Although American families of Arab origin come from 22 countries and from varied backgrounds and cultures, reports suggest that they suffer equally from acculturation stress, stereotyping, discrimination, and the reverberations of the aftermath of September 11 as well as global affairs. However, because children and adolescents from these families, particularly those who are newly arrived immigrants, tend to do well in school, they are rarely targeted by research or policy. This article uses the narratives of 5 middle school age male students from Arab descent who were in a support group that met for 3 years (2004-2007), beginning shortly after President George W. Bush's declaration of the war on the "axis of evil." I used vignettes from this group to illustrate the stressors this population faces. The final section suggests an option for supporting this population.
This paper argues that the United Nations (UN) Security Council counterterrorism policies have largely failed because they did not address many of the conditions that make certain parts of the world a fertile ground for the emergence of terrorism, including the historical antecedents that lead to violence; the lingering and pervasive influence and hegemony of UN Security Council Members; the UN Security Council members' self‐serving and morally inconsistent exercise of their power of veto or in condemning violent acts perpetrated by Member States; and the double standard in the implementation of its policies (Barnett & Finnemore, 1999; Farer, 2002; Glennon, 2003). Utilizing a critical geopolitical perspective, as well as the conceptualizations of the “normative unconscious” (Layton, 2002, 2006) and the “absent referent” (Adams, 1990) of and Benjamin's framework of witnessing and the “moral third” (Benjamin, 2018). The paper further argues that much of what is taken as the status quo in United Nations Security Council counterterrorism policies is derived from ideological principles that were ultimately created in the service of the state apparatuses (and their signature exploitative practices) that governments unconsciously feel compelled to sustain. By making explicit these proclivities, and exposing terrorists as the absent referent of the United Nations Security Council's discussions, the paper offers a psychoanalytic framework to explain the logic behind such counterterrorism policies. Further, following Benjamin, the paper suggests that by moving away from Eurocentric, zero‐sum, and colonial logic, there may be a way to organically recognize populations that are aggrieved by these state apparatuses in a way that could obviate the use of political violence and, inter alia, terrorism.
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