Foreigners among Citizens

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It is, in our moment, the number of the political. Eleven: as in 11 March 2003, the bombing of the Atocha railway station in Madrid, Spain; as in 11 October 2005, when the murder of two suburban boys by French police in a Clichy DuBois substation on the outskirts of Paris made the banlieue into the space of the political; and as in 11 of December 2005, when the attack by five thousand (predominantly white) Australians on their Lebanese compatriots exploded in Cronulla, a beach suburb in southwestern Sydney. To say nothing, of course, about that iconographic eleven upon which the whole of the United States' political now turns, 11 September, or, in the argot of this nation, 9/11. A moment inaugurated, it could be argued, with that other 9/11: the overthrow of Salvador Allende by Augusto Pinochet in Chile in September 1973. (The only event in this chronos that does not turn on eleven is, of course, the London bombings, and even that has a memorable number: 7/7, the seventh of July, 2005, just three months before Clichy DuBois.) These events are, of course, all distinct, but these elevens (and the seven) are bonded together by a singular phenomenon: the attack on the sovereign Western nationstate from within that state itself, an attack originating with the recurring figure of the Muslim as the agent of (anti-Christian) violence, the Muslim as either the terrorist (in the United States and Spain) or what might be named the insurgent native-that subject named immigrant or Arab (again, Spain, and also in France and Australia).