As a black person who has lived 40 years on this planet, I’d like to think that we have made racial progress. But then you hear about things like Rep. Peter King’s Congressional hearings on Islamic terrorism.
King’s hearing on home-grown Muslim terrorism kick off Thursday. This McCarthy-like circus is the culmination of about 12-month of rising anti-Muslim hysteria. This has included protests in the streets of New York over Park51, a mosque scheduled to be built a few blocks from Ground Zero, demonstrations against mosque construction in California and Tennessee and frenzied warnings about alleged plans to impose Sharia law in the United States. (It should be noted that Muslims currently account for less than 0.5 percent of the U.S population.)
This Islamophobic propaganda has been disseminated by a host of shrill, racist commentators. People such as Frank Gaffney, a former Reagan administration official, who claimed that the NASA sign had hidden Muslim symbols, Pam Geller, a lunatic blogger, who claimed that President Obama was Malcolm X’s son, and Bryan Fischer of the American Family Association, who has said we should end Muslim immigration.
And all of these propagandists get an open forum on the neo fascist/neo racist FOX News, which is ironically partially owned by Saudi Prince Alwaleed bin Talal who also funded Park51. (Although this has been covered extensively by Think Progress and “The Daily Show,” you won’t find this information on FOX or other right-wing outlets.)
Islamophobia is not just words, it has spurred violent action. In Sacramento, two Sikhs were killed in an attack which police believe was a hate crime, and a video from the Council on American-Islamic Relations (CAIR) showed Tea Party protestors haranguing Muslims, including children, at a fundraiser in Orange County. Speaking at the event, Villa Park Councilwoman Deborah Pauly said, “As a matter of fact, I know quite a few Marines who would be very happy to help these terrorists to an early meeting in paradise.”
Now King brings this rising Islamophobia to a head with his farcical hearings. King claims that about 80 percent of American mosques harbor radical imams. Ironically, he doesn’t plan to call any senior law enforcement or intelligence officials to testify at the hearings. Maybe, because they would disprove his accusations.
According to an article in Think Progress, more domestic terrorist attacks have come from non-Muslim terrorists, than Muslims terrorists. Writer Zaid Jilani says: “In fact, right-wing extremist and white supremacist attacks plots alone outnumber plots by Muslims, with both groups being involved in 63 terror plots, 18 more plots than Muslim Americans have been involved in.” Jack O’Reilly Jr., mayor of Dearborn, Mich., a city with a 30 percent Arab population, has described King’s accusations as “just not true.”
King himself has a long history with terrorism. His great uncle was a member of the IRA, which was responsible for a series of terrorist bombings of London in the 1970s and 1980s. King was an enthusiastic supporter of the Irish Republican Army (IRA) and according to the New York Times he said, ““If civilians are killed in an attack on a military installation, it is certainly regrettable, but I will not morally blame the I.R.A. for it.” He was also accused by a Belfast judge of being “an obvious collaborator.”
It’s questionable why King has launched his quixotic campaign against terrorism. His anti-Islam hearings could be a cynical attempt to boost his profile. And it's seems to be working, because he is all over the media. If you didn't know who he was before, you do now. Maybe King, like pseudo-politicians Newt Gingrich and Sarah Palin, he is following the format of making outrageous comments to sell more books and book more media appearances. But this sudden outburst of Islamophobia is more calculated. Studies show that anti-Muslim rhetoric spiked in the run up to the mid-term election. This is really about politics and scaring people into voting against their own interests.
The upper-class whites who controls this country don’t care about working-class whites who drive Toyotas and shop at Wal-Mart. The only thing that alligns them with working class whites is racism. And over the last 40 years, the Republican party has mined that fear to get people to vote. For a long time it was blacks, with fears of integration and “welfare mothers in Cadillacs,” then it was fear of gays, who were destroying the traditional family, then it was Latinos threatening American culture with the Spanish language. But all of these minority groups have largely been mainstreamed.
The new ethnic bogey man is Muslims (read Arabs.) The right doesn’t seem to care that not all Arabs are Muslims, and not all Muslims are Arabs. To them it doesn’t matter as long as it gets NASCAR dads and Tea Baggers to forget about their vanishing 401ks, declining home prices, the awful health care system and the cost of two foreign wars. Muslim is the new black.
What do you think of the Rep. Peter King hearings?Market Research
No comments:
Post a Comment