Speaking on a conservative talk radio show last week, Attorney General Jeff Sessions denounced a decision issued by Derrick K. Watson, a federal judge in Hawaii, blocking Trumps Muslim travel ban: I really am amazed that a judge sitting on an island in the Pacific can issue an order that stops the president of the United States from what appears to be clearly his statutory and constitutional power.

In one sentence, Sessions turned island and Pacific into swear words, and expelled Hawaii from the United States. Presumably, for Sessions, had the judge been sitting someplace in the real world, someplace that matters, like St. Louis or Dallas, that might have been home to a more credible challenge to Trumps travel ban. But an island in the Pacific? Contemptuous.

Sessions sneering remark must feel familiar to so many Pacific Islanders whose lands and lives have been the playthings of imperial powersespecially the United States. It reveals an attitude which, in the shadow of the climate crisis, has genocidal implications.