Ukraine: CBS News’ Charlie D’Agata sparks anger for remarks about Iraq and Afghanistan
Washington: CBS News is receiving backlash after its correspondent Charlie D’Agata said Ukraine is a relatively civilized and relatively European unlike Afghanistan and Iraq who has seen conflict rage for decades.
“This isn’t a place, with all due respect, like Iraq or Afghanistan who has seen conflict rage for decades. This is a relatively civilized, relatively European – I have to choose those words carefully – city where you wouldn’t expect that or hope that it was going to happen,” said the CBS News correspondent while commenting on the situation that has unfolded after Russian invasion.
The comments have angered thousands of people including Muslims from several countries who are calling out the broadcaster.
Jairo I. Fúnez, an American professor, criticized the TV channel on Twitter and wrote, “This is not Iraq or Syria, this is a civilized and European country,” as CBS News reports, parallels what was said about the floods in Germany. Bad things aren’t supposed to happen to the socalled civilized first world. The coloniality of these discourses is clear.”
He added, “The abyssal thinking that continues to inform modern epistemology & international law is incapable of seeing the suffering of those on the Other side of European humanity. The zone of nonbeing is real. All wars, death, and destruction in this zone are insignificant to “humanity.”
He continued, “Abyssal thinking sustains a colonial demarcation dividing humanity into being and non-being. Those on “the other side of the line” are conceived as inferior while those on “this side of line” are representative of what Wynter conceived as the white ethnoclass..”