Last week, De Anza Students For Justice hosted a campus screening of the documentary film “Meeting Resistance”, which primarily consists of interviews conducted with Iraqi insurgents who have taken part in violent attacks on American and other coalition soldiers.
In essence, the film is just a propaganda piece aimed at portraying the violence in Iraq as a heroic uprising against a brutal and illegitimate occupation. To that end, in an apparent attempt to draw a parallel between the Iraqi insurgency and the American War of Independence, SFJ posted fliers throughout campus showing a group of men huddled around a bomb they had just constructed with the words “What would you do if your country was invaded?” written directly above.
Two questions immediately come to mind. First, should we find all of this offensive? You might also wish to phrase this question as, “What the hell were they thinking?” or, rather more succinctly, as a momentary lapse into static catatonia induced by sheer incredulity and shock. The answer to this first question is, unequivocally, yes. Cindy Sheehans aside, one must wonder how insulted and hurt the parents of a soldier killed in Iraq would feel due to the efforts of this event’s organizers.
Second question: Should we find this worrying? Or: Are the views expressed by and during this event politically relevant? Surprisingly, the answer to this question is no. If there is any comfort to be taken from this morally bankrupt display, it is that extremism – by definition – marginalizes itself.
In politics, things tend to get a little kooky at the margins. Go too far to the right, and you’ll find yourself on the left. Go too far to the left, and you’ll find yourself on the right. Politics is less of a spectrum than it is a loop – or, if you prefer, a level of Donkey Kong.
You see, according to the film’s creators, the whole world – including the overwhelming majority of foreign policy experts and historians – has been laboring under the misconception that Iraqi Sunnis, Shias and Kurds are engaged in a civil war stemming from a centuries-old blood conflict.
Actually, they say, these groups are happily united against the shadowy, faceless Westerners who are oppressoring them (note: Western = evil). Thus it follows that if the U.S. simply left Iraq, everything would be sunshine and lollipops. Yes folks, it’s the Age of Aquarius in Baghdad.
Let’s ignore for the moment the question of whether this reasoning is specious, or based on distorted information, or what would most likely occur if U.S. forces left Iraq, and instead ask ourselves, “Hmm… where have we heard this argument before?”
Oh, that’s right. This is the same ridiculous argument used by the grossly inept and dangerously far right Defense Deptartment of Donald Rumsfeld for months after the violence in Iraq began to escalate.
In the end, one could claim that the attendees and organizers of this event have marginalized themselves simply by way of the radical nature of their views – evidenced, for instance, in the slide show aired before the movie that displayed a protest sign stating “I don’t support the troops,” or the man who asked the filmmakers, during the post-screening Q and A session, whether al-Qaeda was an invention of the “U.S. covert intelligence community.”
But a stronger claim would be that when the things you say start to sound a whole lot like the lies your supposed “enemies” have been dishing out, you’re probably not saying anything of import at all.
