You do not currently have permission to view the full text for this document. Please sign in to an account with an active subscription or contact support.
The paper explores the relationship between racism in the mind and events in the world post-September 11 2001. It proposes that pervasive, primitive anxiety in the West, triggered by the bombings on that day, was managed by the deployment of a paranoid organisation in which the world of Islam is viewed as the enemy - the source of the threat to the West. The unfolding chain of attacks on Islam and Muslims speaks to the extraordinary power of this construction as an organised strategy of defence.
The nature of internal racism is explored clinically, and by reference to aspects of the Lawrence and Climbié cases in the UK. Professional failures are linked to the paralysis of ordinary ego functioning, along with unconscious guilt, both seen as features of internal racism. It is suggested that the deployment of a racist organisation post-9/11 has had widespread effects, one of which has been to influence, a priori, some attempts to understand today's terrorism. Erlich's (2003) account of the motivation of Palestinian suicide bombers is critically examined, and it is argued that a hidden assumption that Islam was to blame had crept into the analysis, yielding a decontextualised reduction to a supposed psychological essence. An alternative reading is offered. The author ends on a note of caution: that, once deployed, it is extremely difficult to sidestep the influence of internal racist organisations.
In Paris, on 18 September 1989
Leila Achaboun, Fatima Achaboun and Samira Saidani - three schoolgirls of North African descent - were suspended from College … for refusing to remove the headscarves that they understood to be prescribed by Islamic
Page 63tradition. The school's principal … claimed to be acting in accordance with … legislation, which prohibited the wearing of religious or political symbols….
The incident was brought to the attention [of] the Minister of Education, who overturned the decision, insisting that although the French school system should discourage