Menezes Syndrome: Yikes!

A dark-skinned man walks out of a house full of suspected terrorists in London, wearing a heavy overcoat. He heads for the subway, defies police orders to stop, jumps the turnstile and suddenly finds five bullets in his skull.

From this now-familiar, entirely understandable and entirely regrettable event comes this is the analysis Pakistanis are treated to in the PakTribune (which originally appeared as a post in Anwar Hussain's blog Fountainhead, now complete with lots of troubling comments). Emphasis added by me:

In a small red-tiled home at the end of a rutted road in the Brazilian town of Gonzaga, Jean Charles de Menezes' parents cry silently each night over the tragic demise of their murdered son. During this ritual, the mother holds a recent photo of her smiling son, her tears cascading over her weather-beaten face onto the framed photograph. The mango and orange trees of the nearby farms have borne silent witness to her mourning since Friday, July 22, when the life of their innocent son was snuffed out by the London Police.

A routine commute for Jean Charles ended in the never-never land, courtesy of Her Majesty’s armed police who, in the wake of the recent bombing-attacks in London, were given shoot-to-kill orders for all Asian-looking suspects. With five shots to the back of Menezes’s pinned down head at point blank range, an innocent man was deprived of his youth and his dreams.

Is it a one-off incident, or is it indicative of a resurgence in the once-thriving attitude toward people of color? This was an illness when the white man ruled supreme over a large swath of planet earth. And it is a disease that was never really cured: call it the Menezes Syndrome.

Perhaps it isn't possible for the white man to get past those bygone days when the British Empire rose to its pinnacle, showered in the blood of people of color. That the imperialistic genes are surging again in the white man’s veins is amply demonstrated by Prime Minister Tony Blair’s decision to grab on to the coattails of the latest empire-seeker, the U.S.A., and the decision of Blair’s people to reelect him and give his imperialistic ventures their seal of approval.

As the British lead their American cousins into the vacuum that their own empire left behind, the world must come to grips with the white man's method to better understand the new imperial master.

With open-season having been declared on men of color and the world cringing at each new atrocity that these international cousins commit against any non-Europeans still sitting on the leftovers of the planet’s resources, it would be worth our while to have a brief look at the white man’s imperial past. ...

To the people of color, the British are the embodiment of white men and therefore the symbolic flag carriers of what is best and worst in the white man. The tendency shown in the casual killing of De Menezes is a dark omen of a revival of superior attitudes in the white man towards people of color. It seems that the white man has not really been able to immunize himself from this unfortunate, contemptible and skewed mind-set towards people of color—a curse of the white man’s imperial legacy.

The killing of innocent Jean Charles de Menezes of Gonzaga is not an isolated incident. A chain of incidents in campaigns Iraq and Afghanistan, including the campaigns themselves, are sufficient proof that the Menezes Syndrome is back and back with full force. It shows beyond any doubt that the white man continues to remain convinced that his actions are above reproof, his cause the only just one, his religion the only right religion and his God the only true God.

What, no "bin Laden Syndrome?"

May our one true God help us. Throughout the Islamic world, people read things like this every day in a concerted campaign of hatred that never ends. Jews, whites, Christians, Americans: All are the targets of an unrelentingly hatemongering media in the hands of a religion with a frightful superiority complex..

Granted, the colonial period was beyond ugly. But it was all but over more than 100 years ago. And today, you can't write about ugliness without writing about the Taliban, al Qaeda, the bloodthirsty beheaders of Indonesia -- all of whom are following a 1,500-year history of religious expansion by the sword -- and none of whom are mentioned by Anwaar Hussain.

h/t Watching America