‘An unusually violent society’ is a judgment about the United States that John Kiriakou attributes to Isa bin Salman Al Khalifa, the Amir of Bahrain, and has adopted as his own explanation for American political violence.[1]
The conversation
Kiriakou served in Bahrain for two years — “two of the happiest years of my life” — under an Amir he describes as a kind and generous man who opened his beach house to diplomats at weekends, where wives could wear a bikini and nobody would stare, and who invited them over for tea.[2][3]
The exchange came immediately after the Oklahoma City bombing, at the point where the conventional wisdom had already moved away from a Muslim perpetrator. Kiriakou told the Amir he said the same thing himself every day — that a Muslim attacker “would be so bad for us, for all of us.” The Amir answered: “You know the thing about you Americans, you have an unusually violent society, even by Arab standards. You are accepting of violence that would be unacceptable in any other civilized country.”[3][1]
Kiriakou’s response is the part he preserves: “I didn’t know how to respond to that, because he was right.”[1]
How he applies it
He uses the judgment as a general frame rather than a lament, listing the pattern as a sequence of substitutions: dislike Charlie Kirk’s talks, shoot him in the neck; dislike Capitol Hill politics, go to the Congressional softball game and shoot as many members of Congress as possible; want to make a political point about gun control, open fire on children in a school — “because the law is not going to change. Nobody’s going to stop you. Nobody’s going to ban guns. Nobody’s going to make mandatory registration. Nobody’s going to do anything.”[1][4]
In the same passage he ties the immobility back to the parties: people fall away from them “because the political parties don’t affect change in any way. The American people really do want change. The parties aren’t willing to do it.”[4]