Racism is not funny

"The Proud Tradition of European 'Satirical Journalism – Islamophobia Is 21st-Century Anti-Semitism."

Worthwhile reads: "Western Values."

Lenin's Tomb on Charlie Hebdo

"This attack was nothing to do with free speech — it was about war."

Talking With Everybody in the Neighborhood

I'm absolutely thrilled to report working with my local Occupy group, Occupy Sunset Park, to produce three new posters for our ongoing May Day campaign in Arabic! Sunset Park is a remarkably diverse community, a microcosm of Brooklyn itself. It started out as a community built for immigrants from Northern Europe, developed largely in the early years of the twentieth century. But it has remained a entryway for newer immigrants. Today the neighborhood's largest groups are people from the Spanish-speaking Caribbean and from Mexico and Central and South America, and people from various regions of China. While next-door Bay Ridge has larger Arab and South Asian Muslim communities, our neighborhood is home to many Arabic-speaking people as well. Hopefully Chinese=language posters are on the horizon.

The poster above is a translation of one of our English-language posters, reading roughly "We Are Many (99%) They Are Few (1%)." In the next month these posters will be put up around the neighborhood. They're already being shared all over facebook. Closer to May Day itself we'll produce new posters with a specific call for action on that day.

Another of our new Arabic-language posters is tailored to speak directly to another part of the community being targeted for repression by the NYPD.


This one reads, "Are You Only Innocent Until Proven Muslim?"

I'm proud that my fellow Sunset Park occupiers understand how important it is to build bridges to everybody in our community. It truly is a movement about fighting together for our common interests, common interests that can be achieved only if we do, in fact, stick together.

The New York Post: The Der Stürmer of Our Time

Sean Delonas, ultra-racist and anti-gay cartoonist from the racist New York Murdoch tabloid "The New York Post" has proved once again that the spirit of the Nazi propaganda rag Der Stürmer is alive and well in today's New York City. Anyone who doubts that Islamophobia is racism should view this latest outrage and compare it to the vile ouevre of classic 1930s Nazi propagandist Julius Streicher. (I posted a previous Delonas cartoon equating Obama to a dead chimpanzee here on The Cahokian back in 2009. Good As You blog features an incredible roundup of some of his previous racist and anti-gay vitriol here.)

Delonas' cartoon was the response to complaints from New York City's Muslim community upon the discovery that the corrupt and deeply racist New York Police (NPYD) have been spying on the Muslim community mosques and organizations via in-depth surveillance and infiltration, even spying on things like hiking trips. Of course in Delonas' fevered imagination, all Muslims are terrorists, and all are hook-nosed, bearded and be-turbaned.

Delonas, fully encouraged and promoted by his employers in the Rupert Murdoch empire, seeks the same thing as Streicher and Der Stürmer: the dehumanization and demonization of people determined to be "other" into icons of derision and disgust. Never mind that the NYPD has been spying on peaceful men, women and children, American citizen and immigrant alike, the hateful bigots of the Post think they're all subhumans without the same rights as other people.

The printed equivalent of cable TV's ignorance-promoting Fox News, The New York Post is the voice of rightwing white racial resentment. Viciously pro-war and pro-repression, the Post is low on facts and information and high on bigotry. The New York Post deserves to be thrown into the trash; it's probably too toxic even to be used to absorb pet urine.


Here's a couple classic anti-Semitic Der Stürmer originals for comparison, snagged from the online German Propaganda Archive. A sense of familiarity is striking.

What Is Race?

Having had my umpteenth argument on another blog about how Islamophobia is a form of racism, I ran across this clip on the "We Are Respectable Negroes" blog. It's an excerpt from a talk last year by Dr. Charles W. Mills of Northwestern University at the University of King's College.

This fairly short clip is incredibly rich with ideas. I post it here because it addresses how race itself is a social construct and not a biological reality. The identities of race are determined by the lens of cultural dominance: Professor Mills gives an example of how his own mixed national heritage would be determined completely differently depending on who gets to make the rules. This is so key: when I say Islamophobia is racism, those who say "Islam is not a race" are erasing the systems that inform social dominance and prejudice. This becomes easy to see when one considers Hitler-era Germany, where racist laws and racial prejudice were applied by one group of white people sharing overwhelmingly identical genetic makeup with the white victims of their repression. Although religion was the window dressing, be sure that the holocaust was not the product of German Christian theological difference with Rabbinical interpretation of the Old Testament. Anti-Semitism is a clear example of how divorced racism is from actual human biology.

Professor Mills concludes with the idea of racism in society being a product of cultural racial dominance not just the race of individuals, another key concept in the age of our first black American president.

"Pinkwashing" Called Out in the NY Times

It's not the kind of thing you usually see in The New York Times. While the Times has a "liberal" reputation, its position on Israel is quite fundamentally compromised (see the Angry Arab for near daily demolitions of the Times's anti-Palestinian racism). But there it is, an Op-Ed piece entitled "Israel and 'Pinkwashing.'" I'm proud to say that the author of this piece, Sarah Schulman, is a friend of mine, somebody I actually went to college with many years ago. She's been active as a writer, academic, and lesbian activist for three decades, and getting this piece in the Times is a real achievement not only for defenders of Palestinians but for lesbian and gay activists in general.

Schulman skillfully ties the Israeli attempt to make gays complicit with the repressive policies of the State of Israel to the European-American Islamophobic movement that is racist to the core:

"These depictions of immigrants — usually Muslims of Arab, South Asian, Turkish or African origin — as “homophobic fanatics” opportunistically ignore the existence of Muslim gays and their allies within their communities. They also render invisible the role that fundamentalist Christians, the Roman Catholic Church and Orthodox Jews play in perpetuating fear and even hatred of gays. And that cynical message has now spread from its roots in European xenophobia to become a potent tool in the long-running Israeli-Palestinian conflict." Read the whole piece. Congrats, Sarah.

---

In related news, New York City Queers Against Israeli Apartheid (NYC QAIA) continues to be excluded from using the meeting rooms at New York City's LGBT Community Center. It's been conducting its business for months now at sit-ins in the Center's lobby. Veteran gay activist Steve Ault, both a member of QAIA and a founder of the LGBT Center, tried to meet with Center Board Members but was rudely disinvited from any board discussion. NYC QAIA has now issued an excellent identity statement:

New York City Queers Against Israeli Apartheid (NYC-
QAIA) is a group of queer activists who support Palestinians’
right to self-determination, and challenge Israel’s occupation
of the West Bank and East Jerusalem as well as the military
blockade of Gaza. We endorse Palestinian civil society’s call
for Boycott, Divestment and Sanctions (BDS) against Israel,
and the call by Palestinian queer groups to end the
occupation as a critical step for securing Palestinian human
rights as well as furthering the movement for Palestinian
queer rights.*

NYC-QAIA also calls for an immediate end to Israel’s siege of
Gaza and the collective punishment of its people, which are
clear and widely recognized violations of international law.
NYC-QAIA opposes the continued construction of illegal
settlements in the West Bank and East Jerusalem and the
demolition of Palestinian homes. NYC-QAIA calls for the
release of all political prisoners in Israeli jails. Lastly, given
that Israel’s brutal treatment of Palestinians depends so
heavily upon our own government’s support, NYC-QAIA
demands an end to U.S. military and financial aid to Israel.

PALESTINE IS A QUEER ISSUE.

As queers, NYC-QAIA recognizes the myriad ways in which
various forms of oppression — including colonialism, racism,
homophobia and transgenderphobia — are deeply entwined.
As queers, we refuse to accept state violence against
ourselves or others. As gay rights gain support in the US and
Israel, the Israeli government and its defenders have
increasingly co-opted the rhetoric of gay rights to veil Israel’s
racist, colonialist state violence—and this pinkwashing we
also adamantly refuse to accept.

To those who claim Israel is a haven for queers, NYC-QAIA
replies: queer rights in Israel have not been granted by a
benevolent government—they were demanded, fought for,
and to some extent, won. Because Apartheid Israel applies
different rules and laws to Jews, non-Jews and particularly
Palestinians, those minimal rights do not universally apply to
queer Palestinians, nor to queer Israelis of any ethnic group
who build families with Palestinians, nor to queers who
support BDS and oppose Israel’s crimes against Palestinians,
nor to many others. The presence or absence of the same
minimal rights in Palestine is not comparable; apartheid and
occupation strip Palestinian queers of the basic human rights
that have permitted queers in Israel to make their small
gains. Apartheid is the issue.

NYC-QAIA does not speak on behalf of Palestinians — we
stand in solidarity with Palestinians in their struggle. NYC-
QAIA does not support any formal political entity and we do
not all necessarily stand behind a one- or two-state solution.
We reject outright all systems of domination and hate,
including Islamophobia and anti-Semitism. Despite what our
detractors claim, we are not self-hating queers. And the
many Jewish members of NYC-QAIA are not self-loathing
Jews but rather Jews who refuse to support an apartheid
state.

NYC QAIA meets at the LGBT Community Center. We're currently forced to hold our meetings as sit-ins in the lobby: at the behest of anti-Arab and anti-Muslim hatemongers, the Center refuses to rent meeting space to anti-apartheid queers. But the Center is wrong to deny safe space to Arab queers, Muslim queers & other queers it deems “controversial.” And the Center is wrong to censor queer political organizing. So NYC QAIA is holding the space. Occupy!

*The BDS document and its original signers are posted at
www.bdsmovement.net. For more information, see the websites
of Palestinian Queers for BDS, Aswat, and al-Qaws.

NYC QAIA sits-in at the Center alternate Tuesdays, next meeting December 6. They're working on getting a blog up, I will update here when that blog is made public.

For past Cahokian articles on Pinkwashing, click here. I also recommend another activist friend's article "Scott Piro, Queer Support for Israel & the Pinkwashing Scam" by Pauline Park, at her blog on gender rights.

UPDATE: Check out Sarah's "Documentary Guide to Pinkwashing" on PrettyQueer.com. Essential!

Did You Hear the One About the Iranian Used Car Dealer?

An Iranian used-car dealer in Texas has a relative in the Iranian military and they're actually super spies who tried to hire the Mexican mafia to kill the Saudi Arabian ambassador to the U.S. because, well, just because. I mean, everybody knows ALL IRANIANS ARE TERRORISTS!!!11!. And the news just happened to break the same day President Obama's jobs bill was defeated in its first test vote in Congress strangely pushing that event off the headlines. And strangely Secretary Hillary Clinton and various members of Congress are now rattling sabers against Iran again instead of commenting on the U.S.-supported Yemeni dictatorship gunning people down in the streets. And just a couple weeks ago it turned out the U.S. sold bombs to Israel that would be perfect to destroy, say, an underground nuclear facility in Iran.

Suuurrrre. I believe it's all happening just like the government says it is. Don't you?

Hater Speaks at Hate Groups' Confab of Hate

There are plenty of other bloggers who enjoy watching every hateful, insane thing uttered by right-wing fundamentalist Christians and their various hate groups, and normally I'm not one for paying too much attention to every bit of hate speech they utter. It's nauseating and tediously repetitious. But here's a brief clip from Brian Fischer of the hate group American Family Association group making the concise point at today's Family Research Council-sponsored Value Voters Summit that the twin dangers of Islam and homosexuality are the worst things facing America today.

To my knowledge not a single Republican politician has explicitly distanced themselves from this single-minded focus on hatred as the unifying principle behind so-called "Values Voters" or social conservatives. It should be presumed that any politician who attended this conference with an aim other than denouncing it completely, including alleged moderate Mitt Romney whose religion has also been denounced by some of these same hate mongers, thinks it's okay to villify gays and Muslims in exchange for votes. What kind of country to they want to live in? Not the one I do. Shame on anyone who does not recognize this conference and every last social conservative it represents as being nothing but a modern-day Klan rally. Indeed while Mitt Romney has generalized about "poisonous language" from Fischer, he certainly didn't boycott the forum provided by people who share Fischer's views, and agrees with Fischer that gay Americans should be denied equal rights. All these groups with "Family" in their name prefer that gay people not be allowed to build loving families equal under the law. "Family" is their codeword for hatred of lesbians and gays.

Incidentally, the hate group FRC, organizers of today's summit, is run by Tony Perkins, who has given money to David Duke of the actual KKK as well as spoken to the white-racist Council of Conservative Citizens.

(Clip from Right Wing Watch via Gawker)

Another Vast Right-Wing Conspiracy

Head over to Mondoweiss to find a free PDF download of a massive and thorough report by the Center for American Progress called "Fear Inc.: The Roots of the Islamophobia Network in the U.S." Running 130+ pages (which I'm still digesting), the report documents the network of right-wing pseudo experts orchestrating the wave of Islamophobia responsible for everything from bizarre legislation against Muslim Sharia law in the Midwest to bloodthirsty racist protests against the proposed downtown Manhattan Muslim community center.

In the aftermath of the right-wing terror incident in Norway which revealed many of the leading lights of Islamophobia to be influences and even correspondents to its perpetrator, the report paints a compelling picture of a vast international and well-funded web with a laser-focused agenda on demonizing Muslims. There's a great chart in the report showing the multi-million dollar funders at the root of this network, the misinformation think-tank experts who pull the paychecks, and the "Islamophobia Echo Chamber" who do the dirty work of "mislead[ing] the public [by] amplifying the fear and misinformation" that they are supplied. Republican presidential candidate Michele Bachmann is prominent among the "echo chamber" players. It's heavily footnoted, and absolutely chilling.

The report warns, "As the 10th anniversary of 9/11 approaches, the Islamophobia network will be working overtime. The anniversary could be manipulated to ratchet up the non- existent threat of Sharia and warn of apocalyptic dangers stemming from Muslims living in America."

While the report is chock-full of detailed information, I'm finding it a little weak on analysis: while it correctly labels much of the Islamophobia as "racist," it fails to delve too deeply into the "why." While painting an exhaustive picture of craven and cynical opportunism, it doesn't take too deep a look at how central the American relationship to Israel is to creating the petrie dish where this infection has bred. That said, this is an indispensible document that names plenty of names.

Islamophobic Terrorism: Mainstream Racism Comes Home To Roost

No sooner had the smoke started clearing from the rubble in the streets of Oslo, the word was out: jihadi Islamic terrorists have struck again. Even the New York Times briefly reported a sudden claim of responsibility alleged to have been issued by some previously unreported al-Qaeda-like sectlet. Then came the reports of shootings on a "youth camp" outside of Oslo. Soon a shooter was apprehended: He was distinctly blonde and Scandinavian. Between the bombing and the shooting, at least 75 people were dead and dozens more wounded. The news stories changed: the terrorist was now claimed to be a Norwegian convert to Islam. To fit the standard established media narrative, as more came to be known of Anders Breivik, the word "terrorist" started appearing less and the word "madman," more. For days afterward, the American wingnut site World Net Daily ran a poll: "Do you think more Islamic terrorism of the kind that hit Norway today will visit U.S.?"

And then out came the truth: in a propaganda video slideshow, a record of copious web posting, a facebook page, and a thousand-page manifesto, Anders Breivik announced himself to be not only a Christian, but a dedicated crusader (in the most literal sense of that word) to fighting Muslim immigration to Europe and its enablers, "multiculturalism" and "cultural Marxism." He revealed himself to be an ardent supporter of Zionism and the State of Israel. And he revealed himself to be an ardent fan of the whole roster of pseudo-scientific European and American Islamophobes including the vile Pam Geller of the American Atlas Shrugs hate blog. He announced the beginning of a historic struggle to defeat a Muslim takeover of Europe on the scale of the war that defeated the Ottoman Empire at the gates of Vienna in 1683 (that battle is shown in the illustration above: it is apparently a central theme of European Islamophobes and a recurring motif in Breivik's opus). His Norwegian targets were chosen because, out of some sci-fi scenario, he felt it was necessary to snuff out the next generation of "cultural Marxists." The youth camp, it turns out, was affiliated with the ruling Norwegian Labour (socialist) Party, and routinely held solidarity workshops with international struggles like Palestine and the Western Sahara (although condemning the attack, the American fascist commentator Glenn Beck charmingly suggested the youth camp sounded like "the Hitler Youth.")

Here's the thing: while Breivik's murderous rampage may place him on the violent fringe, his ideology is something quite less than fringe. Right-wing politicians across Europe in the Netherlands, Austria, Italy and elsewhere have been stoking the flames of hatred against Muslim immigrants and against "multiculturalism." While not everybody might be waxing nostalgic about the Knights Templar and the Winged Polish Hussars as Breivik does, clearly this idea of a white Europe besieged by brown heathens has caught the imagination of many, many people.

And the ideas of Islamophobia are seeping into mainstream discourse.


I saw this snippet from British "new atheist" Richard Dawkins posted at Lenin's Tomb earlier this year. In it the allegedly humanist Dawkins, a darling of intellectual liberals in the U.K. and America, speculates: "Given that Islam is such an unmitigated evil, and looking at the map supplied by this Christian site, should we be supporting Christian missions in Africa? My answer is still no, but I thought it was worth raising the question. Given that atheism hasn't any chance in Africa for the foreseeable future, could our enemy's enemy be our friend?" Wait, Dawkins is willing to speculate about casting his lot with (wildly conservative) evangelical Christians just to defeat the evil Muslim menace?? Dawkins' suggestion that Muslims represent a force of "unmitigated evil" that transcends his normal principles should be a danger sign that his ideology is infected with European nationalism that is ultimately racist at its core.

I have written earlier about "Everybody draw Muhammad day" in the U.S.: in my opinion it's an excellent example of how what might look like a laudable action in support of civil liberties becomes transformed into a mass demonization of the Muslim "other," a crazed, armed, and bloodthirsty mob threatening the foundations of Western civilization. How easily defense of secularism can be manipulated into an orgy of racist stereotyping, disinformation, and alarmist hype.

If in the U.S. the most outspokenly anti-Muslim politicians are obviously bigoted Republicans like Herman Cain and Congressman Peter King, one can see a potential trajectory based on how anti-Muslim immigrant attitudes have taken hold in Europe. A number of the right-wing anti-immigrant politicians in Europe are openly gay, claiming in Islam a special threat to European social tolerance. But this is a specious argument, presupposing that Muslim immigrants are not only specially predisposed to violently oppose homosexuality, but also closed to the possibility of coexistence. This despite the fact the Islamic scripture on homosexuality closely follows that of the Abrahamic traditions of Judaism and Christianity which, it must be acknowledged, birthed European secular society. In my experience in discussions on gay blogs, I can easily see Muslim immigration becoming — perhaps thanks to the Zionist investment in pinkwashing — a wedge issue that starts to chip off layers of privileged gays toward a conservative agenda. The condemnation of Islam's alleged social conservatism is not usually a serious theological discussion but an amalgam of fantasist assertions and alarmist generalizations usually invoking the notion that all Muslims want nothing more than to behead anyone who stands in their world-dominating way. Note that the anti-Muslim immigrant politicos, gays included, are so wrapped up in their narrative of these murderous "others" there is no thought to the bridges that might be built, for example by queer muslim immigrants (and there are plenty) between communities that might unite to find common — multicultural, and even class — interests.

Here's where, most closely tied to neoconservatism, the faux authorities on Islam step in: Pam Geller, Daniel Pipes, Robert Spencer, Bruce Bawer, Ayaan Hirsi Ali, and others. These cultural theorists beat a drum of hatred toward Muslims, hatred that is transformed into violence at the hands of activists like Anders Breivik.

And here's the truth you won't get from the media narrative: according to Europol, terrorist "attacks by separatist/nationalist groups far outnumber attacks by Islamists." (See Matthew Yglesias at Thinkprogress). It is not the Muslims who are bringing violence to Europe's streets. And on the contrary, fascist nationalist groups like the English Defense League (which Breivik was apparently in contact with) have been organizing not only behind the scenes, but openly provocative street actions as well.


This is a photo (from TPM) of one of the hate-fests held to protest the downtown Manhattan Islamic Community Center in 2010. Note the pro-torture "Waterboarding Instructor." These are not thoughtful secular humanists, this is a reactionary mob. The 75 acts of murder committed by Anders Breivik are an easy-to-understand warning to take the mainstream ideology of Islamophobia dead seriously. Are Breivik's writings the "Mein Kampf" of a future mass movement, as one leftwing blogger suggests? I'd rather not wait to find out.

A Tale of Two Videos

This catchy song and video is the work of One World, a project formed by members of the British electronica band Faithless. It's a benefit for UK Charity War on Want projects in Palestine, and features a mini-super group of pop musicians, gospel choirs, rappers, break dancers, and even musicians playing Middle-Eastern hand percussion and oud.

"So many years of catastrophe
More than six million refugees
It could be you and your family
Forced from your home and your history

We are the people
And this is our time
Stand up and sing out for Palestine

No matter your faith or community
This is a crime against humanity
God's earth turned into a prison camp
Apartheid wall divides the West Bank

We'll break down the wall
Freedom for Palestine
Demand justice for all
Freedom for Palestine"

The One World website has dance remixes of the song and there's a facebook page as well. It really shows the diverse face of the justice for Palestine movement.

And now to break the mood here's the second video.



It's a video of the "Reunified Jerusalem" demonstration by extremist Israelis in the Sheikh Jarrah neighborhood of Arab East Jerusalem just this past June 1. As you'll see in the subtitles the crowd is chanting such charming things as "Butcher the Arabs!" "Death to Arabs!" "Death to Leftists!" "May your village burn!" and "Muhammad Is Dead!". (More photos of the demonstration can be seen here.)

This is who the so-called settlers are: racist bullies shouting for genocide. Next time the U.S. vetoes a motion in the UN about Israel's illegal settlements, this is whose side the U.S. is taking.


(Hat tip to Annie for pointing me to the first video; second video from Mondoweiss. There's another video on Mondoweiss of the same demonstration.)

Indian in a Box

Some time back in the 1960s I had a version of this toy. Mine didn't come with a horse; but I still remember how much I loved this plastic figure. I remember how the joints would creak when you moved them, the cool smoothness of his plastic skin, the slightly sticky touch and rubbery smell of his accessories, and of course the deep mystery of his lack of certain proper anatomical features. Part of me is embarrassed over this toy. How dare I, a little white boy, objectify an entire people and reduce them to a little plaything. Part of me is proud of choosing this toy over the matching cowboy: in my imaginary world the Indians almost always won as though the injustices I was reading about in the history books this toy helped me to love could be made to be unhappened and rewritten away. As much as I flinch, now, as a middle-aged adult, watching children play at killing each other with violent toys as I suppose this one was, I seem not to have indoctrinated myself into a strong urge to kill my fellow humans, join the army, or otherwise lead a life of crime or violence. In the end I think the imaginations of children are probably best left to do what they're supposed to do, stretch and expand little minds.

The thing is, playing with my toy Indian didn't really teach me anything about real Indians. It taught me to spin a narrative about Indians in my head, a narrative wrought from TV shows and old movies and daydreams which had elements of reality mixed altogether with my and other people's fantasies. My playtime did, ultimately, send me on a quest for information about Native Americans, and eventually I set aside the toys in favor of books. And to this day I'm an avid reader of books about Indian history. Which makes me well informed in a certain kind of way but in the end I'm still a (grown up) white boy trying to contextualize information about, well, others, albeit hopefully in a respectful way.

Because of course my Indian in its box had nothing much to do with any actual flesh and blood people. There are people I have come to know who have ancestors who lived here before white people and survived the rapacious thirst of European immigrants for land, just like others I know have ancestors who came here for all sorts of complex reasons, some of whom probably participating in various unspeakable acts of ethnic cleansing. It's ludicrous to even try and say it, but none of us is lifted up or cursed by this ancestry, we're all just regular people: some have values in common with me and some don't. And this brings me to the point I'd actually like to make, which is not about Indians at all.

Today France outlawed the wearing of Islamic face-coverings: either the Afghan-style Burqa bodysuit or the niqab, a veil draped across the face. A couple weeks ago that bigoted American pastor in Florida who had threatened to burn a Holy Q'uran fulfilled his promise; and while the American media took a pass on covering the event it was later used by fundamentalist demagogues across the planet in Afghanistan to whip up a crowd who last week wound up murdering a handful of innocent United Nations workers.

These three events all have in common, I think, a basic failure to recognize ourselves in the faces of others. These are all actions based in fear. Certainly the murder of innocent people is the worst of them. But the other actions are repellent also: societies where religious freedom is allegedly cherished acting in these ways? We should be ashamed. Because just as the fundamentalist demagogues in Afghanistan have put non-Muslims in a box, so fundamentalist demagogues like Pastor Jones or the racist politicians behind France's new law are putting Muslims in a box: the dehumanizing box of otherness and objectification.

Only now, it's not children's playtime. These reactions are not based in reality, they're based in narratives going on in the heads of the perpetrators.

Tea Party Rally turns into Fascist Hate Fest

This horrifying clip has been making the rounds of virtually all the blogs I read. I can't let it go by without sharing it here as well. The video is from the Greater Los Angeles Area office of the Council on American-Islamic Relations and it documents a California rally "organized by anti-Muslim bigots to protest a February fundraising event held by an American Muslim relief group for relief work and charity in the U.S." The video excerpts speeches by local elected politicians, as well as the crowd heckling attendees to the benefit. Attendees who include lots of women and children. Among the organizers of the hate rally were local teabagger, uh "Tea Party," groups, no doubt focusing only on issues of economy and small government (snark!). In it one can see elected officials proudly fantasizing about murdering some of their constituents.

This is some of the ugliest video I've seen. And unlike the numerous videos of stupid people and/or rightwing people and/or racist people and/or some combination of the above that have been making the rounds over the past two or three years, this doesn't show teabaggers wandering about in a teabagger environment. This shows the unbridled racist anger and hatred of teabaggers when they get a chance to actually interact with the objects of their disaffection. It's viscerally disturbing.

To those who say the Teabaggers are not a fascist movement, I present this as evidence. Be afraid, be very afraid.

American Burqa: a Night Out on the Jersey Shore

There is a place where women are forced to dress all alike. It's a kind of uniform of submission: all women are forced to wear this uniform or be shunned, whether they are young and shapely or middle-aged and chubby. Black is the preferred color, though this is not rigidly enforced. What's going on inside a woman's head, her own vision of who she is and what she thinks and what she wants is irrelevent: individuality and freedom of thought is suppressed and propaganda carefully herds women to a standard of sameness. If you think I'm talking about the Middle East you're wrong. I'm talking about Friday night on the Jersey Shore; Atlantic City to be precise. Perhaps I need to get out more, though: I'm thinking it is possible that the horror I witnessed is common throughout suburban heterosexual nightlife. Perhaps in news coverage of the Egyptian revolution you have witnessed the clucking tongues of baiting neocon pundits worrying about whether Islamist activists will somehow hijack the revolution and force Egyptian women into forced modesty. Well here's what I've realized: the concern of American culture for the fate of women in predominately Muslim countries is nothing but a big-fat crocodile tear, because American women, especially young ones, have already been sent down a path of objectification and posed hypersexuality every bit as dehumanizing as what some claim has happened to women in countries like Saudi Arabia and Iran.


There's something fascinating about Atlantic City. The combination of wishful thinking and seediness is honed to a fine edge. The casinos are full of people and yet they're not doing great financially, just as most people spending time there -- me included -- are calculating the enjoyment of the place not in massive gambling winnings but in whether the time was worth the price. We spent a night there this past February weekend. The worst of the winter seems to have passed for now and the indoor social life of the casinos seemed to be jumping. Atlantic City isn't the setting for the MTV "reality" show The Jersey Shore, but it's in close proximity to that show's location, not only physically, but spiritually.

We arrived on a Friday night, just as the crowds seemed to shift from elderly retired people to young adults out to party. As I and my companions sat down for a late dinner we realized that practically every woman we saw was dressed identically: in uncomfortably high heels, and shockingly tight shoulderless cocktail dresses coming down a barely calculable measure below the crotch. These dresses were all about ass threatening to burst out of tight confinement. We began to play a tasteless game we called "hooker or slut." Of course there was simply no way to tell. These women had been completely absorbed into the aesthetic of prostitution.

As we walked around the casino it became almost absurd. Small groups of identically dressed women only occasionally in the escort of calculatingly-casually dressed young men moved about through the halls from bar to gambling room to club. I never saw one try to sit down, I can't imagine what would have happened to their dresses if they tried. At some point I looked at three women leaning over a counter: all had identical hair and makeup as well, the same cut, the same strange-looking false sunstreaks dyed into identical patterns. I realized that while most of these women were young and fit with curves that successfully filled out their tight little dresses, I was also seeing older women or women without such studied bodies who couldn't quite pull off the look but were doing their best to try. Sleeves and leggings accessorized those who feared the exposure of a little flab or wrinkle.

Now granted as a gay man I don't spend a lot of time staring at women. But I don't think my horror at what I saw was driven by prudery or disdain for female sexuality. In the uniformity of what I saw there was something so forced and un-sexy about the professed sexiness of the uniform. All of these women might as well have had signs pinned to their waists saying "you can almost see my vagina." Their outfits pulled attention away from their faces and turned them into automatons of base male gratification.


So when the media shows excessively veiled Muslim women in its condescending or fearful tone, I now have to ask: do you want women to be free to express their individuality? Their sexuality? Or are you just complaining that you can't ogle the flesh of these women? Is the issue the right of these women to live their lives in the way they choose? Or is the complaint that these women might have secret inner lives that are not available to your observation?

I think if I was a woman and a Muslim I would not choose the extreme forms of Muslim hijab like the burqa or abaya. And I do understand that in our harsh world, excessive hijab can be a form of oppression. And I think if I was a young woman looking for love, or for fun, on a night out on the town in a New Jersey beach town, I would not choose to make myself uncomfortable and identical to all my friends. But the choice is not really between covering up and dressing like a prostitute. This is a false choice: a false choice that the women of the Jersey Shore are apparently unable to see.

I was reminded of my visit last summer to an Orisha ceremony and to two jazz concerts in Brooklyn, all of which I described on this blog. At the Santeria ceremony, attended by people of every imaginable race and ethnic mix, the women radiated beauty and strength and individuality and even sexiness. Gay and straight women alike projected a spiritual centeredness and pride. Hair was worn naturally, sometimes very short or in locks. Clothes were not flashy, but neither were they shapeless potato sacks. Some wore African-inspired finery but everyone projected her own being. At the jazz concerts, the overwhelmingly African-American crowd ran the gamut from young to old. There was certainly flashiness there, but the fashion was consciousness and self-empowerment. If there was flirtation it was chosen, rather than a blatant neon sign of objectification and neediness.


It is not the lack of modesty that concerns me, nor the display of sexuality. It's something else. Oh I hear a voice in my head that sounds like the mean old man telling those darn kids to get off his lawn in some early 1960s youth culture flick. But I don't think what I was seeing was youth rebellion; on the contrary, I think it was the fruit of some kind of media hypnotism. To me it looks empty and false.

I miss feminism: when women were empowered to make choices for themselves, to be freethinkers, to be unabashedly sex-positive. Those tight little cocktail dresses strike me as the Burqas of our age: prisons of subjugation and objectification. I've read Middle-Eastern feminists criticize the abaya and the burqa because a woman must spend so much time hanging on to her clothes she couldn't possibly work at a physical job and must therefore change her orientation to the home. And so it is with crotch=length dresses: how can one even think if all one is doing is ensuring something won't pop out?

Bad television like "The Jersey Shore" is good for a laugh. But I'm starting to think it's not so funny. What happens when life starts to imitate this terrible, demeaning "art"?

(Atlantic City booty photos by me. Sorry for using your butts to make a point, ladies.)

Is the New Atheism Left-wing?

It's a caricature that religion and religious people are always defenders of the way it is and atheists the brave challengers and visionaries of a new world. Yet I know from my own evolving spirituality that my spiritual and religious views and experience have become the bedrock of my own commitment to social change and justice. I also know that many of the proud atheists I have engaged in conversation with show themselves to be every bit as rigidly fundamentalist as the right-wing religious fundamentalists they claim to oppose. In many cases atheists in their sweeping condemnation of faith find themselves courting national chauvinism, Islamophobia and worse. Of course spirituality, or the lack thereof, is a personal experience: I neither condemn nor advocate any path of belief or the absence thereof but the one someone feels to be right for them. But it is not true that religious equals rightwing and atheist equals leftwing.

I have quoted British socialist Richard Seymour of the Lenin's Tomb blog before. He has just offered up a challenging and thought-provoking essay on this issue in the context of the protests against Pope Benedict's visit to the U.K. Entitled "Papists, secularists and capitalists," it contains ideas, from a left-wing source I find myself in frequent agreement with, I've never really seen written down before. Here's an excerpt:

"From what little I have read and seen on this subject, I suspect that on this issue the 'new atheists' are correct, and that Ratzinger is indeed every bit as indictable as they say he is - just as in general they are correct to charge religion, and not merely its institutions, with promoting patriarchy, oppression and ignorance. On the other hand, that is not all that religion does. I myself have religious friends and comrades who make far better allies of Enlightenment, and of the oppressed and exploited, than a great many of those who claim to be atheists. Religion is not only far from being the major force promoting oppression in this world - for some, it is an inspiration and an alibi in the struggle against it. The diversity of interpretations of religious doctrine, especially on social and political matters, simply does not support any narrow, literalist reading off of prescriptions from texts. I note, with some satisfaction, that for all the theological ignorance of Dawkins et al (an ignorance which, I hasten to add, I share), they are at one with the fundamentalists on the stable meaning of religion and its texts.... Dawkins' own free will still seems to be constrained by his selfish, competitive genes, however. To the imperial chauvinism mentioned above, we could add his intolerance of cultural difference...in relation to the Pope's visit, he described his Romanness as the head of the second most evil religion in the world. What, I wonder, might come first? Buddhism? Judaism? Hinduism? Jainism? Zoroastrianism? No? Ah, right - so it'll be Islam again. One form of religious intolerance informs another prejudice, one which is bound up with race-making processes across the 'white' world. Such a ranking of religions according to alleged harm is not really to do with atheism. Far from having an emancipatory, enlightened content, it precisely reinforces a hierarchical ordering of human societies and cultures at the apex of which invariably sits largely bourgeois, largely white, and largely male liberals of no faith, other than in the sanctity of the Holy Profit. For these and other reasons, the 'new atheism' is mainly a reactionary current."

Read the entire essay at Lenin's Tomb. It's a great read.

(Photo is an 18th- or 19th- century headstone in rural northeast Pennsylvania, photographed by me ca. 1992. The clasping hands image was also a socialist icon in the early days of the socialist movement.)

Hamdulillah: Thank God For It

The Narcicyst is an Iraqi exile living in Montreal; this beautifully photographed video is a hip-hop plea for peace and understanding. It's a powerful statement against Islamophobia. Click through to the youtube page for more info about the production of the video and the full lyric sheet. Thanks to the folks at Mochilla for bringing this to my attention.

Bismillah,
means to will in God's name, without the ball and the chain a slave falling to claim,
Bismillah,
will forever hold inner peace, Wicked streets cripple little being rippling through the middle east
Hamdulillah,
may God bless the dead and gone, forever strong a better song, breaking bitter bonds
Hamdulillah,
for this world, in this spot to this song with these words for hip-hop say
Bismilllah,
stay humble in rhymes in eyes that hate your hunger
its like a jungle sometimes it makes you wonder

What Nine Years Have Wrought

Here's a headline that puts tomorrow's ninth anniversary of September 11 in some perspective:

U.S. Soldiers Allegedly Killed Afghan Civilians, Kept Body Parts As Trophies

"A dozen U.S. soldiers are charged with organizing a secret 'kill team' which allegedly murdered Afghan civilians at random and cut fingers and other body parts from corpses as trophies. Charging documents released Wednesday shed new light on the cases against 12 soldiers who served a year in southern Afghanistan with a Stryker infantry brigade. The most serious accusations involve five soldiers -- Calvin Gibbs, Adam Winfield, Jeremy Mortlock, Andrew Holmes and Michael Wagnon II -- who are said to have slain three Afghans earlier this year. According to reports, those men would likely be charged with premeditated murder, but may face additional charges relating to obstructing justice, possessing human body parts and retaining mortar rounds for personal use..."

This is Afghanistan they're talking about. You know, the good war, the one supposed to be preventing actual terrorists (as opposed to Saddam's imaginary ones) from attacking the U.S. I wonder who's winning that war? Because it sure looks like it's become a war of terrorist vs. terrorist to me.

Speaking of terrorists, a crazed anti-gay pastor of a microchurch in Florida may or may not have cancelled his plans to burn some holy Qurans to celebrate the anniversary of 911. The crazed anti-gay inbred morons of the Westboro Baptist Church may join in. Meanwhile, Muslim houses of worship in Tennessee and New York State have been targeted by bigots and arsonists. The proposed Islamic community center in downtown Manhattan continues to be attacked by right-wing Republicans, Zionists, and the odd liberal or two. Or three. People in government are actually suggesting Muslim Americans should be deprived of their rights.

All this hate against Muslims. Go on any blog to any discussion of Muslims, mosques or Islam and you'll find commenter after commenter reciting similarly worded tirades about Muslims overrunning Europe, inflicting Sharia law on civil societies, now setting their sights on our shores. Read these comments, these blogs, these news stories. Respectable news organizations ponder American anxiety over Muslims. Change Muslims to Jews. Change Mosque to Synagogue. Change Islam to Judaism. Do you not feel a chill down your spine?

What kind of country is this one becoming? What nation is in the throes of its birth? Who are these people who believe all Muslims share in the collective guilt of September 11? Who are these people who allow that insinuation, whose silence becomes acquiescence? Among the silent are allegedly progressive politicians. They know that the leaders of the Cordoba House initiative have nothing to do with terrorists, no specific links to Al Qaeda, well, as far as they know. But in their silence, or in their weak assertion that perhaps the proposed community center is legally right but morally unwise, they reveal a corruption in their hearts. They're willing to sacrifice Muslims on an altar of intolerance. The Carl Paladinos, Rick Lazios, and Sarah Palins of this world, these are the would-be Goebbelses and Himmlers of our time just waiting for their chance. And those who remain silent while Muslims are dehumanized and demonized and presumed guilty by association, they are the Good Germans who could have said something, but didn't. Nevermind the fact that many of those killed on 911 were Muslims. Nevermind that the biggest victims of Al Qaeda worldwide have been Muslims. Nevermind that Muslims aren't one monolithic mass. Nevermind that most of the tens (hundreds?) of thousands of people killed in the American wars of this new millennium have been Muslims.

"I just have to commit one act and the Americans will destroy themselves..." --Osama bin Laden

Who is winning this war that began on that beautiful and sad morning nine years ago? I don't think it's the good guys. It's another war that needs to end before the cancerous malignant rot at its core metastasizes. So who is profaning the memory of all those innocent people who died on September 11, 2001? It's not the people building mosques.

Hallowed Ground?

I think it was the summer before I graduated high school, which makes it 1975. My mom and I drove southward from where we lived in Connecticut to visit a dizzying chain of historical sites and memorials. I was big into history, and we, like many at the time, had a distracting light case of bicentennial fever as we tried not to look too hard at the utter idiot then occupying the White House. We went to all sorts of Revolutionary War and Civil War sites: battlefields, museums, you name it. I think this snapshot was taken at Gettysburg. I haven't been back there in the 35 years since, but I remember an endless expanse of fields, hot and humid and buzzing with insects, punctuated with stone walls and corn. There was a huge indoor mural and a scale model of the battlefield, and cannons were set up at various spots, as though the soldiers manning them had just that moment wandered away from their posts.

It really brought Gettysburg home to me; to picture the humanity rushing at each other with lethal intent; the bullets and cannonballs and limbs and blood flying, and on such a vast scale. They don't fight wars like that anymore. As much as I hate war, and hate the culture that excuses it as some kind of ugly necessity, I have to say of all the murderous exercises in wasting life that I have studied, the American Civil War comes closest to being the exception to prove the rule. How lucky we are to live in an America where the side that won were the ones who wore blue and not gray.

I'm glad Gettysburg is still there. It's important to remember what was defended there. It's not the unity of this country that resonates emotionally to me, but the destruction of that confederate nation built on the backs of slaves. Now that was a worthy cause, and I hope they keep Gettysburg like it is as testament to the thousands and thousands of men who died fighting for that victory.

I lived in New York City in 2001. I saw what happened on that beautiful September morning. I didn't see planes crash or bodies falling, but I saw smoke and flames, and witnessed the world we live in change forever. I went downtown to peer at the smoking ruins once a week or two later when they started letting people go back down there. For weeks and weeks you could see the plume of smoke from my bathroom window where previously you could see the towers, but this was while actual standing ruins were still there and I wanted to get closer. There were barricades and fences and black-clad soldiers or police or something with machine guns everywhere...I'm not sure who the guns were meant for; I didn't see any terrorists about. My friend had brought along a coworker in from out of state. "I'm so proud of Our Military and Our President," she pronounced. I wanted to vomit. And having just spent a week crying I realized I didn't actually want to look at the ruins too closely. I felt like I was looking at something I shouldn't be seeing.

When I went back to that neighborhood for other reasons in the months and years that followed, I would avert my eyes from the pit and the fence around it. I didn't want to see what wasn't there. To my disgust I would see tourists posing for snapshots in front of the pit. A young couple, smiling, posing. Families. And you could buy bizarre souvenirs, ranging from full color atrocity porn to little snowglobes with tiny firetrucks surrounding little model burning towers, with sprinkles like ash floating around in the water inside the glass domes. And eventually I listened and watched as Bush used the occasion...to attack a country that had nothing to do with that place and the tragedy there, emotionally manipulating an entire nation and profaning that spot forever.

While this is a big city, it's not so big that we can rope it all off leave it like Gettysburg. Life goes on here. There's a really comfy movie theater a half block from the pit and the discount department store right across the street from it still has great cheap shoes. We New Yorkers we just walk by, doing what we have to do to live our lives here, averting our eyes when necessary. The subway line I take to work runs right by the site, and for years now there have always been clusters of tourists heading there on my train. To see nothing, no more smoking ruin, no crumpled bodies or piles of ash, just a big hole in the ground. They would puzzle over the subway maps and ask stupid questions like "Does this train go to 911?" I guess I'm immune to them now but for years I wanted to shout at them. "It's not there any more!" I wanted to shake each one of them and demand to know if they had voted for Bush. Go away! This is not the place for you.

I haven't been by it in some months but I understand that there are now, nine years later, visible structures rising from the pit. While I sure wouldn't ever want to work in the new World Trade Center building, I guess I'm happy that something's being done. There should be a memorial there, there was a terrible tragedy and the friends and relatives of 2,700 or so people deserve a place to mourn. And I'm glad they've dispensed with the abomination of a name "freedom tower" for the new building. The greedy real estate developers are all still trying to figure out how that pit's going to keep them rich: for them it's a money pit, not hallowed ground.

And now so many years later so many other people have died. So much about our way of life has changed and gone. I still see black clad uniformed men with machine guns in the subways. Seven stupid years of war in Iraq, and nine stupid years of war in Afghanistan; millions of innocent Iraqis and Afghans mourning just like millions of New Yorkers and just as psychically damaged; millions of Iraqis and Afghans associating "terrorist bombing" with the United States and its callously murdering contractor hordes and silent inhuman predator drones and its shock and awe and manipulative self-righteousness. And a whole lot more than 2,700 lives cut short. If you listen you can hear them shout: "Go away! This is not the place for you!"

This past Sunday, in a rain storm, the site was again profaned. Not by Muslims who want to go ahead with their lives and build a community center at the abandoned storefront a couple blocks away that they've been using for years, but by monstrous bigots protesting that center. I heard a radio report: the woman interviewed was described as waving an Israeli flag. She was, and I am careful to rarely use this word, hysterical. Practically weeping she was ranting about how horrible it was that the Muslims were coming to bring Shariah law and a terrorist recruiting center to lower Manhattan and such a hallowed place. She was so filled with hatred and fear you could hear her body shaking at the terrible lies that filled her head. I saw a video of the event: a dark-skinned Puerto Rican man wearing an apparently un-American looking hat is threatened and bullied out of the rally by a lot of menacing white people. Three women in sunglasses make sure to stay in camera shot with signs saying the Mosque Supports Hamas. These are the people who voted for Bush. These are the ones who are prostituting the memory of a tragedy for a corrupt political cause. These are the hate-filled ignorant bigots, brothers under the skin with a bunch of terrorists who flew planes into buildings.

Again, I'm remembering it all. I want to rush up to these people and say, Go Away. This place is not for you.

A Nation of Racist Morons?

Coming soon, a combination all-purpose item of headwear!

According to a recent poll, 18% of Americans believe President Obama is a Muslim. According to the same poll, 43% of Americans don't know what religion he is. Worse, these numbers are sharply up over previous polls. Other polls suggest that a quarter or the American population believes he was born outside the United States.

In the midst of serial manufactured cable-television and internet outrage where the liars of the right-wing propaganda channels (I love that The Field Negro blog calls Fox News "Radio Rwanda") spout utter nonsense, and even allegedly centrist or liberal media routinely feature complete know-nothings and bigoted fabulists as "opposing voices" to add readers, ratings and pageviews, these statistics seem more than a little troubling. And what does it mean that these numbers change toward the wholely fantastic? Who thinks these things? And worse, who changes their mind to think these things?

Though few are willing to say it, it's really clear that to a large number of people "Muslim" is pretty much a form of the "N" word that doesn't require self-censorship. For an overlapping number of people "Muslim" is identical to "terrorist," holding the same demonizing purpose as "communist" used to.

In the ongoing controversy over Cordoba House in New York City, the remarks of those opposed to the so-called Ground Zero mosque say so much more about what these people actually think. We all know Newt Gingrich probably really does think all Muslims are terrorist nazis (setting aside for the moment his problem with terrorist nazis is the "who" not the "what"). But when even professed liberals like the New York State governor Paterson say that the location of Cordoba House is painful to some or controversial they are fundamentally acceding to the belief that all Muslims share in the guilt of 9/11. Here's more polling data: According to the Economist, 53% of Republicans believe that Muslims have no constitutional right to build a mosque where the Cordoba Center is planned, and 14% of Americans believe mosques should not be permitted in the U.S. at all.

There have always been stupid and gullible people. But stupid and gullible people, especially when they are afraid, are so easily manipulated; this is where the danger lies. Alex Kane wrote an excellent piece on his blog lately
about the genesis of the "ground zero mosque" controversy. He compares it to another manufactured controversy, the one over what was to be New York City's first Arabic-bilingual public school. He neatly reminds us that these are anything but groundswells of stupidity: these are issues being manipulated into a froth by far less stupid political forces, chief among them the political supporters of Israel. Again and again the facts about Cordoba House, about Muslims, about Muslim Americans, are set aside in favor of "gut" feelings and prejudices. For some this is ignorance, but for others it is something else.

In the recent lawsuit in California overturning the anti-gay Prop 8 ban on marriage equality there's an interesting parallel. The pro-gay plaintiffs, and the judge ruling in their favor, structured their arguments brilliantly and factually. They explicitly debunked any factual notion that same-sex marriage threatens heterosexual marriage. They showed that the only hand the anti-marriage equality forces are holding is one of prejudice and emotional belief out of step with secular constitutional law. The judgment makes fascinating reading. Yet in the anti-gay forces' rebuttals to the ruling, and in the reporting on the decision by the allegedly neutral media, both these parties do nothing but repeat the arguments that are clearly already anticipated and rebuked in step-by-step fashion by the judge in siding with the marriage equality proponents. There are knee-jerk bigots acting out of ignorance, but there's also something else going on.

Behind that aggressive and increasing stupidity of so many Americans over Obama's birth and religion are forces actively manipulating ignorance into something else altogether. When delusional liars like Glenn Beck and Sarah Palin begin to lead these legions of stupidity into the streets, as they plan to do shortly in a march on Washington, DC, to profane the memory of Dr. King's "I Have a Dream Speech," the joke starts to become not nearly so funny.

And while defending Cordoba House and decrying racist stereotypes does bring up issues of value to those who treasure the fight for civil rights and who fight for a just society, ultimately it's all such a distraction. The issue of Cordoba House is a trifling, unimportant non-issue. There is no legal controversy. New York City governance has done its job and paved the way for the Islamic center to be built, and there are already undisturbed and uncontroversial storefront mosques just a couple more blocks distant from the site of the World Trade Center. The idiots who want to believe Obama is a Muslim--as if there were something wrong with that in the first place--are a minority firmly on the wrong side of peace and progress anyway.

But these issues keep people from focusing on the continuing economic crisis that the Democrats are unable and the Republicans are uninterested in fixing. They keep people from focusing on the need to undercut terrorism by radically changing American foreign policy. They keep people focused on the gotcha game in which liberal and conservative media enable each other while keeping their audiences firmly hypnotized and safely oh-so-outraged while confined to their sofas or mesmerized by their handheld devices.

We will be a nation of morons if we let all this continue.

The Battlelines Are Drawn Over Cordoba House

The photo above shows a rightist protester holding up a sign at New York City hearing over Cordoba House's real estate: "No 9/11 Victory Mosque." Cordoba House is the downtown NYC Islamic community center and mosque being villified as the "Ground Zero Mosque" by the right wing.

It pains me to recognize that Mayor Michael Bloomberg is eloquently on the correct side of this issue:
"We may not always agree with every one of our neighbors. That's life. And it's part of living in such a diverse and dense city. But we also recognize that part of being a New Yorker is living with your neighbors in mutual respect and tolerance. It was exactly that spirit of openness and acceptance that was attacked on 9/11, 2001....
“Let us not forget that Muslims were among those murdered on 9/11, and that our Muslim neighbors grieved with us as New Yorkers and as Americans. We would betray our values and play into our enemies' hands if we were to treat Muslims differently than anyone else. In fact, to cave to popular sentiment would be to hand a victory to the terrorists, and we should not stand for that...
"For that reason, I believe that this is an important test of the separation of church and state as we may see in our lifetimes, as important a test. And it is critically important that we get it right...
"Muslims are as much a part of our city and our country as the people of any faith. And they are as welcome to worship in lower Manhattan as any other group. In fact, they have been worshipping at the site for better, the better part of a year, as is their right. The local community board in lower Manhattan voted overwhelmingly to support the proposal. And if it moves forward, I expect the community center and mosque will add to the life and vitality of the neighborhood and the entire city...
"Political controversies come and go, but our values and our traditions endure, and there is no neighborhood in this city that is off-limits to God's love and mercy, as the religious leaders here with us can attest."

Now President Obama has forcefully also come out on the correct side of the issue: "As a citizen, and as president, I believe that Muslims have the same right to practice their religion as everyone else in this country...That includes the right to build a place of worship and a community center on private property in lower Manhattan, in accordance with local laws and ordinances. This is America, and our commitment to religious freedom must be unshakable."(full text)

Contrast this with the remarks of insane racist blogger Pamela Geller whose "Atlas Shrugs" blog is leading the charge to paint Cordoba House as a den of terrorism: "Obama came out for the Islamic supremacist mosque at the hallowed ground of 911 attack. He has, in effect, sided with the Islamic jihadists and told the ummah (at an Iftar dinner on the third night of Ramadan, of course) that he believes in and supports a triumphal mosque on the cherished site of Islamic conquest. If you had any doubt who Obama stood with on 911, there can be no doubt in our minds now. I believe he planned it all along. He waited until Ramadan. Symbolic." Geller has previously ranted on issues of Obama's citizenship. She is the force behind the outrageously hateful and inciteful signs shortly to appear on NYC buses attacking Cordoba House. Lining up behind Geller's disgusting campaign are a host of right-wing Republicans ranging from local political candidates like Rick Lazio to unemployed quitter and political parasite Sarah Palin.

Even George Bush resisted the urge to tar all muslims with the taint of 9/11 terrorism. These unleashed forces of Islamophobia are indicative of the qualitative rightward shift that has been transforming the Republican base into something quite new and dangerous.

For more discussion of the issues around Cordoba House see my previous posts on the Massacre Monument, Islamophobia, and on "Everybody Draw Muhammad Day."

Why Islamophobia IS Racism

I keep running up against people whose vitriol against Muslims transcends the normal rage in our very angry modern society. Every headlined outrage perpetrated by some fringe Al-Qaeda lunatic is cited as evidence that all Muslims harbor in their black hearts the urge to behead us infidels, to leech off "our" societies, to change "our" way of life. I have accused these people of racism. Oh no, they say, Islam is a religion, a choice, not a race! (Ironic how many of the people saying this to me are gay, as in whom the right-wing Christians always say "Being gay is a choice not the same as a race!") Oh no, they assure me, it's the religion of Muslims they are criticizing. It's backward! It's inhumane! Besides, they're entitled! Not to do so is to surrender! To give up! Completely unselfconsciously these Islamophobes then start muttering about how "these people" are sweeping over Europe, ruining it for the rest of us. How "we" are next. It would be laughable if it weren't so tragic. That it is textbook racism is plain to see.

Still, it's easy to get bogged down in a response. That most Muslims are of darker hue than the average white American doesn't entirely explain what's going on. And Edward Said's theory of Orientalism, the complex psychic bleeding wound of European/American colonialist consciousness, is more than a mouthful in simple conversation.

So I was excited to find an example of some extraordinarily clear thinking on the subject of the changing forms of racism. Here's an excerpt of a really insightful and useful talk by British revolutionary socialist Richard Seymour from the Marxism 2010 Conference in the UK this year. It's focused on the situation in Europe and some of the examples are outside of our experience, but it's very apropos of the situation in the U.S. Read the complete text at Lenin's Tomb.

THE CHANGING FACE OF RACISM IN BRITAIN TODAY

I don’t know how many of you use social media service, ‘Twitter’, but those who do may be aware that some months back there was a trending topic called #thingsracistssay. Among these were: “I’m not a racist, but...”; “You can’t say anything these days...”; and, a growing favourite, “Islam ain’t a race, duh!” This talk is about the things that racists say and do, the alibis they use to cover their racism, and the reasons why racism has had to shift in the course of a generation or so, from focusing on biology and colour, to creed and culture....

But in all this, there are some novelties. Racism is changing. It no longer focuses so explicitly on biology and skin colour. The major focus is on culture, and religion. The specific targets are not necessarily black. In fact, many Islamophobes would try to persuade you that they aren’t racist by insisting that they aren’t hostile to black people as such. Now, some people say that Islamophobia is just a cover for ‘Paki’ bashing; that the hostility is not toward Islam itself, which is just a convenient excuse, but toward Asians in general. There are certainly many for whom this is true, but that’s not the end of the story. There is a specificity about Islamophobia, a particular emphasis on Muslims, their purported culture, what is supposedly said and implied by the Quran and hadiths - and the fact that this is so, and that the target appears to be a religious group, doesn’t make it any less racist. Or so I will argue....

...When Martin Amis complained about ‘honour killing’, saying that multiculturalism had meant allowing outrageous forms of behaviour purely on the grounds that it could be traced to someone’s tradition, a form of religious piety or ethnic ritual. He assumed, incorrectly, that honour killing is a particularly Islamic form of behaviour. It is not. It is a form of patriarchal violence that is practised in numerous countries, from Latin America to Europe to south Asia. It is sometimes called dowry killing; sometimes called a ‘crime of passion’; and sometimes it’s just known as murdering your spouse, two cases of which take place every week in the UK. But, again, he repeated this nonsensical claim that multiculturalism means tolerating murder – repeat and underline, it’s not tolerated, it’s against the law.

The confusion which enables people like ...Amis to spout this kind of hysterical racist nonsense, while professing to be anti-racist, partly results from the exaggeration of the role of biology in racist ideology. Historically, cultural tropes have always been built in to racist ideology. Many variants of Enlightenment racism were explicitly culturalist rather than biological, but even those forms of racism that have historically privileged some idea of the biological race have always supplemented it with cultural stereotyping and essentialism – from wily Orientals, to avaricious Jews, to violent African Americans. More to the point, the way in which ‘race’ was constructed as a political category had surprisingly little to do with biological notions of race....

And once this process begins, it doesn’t simply stop and ossify. It transforms in response to new political developments. So, new immigrant groups to America such as European Jews, Italians, the Irish, Poles, Hungarians, etc., would always be initially racialised. But as they consolidated their position in civil society, improved their bargaining power as labourers, and achieved political representation, they became ‘white’. It’s important, when assessing whether a particular speech-act is racist, to consider race as a process rather than a static entity. Racism, like fascism, is a ‘scavenger ideology’ which draws on national, regional, gender, class and cultural stereotypes. As such, it won’t do to say “Islam isn’t a race”, and consider that the end of any discussion about Islamophobia. The question is whether processes are at work separating Muslims out for particular oppression and surveillance, and whether the discursive practises of people like ... Amis, among others, are part of a race-making process....

If I was right in arguing that race is a social construct, a process of political oppression, then it also follows that racism can always adapt, and doesn’t have to respect previously existing boundaries of racial discourse. That means that for as long as there are systems of domination and exploitation, for as long as societies are run on the basis of producing surplus value, profit, for the few, there will always be new ways of dividing people....If we want to put an end to racism in the long-term, we have to challenge the system itself.

I've edited this clumsily with a butcher knife. Go read all of Seymour's talk.

---

Exhibit A: Here's a disgustingly vile Islamophobic video just put out by right-wingers to protest the construction of a mosque in lower Manhattan: