Category Archives: Essays

Without getting into the wisdom of NPR’s decision to fire Juan Williams, it is amazing how article after article in the mainstream press make great efforts to minimize Mr. Williams’ unquestionable and unapologetic justification of prejudice. Ms. Parker, it’s not like he “gets a little nervous” but then recognizes that the nervousness is irrational and unfair. To the contrary, he has argued that even though not all Muslims are terrorists, he was justified in believing that people who dress like Muslims on planes are potentially terrorists because they are dressed like Muslims.

As Glenn Greenwald found in digging up some of Mr. Williams earlier writings on racial prejudice,

In 1986, Juan Williams participated in a forum in The New Republic regarding a column by The Washington Post’s Richard Cohen, who had justified the practice of D.C. jewelry store owners who would “admit customers only through a buzzer system, and [] some store owners use this system to exclude young black males on the grounds that these people are most likely to commit a robbery” (h/t).  Defending this race-based exclusion, Cohen argued that “young black males commit an inordinate amount of urban crime,” and that “black potential victims as well as white ones often act on this awareness, and that under certain circumstances, the mere recognition of race as a factor . . . is not in itself racism.

“Responding to Cohen’s argument, Williams said:  “In this situation and all others, common sense in my constant guard.  Common sense becomes racism when skin color becomes a formula for figuring out who is a danger to me.“

But the prize goes to Robert Scheer who made the most telling analogy on “Left Right and Center“. According to Scheer, if we follow Mr. Williams’ logic, then parents should being concerned about having their children sit next to Catholic priests on planes, especially considering that a much larger percentage of priests have committed acts of abuse than Muslims have terrorism.

Finally, people dress differently in different parts of the world — not to mention that people in different Muslim countries dress differently from each other — not to make a political or religious statement, but simply because that is how they dress. I am sure that when Mr. Williams gets dressed in the morning he isn’t contemplating expressing his Americaness, drones, and civilian casualties.

With so much unsubstantiated verbiage over the past decade – especially over the past few weeks – about Islam’s inherent incompatibility with world peace, one thing is almost always forgotten: not only has every major Muslim political and religious leader across the globe publicly denounced al Qaeda (an organization whose leaders lack any formal religious training), but more importantly, Muslims – in their vast, overwhelming majority — have rejected al Qaeda’s call for global Jihad. More than just the logistic and military dismantling of al Qaeda by the hands of the U.S., al Qaeda has suffered a devastating moral defeat by failing to rally the faithful.

Just consider the basic numbers. There are over 1.5 billion Muslims spread across the globe. If Islam really required militant Jihad – as Newt would have us to believe — we would be powerless in the face of the carnage. So where are the billions of suicide bombers? Where is violent Islam? The fact of the matter is that the world is not in dire need of “moderate” Muslims because it is already filled with them. While at the onset of the wars in Afghanistan and Iraq, the U.S. was concerned with how the Arab Street would react, the Arab Street never radicalized. It never even showed up. The European Street was more antagonized and vocal than anyone else. There were no mass uprisings in Casablanca, Cairo, Amman, Damascus or Jakarta.

Nevertheless, we love to point at the hordes of Muslims – arms raised and enraged – protesting a Danish cartoon or some other matter we believe they should “rise above” and get the joke. But these headlined few are no more representative of the masses than those Americans who show up to protest the Ground Zero Mosque or to burn the Koran. (Ironically, it looks like Muslims aren’t the only ones without a sense of humor: the French government asked for an apology from the Iranian government when an Iranian newspaper slurred Madame Sarkozy, and the Spanish opposition party, the Partido Popular, demanded that the Spanish government seek a similar apology from Morocco when a group of Moroccan citizens held up posters mocking female Spanish policy officers.  Should the Danish government have been required to apologize for the free speech of its citizens when they poked fun at Islam? Should the U.S. government apologize for South Park or for a radical Floridian?)

Of course, there is violence in Iraq, Afghanistan, and Pakistan. That is not only expected in any war torn nation invaded and occupied by a foreign power, but it is what has always happened throughout history (you can imagine Americans, Second Amendment in hand, acting accordingly under similar circumstances). Just ask Dick Cheney in 1994 why Bush 41 decided against invading Iraq. As Graham Fuller explains, the tensions in the Middle East would persist even if Islam didn’t exist. For example, there is no history of suicide bombings in the Middle East prior to the Palestinian/Israel conflict, regardless of hundreds of years of Islam. Remember that one of the first Palestinian terrorists was a Christian, Arafat’s PLO was not a religious movement, and Hamas has emerged as other forms of violent Palestinian nationalism have failed.

But viewed from outer space, one may reasonably come up with the conclusion that Democracy – based solely on the actions of the United States over the past decade – is an inherently violent ideology. Consider that after a low tech terrorist attack by twenty fanatics mainly from Saudi Arabia – having received training in Europe, Florida, and Afghanistan – murdering over 4000 Americans, the United States – with its now heavily military dependent economy – disproportionately responded with the largest military expenditure in the history of mankind, spending more resources than it had during the Cold War against the nuclear armed Soviet Union, passed draconian legislation to curtail the rights of American citizens, built a Top Secret Security State, implemented an illegal rendition, detention and torture regime (above the law and beyond judicial review), attacked and occupied various Muslim countries (and in the case of Iraq on unquestionably false pretenses), directly causing the deaths of hundreds of thousands of people and displacing a few million more, and even after largely dismantling al Qaeda in the region in the early 200os, we continue to fight on in full force – all with the support, encouragement and cheerleading of the American people, politicians and press. And you have to wonder who is violent in this world?

Go to any European or Muslim country, turn on the TV, and there are no talking-heads, security experts, military officers, and politicians promoting air strikes, drones, surges, justifying torture, and rationalizing civilian casualties. In that we are unique and exceptional. We are the only ones who worship the warrior state, with our daily dose of pundits, politicians, and experts – none of whom actually go to battle themselves (not Cheney, W. Bush, Obama, David Brooks, Tom Friedman, Bill Kristol, etc) – advocating for more and more war. Just today, the news reported record levels of drone strikes in Pakistan – those would be the non-combatant, non-uniformed, non-military covert CIA drones.

As Glenn Greenwald explains:

There’s a particularly bitter irony here. The campaign against the Park51 community center in Lower Manhattan is being condemned, rightfully so, because it is driven by a desire to stigmatize all Muslims and even institute a generalized war against Islam as American policy.  But far from Ground Zero, having nothing whatsoever to do with the warped right-wing fanatics driving that campaign, we’re increasingly engaging in actions perceived — understandably so — to be exactly the War against Muslims which, with our pretty presidential words, we renounce.  Escalation in Afghanistan, a sustained bombing campaign in Pakistan, all sorts of increased covert actions in multiple Muslim countries, the ongoing imprisonment with no charges of Muslims around the world, bellicose threats to Iran, and now a proposed expansion of our drone campaign into Yemen:  we can insist all we want that we are not waging a War Against Muslims, but it’s going to look to a huge number of people as though we’re doing exactly that.

It goes without saying that it is counter-productive for Americans to be banning Mosques, threatening to burn the Koran, and attacking Islam when the key to al Qaeda’s demise over the past decade has been its inability to rally the world’s Muslims to violence. Why? This may seem counter-intuitive because we are constantly fed the opposite:  because Muslims simply are not violent. If the opposite were true, then wouldn’t our ongoing wars, occupations, air strikes, due process-free imprisonment and torture of Muslims only cause the 1.5 billion evil beasts to strike back in full battle armor? And that is not happening.

From Tom Toles.

I have already written about our hypocritical, romantic vision of the Second Amendment. Now imagine the Tea Party was Black.

After its second consecutive display of judicial activism on the matter, the Supreme Court has reiterated that individual’s have a Constitutional Right to bear arms. In popular lore – as accepted by the Court’s conservative majority – individuals have a right to protect themselves against an oppressive government. As I have written before, deep in the American historical consciousness, there is this romantic notion of the Founding Fathers as revolutionaries. If in fact that is the basis on which the Second Amendment stands, then under today’s standard wouldn’t our “revolutionaries” who were insurgents and fought by guerrilla warfare, be considered today analogous to terrorists? And how different is a Jihadist than an insurgent whose reason for fighting is to defend one’s nation?

(As an aside, the term “jihad”, roughly meaning “struggle”, outside of the spiritual context was historically used to refer to an obligation to defend one’s nation against foreign attack. In modern Arabic, the term is also a common first name amongst Arab Christians).

Isn’t there something incredibly Jihadist in the psyche of the American who truly believes that the Second Amendment grants an individual the right to armed insurgency? The whole idea of “Second Amendment Remedies” is a fairly standard Republican talking point spewed from the likes of Newt Gingrich to Sharron Angle. According to Ms. Angle,

You know, our Founding Fathers, they put that Second Amendment in there for a good reason and that was for the people to protect themselves against a tyrannical government. And in fact Thomas Jefferson said it’s good for a country to have a revolution every 20 years. I hope that’s not where we’re going, but, you know, if this Congress keeps going the way it is, people are really looking toward those Second Amendment remedies and saying my goodness what can we do to turn this country around? I’ll tell you the first thing we need to do is take Harry Reid out.

As is usually the case, though, we don’t always appreciate that each of our American values be spread around the world. Also times change. For example, contrary to British protests, our closest allies, the Israelis, unashamedly commemorate the Israeli terrorist bombing that killed British and Arab citizens in 1946. And even though idealist American writers such as Hemingway and Langston Hughes, took up arms against the Franco regime during the Spanish Civil War, under the current political climate, fighting an oppressive regime is tantamount to an act of terrorism against the U.S., even when the U.S. is not a party to that conflict (as is the case of Somali Americans traveling to take up arms in Somalia). During the war in Yugoslavia in the 1990s, then Senators Dole and Lieberman had proposed a bill to lift the arms embargo, so as to give the Bosnians a fair chance. Can you imagine our Second Amendment guardians in favor of exporting an American style right to bear arms to the Afghanis, Iraqis or even the Palestinians?

So for all those who believe in this radical Jihadist reading of the Second Amendment as a fundamental pillar of American democracy, should the U.S. be pushing a similar right to bear arms when promoting democracy around the world?

I recently observed that in the face of the undeniable fact of Israeli’s existence — a country that is a member of the U.N., with embassies around the world, universal health care, 8,419 millionaires (2,519 new ones since 2008), nuclear weapons, and billions of dollars in aid from the world’s largest military power —  the real question should be whether the Palestinians have a right to exist.

Today, according to the Associated Press, Israeli Foreign Minister Avigdor Lieberman answered that question: “As an optimist, I see no chance that a Palestinian state will be established by 2012.” In other words, not yet.