Terrorist Diaspora or Indirect Murder?
“This invasive species knows what it is doing: how to remain invisible within the local population while preparing tactics and tools for attacks, and then launching devastating assaults such as those in Paris in November 2015.” — Phillip Seib
The above image provides you with the exact image of that should be brought to mind when trying to figure out who is apart of this invasive species. A dangerous hooded (likely brown) person constantly threatening American’s safety and has now, by the grace of the FBI, been named a member of the ‘coming Terrorist Diaspora’.
Terrorism is a word we’ve all been conditioned to be familiar with. Entire movie plots have managed to create a distinctive story that can be easily replicated and connected to the tragedy that started this all: 9/11. Films like Olympus Has Fallen (2013), and now London Has Fallen (2016) play into this narrative that a there is always going to be a brown person that is threatening the safety of Americans, so that instinctually hearing the word terrorist brings these types of images to mind.
Diaspora however, that’s a newly added term to the concept of American war-culture that allows for the script of terrorism that we know so well to become the government approved profiling methods to now be applied to every living body (American or not) that appears even remotely similar. This is shown best by the satirical film Tere Bin Laden (2010) which gives a twist to the over-used terrorist plot line by manipulated a brown man that can pass as Osama Bin Laden to make a terror threat video, giving a different message to viewers about how easily the ‘terrorist’ script can be employed.
The recent ‘terror’ attack at OSU has provided the prefect context to understand the power of life as bodies with brown skin will all be subjected to suspicion under the pretext that this is being done ‘to keep you and yours safe.’ This power of life concept is Michel Foucault’s idea that maintaining this narrative of constant threat from the brown (migrant) body is the unofficial way of fostering life for perceivably ‘non threatening’ white bodies by disallowing life for the ‘invasive species’.
“I’m a Muslim, it’s what the media portrays me to be. I don’t know what [Americans] are going to think, what’s going to happen. But I don’t blame them, it’s the media that put the picture in their heads…it’s going to make them feel uncomfortable…” — Abdul Razak Artan
Artan, a Somalia refugee, embodies exactly what the members of Terrorist Diaspora are assumed to look like; non-conspicuous, seemingly nonviolent, and most importantly, brown. His death is justifed as a means of maintaining the situation and American safety while the media provides a detailed description of his ‘silent’ crimes to the masses. Being shot before his side of the story could be addressed, yet his words (quoted above) describe exactly what it means to be indirectly ‘exposed to death’ by the sovereign state that creates the markers that members of the state recognize as implications of danger.
In the coming years of the Trump facist inspired regime, it’s important to ally with those who do not conform and to protect those threatened by the soverign in a way that inspires true resistance on the basis that humanity is a privilege of any living body. It’s our time to show that we can survive, and then we will thrive.
