From: subir-AT-casbah.acns.nwu.edu
Subject: Re: Oklahoma Bombing
Date: Sat, 22 Apr 1995 15:47:45 -0500 (CDT)


first, deep sorrow at the loss of life. and then a deeper anger at the loss of
dignity for those of us not blessed with white skins.

if you really have nothing better to do (like i didn't), check out
alt.politics.republicans.usa. folks were laying out elaborate plans as to how
to jump behind 'enemy lines' and decimate iraq all over again. but look also
at the discourse of citizenship: clinton's first response indicated that
american citizens were under threat from non-americans, which is in keeping
with the obsession with 'american lives' lost in ww1, ww2, vietnam and every
other bloodletting episode. when concepts of 'american' are so implicated in
supremacist ideas, i don't think people would be so concerned with white
supremacist movements. (btw, i do not know if the militias are exclusively
white. while the dude from michigan claimed that they were an open group, i
didn't see anyone who was even remotely tanned)

the poor jordanian guy who flew from oklahoma city to chicago and was caught
in london: first reports say that he had wires, fertilizers and so on, then we
heard he had a transistor radio and a video camera, and finally that he had
tweezers and aluminium foil. the nature of comodities becomes so much more
sinister depending upon the national origins of the hands that hold them!
there is not reason to pass 187. xenophobia is all around us anyway.

the reluctance with which most news sources admitted that the midwest, not the
mideast, was where these people came from also is interesting. another point:
first we heard about arab terrorists (coldblooded murderers, i would imagine),
and then we had ted koppel talk about these loonies, ie, people not in control
of their senses. rather like the israeli right wing terrorists who are always
stripped of their mental faculties when they go around killing palestinians,
while, on the other hand, the other side is well organized and so forth.


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