Tournament: UMKC | Round: 2 | Opponent: UCO | Judge: Wash
Judith 1AC

Contention One is the Book of Judith

(Nicholas Schmidle, staff writer, “GETTING BIN LADEN: What happened that night in Abbottabad”, The New Yorker, 2011, http://www.newyorker.com/reporting/2011/08/08/110808fa_fact_schmidle?currentPage=all, rcheek)
“On the morning of Sunday, May 1st, White House officials cancelled scheduled visits, ordered sandwich platters from Costco, and transformed the Situation Room into a war room…Obama returned to the White House at two o’clock, after playing nine holes of golf at Andrews Air Force Base. The Black Hawks departed from Jalalabad thirty minutes later. Just before four o’clock, Panetta announced to the group in the Situation Room that the helicopters were approaching Abbottabad. Obama stood up. “I need to watch this,” he said…Minutes after hitting the ground…team members began streaming out the side doors of helo one…SEALs rushed forward, ending up in an alleylike driveway with their backs to the house’s main entrance…Until this moment, the operation had been monitored by dozens of defense, intelligence, and Administration officials watching the drone’s video feed…After blasting through the gate with C-4 charges, three SEALs marched up the stairs. Midway up, they saw bin Laden’s twenty-three-year-old son, Khalid…and killed him…The final person was bin Laden…Three SEALs shuttled past Khalid’s body and blew open another metal cage…The Americans hurried toward the bedroom door. The first SEAL pushed it open…A second SEAL stepped into the room and trained the infrared laser of his M4 on bin Laden’s chest. The Al Qaeda chief, who was wearing a tan shalwar kameez and a prayer cap on his head, froze; he was unarmed. “There was never any question of detaining or capturing him—it wasn’t a split-second decision. No one wanted detainees,” the special-operations officer told me…Nine years, seven months, and twenty days after September 11th, an American was a trigger pull from ending bin Laden’s life. The first round, a 5.56-mm. bullet, struck bin Laden in the chest. As he fell backward, the SEAL fired a second round into his head, just above his left eye. On his radio, he reported, “For God and country—Geronimo, Geronimo, Geronimo…Hearing this at the White House, Obama pursed his lips, and said solemnly, to no one in particular, “We got him.”
(excerpts taken from Nicholas Schmidle’s “Getting bin Laden” article in the New Yorker, citation above)

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To truly understand this moment of U.S. history we must begin with the deuterocanonical Book of Judith as the prime cultural narrative embedded in the American psyche that authorizes assassination as a political tool of warfare.

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(New American Bible: excerpts from the Book of Judith; Chapter 13. http://old.usccb.org/nab/bible/judith/judith13.htm#v11 )
Judith was left alone in the tent with Holofernes, who lay prostrate on his bed, for he was sodden with wine…When all had departed, and no one, small or great, was left in the bedroom, Judith stood by Holofernes' bed and said within herself: "O Lord, God of all might, in this hour look graciously on my undertaking for the exaltation of Jerusalem; now is the time for aiding your heritage and for carrying out my design to shatter the enemies who have risen against us."…She went to the bedpost near the head of Holofernes, and taking his sword from it, drew close to the bed, grasped the hair of his head, and said, "Strengthen me this day, O God of Israel!"…Then with all her might she struck him twice in the neck and cut off his head…She rolled his body off the bed and took the canopy from its supports. Soon afterward, she came out and handed over the head of Holofernes to her maid, who put it into her food pouch; and the two went off together as they were accustomed to do for prayer. They passed through the camp, and skirting the ravine, reached Bethulia on the mountain. As they approached its gates, Judith shouted to the guards from a distance: "Open! Open the gate! God, our God, is with us. Once more he has made manifest his strength in Israel and his power against our enemies; he has done it this very day."…Judith urged them with a loud voice: "Praise God, praise him! Praise God, who has not withdrawn his mercy from the house of Israel, but has shattered our enemies by my hand this very night."…Then she took the head out of the pouch, showed it to them, and said: "Here is the head of Holofernes, general in charge of the Assyrian army, and here is the canopy under which he lay in his drunkenness. The Lord struck him down by the hand of a woman…All the people were greatly astonished. They bowed down and worshiped God, saying with one accord, "Blessed are you, our God, who today have brought to nought the enemies of your people."…Then Uzziah said to her: "Blessed are you, daughter, by the Most High God, above all the women on earth; and blessed be the Lord God, the creator of heaven and earth, who guided your blow at the head of the chief of our enemies…Your deed of hope will never be forgotten by those who tell of the might of God…May God make this redound to your everlasting honor, rewarding you with blessings, because you risked your life when your people were being oppressed, and you averted our disaster, walking uprightly before our God." And all the people answered, "Amen! Amen!"

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Contention Two is the Will to Revenge
First, Status quo politics operate as a resonance machine of the Christian will to revenge
Connolly 05 William Connolly political theorist at John Hopkins University; The Evangelical-Capitalist Resonance Machine"; Political Theory 33: (December 2005); http://ww1.pubtheo.com/papers/connolly.pdf  BlackMagic

An abstract will to revenge against the world and the weight of the future¶
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it only if¶ it does not spawn new persona to replace them.

And, the will to revenge is a life denying ascetic impulse that poisons the spirit with contempt and makes cycles of violence inevitable

Mandalios in 2008
(John, senior lecturer at the School of Arts at Griffith University, Australia, “Nietzsche And The Necessity Of Freedom”, p. 176-178, rcheek)

The foregoing analysis indicated the conditions under which the ‘ripest fruit’ can emerge to
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or only in the eyes of him who injured it’ (WS 33).
And, the U.S. targeted killing regime is legitimated by Judeo-Christian narratives of retributive justice
Grayson 2012 (Kyle Grayson, The ambivalence of assassination: Biopolitics, culture and political violence, Security Dialogue 2012, Feb 15 2012, http://sdi.sagepub.com/content/43/1/25, BlackMagic)

Although the deferral of culture may just be an analytic convenience to deal with the
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mechanisms that make possible forms of political violence that register as assassination events?

And, the assassination of Bin Laden mirrors the ambiguity of the Book of Judith. Obama’s announcement of the success of seal team six confirms the security apparatus as a modern day Judith justified by divine right. The ambiguity of these narratives is lost in the liberal cultural justifications that continue to legitimate an unending war-on-terror. 

Grayson 2012 (Kyle Grayson, The ambivalence of assassination: Biopolitics, culture and political violence, Security Dialogue 2012 43: 25, Feb 15 2012, http://sdi.sagepub.com/content/43/1/25, BlackMagic)

The ambiguity of Judith and the lingering ambivalence over this ambiguity is instructive. It
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understand themselves to be liberal agents, subject to a benevolent governing regime.
Contention Three is Cultural Narration
First, by understanding political violence as a genre of emplotted action, our method of cultural narration can effectively rupture the narrative bloc that justifies status quo clandestine killing operations. 

Feldman 91  Allen Feldman associate professor of culture and communication at the New York University Steinhardt School of Culture, Education, and Human Development; “Formations of Violence: The Narrative of the Body and Political Terror in Northern Ireland”: p. 20-23BlackMagic
Crapanzano (1984) has made this point by polarizing narrative and social practice.
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to registering the limits of of?cial political codes through an imagery of alterity. 

And, assassination and targeted killing security practices are echo chambers of mimesis through which the evangelical will to revenge reverberates. The failure to understand political violence as an emplotted action linked to Judeo-Christian cultural narratives has led to policy postures that make this resonance inevitable.  

Grayson 2012 (Kyle Grayson, The ambivalence of assassination: Biopolitics, culture and political violence, Security Dialogue 2012 43: 25, Feb 15 2012, http://sdi.sagepub.com/content/43/1/25, BlackMagic)

A sensitivity to the biopolitical dimension of liberalism reveals that political violence is intimately related
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biopolitical rationalities, along with the policy postures that their resonance makes possible.

The United States federal government should eliminate the targeted killing war power authority of the President of the United States.

Finally, targeted killings don’t take place in a vacuum. The “will-to-revenge” and the ambivalence of assassination play a crucial role in the cultural understandings that underpin contemporary military practices. Our cultural narrative—analysis of Judith makes possible a new politics that contests the dominant Judeo-Christian paradigm responsible for the war-on-terror.
Grayson 2012 (Kyle Grayson, The ambivalence of assassination: Biopolitics, culture and political violence, Security Dialogue 2012 43: 25, Feb 15 2012, http://sdi.sagepub.com/content/43/1/25, BlackMagic)

Ben-Naftali and Michaeli (2003: 175) remind us that ‘targeted
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contemporary military practices while potentially offering a means of critically engaging with them.

Finally, our method focuses on the particularities of violence that is often ignored—that legitimates narratives of state violence and causing them to occur; only the 1AC can rupture this
Feldman 91  Allen Feldman associate professor of culture and communication at the New York University Steinhardt School of Culture, Education, and Human Development; “Formations of Violence: The Narrative of the Body and Political Terror in Northern Ireland”: p. 20-23BlackMagic 

This book is an ethnography of surfaces-those sites, stages, and templates
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of antagonism generate different ideological and practical settings and are subject to diachronic frictions

Tournament: Val Round Robin | Round: 2 | Opponent: Kansas State KM | Judge: KUSWA
Somalia 1AC
Somalia: Nevermind”: Poem
First, status quo discourse paints Somalia as a “failed state” where despotism and terror reign. Suffering is perceived as self-inflicted and ineffective governance is decontextualized from the ongoing colonial power relations and global capitalist markets that work to sustain it. The west is relieved of accountability and expects praise for its charity under the false belief that Africa is better off under the shackles of imperialism.
Sium 2012 (Aman Sium the Department of Sociology and Equity Studies in Educatio; University of Toronto. Writer for Decolonization; “From Starving Child to Rebel-Pirate: The West’s New Imagery of a ‘Failed’ Somalia”; http://www.borderlands.net.au/vol11no3_2012/sium_somalia.pdf  BlackMagic)

Another feature of ‘failed state’ discourse is the intellectually shallow nature of its analysis
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, let us now turn our attention to the al-Shabaab rebel.

And, “failed state” discourse is a dangerous trope loaded with assumptions of cultural barbarism, political volatility, and racial inferiority. The very logic of colonialism has destroyed the historical memory of Somalia to control their understanding of self in relation to humanity. This anti-black racist erasure of Africa’s past has denied Somalia the capability of succeeding in the modern world.
Sium 2012 (Aman Sium the Department of Sociology and Equity Studies in Educatio; University of Toronto. Writer for Decolonization; “From Starving Child to Rebel-Pirate: The West’s New Imagery of a ‘Failed’ Somalia”; http://www.borderlands.net.au/vol11no3_2012/sium_somalia.pdf  BlackMagic)

‘Failed states’ discourse is ultimately about race. Essentialized racial categories determine which political
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the discourse is disproportionately unleashed on Africa in general and Somalia in particular.

And, the rise of al-Shabab has eliminated all pretense of peace keeping in Somalia. Peace has taken on the face of a war without end in the ongoing project of U.S. proxy occupation and annihilation justified by a narrative of collapse, misogyny and terror. The message is clear: The West needs Somalia to be violently expelled from the modern world.  
Sium 2012 (Aman Sium the Department of Sociology and Equity Studies in Educatio; University of Toronto. Writer for Decolonization; “From Starving Child to Rebel-Pirate: The West’s New Imagery of a ‘Failed’ Somalia”; http://www.borderlands.net.au/vol11no3_2012/sium_somalia.pdf  BlackMagic)

The question posed by Somalia is no longer one of peacekeeping or not, precisely
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to modernity and how the West has engaged them since ascending to primacy.

And, the Somali nation space has been sentenced to social death. Its people are always already marked for death in this phantom world. The west demands their suffering to rationalize imperial violence. It is time for new discourses on Somalia to push back against dominant ones. It is time to make room for anti-colonial interrogations and struggle.
Sium 2012 (Aman Sium the Department of Sociology and Equity Studies in Educatio; University of Toronto. Writer for Decolonization; “From Starving Child to Rebel-Pirate: The West’s New Imagery of a ‘Failed’ Somalia”; http://www.borderlands.net.au/vol11no3_2012/sium_somalia.pdf  BlackMagic)

Today just as yesterday, the Somali nation space is sentenced to social death.
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anti-colonial interrogations of Western implication in all claims to ‘failure’.
Finally, the act of story-telling and performance operates as a disruption of dominant scholarship on Somalia—indigenous storytelling threatens the detached Eurocentric objectivity that empties experience from knowledge production.
Sium and Ritskes 2012 (Eric Ritskes and Aman Sium the Department of Sociology and Equity Studies in Educatio; University of Toronto. Writer for Decolonization; “Speaking truth to power: Indigenous storytelling as an act of living resistance”; http://www.borderlands.net.au/vol11no3_2012/sium_somalia.pdf  BlackMagic)

Each of the articles can also be seen as ‘insurgent moments’ (Mendoza,
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and their arrival stories of terra nullius (Tuck and Yang, 2012).