Omid Safi | Jun 29, 2012
"Here is a very curious story from a paper in Virginia Beach:
The story talks about the difficult conditions under which the Navy special warfare community (Navy SEALs) have to train, including simulated conditions in which they go through rooms that are designed to resemble “a mosque, bank, post office, market and residential compound. In one section, nine chairs painted in primary hues sit behind desks in an elementary school classroom.”
The story doesn’t mention it, but something caught my eye: the image that they are using for target practice is unmistakably that of a Muslim woman wearing hijab, with what looks like Qur’anic inscriptions behind her on the wall.
These houses are called “kill houses.”
The person who designed these so-called “kill houses” touts their high technology: Larry Pacifico, “who manages the complex, said instructors will control each scenario using an iPad to adjust the lighting and movement of the targets. Cameras will record the action, so SEALs will find out where the bullets they fired came to rest, he said, down to specific bones and organs.”
Apparently the Navy has enough concern about technology to want to know which bones and which organs the Navy SEALs would be hitting, but not enough concern to know that they are taking target practice shooting at Muslim women.
Yeah, we are not at war with Islam, they keep telling us.
We just train our most skilled soldiers to kill Muslim women.
God have mercy on us.
It’s not so much that this looks bad.
This is bad. It’s rotten to the core.
Can the folks in charge at the NAVY not see how this contributes to the dehumanizing of Muslims, not just Muslim women, not just Muslim civilians, but all Muslims?
Link to the source
http://www.religionnews.com/blogs/o
OP:
My inner-Psychology geek is spitting flames, and wanting to rage about the racist and bigot'ed types of mental techniques (like this one) that are being used to de-humanize the 'enemy'.
"Here is a very curious story from a paper in Virginia Beach:
The story talks about the difficult conditions under which the Navy special warfare community (Navy SEALs) have to train, including simulated conditions in which they go through rooms that are designed to resemble “a mosque, bank, post office, market and residential compound. In one section, nine chairs painted in primary hues sit behind desks in an elementary school classroom.”
The story doesn’t mention it, but something caught my eye: the image that they are using for target practice is unmistakably that of a Muslim woman wearing hijab, with what looks like Qur’anic inscriptions behind her on the wall.
These houses are called “kill houses.”
The person who designed these so-called “kill houses” touts their high technology: Larry Pacifico, “who manages the complex, said instructors will control each scenario using an iPad to adjust the lighting and movement of the targets. Cameras will record the action, so SEALs will find out where the bullets they fired came to rest, he said, down to specific bones and organs.”
Apparently the Navy has enough concern about technology to want to know which bones and which organs the Navy SEALs would be hitting, but not enough concern to know that they are taking target practice shooting at Muslim women.
Yeah, we are not at war with Islam, they keep telling us.
We just train our most skilled soldiers to kill Muslim women.
God have mercy on us.
It’s not so much that this looks bad.
This is bad. It’s rotten to the core.
Can the folks in charge at the NAVY not see how this contributes to the dehumanizing of Muslims, not just Muslim women, not just Muslim civilians, but all Muslims?
Link to the source
http://www.religionnews.com/blogs/o
OP:
My inner-Psychology geek is spitting flames, and wanting to rage about the racist and bigot'ed types of mental techniques (like this one) that are being used to de-humanize the 'enemy'.
Or just use drones.
Please tell me you're being sarcastic.
But I follow the cold logic of the hawkes.
This is why drones are deployed every four days. It does save money and the civilian collatoral is worth not putting american soldiers lives on the line. It also gets around that messy 'official war' thing. If you don't technically put boots on the ground of another sovereign nation, you're not at war. Brilliant.
All this just makes me think of is that one scene from Apocalypse Now where the one guy is going "I love the smell of Napalm in the morning."
Or just use drones.
Honestly, I'm waiting for the moment someone has found a way to hack them. Then it'll be like we have our very own potential RL version of the Toclafane from Doctor Who.
Now, what could possibly go wrong!
When you train elite soldiers, you train them to do everything they must do in order to reach their objective, otherwise they're not elite. If your objective includes shooting at a woman in a hijab who is shooting at them, then it's going to be easier to do when the time comes if they've been through that situation in training.
Is what they do pleasant? No. I wouldn't want that job. I couldn't do that job. Forty years ago the targets were women and children holding hand grenades. Now, it's women in hijabs. It sucks, but it makes sense.
I was talking in that sense that I think that there's got to be another way of mentally training soldiers to be able to 'take out the enemy' without the potential risk of them thinking that 'women in hijab = automatic enemy' without any spare thought behind it.
Even if the writer of the article just saw one image-target, and it was of a Muslim woman wearing a hijab - there's not enough info here to tell whether they're just freaking out. BUT, because of the far-reaching amount of anti-Muslim thinking and Islamophobia in today's society- it wouldn't be too shocking to me if there was some religious bigotry and racism involved in this "kill house".
Very relevant CSB: in training exercises at the very same base, I've been the woman designated to dress in conservative Muslim garb and attack US Soldiers, and I've also been a civilian village woman who had to be searched:
If all the targets in this kill house are women in hijabs holding guns, it's a problem, and I'm not going to pretend like there aren't enough bigots in the military for that to be a possibility. But this picture doesn't provide that context, and the pictures at the original article don't either. If it's the other thing, where one target is a woman in a hijab holding a gun and the other is a woman in a hijab holding a book, then that's actually the kind of training you want them to have.
The story doesn’t mention it, but something caught my eye
The way it's written could give one the suggestion that the person flipped out from seeing just that one image-target, so I can also think that they assumed what they wrote about in the article.
But then there's the other way of seeing it- which you brought up in your comment:
If all the targets in this kill house are women in hijabs holding guns, it's a problem, and I'm not going to pretend like there aren't enough bigots in the military for that to be a possibility.
Yup. There's basically not enough information to ultimately decide if the person is just making a mountain out of a molehill. But I can't ignore the other thought of there being a possibility of racism and anti-Muslim stuff going on (considering how wide-spread Islamophobia still is). So I can't just blow off their view-point that they're going with.
*shrugs* I think you've been making sense so far. :D
If anything's 'off' about the article- personally I'm thinking it's this one bit that I already brought up:
The story doesn’t mention it, but something caught my eye:
I mean, I want to believe them due there being so much chance of Islamophobia going on (especially if the writer is Muslim too- so I could only imagine what they must've felt if that's part of the case)- but fhdaskfhsa "but something caught my eye" also gives a potential that they just saw that one image of the Muslim woman and automatically thought that the training house was entirely there for training Navy SEALs how to dehumanize and kill Muslim women.
And I'm not really a fan of making shit up to be speculatively mad about, especially when there's legit shit to be mad about specifically with respect to Islamophobia and military treatment of women in general.
Yup.
Arg- This article is now just leaving me frustrated and confused because NEEDS MOAR INFO.
now if they had photos of all the targets in the house, and they were all women in hijabs, then thats a fucking issue.
Well that’s the first time I have heard that phrase used. It’s special.
Apparently the Navy has enough concern about technology to want to know which bones and which organs the Navy SEALs would be hitting,
Well yeah, would it be a kill shot or not?
but not enough concern to know that they are taking target practice shooting at Muslim women.
Muslim Women Pointing Guns at them. Women can use guns you know.
So, the question I have is, are there also cutouts of Muslim women without guns? The article doesn’t seem to mention that.