Taken from stevetilford.com
Arendt and Melville's positions on the use of power and privilege in relation to willful ignorance can be demonstrated through the United States' policies and views on Islam and the Middle East.
The presence of American troops in the Middle East has been a point of contention since 1991, when the United States aggressively responded to Saddam Hussein's invasion of Kuwait and immersed itself in the Persian Gulf War. From then on, the United States has plunged itself into Middle Eastern affairs, remaining as a strong military presence in Saudi Arabia and neighboring countries. In 2002, just one year after the September 11th attack, Osama Bin Laden wrote a letter to America, explaining his motivations behind the act of terrorism. Bin Laden claimed that the attack was simply retributive: “As for the first question: Why are we fighting and opposing you? The answer is very simple: Because you attacked us and continue to attack us” [2]. Al Qaeda believed that the United States had to personally suffer the pain that it had inflicted through its prolonged presence in the Middle East, beginning in 1948 with the recognition of the state of Israel and intensified in the early 1990s following the Gulf War.
Frustrated Palestinians believe that Israel is their territory and despise the sovereignty of the state of Israel, as well as the U.S.’s commitment to backing Israel. Bin Laden also claimed that the U.S. “attacked [Muslims] in Somalia; [the U.S.] supported the Russian atrocities against [Muslims] in Chechnya, the Indian oppression against [Muslims] in Kashmir, and the Jewish aggression against [Muslims] in Lebanon” [3]. Although he was aware that American civilians had no direct involvement in these crimes against Islam, “the American people are the ones who choose their government by way of their own free will; a choice which stems from their agreement to its policies. Thus the American people have chosen, consented to, and affirmed their support for…oppression” of Muslims [4]. Americans claim to value the extensive civil rights and liberties that the United States government lends them, especially when compared to the limited freedoms offered by autocratic regimes in third world countries. The system of democracy that the U.S. is founded on offers the privilege of civic involvement to citizens, which in turn gives individuals collective responsibility for the actions of their government.
Few newspapers chose to print this letter, and in the year following the September 11th attacks, the American public desperately searched for answers: “Americans looked toward public broadcasting, radio, and the Internet, to help explain why America was attacked, and the answers were insufficient” [5]. The response citizens received from the media and the federal government was passionate, but missing key information.
Taken from Youtube
The message that Americans received was only half of the truth. While one of Al Qaeda’s objectives was to spread Islam throughout the entire world, it was clear through Bin Laden’s letter that the attack was predominately retributive. Americans believed that Muslims wanted to eradicate Western values, including democracy and Christianity, because Americans enjoy freedoms that Arabs do not. The information given to the public created a culture of willful ignorance within society: “Due to the terrorist attacks on September 11th, the generalized American public entertains the misconception that all aspects of Islam and Muslim culture are harmful and jihad is synonymous to war” [6].
Taken from stephaniesugars.weebly.com
Despite the
factual basis presented to the United States in both concrete military history
and the written word of the leader of Al Qaeda, the United States government
and the American public responded to the attacks with high correspondence,
assuming that Al Qaeda had maximalist goals to destroy the American way of
life. President George W. Bush presented the Patriot Act to Congress, which
passed without contention, and within months American soldiers had entered
Afghanistan. The American people sought justice for perceived violation of their life, liberty, and property, as noted by John Locke. Bin Laden argued that due to the public's involvement in government, or at least the potential involvement offered by a democratic system, individuals have the ability and obligation to collectively overcome the willful ignorance produced by the media and government, which the populace failed to do.
The September 11th attacks were the first time that Islamic terrorism was brought to the forefront of most Americans’ lives. The presence of contention in the Middle East and the use of terrorism by Muslim extremists against fellow Muslims went unacknowledged, as do most acts of violence in the non-Western world. This was demonstrated by the reaction to the Paris attacks in January 2015, and then again in November 2016. All attacks were widely publicized and discussed extensively by every media outlet, and social media sights offered filters to post to stand in solidarity with the victims. Major world monuments were light up with the colors of the Parisian flag, and the slogan “We Are Paris” was spread and adopted by everyone. In contrast, the airport bombing in Istanbul and the funeral bombing in Baghdad in 2016 were barely covered by the media. Bin Laden addressed this in his letter to the U.S.: “You have starved the Muslims of Iraq, where children die every day. It is a wonder that more than 1.5 million Iraqi children have died as a result of your sanctions, and you did not show concern. Yet when 3000 of your people died, the entire world rises and has not yet sat down” [7].
The novel A Journal of the Plague Year by Daniel
Defoe highlights humanity’s ability to ignore calamity until it is immediately
upon them. Wealthy residents of London stayed in their homes on the outskirts
of the city while the plague festered inside the city walls until it was
immediately upon them, and only then did they flee, leaving the impoverished trapped
to die. Americans, while aware of the violence in the Middle East, actively
chose to ignore the repercussions of the presence of the U.S. army until the
violence directly affected them. Millions of Muslims had died due to Western
forces, as Osama Bin Laden described in his letter, yet Americans only recognized the
presence of terrorism when they were immediately faced with it.
Herman Melville, the author of the novel Benito Cereno contends with the issue of willful ignorance through the lens of slavery. Delano, an American captain of the ship Bachelor's Delight, used his privilege as a white slave owner to blind himself to the nuances hinting at a potential slave rebellion. He failed to realize that Benito Cereno was engaged with the African slaves on board, ignorantly believing that Africans lack the intelligence to plan a rebellion: “Could then Don Benito be any way in complicity with the blacks? But they were too stupid” [8]. His willful ignorance of the condition of the slaves prevented him from acknowledging the potential of the slaves to take over the ship. The revelation of a slave uprising came as a shock to Delano, similar to how the September 11th attack sent shockwaves throughout the United States. Americans, with the privilege to perpetuate willful ignorance, failed to see how U.S. foreign policy was destabilizing the Middle East.
Herman Melville, the author of the novel Benito Cereno contends with the issue of willful ignorance through the lens of slavery. Delano, an American captain of the ship Bachelor's Delight, used his privilege as a white slave owner to blind himself to the nuances hinting at a potential slave rebellion. He failed to realize that Benito Cereno was engaged with the African slaves on board, ignorantly believing that Africans lack the intelligence to plan a rebellion: “Could then Don Benito be any way in complicity with the blacks? But they were too stupid” [8]. His willful ignorance of the condition of the slaves prevented him from acknowledging the potential of the slaves to take over the ship. The revelation of a slave uprising came as a shock to Delano, similar to how the September 11th attack sent shockwaves throughout the United States. Americans, with the privilege to perpetuate willful ignorance, failed to see how U.S. foreign policy was destabilizing the Middle East.
Author David
Rosario, author of “The Culture of Calamity”, argued “…dominant political and
economic systems have long relied for their authority and legitimacy on the
presence or threat of calamities and other crises” [9]. The response of the
Bush Administration to the immediate threat of extremists showcased the
authority continuously exercised in the Middle East. The decision to invade Afghanistan
with the backing of the UN and NATO forces provided legitimacy to further
American interests in the area while simultaneously perpetuating the willful
ignorance of the public. This ignorance was both shattered during the September
11th attacks and replaced with a new form of ignorance. The presence
of such violence on American soil brought forth the reality of the
repercussions of U.S. foreign policy during the 1990s. To quote one of the
witnesses of the planes crashing into the World Trade Center: “’To actually be
seeing it not a mile away was very moving, disturbing, unsettling. Its like the
bottom fell out of your own existence somehow’” [10]. While this reality was ground
into the American conscious, the motivation for the attacks was skewed. The
roots of Islamophobia, bigotry, and racism began to spread, as did willful
ignorance of the religion of Islam and non-Western culture.
[2] The Guardian, "Full text: bin Laden's 'letter to America'", November 24, 2002, https://www.theguardian.com/world/2002/nov/24/theobserver.
[3] Ibid.
[4] Ibid.
[4] Ibid.
[5] Kretsch, "The Misconception of Jihad in America", Loyola Marymount University, April 27, 2016, http://digitalcommons.lmu.edu/cgi/viewcontent.cgi?article=1109&context=ulra.
[6] Ibid.
[7] The Guardian, "Full text: bin Laden's 'letter to America'", November 24, 2002, https://www.theguardian.com/world/2002/nov/24/theobserver.
[8] Herman Melville, Benito Cereno (Boston, MA: Bedford/St. Martin's, 2008) 65.
[8] Herman Melville, Benito Cereno (Boston, MA: Bedford/St. Martin's, 2008) 65.
[9] Rozario, "The Culture of Calamity: Disaster and Making of Modern America", (University of Chicago Press, 2007) 7.
[10] Ibid.
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