European perception of Arab, Muslims and Turks as dark and devilish Others emanated from Ottoman military engagements in the Balkans and played a most significant role in creating the Other, as well as in self-image making: “These attitudes thread through much of church history, emerging notions of sovereignty, and European culture and self-image, and to some degree were handed on to Americans.”91

The vilification of a people carries with it a train of propaganda. The accounts of Christian pilgrims to Jerusalem reveal that before the twelfth century, a grand narrative of Muslims as enemies, as ‘despoilers of Jerusalem’ and as ‘heathens’, did not exist. The stage had not yet been set. The political circumstances involving the Seljuqs’ encroaching into Constantinople and Byzantine requesting assistance from Pope Urban II in France, set in motion a mental imagining or re-imagining of Muslims as the enemies of God who had to be fought. The four surviving accounts of Urban’s speech each present a distinctly different version of what his speech entailed, but the build-up of anti-Muslim rhetoric is unmistakable. He presented a city of Jerusalem under threat of a ‘wicked’ race who partake in ‘abominable’ practices. Crusade propagandists from Pope Urban II’s speech in Clermont in 1095 to further crusades in subsequent decades produced the image of the Muslim as a godless defiler of Christian sanctities, as a barbaric torturer of Christians, as an idol worshipper. The Othering of the Muslims had begun and became more pronounced when Muslims were outside the bounds of normative civilised society, as animals, which is illustrated in “who cut open the navels of those whom they choose to torment...”, taken from the following account of Urban’s speech:

“A grave report has come from the lands around Jerusalem ...that a race absolutely alien to God...has invaded the land of the Christians...They have either razed the churches of God to the ground or enslaved them to their own rites...They cut open the navels of those whom they choose to torment...them as they lie on the ground with all their entrails out.... What can I say of the appalling violation of women? On whom does the task lie of avenging this, if not on you?...Take the road to the Holy Sepulchre, rescue that land and rule over it yourselves, for that land, as scripture says, floweth with milk and honey...Take this road for the remission of your sins, assured of the unfading glory of the kingdom of heaven.’ When Pope Urban had said these things...everyone shouted in unison: Deus vult! Deus vult!, ‘God wills it! God wills it!’”92

Propaganda therefore played an essential part in the build-up to the crusades. Pope Urban II’s speech used highly inflammatory imagery to provoke moral outrage and what was most prominent in his address was the Otherising of Muslims and he connected that to the idea of despoiling of Christian sites. It was what he preached of the barbarity towards other Christians that came to inform his audience about who the Muslims were. Though there had been no systematic persecution of Christians by the Muslims of the Holy Land, Pope Urban II’s speech did enough to generate a mass passionate response to the appeal.

The savagery later unleashed in the siege of Antioch and the capture of Jerusalem was a combination of factors including the three-year march, religious fervour and an uncompromising Othering levelled against the Muslims. The Crusaders unleashed an unspeakable savagery and sought to purge the Holy City of unbelievers – Muslims and Jews.

The inhabitants of the city were beheaded, pierced by arrows, plunged from towers, tortured and burned to death. Groups who had surrendered were also put to death, and women and children were not spared. The Crusaders “seized infants by the soles of their feet from their mothers’ laps or their cradles and dashed them against walls or broke their necks”. The brutal orgy of destruction was a result, in part, of the very negative though untrue stories told about Muslims in the Holy Land. One eyewitness said, “No one has ever seen or heard of such a slaughter of the pagans, for they were burned on pyres like pyramids.”93 The process of dehumanisation goes a long way in explaining the savage cruelty unleashed onto unarmed Muslim civilians. The Crusaders had not been exposed to Muslims prior to the appeal of Pope Urban II and the void of human interactions would in any situation disallow effective perspective taking. Muslims emerged in Crusade propaganda as every stereotype of an Othered enemy.

In the Spanish Inquisition during the sixteenth century, Muslims were depicted as ‘Saracens’, ‘Hagarenes’ and ‘Hagarene beasts’. In the sixteenth-century Hapsburg Empire, Muslim Turks were portrayed as “terrible Turk” and as a subhuman enemy. Spaniards described the Moors as greedy and sadistic. In official documents, the Moriscos were routinely referred to as a “pestilence,” a “plague,” a “fever,” a “pestilential horde,” or “beasts” or “vipers” within the “bosom of Spain.” This was the kind of language used in polemic texts, in texts written in support of the expulsion of Muslims. One of them, a former preacher in Valencia, Fonseca wrote how the “treason and bad customs” of the Moriscos were inherited in their “corrupted blood and their mother’s milk.”94

The concept of Othering and dehumanisation is central to understanding the ideology behind the genocide of Muslims in Bosnia (1992-95). This concept is critical in understanding the mindset of the New Zealand mosque gunman Brenton Tarrant, who carried out the Christchurch terror attack which claimed the lives of 50 Muslims praying at the Al Noor Mosque and the Linwood Islamic Centre in 2019. There existed an entrenched sense of othering of Muslims in Tarrant’s manifesto. There is much that connects the mastermind of the Bosnian genocide, Radovan Karadžić and Tarrant. Radovan Karadžić was infamous in describing Bosnian Muslims as filth, as traitors and vermin that needed to be annihilated. In the words of Biljana Plavsić, Karadžić’s deputy, “It was [Serb] genetically deformed material that embraced Islam.”95

The parallels with the dehumanising of Jews in the Holocaust are all too similar. Muslims were stripped of all human value and rendered alien, inferior and hideous. This attitude towards their Muslim neighbours slowly transformed. Any innocent neighbourly pleasantries were now suspect, the Muslim in the frame underwent a metamorphosis in the mind of Bosnian Serb perpetrators. The process of dehumanisation was implemented through a concerted effort of Othering the Bosnian Muslims by political, religious and intellectual strands of the Serb elite, and then normalised in the media. Polarising propaganda became the flavour of the day for Serbian and Bosnian Serb media to Otherise their victims.

In one horrifying case which reflects the extent of Othering as a process to legitimise violence is the siege of Sarajevo. The state-run Belgrade TV aired a false story intended to fuel hatred and justify the siege, including the line: “Muslim extremists have come up with the most horrifying way in the world of torturing people. Last night they fed the Serb children to the lions in the city’s ‘Pionirska Dolina’ zoo.”96

This was reported on the evening news and was watched by several million viewers. The perpetrators were led to think that the annihilation of the Muslim people was necessary work demanded of the State and that their own freedom and security was compromised by the presence of Muslim “invaders”. The process of Othering was complete.

In an intercepted conversation with a close associate from October 1991, Karadžić made clear:

“Muslims will disappear, that people will disappear from the face of the earth if they start now. Our offer was their only chance. They will be up to their necks in blood and the Muslim people [in BiH] would disappear. In just a couple of days, Sarajevo will be gone and there will be five hundred thousand dead, in one month Muslims will be annihilated in BiH.”97

Karadžić spoke against an ideology of “brotherhood and unity” and the mixing of communities, and instead allowed a discourse of victimhood to frame the Serbian response.

He picked out examples of Serb suffering at the hands of the Ottomans and wove a narrative of traumatisation of his own people. He played on generating a fear of the Muslims, a fear of the Other, which connected the Bosnia Serb perpetrators in their genocide. In Biljana Plavsić’s guilty plea before the ICTY, she explained:

“At the time, I easily convinced myself that this was a matter of survival and self-defence. In fact, it was more. Our leadership, of which I was a necessary part, led an effort which victimised countless innocent people. Explanations of self-defence and survival offer no justification. By the end, it was said, even among our own people, that in this war we had lost our nobility of character. The obvious questions become: if this truth is now self-evident, why did I not see it earlier? And how could our leaders and those who followed have committed such acts? The answer to both questions is, I believe, fear, a blinding fear that led to an obsession, especially for those of us for whom the Second World War was a living memory, that Serbs would never again allow themselves to become victims. In this, we in the leadership violated the most basic duty of every human being, the duty to restrain oneself and to respect the human dignity of others. We were committed to do whatever was necessary to prevail.”98

To achieve the goals of a Serb state west of Drina, Bosnian Serbs deemed it necessary to separate themselves from the Muslim population and they believed this meant the extermination of those Muslims. Such an undertaking could not be possible without first dehumanising the Muslim population to such an extent that perpetrators would no longer see them as human beings, but as rodents that needed to be killed. Karadžić is responsible for putting in place a state-run program of dehumanisation that serves as inspiration for far-right nationalists today.

Christchurch gunman Brenton Tarrant drew much inspiration from the convicted war criminal Radovan Karadžić. En route to his killing spree, Tarrant played a Serbian nationalist song in which Radovan Karadzic is glorified and called on to lead Serbs. The song further glorifies Serbian fighters and calls for the killing of Turks who hard-line Serb nationalists use to refer to Bosnian Muslims. Tarrant’s manifesto ‘The Great Replacement’ describes that the motive for his attack was to create fear and calls for the killing of Muslims in Europe. It threatens Turks, referring to them with the dehumanising “roaches”: “But if you attempt to live in European lands, anywhere west of the Bosphorus. We will kill you and drive you roaches from our lands.”99

Tarrant cited Pope Urban II’s First Crusade speech in which Muslims are presented as barbarians, heathen, and despoilers of the sanctities of God. The Othering of Muslims as presented in Pope Urban II’s speech struck a chord with his audience. Not only were the allegations false, but the image of a Turkish Other who belonged to a different faith, spoke a different language and who prayed to a different God spurred the carnage of the First Crusade. The Othering of the Muslims had begun, and returns here with Tarrant’s address “To Christians”:

“The people worthy of glory, the people blessed by God Our Lord, moan and fall under the weight of these outrages and most shameful humiliations. The race of the elect suffers outrageous persecutions, and the impious race of the Saracens respects neither the virgins of the Lord nor the colleges of priests. They run over the weak and the elderly, they seize the children from their mothers so that they might forget, among the barbarians, the name of God. That perverse nation profanes the hospices … The temple of the Lord is treated like a criminal and the ornaments of the sanctuary are robbed. ASK YOURSELF, WHAT WOULD POPE URBAN II DO?” Tarrant further proposed a “Europe for Europeans”:

“The invaders must be removed from European soil, regardless from where they came or when they came. Roma, African, Indian, Turkish, Semitic or other. If they are not of our people, but live in our lands, they must be removed. Where they are removed to is not our concern, or responsibility. Our lands are not their home, they can return to their own lands or found their homelands elsewhere. But they will not occupy our soil. How they are removed is irrelevant, peacefully, forcefully, happily, violently or diplomatically. They must be removed.

Until these interlopers are repatriated to their people’s lands, then Europe has no true sovereignty, and anyone, no matter their ethnicity or beliefs can call Europe their own.

REMOVE THE INVADERS, RETAKE EUROPE”100

W. E. Dubois questions us in the opening lines of Souls of Black Folk, ‘How does it feel to be a problem?’101 His question challenges an emotional disengagement whereby one who is not and has not been a ‘problem’ could not understand the ‘problematic’ self-description of the many whom Dubois was intending. On July 17 2014, 43-year-old Eric Garner was killed in a chokehold by a New York City Police Department officer, whilst having repeated “I can’t breathe” at least eleven times. Garner was not physically still when he held up his hands, protesting his innocence to the NY police officers who encountered him. His positioning was one of trying to create space between him and the officers. He felt threatened within his space and violated. Activists sought to ‘metonymise’ the 43-year-old’s killing, using the symbolic code of holding up of hands as a declaration of innocence, as a way of placing themselves in the frame of Garner and thus symbolically creating new space. The three words spoken by Garner, “I can’t breathe” topped the list of the most notable quotations of 2014 according to the Yale Book of Quotations.102 But it is the first of his words, it is the simple but highly evocative pronoun “I” which draws us, through a consideration of a range of imagined tones to a perspective-taking with Eric Garner. As Zimmer (2014) describes, “To intone the words “I can’t breathe,” surrounded by thousands of others doing the same, is an act of intense empathy and solidarity. The empathy comes from momentarily stepping into the persona of Eric Garner at that instant the life was being choked out of him. It is a kind of rhetorical tribute to inhabit his subject position, taking on the pronoun “I” and repeating the words he helplessly repeated eleven times.”103 Words reminisced, like the singing of popular songs of deceased artists or the chanting of words during pilgrimage rituals, or during memorials, all contain a sense of empathic solidarity through mimicry.

In a similar light, W.E.B Dubois introduces us to a double consciousness which weighs on his self-perception, seeing himself in light of his blackness and by being seen by a white world and living up to the superimposed standards of that world. He is bound by a negating of his very being in his attempt to define himself outside of the restrictions of what his skin colour has come to mean and represent in a dominant White society. We are challenged to traverse the mental landscapes with Dubois, as he seeks an explanation for the gulf between him and “the OTHER WORLD.” He is present in his enquiry, akin to Fanon’s spatial assertion – his own bodily presence – but we learn from the outset that the other world’s association with him is hesitant.

Implicitly we realise that he is not “the excellent colored man in my town” or, in the case of Fanon not the “Senegalese buddy in the army who was really clever…”

Pre-lynching and post-lynching pictures of victims sought to create a twisted pictorial narrative – dread and fear was altogether fulfilled with humiliation in death. 6,000 people attended the execution of Charles Johnston in Swainsboro, Georgia in 1893, an event which hosted shows as side attractions. Such lynchings and executions resemble modern theatrical entertainment, events of thrilling amusement. The victims of lynching were displayed like animal attractions. Frederickson (2002), Jahoda (1999) and Santa Ana (2002) show that dehumanization is a necessary precondition for culturally and/or state-sanctioned violence, noting that the dehumanising of groups is to morally exclude them, and thus approve and make permissible to treat then in a way that denies their humanity.

This was seen in the tragedy of Ota Benga. Housed at the Bronx Zoo, New York, in 1906, at times with an orangutan in the Primate House, Ota became the spectacle par excellence for a population that relished in ‘seeing’ their attraction. Swarms gathered to catch a sight of the pigmy boy. He was locked behind bars in a cage to be stared at, and people would laugh, though he could not fully understand that the people were laughing not with him but at him.

Pamela Newkirk, author of Spectacle: The Astonishing Life of Ota Benga (Amistad, New York: 2015) describes in an article about her book how Ota Benga became an overnight sensation with the following headline in the New York Times “Bushman Shares a Cage with Bronx Park Apes”. The floor in the zoo was scattered with bones to suggest Ota was a cannibal – though the practice of sharpening teeth was customary among Congolese men.

With only an orangutan named Dohong as a companion, Benga alternated between glowering silently, shooting a bow and arrow, and angrily mimicking the crowd’s jeers. While some in the mob might have felt pity or shame at the sight of a caged man, the Times reassured readers that he was “one of a race that scientists do not rate high in the human scale.”111

That month, the zoo saw nearly a quarter of a million visitors, almost twice as many as the previous September. Benga made headlines from Minneapolis to Los Angeles, and English and French newspapers clamoured for photographs. Newkirk writes, “Benga was alone among the primates—he was not with other human beings. He was captured like an animal and exhibited like an animal,” Perhaps the most poignant and reflective words came from Reverend James H. Gordon, superintendent of Howard Color Orphan Asylum in Brooklyn and leader of the group of African-American clergymen. He travelled to the Monkey House to express his utter disapproval at the way Blacks were being dehumanised through their association with monkeys:

“We are frank enough to say we do not like this exhibition of one of our own race with the monkeys. Our race, we think, is depressed enough, without exhibiting one of us with apes.