Abstract
This chapter uses a critical genealogical approach to illustrate how our contemporary commentaries on “Palestinian” or “Arab” terrorist financing are not the first times that empowered global communities have worried about the need to “dry” up terrorist finance. By pointing out how earlier colonial and imperial powers in the 19th and 20th centuries also worried about both the spread of terrorism and the need to cut off terrorist finance, the author in this chapter displays both the lingering influence of these postcolonial ideologies as well as some of the “Orientalist” politics behind all of this labeling.
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Notes
Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak, “Righting Wrongs,” The South Atlantic Quarterly 103, no. 2/3, (Spring/Summer 2004): 523–581, 527.
Louise Amoore and Marieke de Goede, “Transactions after 9/11: The Banal Face of the Preemptive Strike,” Transactions of the Institute for British Geographers 33 (2008): 173–185.
See, for example, Anthony Anghie, Imperialism, Sovereignty, and the Making of International Law (Cambridge: U.K.: Cambridge University Press, 2005);
Antony Anghie, “Finding the Peripheries: Sovereignty and Colonialism in the Nineteenth Century International Law,” Harvard International Law Journal 40 (1999) 1;
Natsu Taylor Saito, Meeting the Enemy: American Exceptionalism and International Law (New York: New York University Press, 2010).
Tayyab Mahmud, “Colonial Cartographies, Postcolonial Borders, and Enduring Failures of International Law: The Unending Wars Along the Afghanistan-Pakistan Frontier,” Brooklyn Journal of International Law 36 (2011): 10.
See Kathleen Gough, “Colonial Economics in Southeast India,” Economic and Political Weekly March 26, 1977, 541–543, 545–554.
For a historical example of how some of these colonizers worried about the horrors associated with the “thugs,” see Alfred E. Knight, India: From the Aryan Invasion to the Great Sepoy Mutiny (London: S. W. Partridge & Co. 1897)
Thomas Richards, The Imperial Archive: Knowledge and Fantasy of Empire (London: Verso, 1993), 74.
Wendy Larner, quoted in Marieke de Goede, “Risk, Preemption, and Exception in the War on Terrorist Financing,” in Risk and the War on Terror, ed. Louise Amoore and Marieke de Goede (London: Routledge, 2008), 106.
Jean and John Comaroff, “Law and Disorder in the Postcolony,” Social Anthropology 1, no. 2 (2007): 133–152, 133.
For commentary on the material and symbolic importance of the “thugs,” see Kim A. Wagner, Thuggee: Banditry and the British In Early Nineteenth Century India (London: Palgrave Macmillan, 2007);
Mark Brown, “Ethnology and Colonial Administration in Nineteenth-Century British India: The question of Native Crime and Criminality,” The British Journal for the History of Science 36, no. 2 (June 2003): 201–219.
On the vilification and pathologizing of the Mau Mau, see Caroline Elkins, Imperial Reckoning: The Untold Story of Britain’s Gulag in Kenya (New York: Henry Holt and Company, 2005).
The classic text that is filled with essentialist and old imperial and colonial notions regarding the existence of some existential Arab “mind” or “culture” can be found in Raphael Patal, The Arab Mind (New York: Hatherleight Press, 2002).
For an example of how this text is still cited by militarists and some counterterrorists, see Major Michael G. Gonzalez, Combating Deviants: The Saudi Arabian Approach to Countering Extremism and Terrorism (School of Advanced Military Studies, Fort Leavenworth, Kansas, 2009).
Philippe Le Billon, “Fatal Transactions: Conflict Diamonds and the (anti) Terrorist Consumer,” Antipode 39 (2006): 778–801, 781.
See Michael Scharf, “In the Cross Hairs of a Scary Idea,” The Washington Post, last modified April 25, 2004, http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/articles/A38707-2004Apr24.html; Eileen Kaufman, “Deference or Abdication: A Comparison of The Supreme Courts of Israel and the United States in Cases Involving Real or Perceived Threats to National Security,” Washington University Global Studies Law Review 12 (2013): 95.
Christian Enemark, “Drones Over Pakistan: Secrecy, Ethics, and Counterinsurgency,” Asia Security 7, no. 3 (2011): 218–237.
Upendra Bazi, “The ‘War on Terror’ and the ‘War of Terror’: Nomadic Multitudes: Aggressive Incumbents, and the ‘New’ International Law: Prefactory Remarks on Two ‘Wars,’” Osgood Hall Law Journal 43, no. 1/2 (Spring/Summer 2005): 7–9.
Ulrich Beck, “The Silence of Words: On Terror and Law,” Security Dialogue 34 (2003): 255–267, 262.
Michel Foucault, “Nietzsche, Genealogy, History,” in Language, Counter-memory, Practice, ed. Donald F. Bouchard (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1977), 139.
Roger Adelson, London and the Invention of the Middle East: Money, Power, and War, 1902 (New Have: Yale University Press, 1995).
Raymond Hinnebusch, “The Middle East in the World Hierarchy: Imperialism and Resistance,” Journal of International Relations and Development 14 (2011): 213–246.
On the challenges that were faced by Cuban insurgents and freedom fighters, see John Lawrence Tone, War and Genocide in Cuba, 1895–1898 (Chapel Hill: University Of North Carolina Press, 2006).
Joshua E. Kastenberg, “The Use of Conventional International Law in Combating Terrorism: A Maginot Line for Modern Civilization Employing The Principles of Anticipatory Self-Defense & Preemption.” Air Force Law Review 55 (2004): 87–125, 107.
Adam Hochschild, King Leopold’s Ghost (New York, Houghton Mifflin, 1998).
Martin Evans, “French Resistance and the Algerian War,” History Today 41, no. 7 (1991) paragraph 9, http://www.historytoday.com/martin-evans/french-resistance-and-algerian-war.
For more on the ideological, transnational dimensions of this conflict see Irwin M. Wall, France, the United States, and the Algerian War (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2001).
For a discussion of the role that economics played in the Mau Mau “rebellion,”: see Michael Cowen, “Before and After Mau Mau in Kenya,” The Journal of Peasant Studies 16, no. 2 (1989): 260–275.
For many examples of the “draining the swamp” metaphoric clusters in British military discourses, see Paul Dixon, The British Approach to Counterinsurgency: From Malaya and Northern Ireland to Iraq and Afghanistan (London: Palgrave Macmillan, 2012).
Interestingly enough, there were times when the more moderate wings of the Jewish anti-British movements were fighting with the more militant Irgun and Lehi groups. This period of inter-Jewish fighting was known as “The Hunting Season,” but by the end of World War the Hanagah began to cooperate with Irgun and Lehi as they formed underground communities that became a part of more unified Jewish resistance movements. See David French, The British Way in Counter-Insurgency, 1945–1967 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2011), 48.
Howard M. Sachar, Israel and Europe: An Appraisal in History (New York: Vintage Books, 2000), 5.
Chibuike Uche, “Money Matters in a War Economy: The Biafran Experience,” Nationalism and Ethnic Politics 8 no. 1 (2002): 29–54.
A. K. Essack, “Biafra Holds Out,” Economic and Political Weekly 5, no. 1 (January 3, 1970), 8–10.
Marc-Antoine Perouse de Monclos. “Humanitarian Aid and the Biafra War: Lessons Not Learned,” Africa Development 35, no. 1 (2009): 69–82.
Paul Johnson, “The Cancer of Terrorism,” in Terrorism: How the West Can Win, ed. Benjamin Netanyahu (New York: Farrar, Straus & Giroux, 1986), 21,
quoted in Emanual Gross, “Democracy in the War Against Terrorism — The Israeli Experience,” Loyola of Los Angeles Law Review 35 (2002): 1162.
Lynsey Mitchell, “Monsters, Heroes, Martyrs and the Storytellers: The Enduring Attraction of Culturally Embedded Narratives in the ‘War on Terror,’” Liverpool Law Review 35 (2014): 83–101.
Rosemary Sayigh has characterized the narratives that exclude the Nakba as variants of what she calls the “trauma genre.” Rosemary Sayigh, “On the Exclusion of the Palestinian Nakba from the ‘Trauma Genre’,” Journal of Palestine Studies 43, no. 1 (August 2013): 51–60.
Simpson, “Arab Bank’s Link to Terrorism Poses Dilemma for U.S. Policy,” paragraphs 17–19. For a more detailed discussion of the founding of the Arab Bank, as well as its various symbolic linkages to various Palestinian freedom-fighting efforts, see Adulhameed Shoman, The Indomitable Arab (London: Third World Centre, 1984).
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© 2015 Marouf Hasian, Jr.
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Hasian, M. (2015). A Critical Genealogical Study of 19th and 20th-Century Colonial and Imperial Concerns about the Financing of Terrorism. In: A Postcolonial Critique of the Linde et al. v. Arab Bank, PLC “Terrorism” Bank Cases. Palgrave Macmillan, London. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-1-137-57403-9_2
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