Muslim babies as "future terrorists" – the latest barbarous idiom produced by the ‘war on terror’ and its concomitant Islamophobia. Credit for the phrase goes to Rep. Louie Gohmert (R-TX), who recently deployed it to outline, before the House no less, the threat posed to the American "way of life" by insurgent Muslim infants:
Gohmert’s colleague, Texas state Rep. Debbie Riddle (R – District 150), similarly took to CNN to warn viewers of the threat posed by "little terrorists", an "organized criminal element" bent on destroying the US.
Of course, the concept of weaponised babies is hardly new. Islamophobes like Christopher Caldwell have long warned gravely of the "demographic time bomb" set to explode Europe, while in Israel Palestinian citizens are prevented from living with their families for fear of upsetting the "demographic balance". As MK Zahalka recently joked, in the fevered Israeli imagination, "Palestinian romance" involves two Palestinians getting together and plotting to undermine the country’s "demography". In the same vein, sociologist Gunnar Heinsohn has pleaded with the ‘West’ to stop funding "extreme demographic armament" in Gaza – a technical term referring to the phenomenon of Palestinians having children.
And the infant offensive does not, of course, stop there. Consider for example the Palestinians’ use of what Prof. Alan Dershowitz calls the "dead children strategy", in which Palestinian children trick the State of Israel into killing them in order to besmirch its image abroad. Thus the following, sickening caption in the Israeli newspaper Ynet:
Being born and getting killed: both strategies deployed to devastating effect by Palestinian children.
Portraying "enemy" infants as proto-terrorists has obvious propaganda value: if what you thought was an innocent baby is in fact a weapon with a human face, you will be less likely to protest when it is killed. Murder becomes self-defence. The slaughter of children becomes disarmament.
But there is an extension that’s worth noting: not only are we supposed to view ‘their’ children as latent terrorists; we’re supposed to believe that this is the only value they hold for their parents as well. Where Palestinian children are not treasured as weapons to be expended in combat, they are not valued by their families at all. Thus the claim, conventionally attributed to Golda Meir, that "[p]eace will come when the Arabs will love their children more than they hate us". Indeed, the contention that ‘they don’t mind being killed’ is a pretty conventional imperial trope. A British commander observed, during the British occupation of Iraq during the 1920s, that Iraqi "[Sheikhs]... do not seem to resent ... that women and children are accidently killed by bombs", while Gen. Westmoreland was reassured that Vietnamese families don’t care when their children are mowed down by gunfire or incinerated by napalm, since "[t]he Oriental doesn't put the same high price on life as does a Westerner. Life is plentiful. Life is cheap in the Orient."
The third propaganda effect of rendering ‘enemy’ infants and children as combatants-in-disguise is that if even their children are dangerous and bent on violence, then clearly we are dealing with a truly savage people and must adjust our methods accordingly. This is the meaning of the movie Rules of Engagement, produced in cooperation with the Department of Defense:
The US is currently experiencing increasing anti-Muslim sentiment, manifested not least in nationwide campaigns against mosques, such as the so-called ‘Ground Zero mosque’ in New York. As the New York Times reports, "in all of the recent conflicts" surrounding the construction of mosques, "opponents have said their problem is Islam itself". Islamophobia is hardly new, but what is different, according to one observer, "is the heat, the volume, the level of hostility". It is in this context that Gohmert and Riddle floated the notion of Muslim "terrorist babies".
Needless to say, neither representative has produced any evidence to substantiate their claims, citing anonymous "former FBI officials" and refusing to provide further details upon request (the only former FBI official to have publicly commented on the issue, as far as I’m aware, dismissed it as "absurd"). But then, demands for evidence are beside the point. Where you see babies, they see "little terrorists"; where you see dead children, they discern a dead children strategy; where you see a grieving mother, they snort at the poor production values of "Pallywood"; where you see a loving family, they identify a terrorist cell. Portraying infants and children as threats isn’t about anything they’ve done – how could it be? - it’s about what, and who, they are. It’s about existential threat - existence as threat. The genocidal implications of this logic – of phrases like "demographic armament" and "terrorist babies" – are not difficult to discern.
Published at New Left Project