century. Police, showing their true
colours, responded with tear gas, which hung oppressively in the air in an
attempt to quell and suffocate the protesters' indignation. Floyd's last breath
stoked the fires of global outrage.
A
Muslim woman wearing a face mask inscribed with the words 'I cannot breathe'
takes part in a Black Lives Matter protest in Cologne, Germany, on June 7, 2020
[Ying Tang/Getty Images]
-----
"We
revolt simply because, for many reasons, we can no longer breathe," Frantz
Fanon prophetically said. His words capture this collective asphyxiation. In
the case of Floyd and the protesters demonstrating in his honour globally, the
inability to breathe is quite literal. This metaphoric suffocation is
indicative of a broader policy change that expands the so-called war on terror
into a noose around Black America's neck.
Understanding
this expansion requires understanding the American military and its connection
with policing. Few Americans realise they are citizens of an empire, one with
hundreds of military bases in more than a third of the world's sovereign
nations. The criminalisation of Black and brown Muslim people abroad as
terrorists influences the treatment of their American counterparts at home.
American police end up with military-grade weapons. The same tools of indiscriminate
carnage used in Mogadishu and Baghdad wound up in the hands of the
"PoPo". However, excess military supplies are not the only things
police inherit from the military. America's conquests serve as training
exercises for the "boys in blue".
Policing
practices have been continuously informed by counterinsurgency warfare, which
is just a euphemism for "crimes against humanity". How Eyad Hallaq, a
disabled Palestinian, was murdered and dehumanised by an outgrowth of American
foreign policy, sets the tone for sanctioning Black and brown bodies for
violence in places like Minnesota. The imperial tactics of torture and
suppression that stole the lives of countless Muslims took George Floyd's life,
too, on the streets of Minneapolis.
The
"war on terror" creeps onto Black America through the institution of
policing. Police do domestically what the American military does
internationally: extracting resources while suppressing the locals. The US was
built on a principle of racial exclusivity yet was dependent on non-white
labour. The establishment of policing governs this central contradiction.
The police
were put in charge of suppressing communities of colour while society exploited
them. This dynamic continued beyond the police's origins as slave patrols and
lynch mobs. In the words of the deputy director of the immigrant defence
project, Mizue Aizeki, "The real function of policing is ... really to
maintain social control and an unequal status quo." Essentially, police
are the vanguard of systemic inequality.
It is well
known that police behave differently in the barrio than they do in the suburbs.
The police enter impoverished and minority areas like a foreign occupation,
treating the inhabitants with contempt. Huey P Newton once noted the disparate
practices: "In America, Black people are treated very much as Vietnamese
people or any other colonized people ..."
Newton
became cognisant of the parallel experiences between Black and brown folks
within the US and the Black and brown people outside the US who are under Uncle
Sam's imperial boot. The fear of Islamic "terrorism" has further
given the police an excuse to militarise. Institutional Islamophobia sees
Muslims as potential subversives in a civilisational war with savagery. 9/11
gave police another reason to go to war with the American people, especially
those who lay at the intersection of Islam and Blackness.
Islamophobia
and anti-Blackness converge into the crosshairs fixated on the Somali American
community, mostly concentrated in Minneapolis. COINTELPRO, a federal government
programme that upheld white supremacy through murdering Black activists, gave
birth to our modern CVE and TVTP programmes. The malformed TVTP essentially is
a thought-policing programme designed to criminalise American Muslims who do
not pursue Andy Griffith-style assimilation or McCarthyite allegiance to
fascism. These programmes fixate on crushing dissent and coercing conformity
from the Somali community. The toxic energy and funding that went into TVTP
helped fuel the atmosphere and the militarised police apparatus that lynched
George Floyd.
Popular
political discourse paints ugly pictures of Black protesters with the same
brushes it uses to demonise developing countries' rebellion. Even the lexicon
of counterterrorism has been imported from Gaza and Kabul to criminalise the
new Black Intifada. Respectability politics made sure to prioritise the value
of readily replaceable property over the lives of Black folks.
Designating
protesters and looters as "terrorists" obscures the moral realities
of anti-racist resistance. It also links Black Power to "monsterised"
depictions of Muslims abroad. Black people and Indigenous Americans are
two-and-a-half and three times more likely to die in police custody,
respectively. That is not surprising when we understand the police as an
extension of a military that continues settler colonialism beyond its
borders.
With the
growing demand to defund or abolish police that followed Floyd's murder, it
would seem that the recent protests have been successful in catapulting a new
discourse into the popular conversation on police. Riots, once described by
Martin Luther King Jr as "the language of the unheard", have proven
to be more audible than lawful dissent.
However,
Newton's third law of motion dictates, for every widespread political shift, we
can expect a fascist push back. Donald Trump took advantage of the situation by
exaggerating the threat of rioting to assume unprecedented power. In a
sith-like political manoeuvre, Trump threatened to invoke a 203-year-old law
that would effectively grant him the authority to wage war against Black
America and its allies. Like a narcissistic tyrant, he manipulates the fear of
Black protest to exalt himself further on a pedestal of militarised police brutality.
It is no
coincidence that the highest-level authority in our military-executive branch
is asking permission to treat Black protesters like a foreign military
invasion. Although Trump ultimately failed and the political protests have
slowly receded, the attempt to wage war on Black America is telling. With
Trump's abuse of the Insurrection Act, the expansion of the "war on
terror" to Black America will be official.
The police
and the American military empire are two heads on the same Cerberus. They defend
the underworld of systemic injustice, domestically, and abroad. By expanding
the focus of the "war on terror" apparatus to include Black people,
racist forces have unwittingly pushed Black and Muslim liberation movements
even closer together than they already are.
The trauma
of surveillance, racial criminalisation and murder of innocent people is
blurring the lines between Blackness and the Muslim international. This world
failed George Floyd, Eric Garner, Eyad Hallaq and so many more who suffocated under
its oppressive weight. If our adversaries unified, then Black Power and the
Muslim international need closer alliances than ever if we are to collectively
breathe again.
Shaheen
Nassar is an activist and a University of California Riverside graduate with a
degree in Ethnic Studies.
Original
Headline: The 'war on terror' is a noose around Black America's neck
Source: The Al-Jazeera
URL: https://newageislam.com/islam-west/the-imperial-tactics-torture-that/d/122284
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