Dehumanisation of the ‘uncivilised’, ‘savage’, and ‘barbaric’ is a growing Western trope. In 2012, New York City was fancily decorated with city-wide banners that read ‘In Any War Between the Civilised Man and the Savage, Support the Civilised Man. Support Israel, Defeat Jihad.’ This was Israel’s version of an immoral legacy that America and Britain has used extensively in Iraq. This report draws parallels between them.
Before we delve into the sad linguistics of these two conflicts, I would like to address the concept of ‘Defence’. I cannot do so without quoting the famous Professor Robert L. Ivie (an American Academic) who frequently points out that military actions from the United States, throughout its history, have been portrayed in the Western media as “defensive, involuntary, and reluctant.”
The main warmaking body of the United States is of course, the ‘Department of Defence’. Similarly, the Israeli Army is always parroted as a ‘Defense Force’. These titles imply that all massacres from these two armies are done in self-defence, against aggressors who are always “deliberate, willful, and unprovoked.”
So let’s use this definition as we explore the dehumanisation of Arabs in Iraq.
Dehumanisation of Iraqi Arabs
Discussing the maltreatment and rapes of prisoners in an Iraqi prison by U.S. personnel to the Los Angeles Times in 2003, one U.S. official said: “There was a mentality that the people we’re in charge of are not humans.”
Not humans is the keyword. Most normal people cannot stand the idea of killing or torturing another human. To avoid violence is to be human. But when your soldiers do not want to kill innocent people, the devious mind adopts strategies to ‘dehumanise’ the ‘enemies’. Turn them into objects. Garbage to be stomped. Trash to be burnt. A ‘savage’ deserves to be put out of its misery. This is how Arabs were seen by U.S. invaders in Iraq, and I’ll present my evidence below.
We’ve just learned that we’ve killed over 1 million Iraqis since the invasion; we had already killed a million Iraqis before the invasion throughout the 90s through bombings and sanctions.
When I got to Iraq in 2003, I learned a new word – “Haji.” Haji was the enemy. Haji was every Iraqi. He was not a person, or a father, or a teacher, or a worker.
Mike Prysner, U.S. Iraq War Veteran, 2009.
While the Western media cries foul on any critique of Zionism as ‘anti-semitism’ and its headlines hide Israel as the perpetrator of a genocide in Gaza, there were barely any calls for protection of Muslims. Haji, for those unaware, is a honorific title for a Muslim who has done a pilgrimage to Mecca. A Haji is treated with utmost respect in Muslim societies, and the Americans knew well that they were cruelly dehumanising Islamic traditions.
I began to hear new words like “towel head,” “camel jockey” and – the most disturbing – “sand nigger.” These words did not initially come from my fellow soldiers, but from my superiors – my platoon sergeant, my company first sergeant, my battalion commander. All the way up the chain of command, viciously racist terms were suddenly acceptable.
Those were the words they used when they were incinerating civilian convoys. Those were the words they used when this government deliberately targeted the civilian infrastructure, bombing water supplies knowing that it would kill hundreds of thousands of children.
Mike Prysner, U.S. Iraq War Veteran, 2009.
Another U.S. veteran, Corporal Stephen Funk, reflected that U.S. Marine training drills would include the chants “Die, fucking raghead, die.” And when departing for missions, the leaders would yell, “Let’s go burn some turbans!“
They basically jam into your head: ‘This is haji! This is haji!’ You totally take the human being out of it and make them into a video game… If you start looking at them as humans, and stuff like that, well God, how are you going to kill them?
Jody Casey, U.S. Iraq War Veteran.
Dehumanization is a big thing with the troops over there. We’re taught not to connect with the Iraqi people. We’re taught not to view them as human beings, that’s why it’s common in the military to call the Iraqi people hajis, similar to the Vietnam where the Vietnamese people were called Gooks, because they didn’t want to connect with them.
Michael Blake, U.S. Iraq War Veteran
The number is not important to me. I only wish I had killed more. Not for bragging rights, but because I believe the world is a better place without savages out there taking American lives. Everyone I shot in Iraq was trying to hurt Americans or Iraqis loyal to the new government.
Chris Kyle, the infamous American Sniper that Hollywood adored
I like to think of myself as a ‘somewhat’ brave person, but even I don’t have the heart to comment on testimonies from U.S. war veterans on the hate displayed by U.S. soldiers in the Middle East. In the following quotes, you will find testimonies submitted by the ‘Iraq Veterans Against War’ (IVAW) in the Winter Soldier and Rehumanisation events. For those interested in reading more, direct link to the study is shared.
Try to imagine yourself tonight, as you sleep warm in your bed with your wife, your children in the next room, 2:00 am your door is kicked in and men are screaming as they kick open your bedroom door, screaming a language you don’t understand, they’re pointing machine guns at your face as they drag you by your hair from your bed slamming your face down onto the ground, putting their boots on the back of your neck and smashing your face harder into the concrete floor.
Your struggle to protect your family and your home is futile, as you are blindfolded and handcuffed so tight that you lose feeling in your hands within minutes.
All you know is you can hear your screaming wife and children crying for help and you are too useless to protect them. You were not on a list of suspected terrorists. You were not on a list of known terrorists, in fact, you completely supported the US coming into your country and promising freedom and prosperity. You are simply a man in a house, on a street, that my platoon decided to search.
When your blindfold is finally released, the men have left your home, it’s destroyed. Your wife and children are huddled in a corner defenseless and crying. Every drawer in your home is thrown, the contents broken, soiled, your bed has been urinated on, your wife’s panties are glued to the wall, maybe a family heirloom is missing, or other objects stolen, the floor is wet with fresh chewing tobacco spit, and you vainly try to tell your family it will be okay, and never happen again, but in your heart you know all the while your chances are, it probably will.
Ryan Endicott, USMC Veteran of Iraq War
On April 18, 2006, I had my first confirmed kill. He was an innocent man. I don’t know his name. I call him “the Fat Man.” During the incident he walked back to his house, and I shot him in front of his friend and father. The first round didn’t kill him after I’d hit him in his neck. Afterwards, he started screaming and looked right into my eyes. I looked at my friend I was on post with, and I said, “Well I can’t let that happen.”
I took another shot and took him out….We were all congratulated after we had our first kills, and that happened to have been mine. My company commander personally congratulated me, as he did everyone else in our company. This is the same individual who had stated that whoever gets their first kill by stabbing them to death will get a four day pass when we return from Iraq.
Jon Turner, USMC Veteran of Iraq War
I knew my time had come. As I laughed, I ran, this was everything I had hoped for. My chance to kill. I didn’t care how or who, but someone was going to die today, and I was going to be a part of the gun club, which I so cherished. From that moment forward, our efforts became more intense, we began getting intelligence of suspected terrorist safe houses, weapons caches, we would gear up, pump our death metal and pump each other up comparing body counts, telling each other, ‘It’s only a matter of time before we get another.’
We knew every way to walk right around the rules of engagement. Rules of engagement—what a joke! To us, the rules of engagement were not rules at all, but merely words on a piece of paper, somewhere printed for the sole purpose of protecting officers if we grunts actually got caught.
Ryan Endicott, USMC Veteran of Iraq War
Oh at that time, when we first got down there you could basically kill anyone that you wanted, I mean it was that easy, you didn’t even have to get off and dig a hole or anything like that, all you had to do was having something there for a picture, I mean we were driving down the road at 3 in the morning, there was a guy along the side of the road, shoot him, throw a shovel off, there you go.
Jody Casey, U.S. Iraq War Veteran
People made videos to send home to their friends and family to brag. They were used to build morale, to say that killing is right, death is right, dead Iraqis are a great thing, and that’s wrong…This is somebody’s brother, this is somebody’s husband, this is somebody’s son, and this is somebody’s cousin.
Kristopher Goldsmith, US Army Iraq War Veteran
One time our patrol, many a times we would swerve to actually try to hit people and kids, and one of our drivers missed and he opened his door and he hit this child with his door and these doors are plated with a lot of armor. They’re really heavy. Just to pick up the door by itself, it almost takes two men to do it, just to put the door onto the hinge, and these doors are just really heavy, and a moving vehicle opening this door, swinging it out and hitting this kid, um, I’m sure that kid must have died. And I was in the truck, I was on the gun on the truck behind the truck that did it, and we finally pulled up the base where we were headed to, we were on an escort mission, and uh, the TC came around and was screaming and yelling at the kid [driver] who did it, and I was like ‘Thank God,’ you know, something is being done, and uh, the kid [driver] was left alone and he’s pissed off that he got yelled at, and I was asking him about it and he said that he got in trouble because he endangered himself and his crew by opening the door and there could have been a possible IED.
An unidentified U.S. Iraq war veteran speaking at IVAW.
Soon we began to bring candy in our bags and the guys up in the turret of the Bradleys would throw it out the sides of the vehicle. The kids all rushed to the sides of the vehicle and hung out and fought for the candy. It was billed as a gesture of goodwill. There was also another motive: If the kids were around our vehicles, the bad guys wouldn’t attack. We used the kids as human shields.
Scott Ewing, US Army Iraq War Veteran
There were other testimonies of former U.S. soldiers as well, but I think the point has been made. I don’t need to tell you what to think here. It takes great courage to stand up and tell the truth as these soldiers did, because without their testimonies, the Iraqi victims would forever be crying to a Western-dominated world that would never believe them. The U.S. military fought tooth and nail to hide evidence of the Haditha massacre in 2005, where U.S. soldiers executed little girls cowering in their bedroom.
You’d think the Western world would learn from its mistakes, that it would believe that Iraqi citizens weren’t lying about being massacred. But no lessons were ever learnt. In fact, movies like ‘American Sniper‘ placed these murderers on a holy pedestal. Hollywood loves making movies where Arabs are dehumanised, like the scene where a ‘terrorist’ woman shows a grenade to the American Sniper.
Why do I say that no lesson has been learnt? Because these cold-blooded massacres, the casual bombings, the brushing aside of Arab deaths, they have all only been amplified. One only needs to view media coverage on Israel’s ongoing genocide and famine in Gaza to know where Western values stand today.
Dehumanisation of Palestinian Arabs
The U.S. government has been Israel’s greatest asset in supporting the current genocide in Gaza, having delivered more than 50,000 tons of military equipment to Israel. The two countries share an awfully one-sided relationship, where many experts say that Israeli lobby controls the entire U.S. government.
Before I proceed to the ‘language’ part of this article, I’d like to remind the readers to scope of Israeli atrocities: famine, beheaded infants, bombing of schools and hospitals, rape camps, and use of human shields. We’re at a sad, despicable stage of Western hypocrisy where I don’t even need to refer to a specific incident anymore. Since there are so many, I can simply enter a keyword on Google and have an ample count of the latest reported atrocities, fresher than the bread I get in the morning.
We are fighting human animals and we are acting accordingly.
Israeli Defence Minister, Yoav Gallant
You either stand with Israel or you stand with terrorism.
Israeli Defence Force
Anyone that is pro-Palestinian is pro-Hamas.
U.S. congresswoman Majorie Taylor Greene (R-Georgia)
I should mention that U.S. politicians conflate Hamas with ‘terrorism’. They all conveniently forget that Hamas’s fight for freedom draws parallels with how Zionist terror groups attacked, bombed, and massacred Palestinians in the 1930s and 1940s to create Israel. My blog is dedicated to documenting Zionist atrocities, including historical evidence of Zionist terror attacks from 1937 to 1948 on innocent Jews, Muslims, and Christians.
“We need a disproportionate response … If all the captives are not returned immediately, turn the strip into a slaughterhouse. If a hair falls from their head – execute security prisoners. Violate any norm, on the way to victory,”
Israeli ‘Journalist’ David Mizrahy Verthaim
“We are in a religious war here. I’m with Israel. Do whatever the hell you have to do to defend yourself. Level the place,”
U.S. Senator Lindsay Graham (R-South Carolina).
Arabs (or let’s be honest – Muslims) are just that. Animals to culled, who deserve no explanation, no opportunity to live, only carpet bombing.
There are no such things as Palestinians.
Israeli Prime Minister Golda Meir, 1969
[Palestinians are] beasts walking on two legs.
Israeli Prime Minister Menachem Begin, 1982, the man who executed the Deir Yassin massacre.
[Palestinians are] drugged cockroaches in a bottle.
IDF Chief of Staff Raphael Eitan, 1983
[Palestinians are] people who do not belong to our continent, to our world, but actually belong to a different galaxy.
Israeli President Moshe Katsav, 2001
[Palestinians are] the enemies of humanity.
Israeli Prime Minister and ‘Butcher of Beirut’ Ariel Sharon, 2004
Treating Arabs as less-than-humans is a fact of life in Israel. In fact, Israeli state and parents indoctrinate their own children to not view Arabs as humans, but as inferiors. In 2012, Israeli children were invited by their Army to draw anti-Arab cartoons and messages on artillery shells that were used to kill civilians in Lebanon. When you ask a typical child of what they want be when they grow up, they’ll share dreams of being pilots or doctors. Israeli children, however are indoctrinated to say they want to kill Arabs when they grow up.
Israeli and Western media, however happily lies that Arabs raise their children to hate the “Jews”. They even point to a children’s song ‘When We Die as Martyrs‘ as being anti-Israel, where Arab kids sing about being killed by Israeli soldiers. These cries are confirmed today by the UN and Amnesty International.
The indoctrination of Israeli children to hate Arabs is so strong that an Israeli academic and researcher who reviewed “hundreds and hundreds” of Israeli national textbooks meant for children had the following to say:
The Arab with a camel, in an Ali Baba dress. They describe them as vile and deviant and criminal, people who don’t pay taxes, people who live off the state, people who don’t want to develop, the only representation is as refugees, primitive farmers and terrorists. You never see a Palestinian child or doctor or teacher or engineer or modern farmer.
Nurit Peled-Elhanan, Professor of Language and Education, Hebrew University of Jerusalem.
Indeed, such indoctrinated children grow up to have vehemently anti-Arab, racist beliefs. Perhaps this can best be showcased by reports of Israeli tanks deliberating running over Palestinian civilians and children. Go to that report and see the badly mangled, flattened remains of an Arab child that an IDF tank ran over. And tell me if any any parent could bear that sight.
Takeaway
No matter how many massacres, murders, and cold-blooded slaughters that the Western world commits, it will never stand to justice. You’d think that lessons were learnt from decades of Western wars in the Middle East, but Western immorality has only sank lower.
If you’re from the Middle East or are a Muslim, what can you possibly even do? If you raise your voice, you’re automatically a terrorist. The Nazis are infamous for the Jewish holocaust, but the Western world after committing more massacres today is famous for Fish & Chips (more of my blogs) and other delicacies.
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I’m an author & journalist from Islamabad, Pakistan. I explore authentic, credible stories of colonialism and modern-day Imperialism from the West. I also write stories of marginalised, unheard voices that live in slums and indigence. Voices that are rarely heard in the modern literature.
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