Nothing Has to Make Sense by Sherene H. Razack

Author:Sherene H. Razack [Razack, Sherene H.]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: SOC031000 Social Science / Discrimination & Race Relations, LAW013000 Law / Civil Rights, SOC048000 Social Science / Islamic Studies
ISBN: 9781517912352
Publisher: University of Minnesota Press
Published: 2022-04-19T11:00:00+00:00

The vagueness of racist thought is a reminder about the racial fantasies at work and the incoherence that accompanies them. The “all over the placeness” quality of racism that Ghassan Hage identifies is fully in evidence in Welner’s meandering explanations of Khadr’s psyche.59 Questions are rhetorical, and logic is beside the point. Khadr wants to establish Sharia law in Canada but hides his true intentions with an apparent broad-mindedness. His Westernized tastes are merely evidence of his deception. Legal procedures permit the incoherence to stand, as the attempts by the defense to point out Welner’s selectivity and the contradictions of his claims come to naught because the appropriate pages of Welner’s interview with Khadr were not marked and tagged in advance. The defense asks questions that remain rhetorical. The logical circularity of Welner’s argument goes unchallenged. No one pursues how Welner knows that Khadr killed in order to martyr himself or how he knows that Khadr is “al Qaeda royalty.” There is no need for serious consideration of these matters, and they can be dealt with in sound bites gleefully consumed by the media and replayed for several years.60

Nowhere does the legal process seem more complicit in providing a platform for white-supremacist beliefs than when Welner is challenged about his reliance on the work of Nicolai Sennels. Welner acknowledges that although he relies on Sennels, he really does not know a great deal about the man or his work. His knowledge of Sennels was mainly based on a telephone conversation with him. Cross-examination of Welner begins with the inability of the defense to say Sennels’s name correctly. Defense counsel Major Matthew Schwartz establishes that Welner has not interviewed other “jihadists” and had no prior experience with evaluating the future dangerousness of a “jihadi.”61 Sennels, it seems, is Welner’s only source of information. Asked about the peer review process and the details of Sennels’s research (which Sennels himself has made clear in interviews was not a research project), Welner reiterates that he was impressed with Sennels because he acknowledged that he had failed to “deradicalize jihadists” (because they are beyond help). Sennels’s research methodology, he elaborates, was simply that he worked with Muslim patients and treated them therapeutically. Research has no place in the military hearing when it involves Muslims.

The defense presented Welner with three short articles and an open letter to British prime minister David Cameron, all written by Sennels or featuring interviews with him (and widely circulated on the internet on a number of Islamophobic blogs and websites). The court is not told where these articles appear, and the vague discussion about peer review and its meaning only hints that Sennels does not do academic research. Welner is unable to confirm that he has read any of Sennels’s work. He responds that he recognizes only some parts. He is surprised when he learns from the defense that Sennels is only thirty-three years old. He has never seen interviews with Sennels about his book, nor has he seen the open

Download

Copyright Disclaimer:
This site does not store any files on its server. We only index and link to content provided by other sites. Please contact the content providers to delete copyright contents if any and email us, we'll remove relevant links or contents immediately.