This election has reinforced an important truth about political candidates – that the bar is always lower for unqualified white men than it is for equally unqualified white women or men of color.

I am of course speaking of Donald Trump – and not merely of Trump, but of Rick Perry, Dan Quayle, and a long line of Good Ole Boys and Ivy League frat boys with foot-in-mouth disease, whose style is to speak first, think later – if they bother to think at all.

But let a woman try this approach and she’s a ditz or a bimbo. If she has an acerbic manner – well, she’s a bitch. In Sarah Palin’s case, the unqualified woman was quickly exiled to her porch to imagine her Russian neighbors. In Carly Fiorina’s case, her professional incompetence as HP CEO was an issue, while the male candidate who defrauded many with his fake university and who has declared bankruptcy numerous times gets a free pass.

If you are running for the Presidency while being a person of color, God help you. Every gaffe and error is offered up as proof of your genetic unsuitability for the office. Just ask Ben Carson or Herman Cain. Like Trump, Cain had women problems, but somehow Trump’s three divorces, his womanizing, his misogyny, and his ex-wife’s accusations of rape don’t really matter. Or ask Bobby Jindal, the son of Punjabi immigrants. Although what comes out of both Jindal’s and Trump’s mouths sounds much the same, it’s Jindal who is the buffoon, not Trump.

Yes, a lower bar for white men has always been a feature of American life.

Recently the rightwing commentator Patrick Buchanan wrote a piece for Townhall.com entitled “The Great White Hope.” Buchanan whines that white men are no longer respected as leaders and contributors to society. Now, he sobs, white men are seen only as the fathers of colonialism and slavery. I’m not sure how he can wave away fact as we begin to take a long, hard look in the mirror of history – and Buchanan’s case is overstated – but he writes that much is riding on Trump, a hero to millions of white men angry at the changes in society wrought by now “privileged” brown people and forced to give up their Confederate flags.

Writer Lyz Lenz reminds us that they have always been with us, these angry white men. William Faulkner’s “Abner Snopes” (from “Barn Burning,” 1939) is a beaten-down sharecropper who burns down the barns of wealthy men, and rails at rich whites and poor blacks alike. Snopes is precisely the man Buchanan is talking about – although, truthfully, Snopes would sooner burn down Trump’s tower than vote for him.

In Buchanan’s fairytale America, historical oppressors have now become the victims, the historical victims the new oppressors. Where once a white man could readily find employment because of his skin color or his connections, now that same white man is competing with Asians and Mexicans in a global marketplace. I suppose we could lay some of the blame for this at the feet of the white male titans of Capitalism.

But – no. Blame it on the Mexicans.

Which brings us right back to Trump.

Trump’s campaign has accused Clinton of playing the “gender card.” Leaving aside his remarks on Megan Kelly and others, Trump’s own campaign doesn’t do much to dispel the truth of his misogyny and racism. According to a June 4th piece in the Boston Globe by Matt Viser, Trump pays his male campaign workers a third more than women and only 9% of them are minorities. Clinton, in contrast, pays her staff equally and 33% of them are minorities. Whatever you think of her, this says something about her willingness to be everyone’s president.

This election is really a referendum on White Male privilege. Forget Clinton’s email server. Put aside for a moment her lucrative speeches on Wall Street with their guarded transcripts, and all the revolving doors that have brought the Clinton Foundation a half billion dollars. Trump’s supporters simply hate Hillary Clinton for being smarter, more experienced, and more inclined to level the playing field for women and people of color.

Office Hours

April 16, 2016

After a performance of A.R. Gurney’s Office Hours, there was a discussion which ended up defending the preservation of a Eurocentric curriculum based on the Great Books. To which I may have said something like “Western Civilization is greatly overrated.” This no doubt annoyed one person enough to write me an email – to which I replied:

Dear —

I apologize to you, and to everyone else gathered, for my cranky response to your persistent efforts to defend Western Civilization from savages, enemies of enlightenment – or, frankly, anyone outside the Judeo-Christian realm. I especially must apologize to X. I did not intend to denigrate his characterization of the noble impulses of those who founded this nation. I meant only to observe that what they actually created turned out to be, unsurprisingly, not so noble given the models they chose.

Having begun my childhood in India right after independence, I had a front row seat to a side of Western colonialism we don’t see much, fundamentalist missionary Christianity, the subjugation of other people by militarism, eugenics, racism, and the unrestrained greed for other peoples’ resources. It was clear enough as a child that something was profoundly wrong with the Great White World, and it has become even clearer as an adult.

But all this, to paraphrase Kipling, was “justified” because “our” [Western] values were superior to theirs. All this, to paraphrase the Desert Storm general Jerry Boykin, was justified because our god was stronger than their god. All this, to paraphrase the American eugenists who preceded Hitler, was justified because we are genetically fitter than the savages.

Western Civilization is the White Man’s Burden. Some of you think of it lovingly as a curriculum. The rest of the world sees it as a sledgehammer.

Even though I grew up hearing (of the Chinese) that “life is cheap in the East,” it actually turns out that the reverse is true. “We” were the only ones to have ever dropped The Bomb on humans – but, no matter, they were just Asians. “We” in the West are not ashamed to kill – in vast numbers – for money, ideology, or simply because we just don’t like you. Total up all the victims of all our wars of choice combined – they far exceed the Nazi slaughter of the Jews. And just look at our Western legacy of slavery, racism, and exploitation of the poor. Boil down all the cultural relics we have stolen or embraced – and it is little more than justification for violence perpetrated by supermen.

These are our real values, not the glowing words on a page.

We may laugh at Nietzsche’s philosophy, which express our secret values most explicitly, but any objective evaluation of our “Western” curriculum must conclude that this is a warped, ideological education that leads, paradoxically, to violence and immorality – no less than ISIS’ twisted version of Islam.

It has always struck me as incredibly strange that a Western world that embraces such violence and hatred for the weak and the “other” would also embrace a religion of peace and egalitarianism. Even if the Romans had not killed Christ and blamed it on the Jews, I think they would have had to kill him some other way. You just can’t have a guy like that running around espousing kindness and care for the poor and the weak.

The truth that the Spanish, English, Portuguese, Belgian, and American missionaries who came hand-in-hand with their colonizing forces know is this: Christianity is for the defeated. Conquerors always come with Bible in one hand and sword in another. It is always all about power: morality has little to do with it.

Indeed, the pre-millennial post-apocalyptic Christ riding in on his horse with bloodied sword is more to the liking of many Christians today. And where did they learn this version of their religion? From university graduates of the 19th Century with their classical Eurocentric educations.

And this is why I say: Western Civilization is greatly overrated.

James Baldwin observed that Americans are the only people on earth who need to “find themselves.” Baldwin was probably not the first to make this observation but his point is well taken. In the absence of communitarian values we are all on our own, suspicious of and pitted against the other guy, and we have a pretty low tolerance for anyone else’s values. Social Darwinism is our creed. The poor are weak, and the rich get what they deserve. Might is right, and nice guys finish last. A sucker is born every minute, and none of us want to be that sucker. Kindness is weakness, and altruism is suspect. Donald Trump’s genius is that he recognizes all this.

Many American Christians prefer the more muscular Old Testament to the effeminate Gospel of Jesus, and we American Jews have long forgotten what it is to be a stranger in a strange land. Truth be told, many Americans would rather worship at the feet of Ayn Rand than in the pews of traditional religions which, inconveniently, all exhort us to care for orphans and the poor. Turning the other cheek is much less in our nature than smiting the sinner by rock or sword – or at least sticking them in stocks and pillory – or social networking equivalent. In order to smite as many sinners as possible, we have the most savage armory of weapons on the planet, and we are the only nation to unleash the power of the atom on fellow human beings.

We are experiencing a particularly vicious resurgence of racism and nativism in this country. Police murders of Black people are pandemic, and Republican candidates unabashedly make racist proposals. If we look carefully, the GOP’s minor candidates are guilty of even worse than the front-runner. Scott Walker is unsure if we need to build a wall to keep out Canadians, and Chris Christie wants to track Latinos like FedEx packages. You can’t make this stuff up.

None of this should be a surprise. In 1936 the Union Party ran William Lemke alongside Roosevelt and Landon. The party was formed by the infamous Charles E. Coughlin, Gerald L.K. Smith (an associate of Huey Long), Lemke, and F.E. Townsend. Coughlin and Smith were priest and preacher, respectively, the others populists from states with poor, uneducated citizens. Besides their virulent anti-communism, cafeteria Christianity, open racism and Antisemitism, all had a fear of foreigners and a hatred of intellectuals. Although the party dissolved three years later, their political descendants have since found a home in the various brown shirted Tea Parties which now dominate the GOP.

Before that there was the Red Scare, obsessed with Jews newly arrived from Europe. Before that, the fear of anarchists – again with its bald Antisemitism. And before that, the Know Nothings, an anti-Catholic political party with no sympathy for the hundreds of thousands of Irish potato famine victims coming to America to survive. Not surprisingly, they also supported slavery. In the 1857 Dred Scott decision Supreme Court Chief Justice Roger Taney wrote that Blacks, free or enslaved, could not automatically be granted citizenship. No anchor babies! And before that – our Original Sin, slavery itself, and Jim Crow, and institutionalized racism, and xenophobia, and all the other forms of madness we have perfected.

In 1989 San Francisco enacted a “City and County of Refuge” ordinance which prevented city employees from aiding Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) unless there was a warrant or federal law required it. Republicans have twisted the ordinance to mean that the city knowingly harbors foreign killers. Interestingly, the Book of Leviticus – which every fundamentalist Republican should have memorized by now – mandates cities of refuge for shielding murderers from blood retribution. To the west the cities of Golan, Ramoth, and Bosor, and to the east of the Jordan River the cities of Kedesh, Shechem, and Hebron were to be sanctuary cities. Today Hebron is filled with violent settlers (many “illegals” from America), darlings of a GOP which applauds Israel’s “Right of Return” law, permitting Europeans and Americans to settle in the West Bank, but doesn’t see the irony of denying similar privileges to those whose ancestors once lived in the third of Mexico that the United States seized in 1848.

The America of today has too much blood on its hands and hate in its heart for any citizen to truly “find himself.” We are at so many intersections – technology, environment, income equality, race, militarism. And we blow through every red and yellow light – always in a hurry to go nowhere, always taking the wrong turn.

This was published in the Standard Times on September 3, 2015
http://www.southcoasttoday.com/article/20150903/opinion/150909797

More than 20 states have introduced prohibitions against “foreign” (code for “Muslim”) religious laws which would not only ban Islamic “shariah law” but Jewish halacha and (surely unintended) Catholic Canon law as well: Alabama, Alaska, Arizona, Arkansas, Florida, Georgia, Indiana, Iowa, Kansas, Maine, Mississippi, Missouri, Nebraska, New Mexico, Oklahoma, South Carolina, South Dakota, Texas, Virginia, West Virginia, and Wyoming.

But when it comes to promoting Christian shariah, many of these same states are anything but shy.

Indiana’s recent passage of the so-called RFRA (“Religious Freedom Restoration Act”) was the predictable result of two jaw-dropping Supreme Court rulings. The “Hobby Lobby” ruling added religious personhood to the corporate personhood that “Citizens United” conjured up. In so doing, we now live in an alternate reality in which real religious discrimination is enshrined in law and other types of bigotry are legally sanctioned for largely Christian “religious corporations” like Hobby Lobby, owned by billionaire David Green.

Besides Indiana, Arkansas has also passed RFRA legislation. In Georgia and North Carolina similar legislation is pending. According to the New York Times, a dozen other states have some form of laws which give Christians a free pass to act in very un-Jesus-like ways.

This is nuts. We need to go back and read the U.S. Constitution again. We already have religious freedoms here. Who would claim that Christians are still fearfully huddling in catacombs? People can do whatever they want in their churches and homes. And they do – thanks to our Bill of Rights, which is perfectly adequate. If we desperately need to protect any vital, lost liberty, I suggest we restore the Fourth Amendment. That’s one that’s truly under attack.

It is the state, not a religious institution, which has an obligation to protect new families created by marriage and any children that issue from them. States need to firmly reclaim marriage as a purely civil act with legal consequences, like registering your dog or your boat. The rest is purely ceremonial. And states need to take on all forms of corporate bigotry using all means at their disposal.

So here’s what I suggest for both marriage licenses and documents of incorporation.

Go ahead and get married with a preacher who hates gays if you are so inclined. Call it a sacrament. Call it anything you want. But your marriage will simply be a private matter as far as the state is concerned. You can have a minister, a priest, a rabbi, a philosopher, your therapist, or a trapeze artist conduct your chosen rites. The state, on the other hand, requires your marriage be registered in city hall. That’s it. You’re instantly married. No one other than a state or municipal clerk will have any standing to register the marriage. Ministers lose quasi-legal marrying privileges, although they obviously continue to officiate at congregant’s weddings.

If you have a company that (like convicts and philandering politicians) has suddenly found religion, remember: your corporation exists thanks to documents of incorporation and permits issued by the state. Your company, whose ostensible purpose is to serve the public, operates at the pleasure of the state. If you and your company discriminate against even one person in the state, your corporate license should be immediately revoked. You don’t want to serve cake to gays? Fine. Make cake for your church and stop calling yourself a baker. Don’t want to sell condoms in your drug store? Fine. Choose another profession more suited to your rigid beliefs. No one is stopping you from selling to the public except yourself.

This was published in the Standard Times on April 7, 2015
http://www.southcoasttoday.com/article/20150407/opinion/150409566

A little fact-checking would have prevented Frank Medeiros from publicly embarrassing himself with a letter copied almost verbatim from a piece written by Jerry Schaefer in the Las Vegas Tribune three days before: http://lasvegastribune.net/police-officers-killed-fund/

True author aside, whoever wrote it sure did a lot of cherry-picking of police killings, yet still managed to get things wrong. His/their contention, that anyone who objects to police shooting unarmed black men is a racist … is, charitably, disorganized thinking. Or, less charitably, racism trying to defend itself.

Referring to the killing of officer Melvin Santiago, Medeiros and/or Schaefer ask why Atty. General Holder didn’t weigh in on the officer’s death. Perhaps it was because President Obama had already sent condolences to Santiago’s parents, as had Senator Cory Booker.

Medeiros asks, “How about Officer Jeffrey Westerfield?” Good question. This was not merely a case of Bad Black Man kills Good White Officer. It was a domestic abuse case gone terribly wrong, in which the killer’s half-brother did not hesitate to implicate him. Westerfield was not killed because he was white, and his killer was not arrested without help from the black community.

Medeiros and/or Schaefer also chose Kevin Jordan, a black officer who was killed by a white man, Michael Bowman. The author(s) ask why there was little public outrage. Perhaps because an officer was killed while working at a Waffle House by a gang of white thugs with legal gun permits. A better question would have been why so many people in the United States are carrying weapons into Waffle Houses.

Yet the real issue is and always has been how communities are policed.

In 2012 88% of all officers were male, with percentages over 92% in most small towns and cities. Nationally, between 70-80% of police officers are white, again with higher percentages in small towns. But cities are a huge problem. The New York Times recently ran a piece about police departments whose white officers exceed the overall white population by 30-50%. In the greater Boston area, Chelsea is 25% white but has 78% white officers – 53% higher. Dozens of Massachusetts cities have this problem and almost every major city has even worse figures than greater Boston. Ferguson, Missouri is absolutely the national norm.

Worse, these predominantly white police departments police black communities with very little accountability – and they kill on average one black man every 28 hours – so, yes, it does bring out the protests and occasionally a riot. It is impunity that has people so upset.

Statistics demonstrate that white officers are suspicious more, stop more, harass more, and shoot more when those they interact with are not white. All this increases distrust and resentment of the police. The status quo is not working.

We also cannot disregard the fact that Americans are one of the most heavily-armed people on earth. Put weapons in the hands of gangs and thugs – or even an angry boyfriend – and murders happen – to civilians and police officers alike.

According to the FBI’s figures on 48 killings of police officers in 2012, 42 officers were white and 6 were black – pretty much in line with police demographics. Medeiros and/or Schaefer imply, first, from their examples, that blacks are more likely to attack white police officers and, second, that the Sharptons and Jacksons and Obamas and Holders (translation: black people) only care when black blood is spilled. But as we have seen, both claims are nonsense.

The school-to-prison pipeline – a system that still uses “broken-windows” policing (coming down hard on minor crime) – results in one in three minority men being incarcerated sometime in his life. It is a system that prevents people from ever finding work again, denies them the vote, and fosters a cycle of anger, hopelessness, alienation, violence and more crime. Michelle Alexander, the author of the “New Jim Crow,” notes that more men are incarcerated today than under slavery.

We certainly need economic justice in this country, but we also need police departments that reflect the communities they work in and that treat everyone equally. We have a long way to go.

But to paint these calls for change in community policing as a sort of “reverse racism” is another right-wing “blame the victim” tactic. And as such it’s deeply, offensively, racist.

This was published in the Standard Times on September 18, 2014
http://www.southcoasttoday.com/article/20140918/opinion/409180349

This spring will be the 27th anniversary of the shooting of Larry Flynt. As they have each year since March 6th, 1978, millions of Americans will take to the streets, carrying banners that read, “You can paralyze a man but not an entire nation” and “I am Larry Flynt,” arm in arm, some crying softly, all silently remembering the day that Western democracy suffered its greatest test in decades. European heads of state will join arms with their American counterparts to defend the West’s battered secular freedoms from those who would end it with more bullets.

This is more-or-less the Charlie Hebdo fable as presented by the mainstream press.

But when an Evangelical Christian named Joseph Paul Franklin (who just happened to be a Nazi, a member of the Ku Klux Klan and insane to boot) finally copped to the crime, his complaint was familiar: Larry Flynt’s Hustler Magazine had run an offensive picture of an interracial couple. Flynt and his lawyer, Gene Reeves, Jr. were then ambushed by Franklin with a sniper rifle. Flynt’s intestines were blown out and he was paralyzed. Franklin had also tried to kill Vernon Jordan, Jr., and was trying to start a race war.

Yet nobody made a big deal of Franklin’s religion or asked: Where are all the moderate Christians? Instead, rather than react with revulsion, many Americans actually felt that killing someone like Flynt would have been no great loss. What Franklin had done was lost in the wash along with his satin robes and his dog-eared Bible.

Courts and communities have never looked kindly on Mr. Flynt’s publications and he has been charged countless times with obscenity and pornography. For his part, Mr. Flynt has some very uncharitable things to say about journalistic freedom and justice in America, and that includes the Supreme Court. Unfortunately you’ll have to check Wikipedia for what he said about SCOTUS since this is a family newspaper (Mais sacrebleu! Même les journaux américains sont censurés!). Which is to say, yes, even this column is censored.

The point is that no one in the West really defends tasteless garbage masquerading as journalism – unless it happens to be something that, predictably and deliberately, will offend another culture. And not just any culture but one we hate, Islam. Judeo-Christian culture has its protections. In some European countries cartoons and articles perceived to be anti-Semitic are actually illegal. One of Charlie Hebdo’s writers was fired for such a piece, which alone calls into question the “je suis” propaganda. In the U.S. we have no such laws but we know that newspaper editors have been called on the carpet or have been pressured to issue apologies, such as when the Standard Times ran a Pat Oliphant cartoon of a goose-stepping Israeli soldier right after one of the Gaza invasions.

Zut alors! If we’re Charlie Hebdo, then maybe we should also be Larry Flynt or Pat Oliphant.

But we’re not. We have no such absolute, high-minded support for journalists and their profession. Au contraire, mon ami, we are a nation that has actually begun hounding and prosecuting journalists for doing their job. Just ask James Risen, among others.

The real issue is not the depiction of a prophet or assaults on journalistic freedom. The real issue is the West’s hubris – its perceived “right” to denigrate the rest of the world, initiate “regime change” any time of its choosing, its “right” to foist austerity programs on “lesser” nations, its “right” to choose who shall have nuclear weapons and who shall not, and its “right” to maintain military control throughout the world along with colonial era privileges in the Security Council. These are all political issues, and the young Western-educated terrorists who seethe with political insult more than they do with outrage at the depiction of the Prophet know much more about “our” politics than they do about “their” Quran or hadiths. They are easily deceived into battle, just as we are.

We do our best to convince ourselves that the anger that terrorist attacks represent comes out of nowhere, out of unknowable religious fanaticism, out of the complete rejection of democratic values by people who want to roll the clock back a thousand years. But the manifestos and communiques we’ve heard over the years are strongly political in nature – we just don’t want to hear of it. And so we dumbly ask: Why do they hate us so? – almost rhetorically, as if no real answer could possibly exist. Yet if we are really interested in ending terrorism, we need to face the real answer to this question.

And this involves looking in the mirror.

The Standard Times has been airing a lot of attacks on so-called “political correctness” lately – so many that it might momentarily be confused with Fox News.

There are certainly gradations in “PC” sensitivities, and without a doubt some are petty. But when someone launches a vicious attack on others, it is hardly “PC” to be offended or to even turn off the spigot of hate.

Today’s political cartoon shows Arts & Entertainment channel “Duck Dynasty” star Phil Robertson with duct tape over his mouth, ostensibly the latest innocent victim of a repressive climate in which “no politically incorrect speech is allowed.”

Well, not exactly.

Robertson did not utter an essentially harmless remark, or one that people of a certain age might carelessly drop. Here’s what he – wouldn’t you know it, also a do-it-yourself preacher at Berean Bible Church in Pennsylvania – actually said about gays, mixing his own weird theology with his own weird politics:

“They received in themselves the due penalty for their perversions. They’re full of murder, envy, strife, hatred. They are insolent, arrogant, God-haters. They are heartless, they are faithless, they are senseless, they are ruthless. They invent ways of doing evil. That’s what you have 235 years, roughly, after your forefathers founded the country.”

And in an interview in next month’s GQ magazine, Robertson maintains that Blacks were happy, singing, and god-fearing in Jim Crow Louisiana – before the government messed it all up. The NAACP disagrees.

Rightly, A&E felt that many (possibly a majority?) of their viewers might be offended and they shut the bigot down. Making such remarks is something that Robertson should probably have done in his private Bubba World and not on national television. Didn’t his Mama tell him that’s what you get when you throw your own weird views on sex, religion and politics into an already tasteless reality show?

Further down the editorial page we have Bob Comeau whining about the harmlessness of Fox News telling the world that Santa is White. Comeau wants to sweep the Fox News anchor’s idiocy under the rug with “Skin color, in both cases, is totally irrelevant.”

But skin color is not irrelevant. Just ask Christopher Rougier, an “uppity” Black 9th grader who had the nerve to dress like Santa and was rebuked by a teacher at Cleveland High School in Rio Rancho, New Mexico. This was a child affected by the supposedly “harmless” transmogrification of Santa into an Aryan icon. Comeau would have us believe that Fox News anchor Meghan Kelly’s remarks about Santa were simply ill-conceived humor, but then she doubled down on her inanity by insisting that Jesus was White too.

Much of the Christmas Nativity story has to do with miracles. For my money, the greatest miracle is that White America clings to the notion that a guy from present-day Palestine and another from present-day Turkey look like rosy-cheeked Bavarians. To point this nonsense out is a war on Christmas – White Christmas.

I would agree with Jack Rosen, whose own anti-PC letter to the editor was published a week ago, that people secure in their own traditions should not have a problem with Christmas. But, then again, here in Massachusetts we live in an island of greater civility within a nation populated with many Robertsons and Kellys. These racists and homophobes think they can let any verbal sewage leak from their mouths without consequence. Then, when called to account, their hate speech turns out to be “just a joke” and those who find it offensive are simply “hypersensitive.”

Well, perhaps one day, when they let up a bit, we won’t be so sensitive.

In the wake of this week’s election, Republicans have decided that they weren’t paying enough attention to Hispanic voters, and now they’re going to change all that. In his editorial “The Way Forward,” far-right columnist Charles Krauthammer writes: “The principal reason [Latinos] go Democratic is the issue of illegal immigrants.” A few paragraphs later he proposes that, by moving immigration reform ahead and advancing Latino candidates, Republicans can “counter [Democratic appeal] in one stroke by fixing the Latino problem.”

This is a simplistic if not paternalistic view, similar to the one Republicans have about Jews who, in their minds, are supposedly devoted to a single issue: Israel. But the recent election proved to be a wake-up call for Republican (and Israeli Likud supporter) Sheldon Adelson who put hundreds of millions of dollars into uber-Zionist candidates, seeing practically every one of them lose. Meanwhile, JStreet’s PAC provided political money and cover for more moderate, less Likud-oriented, Middle East policies – and all 49 of their candidates won. In Florida, where Adelson and the Republican Jewish Caucus and others attacked President Obama on Israel, the strategy actually backfired. 27% of Florida Jews said the ads made them more likely to vote for the President.

So if Republicans plan to use the same strategy on Hispanic voters, they may be in for a wild ride.

I will leave it to Latinos to speak for themselves, but I’m guessing that years of discrimination, working for social justice, and caring for one another are not unique to any one minority group in this nation, and no matter how much Spanish is heard at the next Republican convention, Latinos will remember who their friends have been. And let’s not forget that the Republicans have had their Herman Cains, Allen Wests and Mia Loves, but a sprinkling of Black faces has not and will not alter a party unwilling to part with its extremist values. Krauthammer says as much: “Ignore the trimmers. There’s no need for radical change… Do not […] abandon the party’s philosophical anchor” – an anchor that promises only: I got mine; you’re on your own.

The original mission of the Southern Poverty Law Center (splcenter.org) was to track hate groups and violent extremists, mainly Southern white supremacists. Last year it still counted 1,018 such groups – but they were distributed all over the United States. In 2010 the FBI reported that violent attacks against Muslims had increased by 50% in just one year. Mosques have been burned – sometimes repeatedly, people murdered, beaten, and stabbed. The recent mass murder by a neo-Nazi in a Sikh temple highlights the fact that those who hate the most are among the least informed.

Which brings us to Wayne Atkinson’s piece, “Islam and Christianity contrasted” (September 25^th). His piece was less a promised “contrast” than simply a recitation of talking points from the usual Muslim-bashing hate groups, many of whom were once in the Jew-bashing business but have now diversified.

Last week in France, for example, the French political “tea” party headed by Marine Le Pen proposed an anti-Muslim law which made wearing headscarves illegal in public. Their new legislation would also prohibit Orthodox Jews from wearing yarmulkes.

The same week, the French satire magazine “Charlie Hebdo” capitalized on the furor over the recent Islamophobic movie, running front and back covers lampooning the Muslim prophet. The back cover was simply pornographic but the front cover broke new ground by presenting hook-nosed caricatures of both a Muslim and a Jew in a single image. When the German satire magazine “Titanic” tackled the Vatican [correspondence] leaks last July, it depicted the Pontiff in various forms of incontinence. The issue was almost immediately pulled out of circulation and images removed from its website. Apparently some kinds of “free speech” are more free than others.

Here in the US, Congressman Peter King conducts his McCarthyesque hearings on Muslims, and some Republicans sound frighteningly like German propagandists of the 1930’s. We learn that the New York City Police has been illegally spying on Muslims not only in Gotham but in New Jersey. And in two dozen states so-called “anti-Shariah” legislation has been filed, authored by the same man, David Yerushalmi, who is one of a number of high-profile haters which include Frank Gaffney, Robert Spencer, Pamela Geller, Daniel Pipes, and David Horowitz – who frequently present their ugly views of a culture war between “Judeo-Christian” values and Islam.

Feeling obliged to defend the very foundations of Western Civilization itself, these cultural jihadis promote American Exceptionalism, an aggressive Christianity, and snipe at non-interventionists, “multiculturalists” and religious moderates. It is no coincidence that some of the strongest supporters of this supposed “clash of civilizations” are far-right Christians like those who made “Innocence of Muslims” – as well as far-right Jews who have funded films like “Obsession” and “the Third Jihad.”

So when folks like Mr. Atkinson grasp at simple answers to complex issues, they often end up grabbing the wrong thing. Islam is not the Arab world’s only feature. Look at a map of American military bases in the Middle East. One of the only nations that we do not have some type of military presence in is Iran. American foreign policy looms large in everyone’s mind – not only rioting mobs or Al Qaeda plotters – but in the daily lives of the overwhelming majority of peaceful Muslims who experience “surgical” drone strikes, unwelcome military operations, and our propping up repressive governments.

Anarcho-terror groups like Al Qaeda indeed create a stew of politics laced with Islamic supremacism. But then American ideologues infuse their politics with the supremacy of “Judeo-Christian values” (as if Buddhists or Hindus have no place in the national conversation) and tirelessly promote American and Israeli exceptionalism. During my son’s life, he has never known a year in which we were not bombing somebody – and it has cost us trillions. Now our cultural warriors are at it again – calling for jihad against Iran next Spring.

Over a week ago a combination porn/hate film appeared on YouTube. Among other things, it presents an image of a bloodthirsty murderer with odd sexual proclivities, in one scene depicting oral sex. Somehow the actors hired were deceived into thinking they were making an action film depicting George, the “Desert Warrior.” But after green-screen tinkering, scene editing and over-dubbing the actors’ dialogue, a 14-minute trailer called “Innocence of Muslims” became the final product, and it was not an action flick at all — but a hit piece on Islam and the Prophet Mohammad. The trailer was placed on YouTube just in time for the anniversary of 9/11, and the calculated outrage it produced contributed to the death of the American ambassador to Libya and three others.

As the strange case unravelled, it turns out that the film was the work of Egyptian Coptic Christian Islamophobes and American Evangelical Christian Islam-bashers who (contrary to their professed love of “Judeo-Christian” values) concealed their identities and initially blamed it all on Jews. All of the usual suspects, including Qu’ran-burning reverend Terry Jones, promoted the film. The haters were having their fun watching ugly, violent fantasies realized on the big screen. Yet even after their fake identities were revealed, they remained unapologetic. So what if a few people had to die to show how evil Muslims really are?

As children we may have heard the truism, “sticks and stones may break my bones, but words will never hurt me.” Well, it just isn’t true. And we’ll never get the chance to ask Ambassador Christopher Stevens for his opinion.

President Obama and Secretary of State Clinton condemned both the film and the resulting mob violence. Right wing pundits went on the offensive, defending “free speech” and “freedom of expression,” and condemning the “Muslim” President for capitulating to the Muslim hordes. One would have thought the Caliphate was about to take power in Washington or the Gates of Vienna finally overrun.

YouTube, which is run by Google, blocked the film in several Arab nations, but again the right wing pundits objected to even this symbolic measure intended to cool the outrage. And a symbolic, if not paternalistic, gesture it was. Google’s own techies certainly know that Arab techies are quite familiar with censorship and how to use proxy servers and other techniques to circumvent access limitations.

In the course of normal human interactions, when we have a dispute with someone, we tend to back off bit, try to defuse the situation, let everybody cool off. But Muslim-bashers are not normal humans. They double down on their malice. Like adolescents with Oppositional Defiant Disorder, they go for the grown-ups’ “buttons” — desperate for the attention and respect so few accord them.

So not to be out-done by les Amis, a French cartoonist recalling the great success of his Danish colleague, created some new, juvenile, cartoons of his own lampooning the Muslim prophet. The cover of Charlie Hebdo broke new ground by caricaturing both a Muslim and a Jew in a single image. The back cover, however, was reserved for — again, pornographic — images of the Prophet Mohammad in various poses. The quips in the cartoon bubbles (such as “And my buttocks? You like my buttocks?”) did not exactly provide much in the way of thoughtful insight — raising the legitimate question: exactly what kind of “free speech” was Charlie Hebdo trying to exercise anyway?

But again the “defenders of democracy” insisted that the Islamophobic show must go on. Tanks were deployed in French embassies throughout the Middle East and, just to make sure that the Muslim hordes back in France would not interfere with free speech, demonstrators were actually barred from protesting the cartoons! It was a Gallic triumph for intolerance, but a definite setback for liberté, égalité, and fraternité. And, well, so much for the national motto — not to mention free speech and freedom of assembly. Gratuitous hate trumped everything, especially reason.

Yet we continue to hear that we live in the West where freedom of expression and speech are about the only thing separating us from the Chinese (with whom we are major trading partners), or the Saudis (with whom we are major arms-for-oil partners) — or those damned Islamofascists who would have us memorizing long passages from the Qu’ran in kerosene-lighted madrassas. Western civilization must be preserved at all costs!

But hold on a moment. The West actually does regulate hate speech and practices selective censorship. Antisemitic hate speech and Holocaust denial is illegal in most of the European Union and in about a dozen European nations where no equivalent protection for Muslims exists. In Israel, which exercises military and civilian press censorship, commemorating the Nakba (the Palestinian “catastrophe” which recalls pogroms and the theft of their homes in 1948) is illegal. And recently, when semi-nude photos of the Dutchess of Cambridge emerged, the British press censored itself and the Royal photos were not printed in England. And back in France French police raided a magazine that actually published them.

Here in the U.S., we think of our nation as the ultimate bastion of freedom. But here too censorship is alive and well. By one measure the United States stands behind 46 other nations in press freedoms. During the last several wars the U.S. has waged, the sight of military caskets or photographs of stricken soldiers has been censored. At most recent national political conventions, demonstrators have had to go into cages or cordoned-off areas euphemistically named free speech zones which our Founders probably never envisioned. And systematic surveillance and spying on virtually allAmericans’ electronic communications has a chilling effect on the willingness to exercise those once-Constitutionally-protected freedoms.

When the Pentagon Papers first appeared, the U.S. government censored their publication. When Julian Assange published a trove of WikiLeaks documents, the U.S. government blocked its DNS records and cut off its payment options via Amazon.com and Paypal. As of this date, Google has received 6,192 requests from the U.S. government to censor web content and it has complied with 42% of these requests. Books, too, are still routinely banned in the U.S. The American Library Associations reports that since 1990 over 11,000 books have been banned.

A recent example of how selectively Western censorship operates is the case of the German satire magazine Titanic, which ran a cover with the pope in a cassock with signs of urinary incontinence and the caption, “Hallelujah at the Vatican — the leak has been found!” — referring to a recent scandal over private Vatican correspondence that found its way into a book. A Vatican spokesman responded, “Titanic oversteps every measure of decency,” slapping a legal restraining order on the magazine, which was then forced to withdraw issues from newsstands and pull the images down from its website.

Censorship in the West is doing amazingly well._

Now I certainly don’t want the government locking me up for what I write — although it did so in the case of Tarek Mehanna. In another case, the government won a case against the Humanitarian Law Project, which only wanted to offer Kurdish rebels ways of resolving conflicts with the Turkish government. The California State Assembly wants to outlaw criticism of Israel on campuses. And I’d rather not have the government assassinate me just because it suspects I’m a dangerous radical. We don’t need any more censorship than we already have. It’s too easily abused.

But government censorship in the age of the internet may pale in comparison to the ability of multinational corporations to either censor content — or promote select content outside national boundaries. In a recent posting on Foreign Policy, Robert C. Post, dean at Yale Law School, wrote:

A looming question raised by Innocence of Muslims is how we should conceptualize the public function played by international companies like Google. On the one hand, they may render our constitutional principles all but irrelevant, since in a digital world private companies will wield the sovereign prerogative of effective censorship. On the other hand, the absence of constitutional restraint will authorize private companies to respond flexibly and pragmatically, in ways that the American government cannot, to the inevitable crises that will accompany an international clash of cultures.

Post makes a good argument that government censorship is largely irrelevant. In Europe, where Holocaust denial is outlawed, those so inclined can still find neo-Nazi propaganda here in the United States — just two clicks away.

And so I reluctantly defend the haters’ right to spread their vile propaganda. But I wonder what kind of sick society so willingly encourages it through repetition of lies until it starts to ring almost true. What kind of sick society gratuitously and habitually puts so much hate into satire, into magazines, into film, into blogs, into everyday discourse? As a card-carrying member of the ACLU, I nevertheless harbor the fear that the damage to civil democracy by such extreme and pervasive hate speech actually outweighs the value of preserving the right to say such things.

So, to those of you — US, Danish, French, German, whatever — who think you are defending freedom by actually generating hate speech — you’re dead wrong. You’re simply looking for an excuse to spew some secret malice. And to those of you who think that governments should ban hate speech — you’re also wrong. Governments, even in the West, selectively choose what and whom they want to ban and none of us should willingly give away even one freedom more to any regime that toys with freedom so carelessly. Keeping in mind that government’s dominion is ultimately weaker than the Internet’s.

Finally, when it comes to hate speech, the issue really boils down to civility. Can a civil democracy survive when it ceases being civil? Can it survive when its minorities live in fear of relentless persecution by the Leitkultur? Not for a thousand years, and not for three hundred.

It seems like a day doesn’t go by without a mosque being blocked, burnt, or picketed by racists. An ignorant “patriot” murders a group of Sikhs because he thinks they’re Muslims. Republicans, besides their usual dismissal of Blacks, gays and Latinos, show a special fondness for demonizing Muslims. Congressman Peter King regularly convenes McCarthyesque show hearings on the Muslim Menace. And in two dozen states these haters have filed “anti-Shariah” legislation authored by a Jewish White Supremacist that serves no purpose other than to show their hatred of Muslims and to proclaim their preference for the “Judeo-Christian” way of life.

CAIR, the Southern Poverty Law Center, and the FBI, all report an alarming increase in murders, assaults, arson, and property damage directed against Muslims. Hate crimes against Muslims are up 50% — and it’s largely the byproduct of a small group of Islamophobic extremists, a well-financed crusade that cranks out books, blogs, and movies like the one that surfaced last week — and which funds think tanks and talking heads on FOX News and other right wing outlets. Disturbingly, these hate-filled messages are nothing but recycled antisemitism: Muslims are the new Jews and Islamophobia is the new antisemitism.

Although today some regard it a sign of an enlightened democracy to permit Muslim-bashing and hate speech of this sort to go unchallenged, let’s not kid ourselves: hate propaganda kills. The Holocaust and the thousands of attacks in recent years on Muslims and those perceived to be “soft” on them by the far right, such as in Norway last year, illustrate this all too well. But there was a time when the United States recognized the lethality of hate speech. In October of 1946, during the Nuremberg trials, Nazi propagandistJulius Streicher was hanged — not for murder but for his “journalistic” career devoted to demonizing Jews.

Colm O’Broin has compared some of Streicher’s antisemitic screeds to current Islamophobic talking points written primarily by Robert Spencer, who is a friend and advisor to just about every right-wing ideologue in the United States, not to mention the author of now-discredited FBI training materials. Many of the quotes O’Broin chose are taken from the Nuremberg trial transcripts or Streicher’s propaganda paper, Der Stürmer. In a few cases I have changed O’Broin’s wording or chosen a different quote. I have also added two points. Clicking on an author’s link will bring up the original quote.

Below are the main points both the Nazi antisemites and contemporary Islamophobes hammer away on. They are amazingly, eerily, disturbingly similar.

1. Muslims/Jews have a religious duty to conquer the world.

“Islam understands its earthly mission to extend the law of Allah over the world by force.” — Robert Spencer

“Do you not know that the God of the Old Testament orders the Jews to consume and enslave the peoples of the earth?” — Julius Streicher

2. The Left enables Muslims/Jews.

“… the principal organs of the Left, which in its [sic] hardened hatred of the West has consistently been warm and welcoming toward Islamic supremacism…” — Robert Spencer on jihadwatch.org

“The communists pave the way for him [the Jew].” — Julius Streicher

3. Governments do nothing to stop Muslims/Jews.

” FDI acts against the treason being committed by national, state, and local government officials, the mainstream media, and others in their capitulation to the global jihad and Islamic supremacism, the ever-encroaching and unconstitutional power of the federal government, and the rapidly moving attempts to impose socialism and Marxism upon the American people.” — Freedom Defense Initiative, a Robert Spencer/Pamela Geller organization

“The government allows the Jew to do as he pleases. The people expect action to be taken.” — Julius Streicher

4. Muslims/Jews cannot be trusted.

” [Muslim] believers may legitimately deceive unbelievers when under pressure.” — Robert Spencer

“In the Jewish lawbook ‘Talmud’ the Jews are told that the possessions of gentiles were ‘ownerless property,’ which the Jew was allowed to obtain through deceit and cheating.” — Julius Streicher

5. Recognizing the true nature of Muslims/Jews can be difficult.

“…there is no reliable way for American authorities to distinguish jihadists and potential jihadists from peaceful Muslims.” — Robert Spencer

“Just as it is often hard to tell a toadstool from an edible mushroom, so too it is often very hard to recognize the Jew as a swindler and criminal.” — From The Toadstool, a children’s book published by Julius Streicher

6. The evidence against Muslims/Jews is in their holy books.

“What exactly is ‘hate speech’ about quoting Qur’an verses and then showing Muslim preachers using those verses to exhort people to commit acts of violence, as well as violent acts committed by Muslims inspired by those verses and others?” — Robert Spencer

“In Der Stürmer no editorial appeared, written by me or written by anyone of my main co-workers, in which I did not include quotations from the ancient history of the Jews, from the Old Testament, or from Jewish historical works of recent times.” — Julius Streicher

7. Islamic/Jewish texts encourage violence against non-believers.

“And slay them wherever ye find them, and drive them out of the places whence they drove you out, for persecution is worse than slaughter…” — Surah 2:191, a Koranic verse quoted by Robert Spencer on Jihadwatch.org

“Deuteronomy 7:16 expresses that command to hate that Moses received at Sinai from the Jewish God Jahwe. It says: ‘You will destroy all the peoples of the earth, whom Jahwe will give into your hands. You shall have no mercy on them.” — inaccurate Biblical verse quoted by Julius Streicher in Der Stürmer

8. Christianity is peaceful while Islam/Judaism is violent.

“There is no Muslim version of ‘love your enemies, pray for those who persecute you’ or ‘if anyone strikes you on the right cheek turn to him the other also’.” — Robert Spencer in “Islam Unveiled”

“The Jew is not being taught, like we are, such texts as, ‘Thou shalt love thy neighbour as thyself,’ or ‘If you are smitten on the left cheek, offer then your right one.” — Julius Streicher

9. Muslims/Jews are uniquely violent.

“(Islam) is the only major world religion with a developed doctrine and tradition of warfare against unbelievers.” — Robert Spencer

“No other people in the world has such prophecies. No other people would dare to say that it was chosen to murder and destroy the other peoples and steal their possessions.” — Julius Streicher

10. Criticising Muslims/Jews is not incitement to violence against Muslims/Jews.

“There is nothing in anything that I have ever written that could be reasonably construed as an incitement to violence against anyone.” — Robert Spencer

“Allow me to add that it is my conviction that the contents of Der Stürmer as such were not (incitement). During the whole 20 years, I never wrote in this connection, ‘Burn Jewish houses down; beat them to death.’ Never once did such an incitement appear in Der Stürmer.” — Julius Streicher

11. God-Bashing: The Muslim/Jewish God is not “our” God

It’s not enough to demonize a people and their religion. Ultimately, you have to blame their God. And in order to do that, you have to deny that their God is the same as yours. Hey, the Nazis did it. The Islamophobes have followed suit.

“In the same way, it is possible that the Qur’an and Islamic tradition present a picture of God so radically different from that of the Bible and Catholic tradition that it would be difficult, if not impossible, to maintain the proposition that they are the same Being in both traditions, apart from some minor creedal differences.” — Robert Spencer and this too

“Deuteronomy 7:16 expresses that command to hate that Moses received at Sinai from the Jewish God Jahwe. It says: ‘You will destroy all the peoples of the earth, whom Jahwe will give into your hands. You shall have no mercy on them.” — inaccurate Biblical quote by Julius Streicher in Der Stürmer

12. People who defend Muslims/Jews are secret race-traitor followers

When it’s not sufficient to bash governments for failing to wage a pogrom on Jews/Muslims, you have to resort to name-calling. Progressive Democrats and others who refuse to demonize Muslims must be Muslims themselves, just as for Streicher the FDR administration had all become Jewish, as if by a bacterial infection. Streicher pre-dated Orly Taitz’s Birtherism and the Tea Party’s obsession with Shariah Law in his “What is Americanism?”

Inflating the significance of individuals and downplaying the power of political and social movements is common. Common, but wrong. “Camelot,” John Kennedy’s administration, is a good example of how a fantasy built around an individual often overtakes reality. We remember the haircut but forget that Kennedy pulled the nation deeper into Viet Nam and botched the Bay of Pigs.

Near the 50th anniversary of JFK’s death and now upon the death of Nelson Mandela, we see the same tendency to inflate the influence and power of these individuals, to ignore the social and political contexts, and to downplay their human and political faults.

Perhaps, with the 50^th anniversary of Kennedy’s killing so fresh, Bob Unger can be forgiven somewhat for doing the same with Abraham Lincoln’s legacy. His contention (“Lincoln’s death robbed U.S. of reconciliation”) is that if Lincoln had lived the U.S. might have been spared Reconstruction and the culture wars.

It is fair to say that the humiliation of the South and the devastating effects of Abolition to its economy, based as it was on human trafficking, led to Lincoln’s assassination. In South Carolina and Mississippi, the slave population was actually greater than the white population. In Florida, Alabama, Louisiana, and Georgia, slaves represented 44%, 46%, 47%, and 48% of the total population. In Jefferson and Washington’s Virginia – in the Upper South – there was one slave for every two free whites.

Despite Mr. Unger’s contention, Reconstruction did not begin after Lincoln’s assassination on April 14, 1865. It had begun some two years earlier. By the time of Lincoln’s death the South’s economy was in tatters and the rise of “terrorist” organizations like the KKK required a Federal response. The South’s “way of life,” not the political power of a racial elite, was at stake.

South Africa is a completely different story. White Afrikaaners were a miniscule minority (whites now account for 8% of the population) but they ran an industrialized economy and may even have had the Bomb. Mandela was the figurehead of a substantial national liberation movement – a movement of and by black South Africans. There was nothing like this among American slaves. In contrast, the War between the States was fought over tariffs, slaves (to be sure), but a variety of issues largely viewed as economic. The Civil War transformed the U.S. from an agrarian nation into an industrial one – and not only in the South.

The questions we should ask are: if Mandela had been murdered (like Steve Biko and many others) and had not been the figurehead of the ANC, would there have been another Mandela? Certainly. Because injustice would still have required a response.

And if Lincoln had lived, would he have created a national reconciliation movement that would have been able to erase the shock of the end of slavery for 8 million Southern whites? The answer is obvious as well: of course not. Pretty unlikely. And doubly unlikely that a single man could have pulled it off.

This was published in the Standard Times on December 23, 2013
http://www.southcoasttoday.com/article/20131223/opinion/312230315

I wanted to find out what the kerfluffle over “creeping Shariah” was all about. After all, this is a Republican worry in thirteen states which have introduced anti-shariah laws. And apparently it’s more serious than even a global economic Depression.

So I went to a blog by the promising name of “Creeping Shariah” and its matching Twitter feed for some hard answers.

The website promised to easily locate the numerous recent cases of jihad being waged on our very shores. In Massachusetts alone there were forty incidents of jihad, as those sly Mahometans managed to finesse a Muslim holiday in Cambridge, plotted to build a cemetery in Belchertown, and the Muslim Brotherhood had apparently consulted with Whitey Bulger to get governor Duval Patrick to build a mega-mosque in Bah-stahn.

Those armed-and-dangerous ladies from Code Pink were raising money for Hamas, CAIR was at it again, trying to help out some headscarf-toting Muslim terrorists at a Boston pharmacy school, Yale University was cozying up to faculty jihadis by not re-inviting an Islamophobe to come back for a conference, and some crazy Mooslim women troublemakers in Kansas City wanted to wear Islamic-style bathing gear in a pool. The fate of our pools, our children, and our very nation were at stake. And all this trouble from a bunch of Muslim women, no less.

Beside the fact that New Haven and Kansas City are not exactly in Massachusetts, most of the other “incidents” reported were endlessly-recycled hate blurbs from people like Pamela Gellar and Rick Santorum – which, I will grant you – do constitute a sort of domestic terror. But most of the postings were over a year old. Maybe getting all that “news” onto his website was just too overwhelming for him. HTML can be so wordy.

But now I was really curious. Incidents of creeping shariah and jihad were obviously so numerous, so dangerous, and so troubling that perhaps a Twitter feed could provide better real-time coverage of the onslaught. And surely the feed would corroborate a pattern of Islamification of our beloved heterosexual, fetus-friendly, pro-capitalist, White-loving, brown-skin-hating, Ayn Randophilic, Judeo-Christian-based culture! I went online looking for more answers.

And answers I found. More attacks on Keith Ellison, indignation at a Toronto school which tried to accommodate a Muslim student who wanted to pray quietly in a corner of its library, and the unmitigated gall of the town of Farmington, Michigan, to sell an unused school to an Islamic cultural association. Truly disturbing stuff, indeed!

Elsewhere in the tweets were some on a Republican congressman (Wolf, R-VA) going after CAIR via the IRS, Judicial Watch going after CAIR, and disappointment that CAIR could sue a former intern who stole tens of thousands of documents for his Islamophobe father, Paul Gaubatz. I made a mental note to give CAIR a donation.

There was also a speech by Geert Wilders at the Cornerstone Church in Nashville, part of his “Warning to America” event, which concluded with the words:

You and I, Americans and Europeans, we belong to a common Western culture. We share the ideas and ideals of our common Judeo-Christian heritage. In order to pass this heritage on to our children and grandchildren, we must stand together, side by side, in our struggle against Islamic barbarism. That, my friends, is why I am here. I am here to forge an alliance. Our international freedom alliance. We must stand together for the Judeo-Christian West. We will not allow islam to overrun Israel and Europe, the cradle of the judeo-Christian civilization.

Wow. Now I get it. Only Leni Riefenstahl was missing from the picture. Or was that Hermann Goering?

I mean, thank goodness I’m a Jew! It wasn’t that long ago that Nordic types like Wilders were saying the same thing about my people. Now with the cool kids expanded to “European Judeo-Christians” and not just Christians anymore, I could join a select club and kick around Muslims if I wanted to – rather than just being a Yid whose faith and culture was once characterized by Nazis exactly as Wilders paints Islam at churches and synagogues today.

I’d get with his program, but all I’d have to do is stop trying to be a mensch. That and the stench Wilder’s words would leave in my mouth.

Today’s opinion page was a smorgasbord of conservative thought on lessons to be drawn from 9/11. I don’t know whether it’s News Corp finally exerting its right-wing politics on the paper, a new editorial policy, or what, but we seem to be treated to an increasing dose of reprints of editorials from the Cato Institute, the Heritage Foundation, the Washington Post and the Weekly Standard. None of the articles on 9/11 were particularly illuminating, but they sure did manage to defend the militaristic and Constitution-hostile world created by the former president and continued by the current one. Even Mr. Obama’s appeal to unity the previous day only papered over the reasons we now find ourselves in never-ending war.

Rather than cloaking ourselves in martyrdom, we should be asking ourselves, honestly, why so much of the world hates us. And, no, it’s not because they hate us for what we have. A lot of the world hates us for what we are doing.

The first essay by Omar Ashmawy, a military prosecutor who did not have enough misgivings about the dubious enterprise at Guantanamo to work there himself, regrets that the US military and law enforcement officers are so ignorant of Muslims and Arab culture. There is nothing wrong with this at all, but Ashmawy makes no mention of our distorted foreign policy in the Middle East as the obvious source of hatred of the United States. It serves little purpose for the FBI and Homeland Security to stop reading Islamophobes and start studying real Middle Eastern scholars when most of the Republican presidential candidates have signed on to Muslim-bashing legislation, Congressman Peter King is conducting antisemitic (in the broadest sense of the word) witch hunts, when we have covert drone wars going on in Arab countries in addition to our public ones, we support an indefensible occupation in Palestine, while half our freshmen congressmen spent their summer recess in Israel, and we honor the Arab Spring by defending despots in Bahrain, Saudi Arabia, and elsewhere. We’re either ignorant, stupid, arrogant, simply don’t care, or some mixture of all of the above. But it’s a recipe for people hating us.

Similarly, the Washington Post’s article is another salute to the conventional wisdom and learning nothing from the preceding decade. There is no mention of the shredding of civil liberties – except where the Patriot Act is defended as “modest” and prudent. No mention of the loss of habeus corpus, widespread wiretaps, email snooping, monitoring of social networking, and the loss of many of our core civil liberties. The article echoes the Heritage Foundation’s distortion that military expenditures over GDP are smaller today than during the Cold War – which is true, except that both military expenditures per capita and as a percentage of our national budget have risen sharply since the Cold War. And much of the divisor, the gross domestic product, is offshore nowadays, in contrast to the Cold War when we still had a domestic manufacturing base. Today more of our tax money goes to killing people in other countries than ever before. The Washington Post’s article warns of “prematurely” getting out of Iraq and Afghanistan – despite the fact that these are already the longest wars in American history. In short, the Washington Post advocates permanent war.

Finally we are treated to a defense of Dick Cheney by neoconservative Weekly Standard writer Stephen Hayes. Cheney is on a tour promoting his new book, “In My Time,” and apparently Hayes, who has another book of his own on the former vice president, is simultaneously trying to sell it and rehabilitate a man whose book, if I had my way, would be titled “Doing My Time.” Cheney most certainly is a neoconservative, helped kick off the neocon think tank Project for the New American Century, is married to a neocon, most certainly did attempt to expand the powers of the executive branch, and most assuredly does not lose one second of sleep over his involvement in the most disastrous American war since the Civil War. Why, on an anniversary of 9/11, is the Standard Times interested in repairing Cheney’s image with bald lies? A better editorial might have examined how a relatively small group of neoconservatives managed to steer the nation onto the rocks.

This was published in the Standard Times on September 14, 2011
http://www.southcoasttoday.com/article/20110914/opinion/109140341

The golden days of Summer are for days at the beach. And days at the beach mean sunscreen, proper hydration, a snack, sunglasses, and a good book to read. But if you’re like me, you may be running out of thrillers. But no worry! We’ve got some great recommendations of fiction from – yes! – the FBI. But first some context.

In recent days, the Norway shootings have revealed a huge number of connections with American hate groups and so called Islam experts. Despite the huge number of these groups, Department of Homeland Security head Janet Napolitano took it on the chin from right-wingers last April for suggesting it even exists. The Southern Poverty Law Center and former DHS investigator Darryl Johnson have written that Napolitano caved to right-wing criticism and dismantled a unit responsible for investigating home-grown terror in 2009. A report by CNN’s Anderson Cooper recently revealed that one of the many “Islam experts” feeding at the government trough who has trained DHS employees, Walid Shoebat, is a complete fraud. Congressman Peter King is still running his McCarthyite hearings on American Muslims, and instead of focusing on real terror, national paranoia has now led to effectively ignoring domestic threats and instead demonizing one of our own religious communities. It all sort of reminds me a bit of the obsession with Jews by the Jüdische Abteilung of the Nazi bureaucracy.

But, people! There’s a silver lining in all this rain! A recent Freedom of Information Act request forced the disclosure of a PowerPoint and other materials the FBI used to train agents on dealing with Muslims. The materials themselves, as well as the recommended readings, are fascinating in a crude, reptilian sort of way – in their demonization of Muslims by the authors, many of whom, it turns out, know bupkus about Islam or have their own axe to grind. If you want some exciting fiction, ladies and gents, it doesn’t get any better or more fictional than this!

So without further ado, here is the FBI’s recommended Summer Reading List on The Evil Moozlim Threat:

The Arab Mind (Raphael Patai)

“The book came to public attention in 2004 after investigative journalist Seymour Hersh writing for the New Yorker magazine revealed that the book was ‘the bible of the neocons on Arab behavior’ to the effect that it was the source of the idea held by the US military officials responsible for the Abu Ghraib scandal that ‘Arabs are particularly vulnerable to sexual humiliation’.”

The Politically Incorrect Guide to Islam (Robert Spencer)

This book should simply be titled “The Incorrect Guide to Islam” because it is a hack job by someone who lacks any academic qualifications in Islamic studies. This book’s many similarities to “The Protocols of the Elders of Zion” should not be overlooked by librarians.

The Truth about Muhammad (Robert Spencer)

Karen Armstrong sums up this one best: “Like any book written in hatred, his new work is a depressing read. Spencer makes no attempt to explain the historical, political, economic and spiritual circumstances of 7th-century Arabia, without which it is impossible to understand the complexities of Muhammad’s life. Consequently he makes basic and bad mistakes of fact. Even more damaging, he deliberately manipulates the evidence.”

The Quran Itself

No doubt included for those who want to selectively hunt the Qu’ran for suspicious passages.

The Complete Idiot’s Guide to Understanding Islam (Yahiha Emerick)

Of this appropriately-titled book, one reviewer wrote: “Throughout the book Yahya Emerick seems to be getting his information from modern fringe scholars who are not representive of the majority in Islam. Many of the ‘reformers’ he mentioned and praised were founders of extremist movements and many people believe these men caused a lot of damage to Islam. I personally do not think Mr. Emerick is qualified to say many of the things he does, I think he should have co-authored the book with a recognised mainstream scholar. There are also many other things, and then some of the information about shias is very incorrect, I am not shia but I found the ignorance about the shia side of Islam offensive. I personally could not give this book to a non muslim because of the errors and minority views it contains…”

Islam and Terrorism (Mark Gabriel, PhD)

From the Amazon.com blurb: “After earning a Ph.D. in Islamic history, Mark A. Gabriel became convinced that Muhammad did not speak for God. His search for truth led to the love of Jesus Christ, as well as complete rejection from his family and two attempts against his life by political fundamentalists. Now pursuing a Ph.D. in world religion at a Christian university, he speaks and writes about the true nature of Islam with the non-emotional accuracy of an academician. As a reflection of his new life in Christ, he has chosen a Christian name to replace his Islamic name.” Objective?

Milestones (Sayyid Qutb)

Qutb’s book is hopefully intended as an introduction to political Islamism, not as a serious study of how most Muslims look at society, particularly European and American Muslims. From an NPR program on Qutb: “Egyptian writer and educator Sayyid Qutb spent the better half of 1949 in Greeley, Colo., studying curriculum at Colorado State Teachers College, now the University of Northern Colorado. What he saw prompted him to condemn America as a soulless, materialistic place that no Muslim should aspire to live in. Qutb’s writings would later become the theoretical basis for many radical Islamic groups of today — including al Qaeda. Qutb increasingly saw the redemption of Egypt in the application of Islamic law.” About as representative of all Muslims as reading – oh I don’t know – Che Guevara.

Kiss, Bow, or Shake Hands (Terri Morrison and Wayne Conaway)

Why this book is included is anyone’s guess.

The question should not be “Why can’t we all just get along?” It should be “How can we afford not to?”

In a rapidly shrinking world made even smaller by the import of foreign workers, offshoring, trade agreements, globalization, and refugees, multiculturalism is under renewed attack. Although there’s significant help from the more racist elements of White America and from the Tea Party, hostility to multiculturalism is shared by the German Chancellor; a majority of House Republicans; Black Americans like Louis Farrakhan, Herman Cain and Allen West; Christians like Pat Robertson and Andreas Breivik; Jews like Ayn Rand, Pamela Geller and David Horowitz; Indians like Dinesh DiSouza; Muslims like the late Osama bin Laden; the heads of state of nations like Israel and Saudi Arabia; pundits like Pat Buchanan and Rush Limbaugh; and conspiracy theorists like Orly Taitz and The Donald. Pardon me if I missed a few million.

What all these examples show, though, is that there will always be people who can’t play nice with others. They also serve to remind us that one person’s victim can quickly become another’s tormenter. Being persecuted yourself does not automatically guarantee compassion for others. Sadly, it often has the opposite effect.

But changes in demographics are virtually impossible to roll back. Large-scale Jewish resettlement of Israel began half a century ago. Palestinians were there for centuries. But nobody’s going anywhere. American descendants of slaves have no African home to return to. Many Latinos living in Texas are the descendants of those who were there when the United States took it from Mexico. To Native Americans the arrival of Europeans was not a welcome development, but where are the voices calling for 200 million Europeans to return to the Old Country? The descendants of South African white settlers are still trying to figure out their place in a post-Apartheid nation. Indian and Chinese merchants have old, established communities on almost every continent. The fingerprints of British, French, and Portuguese colonialism are all over Africa, the Middle East, and Central Asia. The handiwork of Spanish colonialism is seen all over most of the Americas. The least and most recent of these global changes has been an influx of Muslims into Europe, whether resulting from French colonialism or the German Gastarbeiter program. Yet, apparently, there are those who believe they can just roll back the clock on all this change.

What’s done is done.

Multiculturalism encompasses more than ethnicity and language. It has certainly been a shock to many American fundamentalists and conservatives to discover that we have Gay culture, Green culture, liberal culture, conservative culture, religious culture, secular culture, and a bewildering assortment of others. Amazingly, not all families look like June and Ward Cleaver’s, and this has been difficult for many to accept in an economic system where White Protestantism was once dominant and automatically conferred economic and social advantages on its members over all others.

Faced with the reality of change, the only sensible approach is to accept reality. Fundamentalism, racism, ignorance, fear, or self-interest blinds people to what is rational. Their first impulse is to try to make unwelcome interlopers or the new competition pick up and leave. We see this in the Zionist state, where Arabs are hounded from their homes and villages, even in Israel proper. We see this in a variety of Muslim states where Shi’ites, Alawites, Copts, Sufis, and others are persecuted or driven out. We see this in a dozen American states which have instituted laws for ostensibly preventing illegal immigration but whose real function is to harass and send the message to Latinos: you don’t belong here. We see it in new voter registration laws that attempt to disenfranchise minority, poor, and immigrant voters. It’s no coincidence that many of these same states had Jim Crow laws not so long ago.

Resistance to all this change is futile. But why embrace multiculturalism?

First, the world is the way it is because we have changed it. We have to live with the reality and the consequences of how we’ve changed it. Cross burnings and lynchings or the demonization of people who are, for better or worse, now our neighbors doesn’t unravel reality. It only serves to criminalize and destabilize society, to trivialize the meaning of our Constitution, and to divide communities. Embracing reality is really the only sane option. We can’t move forward if we don’t think rationally.

Second, we strengthen democracy by being inclusive, not by building walls. What does it say about our so-called democracy, in the 21^st Century, when gays still do not have all the legal protections of any other class of citizens? If we are truly so concerned about the institution of marriage, why is there such a preoccupation with keeping the fundamentalist Christian, Jewish, and Muslim ideal of heterosexual marriage the standard, and so little interest in keeping families together or raising healthy, well-educated children? Inclusivity focuses on what we all have in common, rather than attempting to preserve some advantage for just our own group or foisting our own religious views on the rest of society.

On those rare occasions in which Americans have been attacked we have felt a remarkable connection to each other, regardless of culture or religion. In the first days after 9/11, there we were — giving blood, saying prayers, just helping each other. But within days we needed to find someone to blame — and the nativists chose Muslims, Sikhs, Indians, or brown-skinned people whom they thought were Muslims. They weren’t picky. Any number of people were beaten, stabbed, shot, and that was just the beginning. These acts of hate may have sufficed to unite xenophobes, but it did not united the rest of society. Faced with economic hardship, the nativist looks accusingly at the undocumented worker. Faced with doubts about the nation’s future, he grasps at straws, believing that simpler times, simpler rules, a simpler mix of people will make everything all right.

But we can create a sense of shared values, compassion, and true connections to teach other by welcoming multiculturalism.

We are blessed with a vibrant mix of people here in the United States. We’ve got just about every language spoken on earth. Go to Washington DC and you’ll often hear Amharic on your cab driver’s radio — at least until the next wave of immigrants replaces the Ethiopians in the taxi business. We’ve got Spanglish. We’ve got Yiddish. We’ve got Creole. Different Creoles. We’ve got tortillas and spaghetti, Swedish meatballs and sushi, baba ganoush and blintzes, hot dogs and crepes, kale soup and cornbread. And there’s the fusion of all these. Instead of a bright white light, we have a dazzling prism of color in film, music, art, theater, and literature. Every religion is here, every spiritual dialect used to talk to God.

Besides the incredible, beautiful, variety within our society, new Americans are a credit, not a debit in demographic and economic terms. While European population growth is flat, ours is growing. This means that the future generation will be large enough to buoy economic growth, even when many of us today are long retired.

Our strength has always been new citizens bringing new strength to an old democracy-in-progress. In every case new Americans have adopted the national story as passionately as each previous group. Multiculturalism is the celebration and the embrace of this ongoing change. The alternative is stagnation, hate, and the erosion of our democratic principles.

Last year in a talk to the youth of her Christian Democratic Union party, Chancellor Angela Merkel declared MultiKulti (multiculturalism) to be dead in Germany. Economist Thilo Sarrizin from the Sozialdemoktratische Partei Deutschland broke with his own party to declare it a failure as well in a badly researched book. In Norway a member of the far Right angered by his own country’s embrace of multiculturalism, and exemplified by what he regarded as Creeping Shariah in Europe, murdered many of the next generation of leaders of the Norwegian Labor Party – all children. The fanaticism with which the Right in America has pursued anti-Immigrant, anti-Latino, anti-Muslim, anti-Gay, anti-Feminist, and anti-Secularist rhetoric and legislation, and has had such a bug up its ass since a Black president was elected, got me thinking that when it comes right down to it, race mixing is what really upsets them.

All this got me thinking of the ultimate example of multiculturalism we probably all saw years ago in George Lucas’s Star Wars. I mean, of course, the bar scene on a remote outpost in space. I went looking for the image and found what I was looking for:

But apparently I was not the first. Our old dependable racist pill popper, Rush Limbaugh, beat me to it, I’m ashamed to say he even had the same picture in mind:

I’m sure Rush would much prefer an America that looks like this homogenous group of ansehnliche Jugendliche:

Yesterday’s terrorist attack in Norway was totally expected.

Of course, when it occurred, the first fingers jabbed into the air were pointed accusingly at Muslims. The Washington Post’s necon columnist Jennifer Rubin didn’t bother for any pesky facts to come in before quoting extensively from an article in the Weekly Standard: “We don’t know if al Qaeda was directly responsible for today’s events, but in all likelihood the attack was launched by part of the jihadist hydra.” Rubin expanded the Standard’s neocon arguments to demand more defense spending. The Washington Post never published an update or retraction.

The New York Times also published a headline somewhat prematurely: “Blasts and Gun Attack in Norway; 7 Dead – Powerful Explosions Hit Oslo; Jihadis Claim Responsibility.” The problem was that no such thing had occurred.

Even President Obama got into the act. “It’s a reminder that the entire international community holds a stake in preventing this kind of terror from occurring,” he said, referring to al Qaeda.

But because of the climate of sanctioned and encouraged hate speech here in the United States, it was a surprise to me that the attack did not originate here – in the cradle of anger, paranoia, and hatred.

The proliferation of anti-immigrant and xenophobic groups like Pamela Geller’s “Atlas Shrugs” has created a large network of hate websites, encouraging violence against foreigners (Muslims principally) and giving a forum to foreign xenophobes like Geert Wilders and neo-Nazi groups like the English Defense League. It turns out that the alleged Norwegian attacker, Anders Behring Breivik, was a regular contributor to “Atlas Shrugs” over several years. The Southern Poverty Law Center, which previously used to track the KKK, now has a full-time job tracking militia groups, “sovereigns,” neo-Nazis, various “Aryan churches,” the “Christian identity” movement, and a slew of groups which violently target Blacks, gays, Muslims, abortion doctors, immigrants, “secularists,” and others.

But if you think these insects are only hiding under a couple of rocks, an NAACP study of the Tea Party movement last year identified these same elements in six of the seven Tea Party organizations [http://www.naacp.org/pages/tea-party-report].

A typical example (from the report): “Larry Pratt of Virginia is a member of two different national Tea Party networks: Tea Party Nation and 1776 Tea Party. He has been promoting the gun and militia movement for years. In 1992 he spoke at a Colorado meeting of Aryan Nations leaders, former Ku Klux Klansmen, and adherents of so-called ‘Christian Identity’ — a doctrine in which Jews are considered Satanic and persons of color are referred to as ‘mud people.'”

No rational person can claim to understand how Constitution’s protections are being applied nowadays. Freedom of association, speech, privacy, and assembly are all under attack by our rapidly-expanding security apparatus and security-friendly courts. But paradoxically we have never been freer to advocate shooting our neighbors in the head with a fifty caliber weapon. Last week a federal appeals court defended the rights of a right-wing racist, Walter Bagdasarian, who had called for Barak Obama’s assassination. In 2008 Bagdasarian, in a Yahoo financial forum, called Obama a “n––” and wrote “he will have a 50 cal in the head soon.” He posted another comment 20 minutes later that said “shoot the n––.”

This insanity occurs within religious groups that should know better. Any number of Christian churches, including the infamous Westboro church, have hosted Dutch extremist Geert Wilders. Although primarily a Christian fundamentalist assault on secularism and a competing religion, as a Jew it rankles me that even a Stoughton Jewish congregation has hosted Wilders, who has extensive links to European neo-Nazis. A Muslim I know has likened the current climate for Muslims in the U.S. to the Germany of 1935 for Jews. He’s absolutely right.

The argument for “tolerance” may well be that democracy cannot afford to legislate civility. But what kind of civil society can survive if even the most violent forms of hate speech are permitted?

So, friends and neighbors, just keep watching the news. Al Qaeda is the least of our worries. It’s only a matter of time before someone — encouraged by their fundamentalist church, a right-wing synagogue, a Tea Party congressman, or some bizarre court ruling — harvests the fruit of the pervasive hate in this sick society.

This was published in the Standard Times on July 26, 2011
http://www.southcoasttoday.com/article/20110726/opinion/107260318

This week the Wiesenthal Center announced that it had purchased a letter written in 1919, the first statement by a young Adolf Hitler proposing the removal of Jews from Germany.

Flash forward almost one hundred years later, in much of the United States it is now open season on Muslims. The number of attacks on mosques, particularly in the South, is now in the hundreds. Besides Quran burnings and mosque arson, Muslims have been beaten, stabbed, and shot. Even Sikhs (who are not Muslim but who wear turbans) and other brown-skinned people have been attacked. Hate groups freely sponsor talks by bigots like Geerd Wilders, often at churches and synagogues. “Anti-shariah” laws have been sponsored in numerous states; the goal is to outlaw religious courts similar to Jewish battei din, which their ignorant sponsors claim is going to replace secular law (which they want to outlaw themselves by pushing a fundamentalist Christian agenda).

The Southern Poverty Law Center reports a huge resurgence in white militias and hate groups. The Washington Post reports that approximately one hundred cases of domestic, right-wing terrorism have  been weakly pursued, or not at all, since the 1995 Oklahoma City bombing.

Meanwhile, gays, lesbians, and transgendered people are still trying to get a modicum of justice. In the minds of the same bible-thumping, Quran-burning fundamentalists, permitting Bob and Jim to get married is going to somehow destroy their own marriages.

And it’s all so petty. This morning I read in these pages that permitting transgendered children to use school lavatories would cause the end of civilization as we know it. It probably never occurred to the writer, a former teacher, that the incredibly minuscule number of children who would supposedly throw schools into such chaos could probably simply use the faculty bathrooms.

But the shrill voices just never shut up. We constantly hear attacks on gays in the military, illegal aliens, unions, environmental regulations, helping our neighbors, paying our fair share of taxes, and any number of things of which Ayn Rand would not approve.

Sixteen states have copied Arizona’s anti-Latino bill, SB 1070. The goal? Removing evil “illegal” foreigners from our midst.

And now, this week in our own community, a Guatemalan man was stabbed in a hate crime, allegedly by a thirteen year-old. I don’t know what was worse – the crime itself or the age of the perpetrator.

The specter of Mr. Hitler usually invokes some Jungian archetype of the ultimate evil, unbounded hate that humans simply cannot comprehend, some abstract demonic impulse, something paranormal.

But Mr. Hitler was hardly a demon. He was, unfortunately, much like us. Exactly like us.

Today, if his name were not so widely known, Mr. Hitler’s ideas would be warmly praised by the religious right – as they were in fact for a time in the Thirties here in the U.S. Because what Hitler wanted was not really so different from what the American religious right wanted then and wants today – a “purified” Christianized culture, preferably overflowing with White Protestants.

It was a relatively short twenty years from Hitler’s letter to the Final Solution. People today cannot comprehend how Germany, a nation of rational people, the most advanced technologically at the time, could have permitted itself to slide into insanity so fast.

Do we have to wait another twenty years before we understand?

The Standard Times editor has apparently jumped on the Terry Jones bandwagon (“Blame violent Islam for deaths”). Not only does the editor appear to share a few of Jones’ own Islamophobic views, he completely misunderstands this as a religious response to the continuing, unwelcome American presence in Afghanistan.

The editor’s last words are: “Let us remember… that Terry Jones might be an irresponsible fool, but he is not responsible for the murder of innocent foreigners in Afghanistan. Those who … practice a faith that they insist commands them to use violence in the service of an angry God are the ones with the blood of innocents on their hands.”

The editor’s use of the words “in the service of an angry God” is horrifying. I doubt he has been trained as a theologian and his inference belies the ignorant Muslim-bashing in vogue today and the rejection of the fact that Muslims worship the same God of Abraham that most Americans do. As for the Angry God, the god of hate is the terracotta idol Reverend Jones apparently worships.

In the 2007 Pew Research study cited in the editorial, “Muslim Americans: Middle Class and Mostly Mainstream” (http://www.pewresearch.org/assets/pdf/muslim-americans.pdf), 26% of American Muslims under 30 did not entirely repudiate suicide bombings as a tactic. Yet in the same study we find that 82% of all American Muslims over 30 see absolutely no justification for it.

But if the editor thinks these figures are “alarming,” let’s look at “mainstream” American values regarding the killing of civilians. I think you’ll see they have nothing to do with religion, but everything to do with politics.

For example, the majority of the American public supported dropping the atomic bomb on Hiroshima. Former Secretary of State Madeline Albright told anchorwoman Lesley Stahl that the sanctions-related deaths of half a million Iraqi children were “worth it” in order to apply pressure on Saddam Hussein.

And let’s not forget the numerous Afghan and Pakistani civilians who are “accidentally” murdered by drones as I write this. Or the thousands of Vietnamese who were cremated by napalm air strikes. Or the hundreds of thousands of Iraqi civilians murdered in “Shock and Awe” – all for nothing. Or the millions of civilians we have left to the whims and caprices of homicidal dictators our own State Department supports.

Our disgust for murdering civilians, it would seem, only applies when we aren’t the perpetrator.

We like to pretend we don’t understand why we are despised. Or we come up with ludicrous explanations to delude ourselves. “They hate us for our democracy.” Or “those damned people and their angry god.”

But the real reason they hate us? Because we won’t stop invading their countries or deciding who should run them. The explosion of rage in Afghanistan had nothing to do with Islam and (I’ll agree with the editor here) had less to do with Terry Jones. Following the disclosure of the premeditated murders of Afghan civilians by Cpl. Jeremy Morlock and other U.S. soldiers, the Quran burning was just the latest affront from America – a nation that will never understand why the world doesn’t embrace us with open arms.

Finally, if Terry Jones is an irresponsible fool for his pronouncements on Islam, the editor is as well for echoing his tripe.

This was published in the Standard Times on April 7, 2011
http://www.southcoasttoday.com/article/20110407/opinion/104070323

It’s been traveled before.

Aside from the fact that real democracies don’t persecute their minorities, Jews are reminded in many pieces of scripture to never forget when we were “strangers in a strange land” (see the book of Exodus). Maybe this is one reason why Muslim-bashing ticks me off so much. As a group, we should know what it’s like – if not us personally, then our parents.

Nowadays, though, we have discovered that, after centuries of being despised by zealots and Christian-tinged nationalists, we have suddenly been mailed gold membership cards to a newly-constituted “Judeo-Christian” country club [others need not apply]. We’ve arrived, we tell ourselves. They love us. Things have changed.

Well, I hate to burst anyone’s bubble, but the folks who hated Jews last year have simply moved on to new enemies. They haven’t stopped their hating, and I don’t trust their unctuous expressions of new-found love. The religious right responsible for so much of the bigotry toward Muslims (and previously Jews and African Americans) still can’t decide whether they want to kiss us, convert us, wear tallit and sing in Hebrew, or keep blaming us for Golgotha. By the time they realize we really aren’t converting any time soon, I suspect they won’t love us quite so much. And then it will be time for us to die in their End Times scenario. All this is to say – we’re really still the enemy. But ever since the Holocaust it’s just been, well, a bit awkward to say things like that in polite company. But give it time. They haven’t really changed.

Yet Jews are not their only enemies. Blacks, gays, tree-huggers, socialists, progressives, unionists, Hispanics, immigrants, flag-burners, pacifists, anti-globalists, anti-imperialists, secularists, atheists – the list is pretty long – everyone’s a target. And it has always seemed so obvious to me that much of their hostility to Muslims is that Islam is simply their number one religious competitor.

But none of this is new.

A few years ago, while doing some genealogical research, I came across a 1909 immigration document which recorded a family member’s recent arrival in America on a ship from Antwerp. I always found it odd that the shipping company had recorded all this information (but more on this in a second):

19y; male; single; can read/write; Citizen of: Russia, Race: Hebrew; Last Residence: Russia, [town] Destination: NY, NY; Has ticket; Passage paid by brother; In possession of: $25; Has been in US before in NY; Never in prison or supported by charity; Not a polygamist or an anarchist; Place of Birth: Russia, [town]

In that year, 1909, many Jews were sympathetic to movements advocating anti-authoritarian forms of government based on justice, not nationalistic slogans. After all, nationalism had never been kind to Jews in Europe. For reasons of both fact and perception, most Jews were presumed to be anarchists in 1909.

And a cautious nation couldn’t be too careful about letting such troublemakers into a society whose ideal was British and German Protestantism. Organizations such as the Boston-based Immigration Restriction League were alarmed that so many of these new Jewish immigrants were “undesirable” that they helped legislate large fines on steamship companies which failed to screen them out (thus the detailed steamship records above). The League’s Numerical Limitation Bill was hardly subtle: restrictions were harshest on eastern and southern Europeans (Jews and Italians). The Dillingham Commission further restricted such immigration and totally eliminated Asians. The American nativists of the time believed these foreigners were inherently “lesser breeds” and incompatible with a superior Christian, European society – something echoed frequently by Tea Party types in the U.S. today and by Islamophobes like Geert Wilders. The League’s charter:

We should see to it that the breeding of the human race in this country receives the attention which it so surely deserves. We should see to it that we are protected, not merely from the burden of supporting alien dependants, delinquents, and defectives, but from what George William Curtis called “that watering of the nation’s lifeblood,” which results from their breeding after admission.

Sound familiar?

First they came for the Jews, then the Muslims. Who’s next?

loonwatch has previously reported the links between the Tea Party and the far-right English Defense League or individual loons like Rick Lazio, Rabbi Nachum Shifren, and a Brooklyn group protesting Park51. We’ve posted Tea Party Express organizer Mark Williams’ “Allah is a Monkey God, Muslims are His Animals” remarks along with his amusing charges that the NAACP is a “racist” group. We’ve posted the NAACP’s resolution condemning racism within the Tea Party.

Now the Institute for Research & Education on Human Rights has released a study of the Tea Party showing that nativism and bigotry is rampant within the movement. It’s not just blacks, gays, Latinos, immigrants, and Muslims.

Tea Partiers are equal opportunity haters.

The complete 94-page report, which studies six of the national Tea Party organizations and includes a forward by NAACP President Benjamin Todd Jealous, notes several efforts that the various Tea Party organizations have made to soften criticism for their racism. For instance, Mark Williams was eventually fired for his Islamophobic remarks, as was Tim Ravndal for his calls for violence against gays. It also cautions that not everyone within the Tea Party movement is a racist:

“It would be a mistake to claim that all Tea Partiers are nativist vigilantes or racists of one stripe or another, and this report manifestly does not make that claim. As this report highlights, however, all of the national Tea Party factions have had problems in these areas. Of the national factions, only FreedomWorks Tea Party, headquartered in the Washington, D.C. area, has made an explicit attempt to narrow the focus of the movement as a whole to fiscal issues – an effort that has largely failed, as this report documents.”

But the report takes the Tea Party to task for the nativism found within most groups, suggesting that its core issues are less economic and more xenophobic:

“The result of this study contravenes many of the Tea Parties’ self-invented myths, particularly their supposedly sole concentration on budget deficits, taxes and the power of the federal government. Instead, this report found Tea Party ranks to be permeated with concerns about race and national identity and other so-called social issues.”

“While Tea Partiers and their supporters are concerned about the current economic recession and the increase in government debt and spending it has occasioned, there is no observable statistical link between Tea Party membership and unemployment levels.”

The report warns:

“Tea Party organizations have given platforms to anti-Semites, racists, and bigots. Further, hard-core white nationalists have been attracted to these protests, looking for potential recruits and hoping to push these (white) protestors towards a more self-conscious and ideological white supremacy. One temperature gauge of these events is the fact that longtime national socialist David Duke is hoping to find money and support enough in the Tea Party ranks to launch yet another electoral campaign in the 2012 Republican primaries. […] The leading figures in one national faction, 1776 Tea Party (the faction more commonly known as TeaParty.org), were imported directly from the anti-immigrant vigilante organization, the Minuteman Project. Tea Party Nation has provided a gathering place for so-called birthers and has attracted Christian nationalists and nativists.”

The largest and fastest growing group is Tea Party Patriots. The report describes its May 2010 convention in Gatlinburg:

“Notable among the workshops were presentations by Pam Geller, an anti-Islam agitator; and a set by the Oath Keepers, a quasi-militia group that focuses on recruiting law enforcement officers and military personnel, and defending their version of the Constitution. A similar workshop with Spike Constitution Defenders, mixed a bit of Posse Comitatus-style rhetoric into their propaganda. Another workshop presenter, Samuel Duck, conducted a workshop advocating repeal of both the Sixteenth and Seventeenth Amendment.”

The second largest Tea Party group is ResistNet which is described as “notable” as a home to nativists and Islamophobes. It includes a number of militia members and anti-immigration activists, including Robert Dameron, founder of Citizens for the State of Washington (Yakima, WA); Wendell Neal, leader of the Tulsa Minutemen (Broken Arrow, OK); Mike Jarbeck, director of the Florida chapter of the Minuteman Civil Defense Corps (Orlando, FL); David Caulkett, creator of IllegalAliens.us and Report Illegals (Pompano Beach, FL); Robin Hvidston of the Southern California Minuteman Project and Gilchrist Angels (Upland, CA); Ruthie Hendrycks, founder of Minnesotans Seeking Immigration Reform (Hanska, MN); Evert Evertsen, founder of Minutemen Midwest (Harvard, IL); and Rosanna Pulido, the founder of the Chicago Minutemen and a former staffer for the Federation for American Immigration Reform (Chicago, IL).

The report adds:

“Another ResistNet partner organization is TakeAmericaBack.org, a website launched in April 2009 to publish anti-immigrant propaganda. One article claimed that ‘multiculturalism’ demands that ‘Americans learn to speak Spanish so illegals can take over America with foreign cultures.’ Another article on this site concluded that ‘a Kenyan, Communist, son of a terrorist, as our wannabe president, who has not only expressed his hatred of America, but is also an avowed Muslim…’ Also included among the official partners is a trio of groups run by anti-Islam activist Pam Geller.”

“It is this untenable attempt to vilify President Obama as ‘non-American’ and ‘foreign’ that pushes a significant number of ResistNet Tea Partiers out of the ranks of a responsible opposition and into the columns of bigots and xenophobes.”

One minor quibble: it’s not just the attack on President Obama that moves these wackos into the column of bigotry and xenophobia.

Next in membership and growth is Tea Party Nation. Describing its Convention in Nashville in February 2010:

“Despite all of these pre-conference difficulties, the convention in Nashville was well attended. Sarah Palin spoke there, generating discussion about her speaking fee, rumored to be over $100,000. Underneath the hoopla attending Palin’s appearance, the convention highlighted the place of Christian conservatives, indeed Christian nationalism, inside this movement generally, and in Judson’s Tea Party Nation specifically. The convention also built bridges to nativists and so-called birthers. There was a marked shift away from a supposed focus on bailouts and budget deficits towards a culture war.”

The convention was also attended by an inexplicable (and to this Jewish writer, a disgusting) number of Jewish ultraconservatives, including Andrew Breitbart, Orly Taitz, and members of the Judeo-Christian Council for Constitutional Restoration. It wasn’t that long ago that we were reviled by such bigots; now some of us are sleeping with these people.

At the bottom of the list and the bottom of the barrel is the 1776 Tea Party, heavily loaded with vigilante militiamen. These guys (and the membership is overwhelmingly male) practically define the word “fringe.”

“On February 27, 2009, Robertson attended a Tea Party event in Houston with a sign reading ‘Congress = Slaveowner, Taxpayer = Niggar.’ He’s also sent out racist fundraising emails depicting President Obama as a pimp. Robertson also has a history of promoting anti-Semites on his ‘Tea Party Hour’ radio program. Both incidents increased the negative publicity surrounding the 1776 Tea Party, but its notoriety did not stop two leaders of an anti-immigrant vigilante group, Minuteman Project, from stepping in to run the 1776 organization.”

The report includes a chapter, Tea Parties – Racism, Anti-Semitism and the Militia Impulse. The Tea Party is riddled with anti-Semites, Holocaust deniers, white supremacists, militia members, and Christian Identity spokesmen. Dale Robertson, chairman of the 1776 Tea Party, supports the views of Pastor John Weaver:

“According to [Weaver’s] particular theology, Jews are considered a satanic force (or the incarnation of Satan himself), and people of color are considered less than fully human. By contrast, the white people of northern Europe are considered racial descendants of the Biblical tribes of Israel, and the United States of America is considered their ‘promised land;’ a theory descended from a theology known as British-Israelism. Although Weaver describes his particular outlook as a variant of ‘Dominionism,’ his essay, ‘The Sovereignty of God and Civil Government’ was listed in a book catalogue published by the British-Israel World Federation. As such, this would place Weaver just one step to the right of the most radical forms of Christian fundamentalism. The list of out-front anti-Semites on Tea Party platforms includes an event in July 2009. One thousand people gathered in Upper Senate Park for a rally in D.C. A full line-up of speakers included representatives from several tax reform groups, FreedomWorks, and talk show hosts. Also on the platform that day was the band Poker Face, playing music, providing technical back up, and receiving nothing but plaudits from the crowd. The band, from Lehigh Valley, Pennsylvania, already had a reputation for anti-Semitism. Lead singer Paul Topete was on the public record calling the Holocaust a hoax, and writing and performing for American Free Press – a periodical published by Willis Carto, the godfather of Holocaust denial in the United States. According to Topete, ‘The Rothschilds set up the Illuminati in 1776 to subvert the Christian basis of civilization.’ Because of their bigotry, the band had been kicked off venues at Rutgers University in 2006 and a Ron Paul campaign event in 2007. But they made it to the stage of the Tea Party without any questions asked.”

And there’s a lot more in the IREHR document: David Duke, European fascists, neoconservatives, and loons like Pamela Geller. But in the interests of space and time, read the frightening report yourself.

http://teapartynationalism.com/index.php

This was published in Loonwatch on December 3, 2010
http://www.loonwatch.com/2010/12/frothing-racism-in-the-tea-party-movement/

Rightwing bigots are bristling at Juan Williams’ firing from NPR for his remarks about Muslims on airplanes. Thank goodness he still has that $2 million job at Fox News, which apparently has lower standards of professional conduct or, for that matter, basic human morality.

“I think the U.S. Congress should investigate NPR and consider cutting off their money,” said former House Speaker Newt Gingrich, who is also a Fox News contributor. Gingrich called William’s’ firing “an act of total censorship. […] I think the whole idea that if you honestly say how you feel about Islam — what he said was very balanced, people should read what he actually said — the idea that that’s the excuse for National Public Radio to censor Juan Williams is an outrage and every listener of NPR should be enraged that there’s this kind of bias against an American,” Gingrich said.

Ok, Newt, here’s what Williams actually said:

“But when I get on the plane, I got to tell you, if I see people who are in Muslim garb and I think, you know, they are identifying themselves first and foremost as Muslims, I get worried.”

If Gingrich can’t understand why these words applied to Muslims are so offensive, perhaps a couple of pictures of air travelers in “religious garb” who are also identifying themselves “first and foremost” as members of a particular religious group will illustrate the pernicious bias against Muslim Americans and the double-standard that NPR finally did something about.

Encouraged by a rising tide of bigotry and xenophobia, opponents of the Cordoba Center, a proposed Islamic Center that has been termed “the Ground Zero mosque” by its opponents, have charged that it tarnishes the memory of 9/11 victims or that it is funded by Islamic militants. This nonsense has been propagated by any number of right-wing politicians like Newt Gingrich, Sarah Palin, Rudy Giuliani, and by people like Abe Foxman of the Anti-Defamation League. In this morning’s paper Kevin Cardin (“Until radicalism subsides, ground zero mosque inappropriate”) has added his own shouts from a mob that would like to erase religious tolerance from this country’s laws and legacy.

But let’s immediately clear the dung from the shovel that Cardin has been swinging. The Cordoba Center is not a mosque and it is two blocks from the former site of the Twin Towers on property that was once a Burlington Coat Factory. The Cordoba Center’s plans are actually based on a model anyone who has visited New York’s 92^nd Street Y or a Jewish Community Center will be familiar with.

The project is spearheaded by Daisy Khan, executive director of the American Society for Muslim Advancement, CEO Sharif El-Gamal, a New York real estate investor, and Faisal Rauf, a New York imam who in 2001 condemned the 9/11 attacks as “un-Islamic” and whose book “What’s Right with Islam is What’s Right with America” directly challenges the views of those who embrace Samuel Huntington’s “clash of civilization” theory. Kevin Cardin appears to be one of these, ignoring the fact that the Cordoba Center’s founders are precisely the sort of “moderate Muslims” whose absence he laments.

Cardin finishes his rant by asking how the Saudis would feel if a U.S. president forced them to build a grand synagogue in the heart of their country – somehow seeing this as equivalent to an American religious denomination simply exercising its freedoms. Interestingly, Cardin shares a mode of thinking with Osama bin Laden, who similarly sees the U.S. presence in Saudi Arabia as a clash of civilizations and an affront to Muslims everywhere.

But thankfully it is not up to Mr. Cardin to decide who has the right to religious freedom in the United States. Although some Christian fundamentalists may see it otherwise, the U.S. Constitution is crystal clear on religious freedom. The First Amendment begins: “Congress shall make no law respecting an establishment of religion, or prohibiting the free exercise thereof.”

Yet in each generation American religious groups have had to contend with bigotry like this. Early in our history it was Protestant discrimination against “Papists.” In the 19^th and early 20^th Century many Jews were accused of being anarchists. During the McCarthy era many were suspected of being Communists. Now we have the Muslims to pick on.

Let me make a suggestion to Mr. Cardin. Drive over to Newport, Rhode Island and visit the Touro Synagogue. Step inside and (if I recall properly) on the right near the door is a letter from George Washington to the congregation, assuring their welcome and safety in the United States. It reads in part:

“The Citizens of the United States of America have a right to applaud themselves for having given to mankind examples of an enlarged and liberal policy: a policy worthy of imitation. All possess alike liberty of conscience and immunities of citizenship. It is now no more that toleration is spoken of, as if it was by the indulgence of one class of people, that another enjoyed the exercise of their inherent national gifts. For happily the Government of the United States, which gives to bigotry no sanction, to persecution no assistance requires only that they who live under its protection should demean themselves as good citizens, in giving it on all occasions their effectual support.”

Sit in one of the benches there and ponder the fact that nowhere in the world are people of any religion more free to practice their religions than in our country. And if you are so inclined, say a little prayer that it remains this way forever.

This was published in the Standard Times on August 13, 2010
http://www.southcoasttoday.com/20100813/opinion/8130332

David Rosenberg’s letter (“Obama’s policies amount to tyranny,” July 8) recalls another time in our history when public discourse was in the toilet and the quality of political arguments was equally deficient. During the Depression demagogues like Huey Long, the Rev. Charles Coughlin, the Rev. Gerald Smith, Dr. Francis Townsend, and William Lemke were fond of throwing around the same kinds of accusations we see today from the tea party and its supporters.

The Rev Smith, ever the political opportunist, was associated with the Christian Nationalist Crusade, the America First Party and the Union Party.

In 1936 at the National Press Club, Smith called President Roosevelt a communist. He also accused Roosevelt of plotting Long’s death. Smith, who railed against Jews and socialists, drew up designs to build a full-size recreation of Jerusalem in the Arkansas hills and was known for other goofy notions, such as linking mental health care in Alaska to a secret government brainwashing program. An early prototype of Glen Beck, Smith was so nutty that even Strom Thurmond kept a healthy distance.

Father Coughlin, who became America’s first mass media (radio) demagogue, coined the phrase “Roosevelt or ruin” and referred to Roosevelt as the “great betrayer and liar” or as “Franklin Double-Crossing Roosevelt.”

Coughlin founded the National Union for Social Justice, the Christian Front, and was the pastor of the National Shrine of the Little Flower Church, which he ran as a multimillion dollar business until 1942 when the Vatican shut him down. Like Smith, Coughlin was a notorious anti-Semite, unlike today’s Fox pundits who have traded in 1930 slurs against “Judeo-Bolsheviks” for more up-to-date attacks on “Islamo-Fascists.”

Does any of this sound vaguely familiar?

David Rosenberg writes: “The Tea Party is a nonpartisan, grassroots movement of individuals united by the core values of our founders derived from the Constitution, Declaration of Independence, and the Bill of Rights.”

If Rosenberg thinks that the tea party is nonpartisan and grass-roots, why are all its proponents associated with the Republican Party? Gallup Poll results published in April state that “Tea Party supporters are decidedly Republican and conservative in their leanings.” Republicans like Sarah Palin pose as if following the tea party, but they in fact are its featured speakers and its leaders.

More than that, they are the more extreme wing of the Republican Party. A case in point is the re-election defeat in Utah of Sen. Bob Bennett, a Republican incumbent who had worked across the aisle with Democrats. “As I look out at the political landscape now, I find plenty of slogans on the Republican side, but not very many ideas,” Bennett told The Ripon Society.

“The concern I have is that ideology and a demand for absolute party purity endangers our ability to govern once we get into office,” he added. In our own state the so-called “Massachusetts Republican Assembly,” which calls itself the “Republican wing of the Republican Party,” is affiliated with the tea party movement but is clearly identified with the Republican Party.

But let’s explore the supposed “grass-roots” nature of the tea party.

Tea Party Nation is a Republican concoction that features Sarah Palin. Tea Party Express is the creation of the Our Country Deserves Better PAC, which in turn was created by Sacramento-based GOP consulting firm Russo, Marsh, and Associates. Tea Party Patriots has a 10-item “Commitment to America” that no Democrats have signed onto and was created by Republican Dick Armey.

Armey, who has been affiliated with or created many more “grass-roots” organizations than the Depression-era demagogues mentioned, founded the Institute for Policy Innovation, Contract with America, Alliance for Retirement Prosperity, AngryRenter.com and FreedomWorks — which is a major financial donor and ideological leader of the tea party. Fox News commentators like Michelle Malkin and Glen Beck serve as the tea party’s free propaganda center.

A media watchdog organization, MediaMatters, summarized: “Despite its repeated insistence that its coverage is ‘fair and balanced’ and its invitation to viewers to ‘say “no” to biased media,’ Fox News has frequently aired segments encouraging viewers to get involved with ‘tea party’ protests across the country, which the channel has described as primarily a response to President Obama’s fiscal policies. Media Matters has compiled an analysis of Fox News’ promotion of these events.”

MediaMatters then went on to list dozens of video broadcasts and Web links which go far beyond reporting into the realm of promotion and political organizing. In April the bias was so evident that Fox stopped commentator Sean Hannity from starring in a Cincinnati Tea Party rally (Los Angeles Times, April 15).

“Nonpartisan” and “grass-roots?”

Surely, Rosenberg jests.

This was published in the Standard Times on July 17, 2010
http://www.southcoasttoday.com/article/20100717/opinion/7170337