Face recognition technology follows a long analog history of surveillance and control
The Conversation
January 21, 2024
Facial Recognition (Shutterstock)
American Amara Majeed was accused of terrorism by the Sri Lankan police in 2019. Robert Williams was arrested outside his house in Detroit and detained in jail for 18 hours for allegedly stealing watches in 2020. Randal Reid spent six days in jail in 2022 for supposedly using stolen credit cards in a state he’d never even visited.
In all three cases, the authorities had the wrong people. In all three, it was face recognition technology that told them they were right. Law enforcement officers in many U.S. states are not required to reveal that they used face recognition technology to identify suspects.
Face recognition technology is the latest and most sophisticated version of biometric surveillance: using unique physical characteristics to identify individual people. It stands in a long line of technologies – from the fingerprint to the passport photo to iris scans – designed to monitor people and determine who has the right to move freely within and across borders and boundaries.
In my book, “Do I Know You? From Face Blindness to Super Recognition,” I explore how the story of face surveillance lies not just in the history of computing but in the history of medicine, of race, of psychology and neuroscience, and in the health humanities and politics.
Viewed as a part of the long history of people-tracking, face recognition techology’s incursions into privacy and limitations on free movement are carrying out exactly what biometric surveillance was always meant to do.
The system works by converting captured faces – either static from photographs or moving from video – into a series of unique data points, which it then compares against the data points drawn from images of faces already in the system. As face recognition technology improves in accuracy and speed, its effectiveness as a means of surveillance becomes ever more pronounced.
Paired with AI, face recognition technology scans the crowd at a conference.
Accuracy improves, but biases persist
Surveillance is predicated on the idea that people need to be tracked and their movements limited and controlled in a trade-off between privacy and security. The assumption that less privacy leads to more security is built in.
That may be the case for some, but not for the people disproportionately targeted by face recognition technology. Surveillance has always been designed to identify the people whom those in power wish to most closely track.
On a global scale, there are caste cameras in India, face surveillance of Uyghurs in China and even attendance surveillance in U.S. schools, often with low-income and majority-Black populations. Some people are tracked more closely than others.
In addition, the cases of Amara Majeed, Robert Williams and Randal Reid aren’t anomalies. As of 2019, face recognition technology misidentified Black and Asian people at up to 100 times the rate of white people, including, in 2018, a disproportionate number of the 28 members of the U.S. Congress who were falsely matched with mug shots on file using Amazon’s Rekognition tool.
When the database against which captured images were compared had only a limited number of mostly white faces upon which to draw, face recognition technology would offer matches based on the closest alignment available, leading to a pattern of highly racialized – and racist – false positives.
With the expansion of images in the database and increased sophistication of the software, the number of false positives – incorrect matches between specific individuals and images of wanted people on file – has declined dramatically. Improvements in pixelation and mapping static images into moving ones, along with increased social media tagging and ever more sophisticated scraping tools like those developed by Clearview AI, have helped decrease the error rates.
The biases, however, remain deeply embedded into the systems and their purpose, explicitly or implicitly targeting already targeted communities. The technology is not neutral, nor is the surveillance it is used to carry out.
Physiognomy went beyond recognition of an individual and tried to connect physical features with other characteristics.clu/DigitalVision Vectors via Getty Images
Latest technique in a long history
Face recognition software is only the most recent manifestation of global systems of tracking and sorting. Precursors are rooted in the now-debunked belief that bodily features offer a unique index to character and identity. This pseudoscience was formalized in the late 18th century under the rubric of the ancient practice of physiognomy.
Early systemic applications included anthropometry (body measurement), fingerprinting and iris or retinal scans. They all offered unique identifiers. None of these could be done without the participation – willing or otherwise – of the person being tracked.
The framework of bodily identification was adopted in the 19th century for use in criminal justice detection, prosecution and record-keeping to allow governmental control of its populace. The intimate relationship between face recognition and border patrol was galvanized by the introduction of photos into passports in some countries including Great Britain and the United States in 1914, a practice that became widespread by 1920.
Face recognition technology provided a way to go stealth on human biometric surveillance. Much early research into face recognition software was funded by the CIA for the purposes of border surveillance.
It tried to develop a standardized framework for face segmentation: mapping the distance between a person’s facial features, including eyes, nose, mouth and hairline. Inputting that data into computers let a user search stored photographs for a match. These early scans and maps were limited, and the attempts to match them were not successful.
A customer pays via facial recognition at a smart store in China. Huang Zongzhi/Xinhua News Agency via Getty Images
More recently, private companies have adopted data harvesting techniques, including face recognition, as part of a long practice of leveraging personal data for profit.
Face recognition technology works not only to unlock your phone or help you board your plane more quickly, but also in promotional store kiosks and, essentially, in any photo taken and shared by anyone, with anyone, anywhere around the world. These photos are stored in a database, creating ever more comprehensive systems of surveillance and tracking.
And while that means that today it is unlikely that Amara Majeed, Robert Williams, Randal Reid and Black members of Congress would be ensnared by a false positive, face recognition technology has invaded everyone’s privacy. It – and the governmental and private systems that design, run, use and capitalize upon it – is watching, and paying particular attention to those whom society and its structural biases deem to be the greatest risk.
Sharrona Pearl, Associate Professor of Bioethics and History, Drexel University
This article is republished from The Conversation under a Creative Commons license. Read the original article.
‘Emergency’ or Not, Covid Is Still Killing People. Here’s What Doctors Advise to Stay Safe.
2024/01/18
With around 20,000 people dying of covid in the United States since the start of October, and tens of thousands more abroad, the covid pandemic clearly isn’t over. However, the crisis response is, since the World Health Organization and the Biden administration ended their declared health emergencies last year.
Let’s not confuse the terms “pandemic” and “emergency.” As Abraar Karan, an infectious disease physician and researcher at Stanford University, said, “The pandemic is over until you are scrunched in bed, feeling terrible.”
Pandemics are defined by neither time nor severity, but rather by large numbers of ongoing infections worldwide. Emergencies are acute and declared to trigger an urgent response. Ending the official emergency shifted the responsibility for curbing covid from leaders to the public. In the United States, it meant, for example, that the government largely stopped covering the cost of covid tests and vaccines.
But the virus is still infecting people; indeed, it is surging right now.
With changes in the nature of the pandemic and the response, KFF Health News spoke with doctors and researchers about how to best handle covid, influenza, and other respiratory ailments spreading this season.
A holiday wave of sickness has ensued as expected. Covid infections have escalated nationwide in the past few weeks, with analyses of virus traces in wastewater suggesting infection rates as high as last year. More than 73,000 people died of covid in the U.S. in 2023, meaning the virus remains deadlier than car accidents and influenza. Still, compared with last year’s seasonal surge, this winter’s wave of covid hospitalizations has been lower and death rates less than half.
“We’re seeing outbreaks in homeless shelters and in nursing homes, but hospitals aren’t overwhelmed like they have been in the past,” said Salvador Sandoval, a doctor and health officer at the Merced County public health department in California. He attributes that welcome fact to vaccination, covid treatments like Paxlovid, and a degree of immunity from prior infections.
While a new coronavirus variant, JN.1, has spread around the world, the current vaccines and covid tests remain effective.
Other seasonal illnesses are surging, too, but rates are consistent with previous years. Between 9,400 and 28,000 people died from influenza between Oct. 1 and Jan. 6, estimates the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, and millions felt so ill from the flu that they sought medical care. Cases of pneumonia — a serious condition marked by inflamed lungs that can be triggered by the flu, covid, or other infections — also predictably rose as winter set in. Researchers are now less concerned about flare-ups of pneumonia in China, Denmark, and France in November and December, because they fit cyclical patterns of the pneumonia-causing bacteria Mycoplasma pneumoniae rather than outbreaks of a dangerous new bug.
Public health researchers recommend following the CDC guidance on getting the latest covid and influenza vaccines to ward off hospitalization and death from the diseases and reduce chances of getting sick. A recent review of studies that included 614,000 people found that those who received two covid vaccines were also less likely to develop long covid; often involving fatigue, cognitive dysfunction, and joint pain, the condition is marked by the development or continuation of symptoms a few months after an infection and has been debilitating for millions of people. Another analysis found that people who had three doses of covid vaccines were much less likely to have long covid than those who were unvaccinated. (A caveat, however, is that those with three doses might have taken additional measures to avoid infections than those who chose to go without.)
It’s not too late for an influenza vaccine, either, said Helen Chu, a doctor and epidemiologist at the University of Washington in Seattle. Influenza continues to rise into the new year, especially in Southern states and California. Last season’s shot appeared to reduce adults’ risk of visits to the emergency room and urgent care by almost half and hospitalization by more than a third. Meanwhile, another seasonal illness with a fresh set of vaccines released last year, respiratory syncytial virus, appears to be waning this month.
Another powerful way to prevent covid, influenza, common colds, and other airborne infections is by wearing an N95 mask. Many researchers say they’ve returned to socializing without one but opt for the masks in crowded, indoor places when wearing one would not be particularly burdensome. Karan, for example, wears his favorite N95 masks on airplanes. And don’t forget good, old-fashioned hand-washing, which helps prevent infections as well.
If you do all that and still feel sick? Researchers say they reach for rapid covid tests. While they’ve never been perfect, they’re often quite helpful in guiding a person’s next steps.
When President Joe Biden declared the end of the public health emergency last year, many federally funded testing sites that sent samples to laboratories shut their doors. As a result, people now mainly turn to home covid tests that signal an infection within 15 minutes and cost around $6 to $8 each at many pharmacies. The trick is to use these tests correctly by taking more than one when there’s reason for concern. They miss early infections more often than tests processed in a lab, because higher levels of the coronavirus are required for detection — and the virus takes time to multiply in the body. For this reason, Karan considers other information. “If I ran into someone who turned out to be sick, and then I get symptoms a few days later,” he said, “the chance is high that I have whatever they had, even if a test is negative.”
A negative result with a rapid test might mean simply that an infection hasn’t progressed enough to be detected, that the test had expired, or that it was conducted wrong. To be sure the culprit behind symptoms like a sore throat isn’t covid, researchers suggest testing again in a day or two. It often takes about three days after symptoms start for a test to register as positive, said Karan, adding that such time estimates are based on averages and that individuals may deviate from the norm.
If a person feels healthy and wants to know their status because they were around someone with covid, Karan recommends testing two to four days after the exposure. To protect others during those uncertain days, the person can wear an N95 mask that blocks the spread of the virus. If tests remain negative five days after an exposure and the person still feels fine, Chu said, they’re unlikely to be infected — and if they are, viral levels would be so low that they would be unlikely to pass the disease to others.
Positive tests, on the other hand, reliably flag an infection. In this case, people can ask a doctor whether they qualify for the antiviral drug Paxlovid. The pills work best when taken immediately after symptoms begin so that they slash levels of the virus before it damages the body. Some studies suggest the medicine reduces a person’s risk of long covid, too, but the evidence is mixed. Another note on tests: Don’t worry if they continue to turn out positive for longer than symptoms last; the virus may linger even if it’s no longer replicating. After roughly a week since a positive test or symptoms, studies suggest, a person is unlikely to pass the virus to others.
If covid is ruled out, Karan recommends tests for influenza because they can guide doctors on whether to prescribe an antiviral to fight it — or if instead it’s a bacterial infection, in which case antibiotics may be in order. (One new home test diagnoses covid and influenza at the same time.) Whereas antivirals and antibiotics target the source of the ailment, over-the-counter medications may soothe congestion, coughs, fevers, and other symptoms. That said, the FDA recently determined that a main ingredient in versions of Sudafed, NyQuil, and other decongestants, called phenylephrine, is ineffective.
Jobs complicate a personal approach to staying healthy. Emergency-era business closures have ended, and mandates on vaccination and wearing masks have receded across the country. Some managers take precautions to protect their staff. Chu, for example, keeps air-purifying devices around her lab, and she asks researchers to stay home when they feel sick and to test themselves for covid before returning to work after a trip.
However, occupational safety experts note that many employees face risks they cannot control because decisions on if and how to protect against outbreaks, such as through ventilation, testing, and masking, are left to employers. Notably, people with low-wage and part-time jobs — occupations disproportionately held by people of color — are often least able to control their workplace environments.
Jessica Martinez, co-executive director of the National Council for Occupational Safety and Health, said the lack of national occupational standards around airborne disease protection represents a fatal flaw in the Biden administration’s decision to relinquish its control of the pandemic.
“Every workplace needs to have a plan for reducing the threat of infectious disease,” she said. “If you only focus on the individual, you fail workers.”
© Kaiser Health News
Reports Expose Deep Harms of Corporate Tax Cuts and 'Trickle Down' Ideology
"Failing to reimagine a more ambitious and comprehensive use of corporate tax policy prevents us from achieving a more equitable, sustainable, and democratic economy."
JAKE JOHNSON
Jan 23, 2024
COMMONDREAMS
Two new reports published Tuesday by the Roosevelt Institute argue that robust corporate taxation is key to creating a strong economy and improving the well-being of families and children—objectives that have been undermined in the decades since the Reagan era by regressive tax cuts enacted on the false premise that benefits would "trickle down" to the rest of society.
The first report, A Mapping of the Full Potential of U.S. Corporate Taxation to Enhance Child and Family Well-Being, examines what the authors describe as the understudied notion that "increasing corporate taxation will necessarily help children and families by providing additional revenue for essential public services."
That perspective runs counter to what the Roosevelt Institute's second report calls "a 'cut-to-grow' mentality" that rose to prominence in the 1970s and was enthusiastically embraced by the administration of President Ronald Reagan.
"Under this view, the thinking went, it was necessary to reduce the corporate tax rate to grow the economy—and that this growth would allow gains to eventually 'trickle down' from the rich shareholders to the middle class," the report states. "During this time, the corporate tax rate was gradually reduced to 35% before it was dramatically cut to 21% in 2017. These cuts resulted in corporate tax revenues falling to less than 10% of total federal revenues."
"Perhaps more than any other, President Ronald Reagan leveraged mounting backlash to taxation and government spending to dramatically reduce both, regardless of the consequences to American families," the report observes.
"Corporate tax policy since Reagan has been driven by the trickle-down economics narrative that cutting the taxes on 'job creators' will benefit less wealthy U.S. taxpayers."
The decades-long decline in corporate tax rates has severely undermined the federal government's ability to finance critical public goods, from education to childcare.
"Since regressive corporate tax cuts don't significantly increase earnings for working families (through either wage or employment increases), but they do reduce the government's ability to fund family income and care supports, childcare costs—which are already rising—can become a relatively more expensive line item in working parents' household budgets," reads the Roosevelt Institute's first report, authored by Emily DiVito and Niko Lusiani.
"When they can't afford childcare," they added, "parents face the difficult choice of having to cut costs in other places—often on the basic necessities that allow children to thrive, like food, clothing, and enrichment activities—or taking on additional caregiving duties themselves."
At the state and local levels, DiVito and Lusiani noted, "corporations' successful efforts to avoid their full property tax liability devastate public school budgets."
DiVito, deputy director for the corporate power program at the Roosevelt Institute, said Tuesday that "we have a false idea in the U.S. that corporate tax policy is unrelated to equitable social reforms."
"However, strong corporate tax policy is vital to all aspects of a thriving economy," she argued. "And the failing to reimagine a more ambitious and comprehensive use of corporate tax policy prevents us from achieving a more equitable, sustainable, and democratic economy and society for all families."
The new reports come a week after a bipartisan pair of House and Senate negotiators announced a deal to expand the child tax credit (CTC) for three years in exchange for a series of corporate tax cuts. The American Prospect's David Dayen estimated that "in the time period when all the tax credits are actually in place, the business tax changes are five times more costly than the CTC changes."
"Who knows if this deal can pass in time to take effect in the upcoming 2023 tax season, if ever. Sen. Mike Crapo (R-Idaho), the ranking Republican on the Senate Finance Committee, is already asking for changes to make it even more generous to businesses. That's in part a function of the dissembling that there is 'parity' in the deal. The truth is that this is not an equal trade. And it may extend that inequity well into the future."
That warning is in line with the Roosevelt Institute's new research, which argues that a corporate tax code generous to big business fuels inequality by "benefiting capital interests (i.e., business owners, partners, and shareholders) at the expense of workers and their families."
"When corporations enjoy low taxes on their profits, they face a trade-off for how to otherwise disperse them: make investments in the workforce and productive capacity (e.g., raise wages, hire more workers, and/or upgrade buildings, equipment, or technology) or distribute them to shareholders (i.e., pay out dividends and buy back stock to inflate prices). Data shows that executives typically choose the latter."
Reuven S. Avi-Yonah, a professor of law at the University of Michigan and the lead author of the new report on "cut to grow" ideology, said in a statement that "corporate tax policy since Reagan has been driven by the trickle-down economics narrative that cutting the taxes on 'job creators' will benefit less wealthy U.S. taxpayers."
"Such an idea is often offered in tandem with the notion that this is the only way tax
policy can help American families," said Avi-Yonah. "But this just isn't true. In fact, this false 'cut-to-grow' narrative has made it very difficult to argue for a more expansive, progressive vision of corporate tax reform—contributing to a decades-long stalemate in efforts toward real comprehensive corporate tax reform."
"Now is the time," he added, "to reverse this trend with a more historically grounded support of the corporate tax."
Air Pollution From Canadian Tar Sands Up to 6,300% Worse Than Industry Reports
"In quantifying the astonishing and largely unreported levels," said a Greenpeace campaigner, "these scientists have validated what downwind Indigenous communities have been saying for decades."
A large oil refinery is shown along the Athabasca River in Alberta, Canada.
(Photo: dan_prat/Getty Images)COMMONDREAMS
Jan 26, 2024
Aircraft measurements of pollutants over the Athabasca tar sands in Alberta, Canada show levels exceeding industry reports by 1,900% to more than 6,300%, scientists revealed Thursday, underscoring the need for humanity to rapidly phase out fossil fuels.
While the Canadian government requires air quality monitoring around oil sands operations, industry figures focus on certain compounds. For this research, published Thursday in the journal Science, experts from Yale University and Environment and Climate Change Canada, a department of the Canadian government, accounted for a wider range of emissions.
After collecting data from 30 flights around 17 tar sands operations in 2018, "what we saw were very large emissions of total gas-phase organic carbon from these facilities," said co-author and Yale professor Drew Gentner in a statement. "On average, the majority of the total gas-phase organic carbon was from often overlooked compounds, which are typically outside of the scope of routine monitoring."
"This report backs up what the communities living in these areas experience—it is so bad they cannot open their windows because it hurts their lungs to breathe—especially at night."
Co-author John Liggio of Environment and Climate Change Canada noted that "the magnitude of the observed emissions from oil sands operations was larger than expected, considering that it was roughly equivalent to the sum of all other anthropogenic sources across Canada when including all the motor vehicles, all the solvents, all the other oil and gas sources, and everything else reported to the inventory."
Nadine Borduas-Dedekind, a University of British Columbia atmospheric chemist who has worked with Liggio but was not involved with this study, toldNature that "I'm concerned by how big this number is."
"You want to be measuring all this carbon. For air quality, for health, but also for climate," she said, explaining that some of the molecules are oxidized to planet-heating carbon dioxide.
Thanks to the tar sands deposits across northern Alberta, which are estimated to contain 1.7-2.5 trillion barrels of oil, Canada trails only Saudi Arabia and Venezuela in terms of total known reserves.
As Inside Climate Newsdetailed Thursday:
The deposits do not technically hold crude oil, but instead a heavier hydrocarbon called bitumen, which must be heated and treated in order to form a liquid that can be piped and refined like oil. That process requires sprawling industrial operations of open pit mines, ever-growing waste ponds, and refinery-like "upgraders." The waste ponds have leached toxic chemicals into groundwater, and a heavy, sulfurous stench often settles over the region. The mines have stripped away an area larger than New York City, lands that had long been occupied by people from several Indigenous First Nations. One of those First Nations, Fort McKay, is now surrounded by mines.
Jean L'Hommecourt, an enrolled member of the Fort McKay First Nation, told Inside Climate Newsshe wasn't shocked by the new findings.
"I was just like, eh, I knew all along," said L'Hommecourt, who has worked to clean up nearby operations. "We feel the physical effects here."
Jesse Cardinal of the Indigenous-led group Keepers of the Water similarly said to The Guardian, "We are told this is all within the limits and OK but this report backs up what the communities living in these areas experience—it is so bad they cannot open their windows because it hurts their lungs to breathe—especially at night."
Asked to comment on the research, Keith Stewart, a senior energy strategist for Greenpeace Canada, wrote in an email to The Independent, "I suppose 'Holy s***' isn't printable."
"In quantifying the astonishing and largely unreported levels of health-damaging air pollution coming out of oil sands operations, these scientists have validated what downwind Indigenous communities have been saying for decades," Stewart added. "This is making people sick, so our governments can and should require these companies to use some of their record-breaking profits to clean up the mess they've made."
'Death Sentence': Reports Call for End to Big Oil's US Sacrifice Zones
"People's lives and the environment are being devastated at the hands of big business," one human rights researcher said.
An aerial shot of the chemical plants and factories that line the roads and suburbs of the area known as "Cancer Alley" was taken on October 15, 2013.
(Photo: Giles Clarke/Getty Images)
OLIVIA ROSANE
Jan 25, 2024
COMMONDREAMS
Amnesty International and Human Rights Watch both published reports on Thursday detailing how the fossil fuel industry has harmed the health and environment of communities in Texas and Louisiana, and how state and federal regulators have failed to protect them.
The Amnesty report, The Cost of Doing Business? The Petrochemical Industry's Toxic Pollution in the USA, focused on the Houston Ship Channel, which has some of the worst air pollution measurements in the U.S. The HRW report, "We're Dying Here": The Fight for Life in a Louisiana Fossil Fuel Sacrifice Zone, looked at the state's Cancer Alley, an 85-mile zone along the Mississippi that reportedly has the highest concentration of fossil fuel and petrochemical plants in the Western Hemisphere.
"We're dying from inhaling the industries' pollution," 71-year-old Sharon Lavigne, who lives in the town of Welcome in Louisiana's St. James Parish and started the environmental justice group RISE St. James, told HRW. "I feel like it's a death sentence. Like we are getting cremated, but not getting burnt."
'Death Row'
In its report, HRW noted that Lavigne and other Cancer Alley residents put up yard signs reading, "We live on death row."
Cancer Alley—which extends from Baton Rouge to New Orleans—has around 200 petrochemical and fossil fuel plants. HRW observed many near to homes, schools, senior centers, playgrounds, and workplaces that would regularly release flares, smoke, or foul smells.
HRW interviewed 70 people between September 2022 and January 2024, including 37 residents as well as regulatory officials, health experts, and nonprofit workers. It spoke to people who had been diagnosed with cancers and various respiratory ailments. One census tract, in St. John Parish, has a cancer risk from air pollution that is more than seven times the national average, the highest in the nation.
"What's happening in Louisiana's Cancer Alley is indeed like a sacrifice, a daily human sacrifice on the altar of our global fossil fuel cult."
"People are getting cancer diagnoses as a result of industry being so close to our homes," 31-year-old Kaitlyn Joshua, who lives in Ascension Parish, told HRW.
The report also reveals new research on reproductive health that is currently under review for publication in Environmental Research Health. Scientists from Tulane University found that there were rates of low birth weight and preterm birth as much as triple the national average, and that the highest rates were found in areas with the highest pollution levels.
The ongoing public health crisis disproportionately impacts Black and low-income communities. For example, nearly 90% of the residents in Welcome are Black as well as 60% of the residents of St. John, compared to 33% of the state population and 13.6% of the national population.
The United Nations special rapporteur on human rights and the environment listed Cancer Alley in 2022 as one of the most toxic places on Earth, termed "sacrifice zones."
"What's happening in Louisiana's Cancer Alley is indeed like a sacrifice," HRW European media and editorial director Andrew Stroehlein wrote in his daily brief Thursday, "a daily human sacrifice on the altar of our global fossil fuel cult."
'Environmental Racism'
The Houston Ship Channel in southeast Texas is another "sacrifice zone" where the fossil fuel industry disproportionately harms the health of low-income communities of color, according to Amnesty.
"People's lives and the environment are being devastated at the hands of big business," Alysha Khambay, Amnesty International's researcher on business and human rights, said in a statement. "Affected communities are predominantly Latinx/Hispanic and Black, low income, often lack access to healthcare they need, and face almost insurmountable barriers to justice. It is environmental racism."
"The doctor can't tell you, 'You got this cancer because you live next to this plant.' But there's no way living right next to them is good. It isn't."
The report focused on four plants owned by major oil and gas companies: ExxonMobil's Baytown Complex, LyondellBasell's Channelview Complex, Shell's Deer Park Chemicals, and Intercontinental Terminals Company's (ITC) Deer Park. Amnesty International interviewed dozens of people and looked at documents, data, and videos and images of the plants between January and December of 2023. It found that the four plants had often released more air pollution than their permits allowed over the past two decades, and three of them had experienced a fire or explosion in the last five years.
As in Louisiana, the plants harm residents' health. They release carcinogenic chemicals including the volatile organic compounds (VOCs) benzene, toluene, 1-3 butadiene, and ethylene oxide. One study found higher rates of childhood leukemia in parts of Houston with higher levels of benzene and 1,3-butadiene. Life expectancy is as much as 20 years lower in some polluted areas when compared to majority white communities 15 miles away.
"My mom, she recently had uterine cancer," one resident told Amnesty. "A lot of people have cancer, breathing difficulties… The doctor can't tell you, 'You got this cancer because you live next to this plant.' But there's no way living right next to them is good. It isn't."
Respiratory illnesses are another major health issue, with 15 of 29 interviewees saying either they or a close relative had been diagnosed with one or experienced chronic symptoms like a persistent cough.
"It pretty much affects me and my family every single day," Channelview-area resident Alondra Torres told Amnesty. "There's always smells in the air, every time you step outside for a little while."
'Reluctant Regulators'
Both reports detailed how government agencies had failed to protect people living near polluting plants.
"The failure of state and federal authorities to properly regulate the industry has dire consequences for residents of Cancer Alley," Antonia Juhasz, HRW senior researcher on fossil fuels, said in a statement.
Resident Brenda Bryant told HRW that making a complaint to the Louisiana Department of Environmental Quality (LDEQ) was like "going up against a brick wall."
"The current system is stacked in favor of the companies and against the people they harm."
A 2021 state audit found that the department did not thoroughly examine facilities' emissions reports, while the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) Office of Inspector General found in 2011 that LDEQ had the lowest level of enforcement in its region for the Clean Air Act, Resource Conservation and Recovery Act, and Clean Water Act.
"DEQ has been actively hostile to communities in Cancer Alley for a long, long time," law professor and University for Human Rights co-founder Ruhan Nagra told HRW.
Louisiana state Sen. Cleo Fields (D-14) said LDEQ was "like partners" with the fossil fuel industry.
"My experience of the last 20 years is that state officials consistently cover for the petroleum industry and the polluters," Louisiana Bucket Brigade director Anne Rolfes told HRW.
Yet the U.S. EPA has not adequately fulfilled its mandate to make sure federal laws are enforced, though HRW noted the agency was hampered by underfunding and hostile court rulings. While the Biden administration has made more of an emphasis on environmental justice, its EPA dropped an investigation into whether or not LDEQ and the Louisiana Department of Health had violated Title VI of the US Civil Rights Act by disproportionately exposing Black residents to pollution.
In an example of the difficulties facing Cancer Alley residents, a Louisiana appeals court on Friday upheld air permits for a proposed Formosa Plastics plant in the area, which would be the largest of its kind in the U.S., as The Guardian reported. Then, on Tuesday, a federal judge in Louisiana blocked the EPA from enforcing Title VI requirements going forward.
In Texas, meanwhile, Amnesty found that, in the past few years, the Texas Commission on Environmental Quality (TCEQ) penalized less than 3% of incidents in which a plant had exceeded its permitted level of pollution and that the fines it does issue are under the maximum amount and usually not high enough to dissuade the companies from reoffending.
"A company gets fined less than one person who's affected by it would spend on medical bills… it's very unfair," resident Carolyn Stone told Amnesty.
A 2022-23 review of the agency said its commissioners were "reluctant regulators" who largely allowed the industry to monitor itself.
"There is no effective regulatory deterrent to prevent these firms harming people, which they are doing with near impunity," Khambay said in a statement. "The current system is stacked in favor of the companies and against the people they harm. The human rights abuses related to the petrochemicals industry worldwide are often staggeringly harmful. This must and can change."
'The End of Fossil Fuels'
Both reports point out that the pollutants harming the residents of Cancer Alley and the Houston Ship Channel are also helping to destabilize the global climate and expose people around the world to extreme weather and other impacts. Around 150 plants in Cancer Alley were responsible for 66% of Louisiana's 2020 greenhouse gas emissions and released the equivalent of what 140 coal plants would release in a year between 2016 and 2021.
Petrochemical plants also produce plastics, a major environmental pollutant and health hazard. Yet their production is set to double by 2040, Amnesty said.
"It's long past time for governments to uphold their human rights obligations and for these sacrifices to end."
Both HRW and Amnesty said that regulators should stop approving new fossil fuel facilities in polluted areas and instead focus on a just transition to cleaner industries. HRW called for a Federal Fossil Fuel and Petrochemical Remediation and Relocation Plan, whereby companies in Louisiana would work with communities to provide jobs, decommission plants, remediate polluted areas, and offer to pay the moving expenses of residents who wished to relocate. Amnesty pointed out that renewable energy has the potential to employ more than 1.1 million people in Texas in the next quarter-century.
"I would like to see the end of fossil fuels," Lavigne told HRW. "If that's going to make me live a longer life, breathe clean air, drink clean water, they should shut them down."
HRW also said that Louisiana regulators should stop issuing permits in communities with high levels of pollution and that the EPA should use its Clean Air Act authority to shut down facilities until they can operate without breaking the law. In Texas, Amnesty said that local agencies should increase monitoring and enforcement, and also that the EPA should step in more frequently to enforce federal standards.
"It's long past time for governments to uphold their human rights obligations and for these sacrifices to end," Juhasz said in a statement.
'Major Blow': Trump-Appointed Judge Bars EPA From Enforcing Civil Rights Protections
"Instead of fixing the discriminatory permitting programs that have created sacrifice zones like Cancer Alley, Louisiana is fighting tooth and nail to keep them in place," said one advocate.
Pallbearers carry a coffin representing Cancer Alley victims during an October 25, 2022 march and rally in Washington, D.C.
(Photo: Eman Mohammed/Survival Media Agency/flickr)COMMONDREAMS
Jan 24, 2024
A ruling in Louisiana by a federal judge appointed by former Republican President Donald Trump will make it even harder for communities to fight environmental racism and the establishment of "sacrifice zones," said one advocacy group on Tuesday.
U.S. District Court Judge James Cain, Jr., appointed in 2018, ruled in favor of Louisiana eight months after GOP Attorney General Jeff Landry sued the Environmental Protection Agency (EPA), aiming to stop the Biden administration from opening investigations into violations of Title VI under the Civil Rights Act of 1964.
Title VI prohibits recipients of federal funds from discriminating against state residents based on race and national origin, and allows residents to petition the EPA arguing that state agencies have intentionally discriminated or disparately impacted a particular community.
In the U.S. District Court for the Western District of Louisiana, Cain ruled that Title VI requirements amount to “government overreach” and said in the decision that “pollution does not discriminate.”
While pollution itself does not discriminate against communities, numerous studies have shown the impact of environmental injustice and racism.
One paper published in 2022 by Tulane Environmental Law Clinic researchers found that communities of color face 7-21 times the amount of pollution that white communities experience and pointed to so-called “Cancer Alley”—an 85-mile stretch in Louisiana where petrochemical companies have built dozens of plants and medical experts have seen a disproportionate number of cancer cases—as an area that’s faced environmental injustice as a result of the state’s permitting process.
As Prismreported last week, the EPA was close to holding the Louisiana Department of Environmental Quality (LDEQ) accountable for putting the historically Black community of St. John the Baptist Parish at risk last year by greenlighting pollution-causing petrochemical plants near the town in Cancer Alley—but it halted a year-long investigation last June, a month after Landry filed his lawsuit.
At the time, Mary Hampton of Concerned Citizens of St. John told Earthjustice, which had called for the EPA's investigation on behalf of residents, that the agency's decision made residents "feel like our lives don't matter."
"We are suffering, we are dying," said Hampton. "That's a hard thing to deal with."
On Tuesday, Sam Sankar, senior vice president of programs for Earthjustice, said that Cain's injunction will allow Louisiana to continue allowing companies to pollute Cancer Alley without considering "disparate environmental impacts."
"Instead of fixing the discriminatory permitting programs that have created sacrifice zones like Cancer Alley, Louisiana is fighting tooth and nail to keep them in place," said Sankar. "The public health crisis in St. John the Baptist Parish shows us why we need Title VI: EPA needs to be able to use our civil rights laws to stop states from running permitting programs that perpetuate environmental injustice."
As The Intercept reported last week, the EPA also backed away from another Title VI case last year—one alleging that the Michigan Department of Environment, Great Lakes, and Energy had violated the law by issuing permits to an asphalt plant in a low-income, majority-Black town where residents were also at increased risk for asthma.
"Experts say that the EPA appears to be shying away from certain Civil Rights Act investigations in states that are hostile to environmental justice, due to fears that Landry's suit or similar efforts could make their way to the conservative Supreme Court," wrote Delaney Hogan.
On Tuesday, Hogan suggested Cain's ruling makes it more likely that the Supreme Court could eventually "crush the EPA's ability to pursue environmental justice."
"I think we can all see where this is headed," said Hogan.
'Jaw-Dropping' Analysis Shows Fossil Fuel Companies to Burn Through 62% of Carbon Budget
One researcher called the findings proof that a decarbonization pact signed by the companies "is little more than a forgery."
Gas prices are displayed at an Exxon gas station on July 29, 2022, in Houston, Texas.
(Photo: Brandon Bell/Getty Images)
OLIVIA ROSANECOMMONDREAMS
Jan 26, 2024
In another high-profile case of "greenwashing," the oil and gas companies that signed a decarbonization pact at last year's 28th United Nations Climate Change Conference have plans that would burn through around 62% of the carbon dioxide that can still be emitted without pushing global temperatures past 1.5°C above preindustrial levels.
The figures come from a Global Witness analysis published Friday, which found that the more than 50 companies that signed the pact would release over 150 billion metric tons of climate pollution into the atmosphere by 2050.
"This analysis, while jaw-dropping, only reinforces what we've long known—that fossil fuel companies will stop at nothing to extract every last drop of profit from the world's remaining fossil reserves, no matter the cost," Friends of the Earth climate coordinator Jamie Peters said in a statement.
The Oil and Gas Decarbonization Charter was launched at COP28 on December 2 by Saudi Arabia and conference president Sultan Ahmed Al Jaber, who also heads the United Arab Emirates' state oil company. In the announcement, Al Jaber called it a "great first step" and said that companies representing more than 40% of global oil production had agreed to reach net-zero by or before 2050, end methane emissions, and stop routine flaring by 2030.
However, the pact has a major loophole, as Global Witness points out: It only covers emissions released by the companies directly, not by the use of their products once they are sold. These "scope 3" emissions represent as much as 90% of the oil and gas industry's total carbon footprint.
"After looking at the detail of this pact, signed to great backslapping by bosses of some of the world's largest polluters, I have only two questions: Who do these people think they are, and how stupid do they think we are?" asked Global Witness senior fossil fuels investigator Patrick Galey in a statement.
"If a child promises to do less than 10% of their homework, they don't get a gold star. So why are oil and gas bosses congratulating themselves for signing up to rules they wrote themselves and which only address 10% of their companies' contribution to the climate crisis?" Galey asked.
"The only way to slash emissions from usage of oil and gas is to cut demand."
Global Witness used data from Rystad Energy to look at the production plans of the pact's signatories—which include major state and private companies such as Saudi Aramco, Al Jaber's Abu Dhabi National Oil Company (ADNOC), ExxonMobil, and Shell—and then calculated the total emissions of those plans through 2050.
It found that the companies would produce 265 billion barrels of oil and 26.7 billion cubic meters of gas by 2050, and that this would result in 156 billion metric tons of carbon dioxide equivalent emissions, or approximately 62% of the remaining carbon budget.
"This pact is little more than a forgery, publicly committing each company to address its outsize contribution to global heating, while privately allowing them to produce and sell billions of barrels of oil and gas for decades more," Galey said.
Of the companies who signed the pact, those with the largest carbon footprints through 2050 were:ADNOC and Saudi Aramco, with plans to emit more than a quarter of the remaining climate budget; and
ExxonMobil, Equinor, TotalEnergies, Eni, and Shell, with plans to emit as much as the European Union does in 15 years.
"You'd think the hottest year in the last 125,000 would be enough to end greenwashing once and for all—but since it wasn't, let's state it plainly. No means no—there's not a way to square 'decarbonization' with fossil fuel expansion," 350.org and Third Act co-founder Bill McKibben said in a statement. "They mean the exact opposite."
The fact that the pact was announced at COP28, along with the high future footprint of ADNOC, calls into question the effectiveness of U.N. climate talks, especially when hosted by major fossil fuel-producing nations like the UAE. This year's COP29 is scheduled to take place in oil and gas-rich Azerbaijan, and will be presided over by a former oil executive.
"COP28 has shown that the profits of fossil fuel companies receive more care than the most affected regions of the world," Luisa Neubauer, climate activist and co-organizer of the Fridays for Future climate strike movement, said in a statement. "Parts of the COP agreement sound like a Christmas present for the fossil fuel lobby. Compared to what is needed in the hottest year in human history, the COP agreement is not even close to enough. The future will lie primarily in the hands of those who resist new coal, oil, and gas projects locally and globally."
Campaigners said that governments must act to phase out fossil fuels.
"This powerful analysis by Global Witness highlights that the operations of the fossil fuel industry make up a tiny proportion of the total carbon emissions from the sector," Cara Jenkinson, the cities manager at climate charity Ashden, said in a statement. "The only way to slash emissions from usage of oil and gas is to cut demand—governments across the world must speed up their electrification plans, with poorer nations being supported to bypass fossil fuel vehicles and ramp up clean renewable energy production."
Galey concluded: "We need a rapid and equitable phaseout of fossil fuels, and fossil fuel bosses must be locked out of climate talks. Everything else is marketing and spin, pure and simple."
Experts Say Israel's 'Buffer Zone' Plan Violates International Law
"Why are they making these explosions other than part of their plan of forced displacement?" asked one human rights advocate regarding Israel's demolition of more than 1,000 buildings in the planned zone.
A picture taken from southern Israel on January 24, 2024 shows destroyed buildings in the Gaza Strip.
(Photo: Jack Guez/AFP via Getty Images)
JULIA CONLEY
Jan 25, 2024COMMONDREAMS
Along with openly flouting the Biden administration's demand that Palestinian territory not be reduced by Israel's bombardment of Gaza, human rights and policy experts on Wednesday said that Israel's efforts to create a so-called "buffer zone" by demolishing buildings near its border structure are a violation of international law.
After satellite imagery and verified online videos have for weeks shown the Israel Defense Forces (IDF) carrying out controlled demolitions of buildings, including some near the Israel-Gaza border, Israeli officials for the first time this week acknowledged they were pushing ahead with clearing border areas of residential and other buildings to create a "buffer zone."
The IDF said it aims to create additional "layers of security" following Hamas' October 7 attack on southern Israel, but with Israel's Channel 12 reporting that 1,100 out of 2,850 buildings in the planned half-mile buffer zone already demolished, experts posited that the clear aim is to further shrink the already densely-populated enclave.
"If the Israeli government wants a buffer zone, it has every right to create one in far larger Israel, but it has no right to seize land in Gaza, squeezing the 2.3 million Palestinians into an even tinier area," said Kenneth Roth, former executive director of Human Rights Watch (HRW).
Israel acknowledged the plans less than a week after videos of one of its most high-profile recent demolitions, that of Israa University, were posted online. The institution was destroyed when the IDF detonated more than 300 mines on the campus—an operation that would have required Israel to "have full control" of the site, one observer noted, suggesting that the military could not have been targeting Hamas as it has repeatedly claimed.
The Washington Post reported Wednesday that it has also verified recent videos showing the demolition of residential buildings about one kilometer from the fence separating Gaza and Israel, including one in which 11 buildings were destroyed at once.
"Civilian properties are protected under international humanitarian law," Basel al-Sourani, an advocacy officer for the Palestinian Center for Human Rights, told the Post. "These houses are empty, and nobody is in them. Why are they making these explosions other than part of their plan of forced displacement?"
"Now with this 1-kilometer buffer they are talking about, and I'm sure it's more, what are we going to do?" he added.
Matt Duss, executive vice president at the Center for International Policy, noted that the Biden administration has previously suggested it would be against the construction of a buffer zone within Gaza's borders, with Secretary of State Antony Blinken saying in November that the U.S. would support "no reduction in the territory of Gaza."
But on Thursday, Al Jazeera reported that the Biden administration's position on the issue is now "subject to some uncertainty," with National Security Council spokesperson John Kirby reiterating that Gaza's territory should not be reduced but Blinken saying the White House may support a buffer zone for some amount of time.
Blinken said on Tuesday that security measures enabling Israelis to return to their homes in southern Israel may be "appropriate."
"If there need to be transitional arrangements to enable that to happen, that's one thing," he said. "But when it comes to the permanent status of Gaza going forward... we remain clear about not encroaching on its territory."
Geoffrey Nice, a former U.N. war crimes prosecutor, toldAl Jazeera that Israel's "landgrab" of farmland near the border which is "crucial to Gaza's economy" is clearly illegal.
"If you want to a demilitarized zone that you're going to fill with landmines, why not have it on the Israeli side and stop people crossing it?" Nice told the outlet. "What they're proposing, effectively and in anyone's interpretation, is occupation."
"But the process has already started," he said. "A large number of buildings have already been flattened. It is unjustified, by any view, under international law."
The Flawed—and Deadly—'War on Terror' Mindset Endures in Israel
If Israel’s U.S.-backed genocide of the Palestinians has revealed anything about the power of discourse, it’s that the war on terror narrative has proven to be remarkably enduring.
Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu shakes hands with Rear Adm. David Saar Salama at the Ashdod Naval Base on October 29, 2023.
(Photo: Office of Benjamin Netanyahu)
MAHA HILAL
Jan 27, 2024TomDispatch
In a New Yorker piece published five days after the attacks of September 11, 2001, American critic and public intellectual Susan Sontag wrote, “Let’s by all means grieve together. But let’s not be stupid together. A few shreds of historical awareness might help us understand what has just happened, and what may continue to happen.” Sontag’s desire to contextualize the 9/11 attacks was an instant challenge to the narratives that President George W. Bush would soon deploy, painting the United States as a country of peace and, most importantly, innocent of any wrongdoing. While the rhetorical strategies he developed to justify what came to be known as the Global War on Terror have continued to this day, they were not only eagerly embraced by Israel in 2001, they also lie at the heart of that country’s justification of the genocidal campaign that’s been waged against the Palestinian people since October 7, 2023.
On September 20, 2001, President Bush delivered a speech to Congress in which he shared a carefully constructed storyline that would justify endless war. The United States, he said, was attacked because the terrorists “hate our freedoms — our freedom of religion, our freedom of speech, our freedom to vote and assemble and disagree with each other.” In that official response to the 9/11 attacks, he also used the phrase “war on terror” for the first time, stating (all too ominously in retrospect): “Our war on terror begins with al-Qaeda, but it does not end there. It will not end until every terrorist group of global reach has been found, stopped, and defeated.”
“Americans are asking,” he went on, “why do they hate us?” And then he provided a framework for understanding the motives of the “terrorists” precluding the possibility that American actions prior to 9/11 could in any way have explained the attacks. In other words, he positioned his country as a blameless victim, shoved without warning into a “post-9/11 world.” As Bush put it, “All of this was brought upon us in a single day — and night fell on a different world, a world where freedom itself is under attack.” As scholar Richard Jackson later noted, the president’s use of “our war on terror” constituted “a very carefully and deliberately constructed public discourse… specifically designed to make the war seem reasonable, responsible, and inherently ‘good.’”
Your Fight Is Our Fight
The day after the 9/11 attacks, then-Prime Minister Ariel Sharon gave a televised address to Israelis, saying that “the fight against terrorism is an international struggle of the free world against the forces of darkness who seek to destroy our liberty and way of life. Together, we can defeat these forces of evil.” Sharon, in other words, laid out Israel’s fight in the same binary terms the American president would soon use, a good-versus-evil framework, as a way of rejecting any alternative explanations of those assaults on the Pentagon and the World Trade Center in New York City that killed almost 3,000 people. That December, Sharon responded to an attack in Jerusalem by two Palestinian suicide bombers by saying that he would launch his own “war on terror… with all the means at our disposal.”
On the day of Bush’s September 20th speech, Benjamin Netanyahu, then working in the private sector after holding various positions within the Israeli government, capitalized on the president’s narrative by asserting Israel’s enthusiastic support for the United States. In a statement offered to the House Government Reform Committee, emphasizing his country’s commitment to fighting terrorism, Netanyahu stated, “I am certain that I speak on behalf of my entire nation when I say today, we are all Americans — in grief, as in defiance.”
Israel’s “9/11”
Just as the 9/11 attacks “did not speak for themselves,” neither did Hamas’s attacks on Israel on October 7, 2023. In remarks at a bilateral meeting with President Biden 11 days later, however, Prime Minister Netanyahu strategically compared the Hamas attacks to the 9/11 ones, using resonant terms for Americans that also allowed Israel to claim its own total innocence, as the U.S. had done 22 years earlier. In that vein, Netanyahu stated, “On October 7th, Hamas murdered 1,400 Israelis, maybe more. This is in a country of fewer than 10 million people. This would be equivalent to over 50,000 Americans murdered in a single day. That’s 20 9/11s. That is why October 7th is another day that will live in infamy.”
But 9/11 doesn’t live in infamy because it actually caused damage of any long-lasting or ultimate sort to the United States or because it far exceeded the scale of other acts of global mass violence, but because it involved “Americans as the victims of terror, not as the perpetrators” and because of the way those leading the country portrayed it as uniquely and exceptionally victimized. As Professor Jackson put it, 9/11 “was immediately iconicized as the foremost symbol of American suffering.” The ability to reproduce that narrative endlessly, while transforming 9/11 into a date that transcended time itself, served as a powerful lesson to Israel in how to communicate suffering and an omnipresent existential threat that could be weaponized to legitimize future violent interventions. By framing the Hamas attacks on October 7th similarly as a symbol of ultimate suffering and existential threat, Israel could do the same.
Giving Israel further license for unfettered state violence under the guise of a war on terror, in remarks in Tel Aviv President Biden stated that “since this terrorist attack… took place, we have seen it described as Israel’s 9/11. But for a nation the size of Israel, it was like 15 9/11s. The scale may be different, but I’m sure those horrors have tapped into… some kind of primal feeling in Israel, just like it did and felt in the United States.”
It bears noting that while Israel quickly deployed the rhetoric of the War on Terror on and after October 7th, weaponizing the language of terror was not in and of itself novel in that country. For example, in 1986, Benjamin Netanyahu edited and contributed to a collection of essays called Terrorism: How the West Can Win that spoke to themes similar to those woven into the U.S. war on terror narrative. However, in responding to Hamas’s attacks, Israel’s discursive strategy was both to capitalize on and tether itself to the meanings the U.S. had popularized and made pervasive about the 9/11 attacks.
“Surprise” Attacks
The power of that “primal feeling” was intensified by the way both the United States and Israel feigned “surprise” about their countries being targeted, despite evidence of impending threats both were privy to. That evidence included a President’s Daily Brief that Bush received on August 6, 2001, entitled “Bin Laden Determined to Strike in US,” and the possession by Israeli officials of a Hamas battle plan document detailing the potential attack a year in advance.
Just as Bush referred to the 9/11 attacks as a surprise, despite several years of conflict with al-Qaeda and Osama bin Laden (who clearly stated that U.S. violence in Muslim-majority countries was the motivation for the attacks), Netanyahu claimed the same after the Hamas attacks, ignoring Israel’s longtime chokehold on Gaza (and Palestinian areas of the West Bank). Addressing Israeli citizens on the day of the attack, Netanyahu asserted that “we are at war, not in an operation or in rounds, but at war. This morning, Hamas launched a murderous surprise attack against the State of Israel and its citizens.”
By portraying terrorism as a grave, unparalleled, and unpredictable danger, both the United States and Israel framed their brutal wars and over-responses as necessary actions. Even more problematically, both tried to evade accountability for future acts by characterizing themselves as coerced into the wars they then launched. Netanyahu typically asserted on October 30th that, “since October 7th, Israel has been at war. Israel did not start this war. Israel did not want this war. But Israel will win this war.”
All of these tactics are meant to create and perpetuate “an extremely narrow set of ‘political truths’” (or untruths, if you prefer). Whether ingrained in the public consciousness by the United States or Israel, such “truths” were meant to dictate just who the “terrorists” were (never us, of course), their irrational, barbaric, uncivilized nature, and so, why intervention — full-scale war, in fact — was necessary. An additional rhetorical goal was to position the dominant narrative, whether American or Israeli, as a “natural interpretation” of reality, not a constructed one.
Israel has relied on such a framework to consistently peddle a depoliticized narrative of Hamas, which roots any violence committed in a fundamental and irrational opposition to the state of Israel and inherent hatred of the Jewish people as opposed to the longstanding regime of occupation, apartheid, and now genocide of Palestinians. Hamas and other non-state actors are, of course, always portrayed as “driven by fanaticism,” as Scott Poynting and David Whyte note, while state violence, in contrast, is “presented as defensive, responsible, rational, and unavoidable — and not motivated by a particular ideological bias or political choice.”
The Threat of Terrorismand Moral Equivalencies
Terrorist violence in these years has regularly been weaponized in the service of state violence by conceiving of its threat as almost unimaginably dangerous. Both the United States and Israel have represented terrorism as “catastrophic to democracy, freedom, civilization and the American [or Israeli] way of life,” and “a threat commensurate with Nazism and Communism.”
As with Bush’s argument that the 9/11 attackers were the “heirs of all the murderous ideologies of the twentieth century” and that “they follow in the path of fascism, and Nazism, and totalitarianism,” Netanyahu urged a mobilization of countries across the world to eliminate Hamas on a similar basis. To this end, he asserted that “just as the civilized world united to defeat the Nazis and united to defeat ISIS, the civilized world must unite to defeat Hamas.”
American officials regularly frame U.S. violence as a function of the country’s inherent goodness and superiority. For example, in September 2006, responding to criticisms of the moral basis for the War on Terror, Bush said at a press conference: “If there’s any comparison between the compassion and decency of the American people and the terrorist tactics of extremists, it’s flawed logic… I simply can’t accept that. It’s unacceptable to think that there’s any kind of comparison between the behavior of the United States of America and the action of Islamic extremists who kill innocent women and children to achieve an objective.”
By the time Bush made those remarks, the invasions of and wars in both Afghanistan and Iraq, as well as other “counterterrorism” operations across the globe, had been underway for years. Given the staggering number of civilians already killed, drawing a demarcation line between the United States and “Islamic extremists” based on the slaughter of innocent women and children should hardly have been possible (though when it came to those killed by Americans, the term of the time was the all-too-dehumanizing “collateral damage”).
No stranger to weaponizing the language of moral equivalencies, Netanyahu has repeatedly highlighted the victims of Hamas’s attacks in order to distinguish them from Israel’s. For example, he described Hamas as “an enemy that murders children and mothers in their homes, in their beds. An enemy that kidnaps the elderly, kids, youths. Murderers who massacre and slaughter our citizens, our kids, who just wanted to have fun on the holiday.” But like the United States, Israel has killed women and children on a strikingly greater scale than the non-state actors they were comparing their violence to. In fact, in the last 100 days of Israel’s war, it is believed to have killed more than 10,000 children (and those figures will only rise if you include children who are now likely to die from starvation and disease in a devastated Gaza).
Birds of Violent Rhetorical Feathers Flock Together
In a White House briefing a week after the Hamas attacks, Biden said, “These guys — they make al-Qaeda look pure. They’re pure — they’re pure evil.” Then, nearly three weeks after those October 7th attacks, in a meeting with French President Emmanuel Macron, Netanyahu asserted that his country was in “a battle” with “the Axis of Evil led by Iran, Hezbollah, Hamas, Houthis, and their minions.” More than two decades earlier, President George W. Bush had uttered similar words, referring to Iran, Iraq, and North Korea as an “axis of evil,” who were “arming to threaten the peace of the world.”
In each case, the “evil” they were referring to was meant to communicate an inherent and innate desire for violence and destruction, irrespective of the actions of the United States or Israel. As the saying goes, evil is as evil does.
As scholar Joanne Esch has noted, “If they hate us for who we are rather than what we do, nothing can be gained from reexamining our own policies.” In other words, no matter what we do, the United States and Israel can insist on a level of moral superiority in taking on such battles as the harbingers of good. And it was true that, positioned as a battle of good versus evil, the all-American war on terror did, for a time, gain a kind of “divine sanction,” which Israel has used as a blueprint.
In response to the recent International Court of Justice complaint submitted by South Africa charging Israel with genocide, a defiant Prime Minister Netanyahu tweeted that his country would continue its Gazan war until it was over. He also mentioned a meeting he had with U.S. Secretary of State Antony Blinken in which he told him, “This is not just our war — it is also your war.”
If Israel’s U.S.-backed genocide of the Palestinians has revealed anything about the power of discourse, it’s that the war on terror narrative has proven to be remarkably enduring. This has enabled both states to make use of specific schemas that were constructed and deployed in Washington to explain the 9/11 attacks — and now to justify a genocidal war in a world where “terror” is seen as an eternal threat to “liberal democracies.”
In his book Narrative and the Making of US National Security, Donald Krebs argues that, when it comes to politics, language “neither competes with nor complements power politics: it is power politics.” In this vein, it remains critical to subvert such destructive and pervasive narratives so that countries like the United States and Israel can no longer maintain “necropolitical” rule domestically or globally — that is, in the words of Cameroon historian and political theorist Achille Mmembe, “the power and the capacity to dictate who may live and who must die.”
© 2023 TomDispatch.com
MAHA HILAL
Dr. Maha Hilal is a researcher and writer on institutionalized Islamophobia and author of the book Innocent Until Proven Muslim: Islamophobia, the War on Terror, and the Muslim Experience Since 9/11. Her writings have appeared in Vox, Al Jazeera, Middle East Eye, Newsweek, Business Insider, and Common Dreams among others. She is the founding Executive Director of the Muslim Counterpublics Lab, an organizer with Witness Against Torture and a Council member of the School of the Americas Watch. She earned her doctorate in May 2014 from the Department of Justice, Law and Society at American University in Washington, D.C. She received her Master's Degree in Counseling and her Bachelor's Degree in Sociology from the University of Wisconsin-Madison.
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