To deny it is to be intellectually dishonest. To not see it is to be part of it. The simple truth is that U.S. society has cultivated a disgusting racism to Arabs and a hypocritical prejudice to Islam. These blights do nothing to protect us, but rather excuses the crimes our government has committed and continues to commit in our names; it provides excuses for our imperialist campaigns; and blinds us to institutional genocide. If a better world is something you seek, you know it cannot be achieved while we are divided amongst ourselves and the real thieves of our era run free.
While I am not given to defend any superstition, the ability for a nation so entrenched in the dogma of Christianity to point a finger at its cousin Islam, should make us all retch. The two faiths are so nearly identical in practice and in blood-lust that to even further illuminate the hypocrisy should be demeaning. But as this century has dawned, so it has been defined in America as an era of hatred and dehumanization for our sisters and brothers of the Middle-East and those adherent to the dominant superstition of the region. As our oil resources dwindle and the seeming inevitability of future resource wars loom over this world, we have been inoculated from compassion for humanity beyond our borders – especially for those who still manage to grasp onto some usable resource(s).
This is a subject I’ve touched on several times but with the recent murder of Osama bin Laden, a seeming increase in anti-Arab and anti-Muslim behavior has come to my attention. Between pilots ludicrously refusing to fly Arab Muslims or Public teachers flinging racist insults at Muslim children. With stories like these and even more accounts of mosques being vandalized with racist slogans and symbols, it’s evident that the lessons we have been prepped with are taking hold. If we should be made to further murder and steal from Arab lands to liberate their oil resources, our culture will gladly turn a blind eye and become entertained with fairy tales about “terrorism” and “jihadists” coming to take our freedom.
I know that my regular audience would not be member to such hatred and that this writing has little hope of reaching those (or even to speak of changing the thoughts of those) who would engage in this, but I still feel compelled to warn you. The only way to stop thieves and murderers is to recognize them. If we are too busy jumping at shadows we’ll never see the real threat.
It’s been a little longer than my usual writing interval and I’m feeling comfortable blaming it on work being very busy and the summer heat making me feel lazy. Lately, everything I see in the news lately is about this bullshit mosque controversy and the midterm elections. I guess the campaign to keep us in line for the coming election is in full force.
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There’s a host of great reasons why the mosque being constructed near Ground Zero delights me. Despite my atheism, the construction of this holy place is really quite a great symbol for the culture of our country. Not because of some romantic idea about healing or tolerance. If we were going to pat ourselves on the back and congratulate one another over ideas like that we would only serve to increase whatever intellectual dishonesty we care to indulge ourselves in. No, there is no healing or tolerance for the individuals building this mosque and the “controversy” surrounding its construction only proves it. With conservatives doing everything but donning white gowns and burning the site (and let’s be honest, they can’t always hold back), liberals are either too afraid or racist to stand up for what’s right. Even “the nation’s premier civil rights/human relations agency”, the Anti-Defamation League, has come out against the mosque with the cowardly rebuttal that “ultimately this is not a question of rights, but a question of what is right.” Suddenly, when Arabs are involved, those “rights” become quaint.
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Helen Thomas’ recent comments, however inartful they may have been, are essentially correct. The Zionist government of Israel needs to be dissolved. While the Rachel Corrie and her passengers were not killed like previous attempts to bring aid to Gaza, the aid supplies were again prevented from reaching a people that desperately need them. The crimes against humanity Zionism has been responsible for eliminate any possibility that it can or should be party to any “two-state” solution and like any reactionary, repressive, superstitious, racist ideology – it should be removed from power. That Israel’s modern origins spring from the events of the holocaust, makes the holocaust it imposes on Palestinians all the more disgraceful.
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Apparently not. I saw this on Matthew Yglesias’ blog a bit ago and didn’t immediately do anything with it as I was curious whether it would ever be widely reported. Much to my dismay it wasn’t and had it not been for Yglesias’ report on it, I unfortunately would not have seen it at all. What its lack of reporting means to us makes it all the more unfortunate.
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While conservatives said we were overreacting and helping to put America in danger, we tried to warn that Arizona’s new racist immigration bill would lead to increased racial profiling and harassment of Latinos. Unfortunately, Republican Governor Jan Brewer signed this bill into law over the weekend. However this bill, now law, only strengthens the police’s ability to discriminate and intimidate minority groups.
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Arizona’s new racist immigration law targeting Latinos has so many dark historical precedents it’s hard to see how it could be proposed in our time. The “Support Our Law Enforcement and Safe Neighborhoods Act” has until Saturday to be signed or vetoed by Arizona Governor Jan Brewer and is widely viewed as the most anti-immigrant proposal in recent years. Now anyone who is or looks like an immigrant will have to carry papers declaring their status in our country at all times.
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How has this not become an unacceptable symbol in our society? How is it that people are allowed to use some bullshit excuse of “heritage” or “pride” regarding this? I’d compare it to Nazism and swastikas but that’s really lost it’s meaning with the banal, ad nauseum usage they receive and because no one needs to prove Godwin’s Law to make this point. So how is it that elected officials who are, at least in theory, supposed to represent all his or her constituents allowed to embrace such a hateful and divisive symbol?
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Since around the summer of 2008, a group of angry people who have currently coalesced under the banner of the Tea Party have been using every opportunity to obstruct much needed progress in our country. They march under demands and vague calls for smaller government, for “real” Americans to “take back” America, a rollback of every aspect of the welfare state, and lower taxes. They endorse mythical conspiracies about Obama’s birth place, his religion, czars, his supposed role in biblical prophesy, “big government”, and a series of other bogeymen they’ve been told to be very scared of.
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Last week, a desperate and angry man killed himself and an office worker in an attack so reminiscent of 9/11 that it begs the questions, why is this man not considered a terrorist? Could it be that he didn’t kill enough people? Maybe that he’s white? Maybe it’s that he doesn’t seem to be of the Muslim faith? Maybe the Obama administration is terrified of the response should this be labeled such. Or perhaps, what I think is most likely the issue, it’s that the conservatives find sympathy not in the actions but in his cause and given the lack of blood this becomes palatable for them.
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