Fire With Water

Drone strike in Afghanistan kills five children. Greenwald: "If one of the relatives of the children just killed in Afghanistan decided to attack the U.S., what would they be called by the U.S. media? Terrorists. Primitive, irrational, religious fanatics beyond human decency."

A very good example of the role of cultural privilege in classifying violence. 

States and their militaries tend to be much more quickly absolved for transgressions against civilians in public perception. And when you toss in an occupied population at odds with an occupier of starkly different cultures to begin with, you get all types of incongruity.

watanafghanistan:

This happens over and over and over again, and there are several points worth making here beyond the obvious horror:

1) To the extent these type of incidents are discussed at all — and in American establishment media venues, they are most typically ignored — there are certain unbending rules that must be observed in order to retain Seriousness credentials. No matter how many times the U.S. kills innocent people in the world, it never reflects on our national character or that of our leaders. Indeed, none of these incidents convey any meaning at all. They are mere accidents, quasi-acts of nature which contain no moral information (in fact, the NYT article on these civilian deaths, out of nowhere, weirdly mentioned that “in northern Afghanistan, 23 members of a wedding celebration drowned in severe flash flooding” — as though that’s comparable to the U.S.’s dropping bombs on innocent people). We’ve all been trained, like good little soldiers, that the phrase “collateral damage” cleanses and justifies this and washes it all way: yes, it’s quite terrible, but innocent people die in wars; that’s just how it is. It’s all grounded in America’s central religious belief that the country has the right to commit violence anywhere in the world, at any time, for any cause.

At some point — and more than a decade would certainly qualify — the act of continuously killing innocent people, countless children, in the Muslim world most certainly does reflect upon, and even alters, the moral character of a country, especially its leaders. You can’t just spend year after year piling up the corpses of children and credibly insist that it has no bearing on who you are.

Continued here