In the early morning hours of New Year’s Day, Shamsud-Din Bahar Jabbar drove a pickup truck through Bourbon Street in New Orleans where thousands were still celebrating the new year. After killing at least 14 and injuring dozens more, he got out of the truck and died in a shootout with police.
Once it appeared that he was at least a supporter of ISIS (a number of groups derived from the Islamic State that developed in Iraq and Syria during and after the U.S. occupation), many speculated that it was an orchestrated terror attack conducted by the group from afar. The right-wing media, of course, seized on it as an example of a revived threat of foreign terrorism against the U.S. and an insecure southern border.
But we don’t need to look to foreign enemies or supposedly dangerous immigrants to see how this happened. If we look at U.S. foreign policy and its effects on people born and raised within U.S. borders we can find the main causes.
Much like the mass killing that took place at the army base in Fort Hood, Texas in 2009, this New Orleans attack was carried out not by a foreign combatant or immigrant, but by a U.S. born and raised Army veteran. In both cases, the veterans saw the effects of U.S. occupations in Iraq and Afghanistan, including their damaging effects not only on U.S. soldiers but also on the primarily Muslim and Arab peoples killed and oppressed by those occupations. Personal circumstances and temperament obviously also played a role, but we cannot deny the impact of the destructive oppression of U.S. imperialist policy on Arab and Muslim peoples.
Viewed in this light, the famous quote by Malcolm X is as applicable now as when he first said it in 1963. When asked about the assassination of President John F. Kennedy, he said that this was an example of “chickens coming home to roost.” In other words, the violence created and carried out by the United States government had now boomeranged back and been carried out against the United States.
The New Orleans attack and killings seems to be yet another example of the chickens coming home to roost. For more than a century, U.S. imperialism has used military force to rain death and destruction on millions around the world. From Cuba and the Philippines, to Japan and Dresden, to Vietnam and Chile, to El Salvador, Nicaragua and Guatemala, to Iran, Iraq, Syria, Libya, and Afghanistan, the U.S. military is responsible for millions of deaths and the suffering and degradation of millions more. And in Palestine and elsewhere, even if U.S. forces are not directly committed, it’s U.S. imperial policy and military assistance that makes slaughter happen.
The men who killed at Fort Hood and New Orleans are products of the violent machine that has carried out these policies, and they have seen their effects firsthand. They are both products and victims of the U.S. military and U.S. imperialism. Their actions should not surprise us.
