Muslim phobia

If the McCain campaign has done one very bad thing, it has fanned the fire of hate and anger in this country, most of it directed against adherents to the Islamic faith. While McCain has publicly denied this, it has not stopped Republican sleazebags like Rush Limbaugh from continuing to harp on this point. I give some examples if you click "read more".


The following is from a personal opinion piece in my home town newspaper, the Morgan Hill Times.

How is it possible for Barack Hussein Obama to be a presidential candidate?

The following points have been extracted or taken from the printed and electronic media.

Obama is 43.75 percent Arabic, 6.25 percent African and 50 percent white. His father's birth certificate states he's Arab, not African. In fact, Obama practiced the Muslim faith daily at school and kept the faith for 31 years, until his wife made him change. He has no real identity. He is half white, which he rejects. Then, most of him is Arabic. Not one drop of his blood is African-American.

Obama's father, a Muslim, was married three times, attended Harvard and returned to Kenya. Obama claims his father was an atheist but he was given a Muslim burial.

Obama said in his book, "Audacity of Hope," "I will stand with the Muslims should the political winds shift in an ugly direction."

My opinion: What better place for Muslims to control our country, than in the office of the President.

This is almost directly out of Limbaugh, especially the supposed statistics on Obama's parentage. The one good thing that I will say for my town is that the response to this column has been universally against the author and calling into question the rationale of the editor in publishing such garbage.

The flagrant racism and outright idiocy of such writing makes it hard for those of us who try to be objective to criticize the governments of countries that soundly need criticism. The following story was reported by several networks today, but I will quote from a student at CSU-Northridge, since it involves another student there.

Feministing pal Roja Bandari gave us the heads up about her dear friend Esha Momeni, whom while in Iran interviewing members of the One Million Signatures Campaign for her Masters thesis at CalState Northridge, was arrested and taken to Evin Prison, which is managed by the Intelligence and Security Ministry.

We’ve been covering this great campaign for quite a while, and Esha is not the first to be arrested. She is a member of the campaign in California, and came to Iran two months ago to work on her thesis there. Her parents [living in Iran] were told by court officials yesterday that nothing can happen until the investigation of Esha’s case is resolved.

Our thoughts go out to Esha and her friends and family who are working tirelessly for her release.

What I have heard from KQED radio was that Momeni had her computer confiscated along with all of the videotaped interviews with women's right advocates in Iraq.

There are some who would be apologists for anything that is considered Islamic Culture. There are others, like the author I cited at the beginning, who harbor so much prejudice that they can not tell the truth when it hits them in the face. Such are the subject of tyrants.

My personal opinion of Limbaugh, who spreads his poison daily, is that he must have a great contempt for the public... in fact, he is probably laughing all the way to the drug store. For those like the MH Times author, we can only have pity. But, for Momeni and others like her, we must work continually to make sure that they are not forgotten.

Dark Age Ahead?

Once in a while you get fragments of ideas, images that are not quite clear, threads that seem to weave themselves into a tapestry that may or may not make sense. When that happens, I try to write it down to see if it still makes sense. That is what I am doing right now. So bear with me, this may be too long but I think that these glimpses of a possible future are somewhat frightening.

When I chose a college, it was a "small Christian College" called the University of Redlands. What I learned there was that I had little admiration for those who proclaimed the truth and a great deal of admiration for those who were searching for the truth. Maybe it was the thread of existential angst that ran through that era.

That is probably why I reacted positively to the discussion on Bill Moyers Journal last night with Anouar Majid. Majid is the author of a new book entitled A Call for Heresy: Why Dissent is Vital to Islam and America.

BILL MOYERS: You are saying that an election is not necessarily the measure of democracy or freedom. That it is the extent to which the society permits, if I may, heresy, dissent?

ANOUAR MAJID: Yes. People who cannot live comfortably with differences always have a tendency to slide into tyranny. That's why we have to maintain robust differences within any-- every society-- any society to continue to prevent those practices from ever taking root. Or at least of becoming dominant in those particular societies. Differences are crucial to the emancipation of the mind. And as Adam Smith and other of his contemporary said-- "To a happy life." I mean, there's nothing better than a conversation.

This is a very important point in light of the Pew Charitable Trust Report that asserts that the World Publics Welcome Global Trade – But Not Immigration To close the door to immigration is to shut down one of the paths by which we maintain robust differences in our society.

We in California tend to think of immigration as a US problem with Mexico. The Pew study shows that it is not. This fact is underscored by the report from Current TV on Immigrants and Skinheads in Russia. This report, along with comments from Diane Sawyer, was featured on both Nightline and Good Morning America thus breaking through to MSM, or at least part of it. Watch the report. It is frightening in that this could not happen in Russia on the scale that it is without at least a nod and a wink from the Kremlin. Orthodoxy reasserting itself.

Are we that far from this in America? How much difference is there between the skinheads in Russia and the Minutemen? How close are we to the Islamic orthodoxy of Wahhabism and the smug media use by an Ann Coulter who wants to "perfect" Jews.

I took that title of this from the last book by Jane Jacobs. In Dark Age Ahead she warns a culture that gives lip service to valuing science but has not developed the scientific habit of mind to question and then seek answers. Too often we fall back to the orthodoxy of the past rather than looking at the evidence right in front of us. We fail to ask the right questions. Majib warns Moyers about that.

If we do not have dissent, if we do not have heretics among us, if we do not cultivate these habits of mind, in other word to think creatively and imaginatively and so on we're gonna remain doomed.

The Green Party is nothing if it is not a home for heretics, for those who will question orthodoxy, including the orthodoxy of our own narrative.