Lily Salter's Blog, page 950
November 18, 2015
“What’s next? Hotties of the Holocaust?”: Even Daily Caller’s own readers agree the “Syria-sly hot” refugee list is disgusting
For those of us who spend a probably unhealthy amount of time consuming news and social media, the time prior to an election, the days during a congressional hearing and aftermath of an act of mass violence are always fraught with awful, awful commentary. And some days, you'd like to just get the facts of a developing situation without the wading through the inevitable "worst possible reaction" angle. But it's there anyway. So on Wednesday, just as quickly a brief spark of humanity dignity flickered across social media with the news that French President Francois Hollande reiterated his nation's commitment to accept 30,000 refugees over the next two years, citing "humanitarian duty," elsewhere, the Daily Caller was finding new depths to sink. In the Tucker Carlson-led site's ongoing bid not to just be a repugnant parody of a news site but a gross parody of Maxim, the Caller somehow decided it'd be a good idea to run a slideshow of "13 Syrian Refugees We’d Take Immediately." And the rest of us all have to live in a world where crap like this exists. "Written" by entertainment editor Kaitlan Collins and hot on the heels of her big "Emily Ratajkowski’s Underwear Doesn’t Match [PHOTOS]" scoop and "These 8 Celebrities Had Sex Romps With Their Nannies [SLIDESHOW]," Collins noted that "While a growing list of governors are claiming they won’t allow Syrian refugees to enter their states, we think these women might make them change their minds." She even managed to throw in a pun, saying, "They are Syria-sly hot." Way to go, there, pulling one- and two year-old images from a "Syrian Girls Got Beauty" Instagram account intended "to show the rest of world the beauty of our queens" and turning it into a bizarre commentary on the refugee crisis. How ill-conceived was this apparent NO FAT CHICKS plea for a U.S. response to the crisis of Syria's people? I could tell you what I think, but hey, I'm just a shrill, pro-abortion feminist who believes that a vast number of people living in America today got here because they or their ancestors were trying to get away from someplace else. What do I know? I could cite Ana Marie Cox's astute observation that "Haha: female refugees are at high risk of sexual assault! Funny because it’s true!" But she's just a lady too. Instead, why don't I tell you what some of the commenters — that's right, Internet commenters, on the Daily Caller, no less — thought. "What's next? Hotties of the Holocaust?" asked one reader, while another wondered, "HOLY **** - are there no editors at the Daily Caller? Who thought this was a good idea???" Another wrote, "Congratulations on turning world turmoil and suffering in to a punchline. Maybe you can dig back to genocidal moments throughout modern history and find archived pictures of hot people we wouldn't have kicked out of bed for eating crackers. Or better yet, maybe we can replace the poem on the Statue of Liberty to simply read, 'If you're ugly...Don't bother.'" Let's put it this way, a user who goes by the nickname StampOutLiberals opined, "Not really a joking matter. I am getting less and less enthused with The Daily Caller." Thanks, StampOutLiberals. Naturally there was plenty of racist commentary as well, but I've got to say, way to alienate even Daily Caller readers, there. It's so pathetic that I'm going to perform a public service and make this easy, so easy even someone who covers the Emily Ratajkowski underwear beat can understand. First, just because a woman is Syrian does not mean she is need of asylum. You don't get to call these women "refugees" when all you know about them is their heritage. Second, turning a crisis of global proportions into a lesson in objectification is not just offensive it's actually dumb. And finally, the Daily Caller is a bottomless toilet full of flaming garbage that makes the world a worse place merely by existing. I think that about covers it. Srsly.
This is America in the age of decay: How we became a civilization dominated by racism & rage
Cities are contradictions segregated by race and class, the spatial organization of a capitalist order that exploits difference to make a profit; they also foster diverse encounters and solidarities as people work, party, transit and live together. Share public restrooms. Sit in a park. Make eye contact acknowledging how wonderfully and horribly bizarre it is that this person on the bus is having such an embarrassing personal conversation in front of everyone. Among the 129 reported murdered on a festive night in Paris were people from all corners. Their number included Patricia San Martín Núñez, 61, a Chilean exile who fled Pinochet's murderous regime, and her French-born daughter. The latter's five-year old son survived. They were attending a rock concert. ISIS, in a statement, described Paris as “the capital of prostitution and vice.” They no doubt knew, and perhaps even preferred, that their victims would be many colors and religions, speaking many languages. Cities are simultaneously the spatial realization of oppression and a bulwark of decency and joy amidst chauvinism and racism; they are a built environment remade each day by commuters, outdoor chess players, carpenters, musicians and bored teenagers. They are the Kurdish proprietor of my neighborhood pizza shop giving me a free pie, made lahmajoon style, after I confided that I thought Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdoğan is an autocrat and warmonger. That is the city that nationalists and bigots want to destroy. That includes the American right wing which, like its European counterparts, quickly found its own use for the innocent blood spilled in Paris. “President Obama and Hillary Clinton’s idea that we should bring tens of thousands of Syrian Muslim refugees to America: it is nothing less than lunacy,” said Ted Cruz, who has also suggested that the United States stop worrying so much about civilian casualties from air strikes. Refugees, apparently, should remain in Syria, living under the Islamic State or the Assad regime and resigning themselves to slaughter at one hand or another. Marco Rubio, chiming in, declared that a "clash of civilizations" is at hand. “There is no middle ground on this." he said. "Either they win or we win.” ISIS would no doubt agree. Both envision a world where all Americans are likely imperialists and all Muslims potential terrorists. This vision cannot make sense of the reality of a world where so many forces and interests are at play. Where the daily lives that people live resist any reduction to skin color, language or religion. Where tens of thousands of Beirutis protest their government's sectarianism, corruption and ineptitude—a fight that continues even in the face of last week's suicide bombings, apparently carried out by the Islamic State, targeting Shiites and killing dozens. Or the October bombing of a left-wing, Kurdish-aligned party's march in Ankara, reportedly carried out by ISIS and killing more than 100—and then exploited by Erdoğan, who has used a crackdown on the very same Kurds to consolidate his power. The right wing of all sects hate cosmopolitanism and favor chauvinistic homogeneity. That shared hatred of difference, and of each other, is their foundational irony.
* * *
For the right, the Paris attacks did not foster solidarity but rather a macabre gloating: their paranoid creed that refugees and migrants invite death and destruction has supposedly been vindicated. The idea is a Fortress America defended with high walls and lethal air strikes. Keep migrants and refugees out; run sorties without regard for civilian casualties. Conservative politics is plumbing new depths of hysteria because the world is indeed spinning out of control. The worse things get, the more dangerous right-wing explanations become. Bitterness is cresting as militants emerge out of destroyed rogue states to simultaneously wage conventional warfare and asymmetric terrorism. Wounded soldiers see the cities they bled to "liberate" fall to ISIS control; they are told, in a tinny post-Vietnam echo, not that they fought for a bad war but that Obama sold them out by withdrawing troops. We've been stabbed in the back: domestic traitors open the door to foreign enemies. Xenophobia is a critical feature of white supremacy in the United States. And white supremacy is at the root of the right-wing explanation of “what is wrong with America.” Most critically, racism is the right's only explanation for the economic crisis because immigrants must take the blame for low wages—at least if the corporations that shipped jobs overseas and crushed unions are to be spared public opprobrium. This year, the national security threat and the economic peril posed by foreigners has morphed into a singular menace. America, as Trump says, never wins anymore. That's true. The question is who to blame. The political fight is over how to explain what's gone wrong. White supremacy is how the right displaces people's anger from the wealthy. The only substitute for bigotry and violence is solidarity.* * *
The most recent development in American white supremacy is the idea that Mexicans no longer just steal American jobs but pose a criminal threat as well. Ever since Kathryn Steinle was allegedly shot dead by an undocumented immigrant in San Francisco, Donald Trump's profession that Mexicans are rapists and criminals has taken on a veneer of scientific proof. North Carolina recently passed legislation requiring local police to fully collaborate with immigration authorities so as to speed the deportation of undocumented immigrants. State Representative George Cleveland, a bill author, acknowledged that witnesses to crime could be scared away from contacting police. He doesn't care. “If they want to live in a community where bandits can treat them any way they want to be treated because they’re afraid to point out to law enforcement who’s doing it, that’s their problem,” Cleveland, echoing conservative sentiment toward Syrians, told the New York Times. Racism is resilient and adaptable. The Ku Klux Klan was founded in the wake of the Civil War to defeat Reconstruction and reimpose black subjugation. A second iteration of the Klan boomed in the 1920s, attacking foreigners, Catholics and Jews. In France, National Front party, with clear roots in Nazi sympathy, has jettisoned its traditional anti-Semitism in favor of Islamophobia, more palatable to the contemporary European mindset. Today, unrepentant white supremacists in the United States have hailed the nativist turn in domestic politics as a vehicle to advance and mainstream a brazenly racist political agenda. But many conservatives have also flocked to Ben Carson. He is a bigot who by virtue of being black offers them absolution, as Jelani Cobb argues. "That the party responsible for the Southern strategy, the racist populism of the Reagan era, and the current age of voter suppression can count a black neurosurgeon among its most popular Presidential candidate is in itself a form of vaccination against charges of racism," Cobb writes. White racism against black people remains the central feature of American white supremacy but it prevails most forcefully in the structural racism that produces second-class school systems, economic marginalization and mass incarceration. Acknowledged bigotry against black people, however, has become disallowed in the political mainstream thanks to centuries of black struggle. American racism, however, cannot do without some embodied evil. Mexicans and Arabs fulfill a role that black bodies can no longer so brazenly play in the iconography of American white supremacy. The hatred of Mexicans and Muslims is the permitted public expression of that same white racist order—and legitimates it. Note that Obama is more often called a Kenyan or a Muslim than he is a certain verboten anti-black slur. The possibility that one of the Paris attackers was a Syrian who hid himself amongst the refugee tide now justifies closing borders in Europe, and in the United States. One Republican governor after another announces that Syrians are not welcome, and demands that cities turn their own police forces against Mexican residents. That single potential Syrian attacker has received more media attention than the fact that most of the attackers appear to be French. The refugee flow to be worried about is that of ISIS recruits fleeing a second-class life in Europe, who then wreak terror upon an imaginary homeland inhabited by real people who want nothing to do with a fantastical and cruel caliphate. This is not a clash of civilizations but rather a struggle shared by many against militarism, obscurantism and reaction. The very serious people who insist that irreducible difference must be erased by closed borders and military force refuse to recognize the historical fact that the Mediterranean was a wellspring of cosmopolitanism before European colonialism helped destroy it. In places like Beirut, “the cohabitation that allowed cultures and languages to flourish beside the quays did not survive the onslaught of nation, race and sect,” Charles Glass wrote in the London Review of Books, describing the decline of the Ottoman Empire and the spread of European empire. “Diversity and simple self-interest were replaced by demagoguery, tribalism and nationalism and islands of diversity and mutual tolerance began to disappear.” But Beirut is cosmopolitan still, home to Syrian, Palestinian and Armenian refugees and to immigrants from Ethiopia and Sri Lanka, belying the stigmatization of the southern neighborhood targeted by suicided bombers as a “Hezbollah stronghold” and implicit military target. ISIS and right-wing Westerners seek a similar goal of a world starkly divided between Muslim and Christian. Between us and them. An attack by one side always props up the other, a violent feedback loop that pushes each side away from one another and into fortified camps, stigmatizing diversity and making it dangerous. It's a war where both opposing sides are constantly winning. A cosmopolitanism framed not by Benetton ads but based in solidarity, the recognition of common interests, joys and aspirations, is the only alternative. That is the city at its best, whether it be Paris, Beirut or New York. And that's what the worst among us want to destroy. [image error]Cities are contradictions segregated by race and class, the spatial organization of a capitalist order that exploits difference to make a profit; they also foster diverse encounters and solidarities as people work, party, transit and live together. Share public restrooms. Sit in a park. Make eye contact acknowledging how wonderfully and horribly bizarre it is that this person on the bus is having such an embarrassing personal conversation in front of everyone. Among the 129 reported murdered on a festive night in Paris were people from all corners. Their number included Patricia San Martín Núñez, 61, a Chilean exile who fled Pinochet's murderous regime, and her French-born daughter. The latter's five-year old son survived. They were attending a rock concert. ISIS, in a statement, described Paris as “the capital of prostitution and vice.” They no doubt knew, and perhaps even preferred, that their victims would be many colors and religions, speaking many languages. Cities are simultaneously the spatial realization of oppression and a bulwark of decency and joy amidst chauvinism and racism; they are a built environment remade each day by commuters, outdoor chess players, carpenters, musicians and bored teenagers. They are the Kurdish proprietor of my neighborhood pizza shop giving me a free pie, made lahmajoon style, after I confided that I thought Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdoğan is an autocrat and warmonger. That is the city that nationalists and bigots want to destroy. That includes the American right wing which, like its European counterparts, quickly found its own use for the innocent blood spilled in Paris. “President Obama and Hillary Clinton’s idea that we should bring tens of thousands of Syrian Muslim refugees to America: it is nothing less than lunacy,” said Ted Cruz, who has also suggested that the United States stop worrying so much about civilian casualties from air strikes. Refugees, apparently, should remain in Syria, living under the Islamic State or the Assad regime and resigning themselves to slaughter at one hand or another. Marco Rubio, chiming in, declared that a "clash of civilizations" is at hand. “There is no middle ground on this." he said. "Either they win or we win.” ISIS would no doubt agree. Both envision a world where all Americans are likely imperialists and all Muslims potential terrorists. This vision cannot make sense of the reality of a world where so many forces and interests are at play. Where the daily lives that people live resist any reduction to skin color, language or religion. Where tens of thousands of Beirutis protest their government's sectarianism, corruption and ineptitude—a fight that continues even in the face of last week's suicide bombings, apparently carried out by the Islamic State, targeting Shiites and killing dozens. Or the October bombing of a left-wing, Kurdish-aligned party's march in Ankara, reportedly carried out by ISIS and killing more than 100—and then exploited by Erdoğan, who has used a crackdown on the very same Kurds to consolidate his power. The right wing of all sects hate cosmopolitanism and favor chauvinistic homogeneity. That shared hatred of difference, and of each other, is their foundational irony.* * *
For the right, the Paris attacks did not foster solidarity but rather a macabre gloating: their paranoid creed that refugees and migrants invite death and destruction has supposedly been vindicated. The idea is a Fortress America defended with high walls and lethal air strikes. Keep migrants and refugees out; run sorties without regard for civilian casualties. Conservative politics is plumbing new depths of hysteria because the world is indeed spinning out of control. The worse things get, the more dangerous right-wing explanations become. Bitterness is cresting as militants emerge out of destroyed rogue states to simultaneously wage conventional warfare and asymmetric terrorism. Wounded soldiers see the cities they bled to "liberate" fall to ISIS control; they are told, in a tinny post-Vietnam echo, not that they fought for a bad war but that Obama sold them out by withdrawing troops. We've been stabbed in the back: domestic traitors open the door to foreign enemies. Xenophobia is a critical feature of white supremacy in the United States. And white supremacy is at the root of the right-wing explanation of “what is wrong with America.” Most critically, racism is the right's only explanation for the economic crisis because immigrants must take the blame for low wages—at least if the corporations that shipped jobs overseas and crushed unions are to be spared public opprobrium. This year, the national security threat and the economic peril posed by foreigners has morphed into a singular menace. America, as Trump says, never wins anymore. That's true. The question is who to blame. The political fight is over how to explain what's gone wrong. White supremacy is how the right displaces people's anger from the wealthy. The only substitute for bigotry and violence is solidarity.* * *
The most recent development in American white supremacy is the idea that Mexicans no longer just steal American jobs but pose a criminal threat as well. Ever since Kathryn Steinle was allegedly shot dead by an undocumented immigrant in San Francisco, Donald Trump's profession that Mexicans are rapists and criminals has taken on a veneer of scientific proof. North Carolina recently passed legislation requiring local police to fully collaborate with immigration authorities so as to speed the deportation of undocumented immigrants. State Representative George Cleveland, a bill author, acknowledged that witnesses to crime could be scared away from contacting police. He doesn't care. “If they want to live in a community where bandits can treat them any way they want to be treated because they’re afraid to point out to law enforcement who’s doing it, that’s their problem,” Cleveland, echoing conservative sentiment toward Syrians, told the New York Times. Racism is resilient and adaptable. The Ku Klux Klan was founded in the wake of the Civil War to defeat Reconstruction and reimpose black subjugation. A second iteration of the Klan boomed in the 1920s, attacking foreigners, Catholics and Jews. In France, National Front party, with clear roots in Nazi sympathy, has jettisoned its traditional anti-Semitism in favor of Islamophobia, more palatable to the contemporary European mindset. Today, unrepentant white supremacists in the United States have hailed the nativist turn in domestic politics as a vehicle to advance and mainstream a brazenly racist political agenda. But many conservatives have also flocked to Ben Carson. He is a bigot who by virtue of being black offers them absolution, as Jelani Cobb argues. "That the party responsible for the Southern strategy, the racist populism of the Reagan era, and the current age of voter suppression can count a black neurosurgeon among its most popular Presidential candidate is in itself a form of vaccination against charges of racism," Cobb writes. White racism against black people remains the central feature of American white supremacy but it prevails most forcefully in the structural racism that produces second-class school systems, economic marginalization and mass incarceration. Acknowledged bigotry against black people, however, has become disallowed in the political mainstream thanks to centuries of black struggle. American racism, however, cannot do without some embodied evil. Mexicans and Arabs fulfill a role that black bodies can no longer so brazenly play in the iconography of American white supremacy. The hatred of Mexicans and Muslims is the permitted public expression of that same white racist order—and legitimates it. Note that Obama is more often called a Kenyan or a Muslim than he is a certain verboten anti-black slur. The possibility that one of the Paris attackers was a Syrian who hid himself amongst the refugee tide now justifies closing borders in Europe, and in the United States. One Republican governor after another announces that Syrians are not welcome, and demands that cities turn their own police forces against Mexican residents. That single potential Syrian attacker has received more media attention than the fact that most of the attackers appear to be French. The refugee flow to be worried about is that of ISIS recruits fleeing a second-class life in Europe, who then wreak terror upon an imaginary homeland inhabited by real people who want nothing to do with a fantastical and cruel caliphate. This is not a clash of civilizations but rather a struggle shared by many against militarism, obscurantism and reaction. The very serious people who insist that irreducible difference must be erased by closed borders and military force refuse to recognize the historical fact that the Mediterranean was a wellspring of cosmopolitanism before European colonialism helped destroy it. In places like Beirut, “the cohabitation that allowed cultures and languages to flourish beside the quays did not survive the onslaught of nation, race and sect,” Charles Glass wrote in the London Review of Books, describing the decline of the Ottoman Empire and the spread of European empire. “Diversity and simple self-interest were replaced by demagoguery, tribalism and nationalism and islands of diversity and mutual tolerance began to disappear.” But Beirut is cosmopolitan still, home to Syrian, Palestinian and Armenian refugees and to immigrants from Ethiopia and Sri Lanka, belying the stigmatization of the southern neighborhood targeted by suicided bombers as a “Hezbollah stronghold” and implicit military target. ISIS and right-wing Westerners seek a similar goal of a world starkly divided between Muslim and Christian. Between us and them. An attack by one side always props up the other, a violent feedback loop that pushes each side away from one another and into fortified camps, stigmatizing diversity and making it dangerous. It's a war where both opposing sides are constantly winning. A cosmopolitanism framed not by Benetton ads but based in solidarity, the recognition of common interests, joys and aspirations, is the only alternative. That is the city at its best, whether it be Paris, Beirut or New York. And that's what the worst among us want to destroy. [image error]
“Syria-ously hot!” The right responds to Paris with Bible-thumping, scientific illiteracy, frat boy antics
The Paris attacks brought renewed interest in ISIS and the ongoing crisis in Syria, and unsurprisingly, that means that we've all had to endure right-wingers rolling out the usual chest-thumping bravado from Republicans who have no personal worries about ever seeing combat. But never fear! Slobbering enthusiasm for war is far from the only right-wing neurosis that is being trotted out in response to the ISIS situation. Our friends on the right are also responding with usual mix of the Bible-thumping, anti-science rhetoric, and gross sexism they manage to work into nearly every conversation. The right's growing hostility to scientific evidence is on full display when it comes to the issue of how to deal with the millions of Syrians displaced by the civil war who are seeking some place safer to live. Hysteria over the refugees is reaching a fever pitch as right-wingers claim to be afraid that ISIS is smuggling terrorists with the refugees who will come kill us all. Even on its surface, these claims of fear should provoke skepticism, and not just because ISIS is too busy begging Muslims to move to Syria to start smuggling people out. As the Paris attacks show, if ISIS wants to bomb something, they're going to go after iconic cities that can be held out as modern Sodoms. In other words, they'd go after New York, not Birmingham. So why was Alabama the first state out of the gate to deny the refugees welcome? But if you dig into the actual scientific evidence, it really shows how completely disconnected from reality the right is on this issue. As Michael Halpern, writing for the Union of Concerned Scientists, explains, the overwhelming scientific evidence shows that allowing people refuge from war is not only safe itself, it actually decreases the chance of future terrorism. In fact, looking over the evidence, it suggests that the best way to keep people safe is to bring in as many refugees as you can. This isn't just because none of the two million refugees accepted into our country since 1990 have committed terrorism, which can be compared that to the almost routine terrorism committed by native born right wingers. Research also shows that a refugee's chance of embracing radical views is much reduced if he moves to some place like the United States or Western Europe. Relocating to a country that is closer often means being closer to the conflict and more likely to pick up on radical views that lead to terrorism. If you want a young man who is just beginning to form his views to turn away from radicalism, your best bet is moving him here. But, as usual, Republicans don't think they need science because they have religion. The Bible-thumping has gotten completely out of control in the past week, with Ted Cruz proposing a religious test for Syrian refugees---if you're Christian, you're in, if you're Muslim, you're not---and Mike Huckabee pretending that Muslims are the only people that commit terrorism. Compared to this unvarnished hatred, John Kasich might look like a gentle soul, but his idea on how to deal with ISIS is the same thing in a prettier package. "We need to beam messages around the world about what it means to have a Western ethic, to be a part of a Christian-Judeo society," he told NBC News, adding that he wanted to start an agency "to promote core Judeo-Christian, Western values that we and our friends and allies share.” So he wants to broadcast targeted messages at Muslim populations that argue that Jews and Christians are better and more moral than Muslims. What could possibly go wrong? Kasich may pretend he's a moderate, but he's playing buying into the same narrative as Cruz and Huckabee that this is somehow some grand conflict between religions. Luckily, that happens to be ISIS's message, too! I have no doubt that ISIS would love nothing more than the U.S. sending a bunch of messages out about how we think Christians (and, as an afterthought, Jews) are better than Muslims, because ISIS thrives on the idea that the differences between Muslims and Christians are irreconcilable and that war is the only answer. Of course, not all responses from the right to the situation in Syria have been about Bible-thumping. The frat daddy contingent of the right that is mostly motivated by the ever-present fear that you might forget they have penises has to have their say, as well. For that set, of course, you have the Daily Caller, which ran a piece aimed at those men titled, "13 Syrian Refugees We’d Take Immediately." (As it is a naked attempt to get traffic, I will not link. Rest assured my description will be enough.) What follows is a bunch of photos from the Instagram account Syrian Girls Got Beauty, which is just what it seems to be, a fashion and beauty photo blog, presumably from Syria. There's no evidence that any of the women are refugees or even know that their photos are being repurposed to make mock of the crisis in their country. The blog hasn't been updated in over three months. Indeed, the photos aren't even of 13 separate women---as a colleague of mine pointed out over email to those of us who were too appalled to look further, one of the women in the list is pictured twice. But you have to give credit to the Daily Caller for really distilling the right-wing mentality down to the basics: Who cares about human rights, international relations, scientific evidence, thoughtful analysis, or even giving two minutes thought about something before forming some idiotic, knee-jerk opinion about it? It's all about them: Their bigotries, their need to be told their religion is the best, their need to remind you every five seconds that they are heterosexual. It's a shame that we have to thank our lucky stars, in this environment, that at least we have a grown-up in the White House. Let's hope it stays that way come November.The Paris attacks brought renewed interest in ISIS and the ongoing crisis in Syria, and unsurprisingly, that means that we've all had to endure right-wingers rolling out the usual chest-thumping bravado from Republicans who have no personal worries about ever seeing combat. But never fear! Slobbering enthusiasm for war is far from the only right-wing neurosis that is being trotted out in response to the ISIS situation. Our friends on the right are also responding with usual mix of the Bible-thumping, anti-science rhetoric, and gross sexism they manage to work into nearly every conversation. The right's growing hostility to scientific evidence is on full display when it comes to the issue of how to deal with the millions of Syrians displaced by the civil war who are seeking some place safer to live. Hysteria over the refugees is reaching a fever pitch as right-wingers claim to be afraid that ISIS is smuggling terrorists with the refugees who will come kill us all. Even on its surface, these claims of fear should provoke skepticism, and not just because ISIS is too busy begging Muslims to move to Syria to start smuggling people out. As the Paris attacks show, if ISIS wants to bomb something, they're going to go after iconic cities that can be held out as modern Sodoms. In other words, they'd go after New York, not Birmingham. So why was Alabama the first state out of the gate to deny the refugees welcome? But if you dig into the actual scientific evidence, it really shows how completely disconnected from reality the right is on this issue. As Michael Halpern, writing for the Union of Concerned Scientists, explains, the overwhelming scientific evidence shows that allowing people refuge from war is not only safe itself, it actually decreases the chance of future terrorism. In fact, looking over the evidence, it suggests that the best way to keep people safe is to bring in as many refugees as you can. This isn't just because none of the two million refugees accepted into our country since 1990 have committed terrorism, which can be compared that to the almost routine terrorism committed by native born right wingers. Research also shows that a refugee's chance of embracing radical views is much reduced if he moves to some place like the United States or Western Europe. Relocating to a country that is closer often means being closer to the conflict and more likely to pick up on radical views that lead to terrorism. If you want a young man who is just beginning to form his views to turn away from radicalism, your best bet is moving him here. But, as usual, Republicans don't think they need science because they have religion. The Bible-thumping has gotten completely out of control in the past week, with Ted Cruz proposing a religious test for Syrian refugees---if you're Christian, you're in, if you're Muslim, you're not---and Mike Huckabee pretending that Muslims are the only people that commit terrorism. Compared to this unvarnished hatred, John Kasich might look like a gentle soul, but his idea on how to deal with ISIS is the same thing in a prettier package. "We need to beam messages around the world about what it means to have a Western ethic, to be a part of a Christian-Judeo society," he told NBC News, adding that he wanted to start an agency "to promote core Judeo-Christian, Western values that we and our friends and allies share.” So he wants to broadcast targeted messages at Muslim populations that argue that Jews and Christians are better and more moral than Muslims. What could possibly go wrong? Kasich may pretend he's a moderate, but he's playing buying into the same narrative as Cruz and Huckabee that this is somehow some grand conflict between religions. Luckily, that happens to be ISIS's message, too! I have no doubt that ISIS would love nothing more than the U.S. sending a bunch of messages out about how we think Christians (and, as an afterthought, Jews) are better than Muslims, because ISIS thrives on the idea that the differences between Muslims and Christians are irreconcilable and that war is the only answer. Of course, not all responses from the right to the situation in Syria have been about Bible-thumping. The frat daddy contingent of the right that is mostly motivated by the ever-present fear that you might forget they have penises has to have their say, as well. For that set, of course, you have the Daily Caller, which ran a piece aimed at those men titled, "13 Syrian Refugees We’d Take Immediately." (As it is a naked attempt to get traffic, I will not link. Rest assured my description will be enough.) What follows is a bunch of photos from the Instagram account Syrian Girls Got Beauty, which is just what it seems to be, a fashion and beauty photo blog, presumably from Syria. There's no evidence that any of the women are refugees or even know that their photos are being repurposed to make mock of the crisis in their country. The blog hasn't been updated in over three months. Indeed, the photos aren't even of 13 separate women---as a colleague of mine pointed out over email to those of us who were too appalled to look further, one of the women in the list is pictured twice. But you have to give credit to the Daily Caller for really distilling the right-wing mentality down to the basics: Who cares about human rights, international relations, scientific evidence, thoughtful analysis, or even giving two minutes thought about something before forming some idiotic, knee-jerk opinion about it? It's all about them: Their bigotries, their need to be told their religion is the best, their need to remind you every five seconds that they are heterosexual. It's a shame that we have to thank our lucky stars, in this environment, that at least we have a grown-up in the White House. Let's hope it stays that way come November.
November 17, 2015
Bobby Jindal finally drops out of presidential race
"I’ve come to the realization that this is not my time," Bobby Jindal admitted to himself and the world today, announcing that he was finally ready to end his long shot bid for the White House after consistently posting disappointing poll numbers and meager fundraising totals. In his final campaign statement, Jindal invoked his parents "who came to this country 45 years ago searching for freedom and a chance," but during an interview on Fox News' "Special Report with Bret Baier," announcing the end of his race, Jindal doubled down on his executive order banning Syrian refugees from entering his state. "We don't want these refugees in our state," the Louisiana governor told Baier. "I've ordered the state police to track the ones that are already in Louisiana," Jindal said, carrying on his scapegoating of Syrian refugees following last week's terror attacks in Paris. "When I was born, we lived in student housing at LSU, and never in their wildest dreams did they think their son would have the opportunity to serve as Governor of Louisiana or to run for President,"Jindal wrote of his own immigrant tale in today's statement. Still, Jindal told Baier that he plans to continue on with plans to block refugees from the war torn nation, despite a legal threat from the ACLU. Jindal is the is the third Republican to suspend his campaign, after former Texas Gov. Rick Perry and Wisconsin Gov. Scott Walker dropped out earlier this year. https://twitter.com/BobbyJindal/statu... come to the realization that this is not my time," Bobby Jindal admitted to himself and the world today, announcing that he was finally ready to end his long shot bid for the White House after consistently posting disappointing poll numbers and meager fundraising totals. In his final campaign statement, Jindal invoked his parents "who came to this country 45 years ago searching for freedom and a chance," but during an interview on Fox News' "Special Report with Bret Baier," announcing the end of his race, Jindal doubled down on his executive order banning Syrian refugees from entering his state. "We don't want these refugees in our state," the Louisiana governor told Baier. "I've ordered the state police to track the ones that are already in Louisiana," Jindal said, carrying on his scapegoating of Syrian refugees following last week's terror attacks in Paris. "When I was born, we lived in student housing at LSU, and never in their wildest dreams did they think their son would have the opportunity to serve as Governor of Louisiana or to run for President,"Jindal wrote of his own immigrant tale in today's statement. Still, Jindal told Baier that he plans to continue on with plans to block refugees from the war torn nation, despite a legal threat from the ACLU. Jindal is the is the third Republican to suspend his campaign, after former Texas Gov. Rick Perry and Wisconsin Gov. Scott Walker dropped out earlier this year. https://twitter.com/BobbyJindal/statu...
CNN reporter grills Ted Cruz over his anti-refugee stance: What would have happened to your father?
On Monday, President Obama rebuked GOP presidential candidates who've clamored to close the doors on Syrian refugees in light of last week's terror attack in Paris. "When I hear political leaders suggesting that there would be a religious test for which a person who is fleeing from a war-torn country is admitted, when some of those folks themselves come from families who benefited from protection when they were fleeing political persecution, that’s shameful, that’s not American, that’s not who we are” Obama said during a G20 press conference, making a not-so-thinly veiled reference to the reckless rhetoric of GOP presidential candidates Ted Cruz and Marco Rubio, whose parents fled to the United States from Cuba. “There is no meaningful risk of Christians committing acts of terror," Cruz said after Friday's terror attack, offering a religious test exemption for his proposed ban on Syrian refugees to the U.S. On Tuesday, Cruz was pressed about his callous and apparently historically clueless response to to clampdown on refugees out of fear and for political posturing. Just last week, the Cruz campaign was forced to respond to charges this his father, Rafael, embellished his past as part of Castro's revolution. Despite that early support for a U.S. enemy, Rafael Cruz was eventually allowed to immigrate to the U.S. “What would have happened if your father, who was trying to get from Cuba to the United States, and the political leaders said, ‘Nope, we don’t think so, because who knows? Maybe you could be somebody who could, you know, commit crimes against Americans,'” CNN's Dana Bash asked the Texas senator during an interview on Monday, pointing out Cruz's apparent hypocrisy. “See, that’s why it’s important to define what it is we’re fighting,” Cruz said. “If my father were part of a theocratic and political movement like radical Islamism that promotes murdering anyone who doesn’t share your extreme faith or forcibly converting them, then it would have made perfect sense,” Cruz said. Sure, waves of Cubans fleeing Castro's regime presented precisely no risks to the U.S. at a time of heightened Cold War fears and international spy games. Not. In fact, as Stephen A. Nuno explains at NBC News, no other single immigrant group may have been more feared as posing a threat to the U.S. than Cuban exiles:
As Cuban refugees flooded Miami after the Castro regime took over in 1959, the potential for insurgents was not far from the minds of Americans. It was not long before that the American press had zealously misquoted the Soviet Union's Nikita Khrushchev infamous boast to the West, "We will bury you". Given the context of the threat of the Soviet Union, the potential for Cuban insurgents being inserted into the flow of refugees was not unreasonable. Thania Sanchez, Assistant Professor of Political Science at Yale University, points out, "There was certainly legitimate concern about how communist regimes would sneak in spies through refugees." Sanchez points out newspaper articles with titles such as, "Some Cuban Spies in Refugee Clothing", which talked about Castro's plans to insert "Red agents" among the refugees and how it was partly being coordinated with the Kremlin. Sanchez points out that a report by the New York Times in 1960 noted that, "With few exceptions, those who have fled Cuba in 1960, for instance, could not be labeled as 'criminals' by any legitimate concept of justice. Many thousands among the refugees - doubtless a majority- are women and children who are simply tragic victims of a political convulsion with which they had nothing to do."Cruz, apparently proud of his exchange with Bash, and ignorant of history, posted the interview to his site under the headline, "Ted Cruz Discusses Defeating Radical Islamic Terrorism": (h/t: Rawstory)On Monday, President Obama rebuked GOP presidential candidates who've clamored to close the doors on Syrian refugees in light of last week's terror attack in Paris. "When I hear political leaders suggesting that there would be a religious test for which a person who is fleeing from a war-torn country is admitted, when some of those folks themselves come from families who benefited from protection when they were fleeing political persecution, that’s shameful, that’s not American, that’s not who we are” Obama said during a G20 press conference, making a not-so-thinly veiled reference to the reckless rhetoric of GOP presidential candidates Ted Cruz and Marco Rubio, whose parents fled to the United States from Cuba. “There is no meaningful risk of Christians committing acts of terror," Cruz said after Friday's terror attack, offering a religious test exemption for his proposed ban on Syrian refugees to the U.S. On Tuesday, Cruz was pressed about his callous and apparently historically clueless response to to clampdown on refugees out of fear and for political posturing. Just last week, the Cruz campaign was forced to respond to charges this his father, Rafael, embellished his past as part of Castro's revolution. Despite that early support for a U.S. enemy, Rafael Cruz was eventually allowed to immigrate to the U.S. “What would have happened if your father, who was trying to get from Cuba to the United States, and the political leaders said, ‘Nope, we don’t think so, because who knows? Maybe you could be somebody who could, you know, commit crimes against Americans,'” CNN's Dana Bash asked the Texas senator during an interview on Monday, pointing out Cruz's apparent hypocrisy. “See, that’s why it’s important to define what it is we’re fighting,” Cruz said. “If my father were part of a theocratic and political movement like radical Islamism that promotes murdering anyone who doesn’t share your extreme faith or forcibly converting them, then it would have made perfect sense,” Cruz said. Sure, waves of Cubans fleeing Castro's regime presented precisely no risks to the U.S. at a time of heightened Cold War fears and international spy games. Not. In fact, as Stephen A. Nuno explains at NBC News, no other single immigrant group may have been more feared as posing a threat to the U.S. than Cuban exiles:
As Cuban refugees flooded Miami after the Castro regime took over in 1959, the potential for insurgents was not far from the minds of Americans. It was not long before that the American press had zealously misquoted the Soviet Union's Nikita Khrushchev infamous boast to the West, "We will bury you". Given the context of the threat of the Soviet Union, the potential for Cuban insurgents being inserted into the flow of refugees was not unreasonable. Thania Sanchez, Assistant Professor of Political Science at Yale University, points out, "There was certainly legitimate concern about how communist regimes would sneak in spies through refugees." Sanchez points out newspaper articles with titles such as, "Some Cuban Spies in Refugee Clothing", which talked about Castro's plans to insert "Red agents" among the refugees and how it was partly being coordinated with the Kremlin. Sanchez points out that a report by the New York Times in 1960 noted that, "With few exceptions, those who have fled Cuba in 1960, for instance, could not be labeled as 'criminals' by any legitimate concept of justice. Many thousands among the refugees - doubtless a majority- are women and children who are simply tragic victims of a political convulsion with which they had nothing to do."Cruz, apparently proud of his exchange with Bash, and ignorant of history, posted the interview to his site under the headline, "Ted Cruz Discusses Defeating Radical Islamic Terrorism": (h/t: Rawstory)
When trolling crosses dangerous lines: This writer’s selfie transformed into a terrorist portrait shows how far online abuse can go
In the wake of the terrorist attacks on Paris, a photograph started to be circulated on the internet. Showing a young bearded man in a bomb vest and holding a Qur'an, the image was presented as being a selfie taken by one of the suicide bombers shortly before the attacks. News outlets around the world swiftly picked up the image and repeated the damning caption. From La Razón in Spain (which has since retracted): "Uno de los terroristas." From Sky TG-Italy: "Ecco uno dei terroristi." However, it was not a selfie of "unnamed suicide bomber" as Sky TG/Italy affirmed, but a photoshopped image of a Canadian man named Veerender Jubbal, whose life has been turned upside down as a result of being maliciously targeted. By whom, you may ask? What kind of people would do such a reprehensible thing? According to an investigation by Rich Stanton for Vice News, it's supporters of the group called #Gamergate — specifically, one "blacktric" and "turd_wartsniff." Both individuals have since deleted their Twitter accounts, but the internet never forgets. Stanton notes:
"Gamergate members have insisted that blacktric has no association with the group, but that is contradicted by his posting on the GG subreddit KIA*, jolly back-and-forths with Gamergate's "based lawyer" Mike Cernovich, and his history of commenting on stories about the group. Astonishingly, amongst the evidence offered by Gamergate that blacktric has no association with them is a tweet where he refers to GG as "us." (*This comment was deleted by KIA moderators after this article was published. It is archived here.)"It is mind boggling that Gamergate could even rear its head in such times as this, yet it also illustrates how much of what we think we know comes to us via the hydra-headed instrument of mis/information that is the internet. If social media upchucked Jubbal's doctored image and called him a terrorist, it also issued a swift corrective, with sharp-eyed netizens realizing that things were awry in that photo. That dildo in the back corner. The conspicuous absence of a camera in the mirror. The fact that he's wearing headwear that identifies him as Sikh. Those involved with the gaming world knew right away that something was awry with the image, because Jubbal is something of a minor celebrity in that subculture thanks to being a favorite target of Gamergaters. Earlier this year, he briefly quit Twitter due to the unending barrage of online harassment he'd been enduring. What had he done to be so loathed? He supported diversity in gaming while being a brown non-Christian. True to the tenets of Sikhism, he was unfailingly polite, kind, and inoffensive in the face of sustained and widespread vilification. Writes idlediletante for Daily Kos: "His trademark response to racist insults directed at him personally was just "Gosh." When things got really heated, Jubbal released his frustration by tweeting Sailor Moon GIFs. Jubbal's calm, polite responses in the face of furious racism became so well-known amongst #gamergate opposition on Twitter that somebody designed a T-shirt to commemorate Jubbal." But if the attacks against him are not new, the real-life implications of harassing him online have dramatically shifted. In the wake of the Paris attacks, doctoring Jubbal's image and labeling him a terrorist is tantamount to making him the target of an international manhunt and placing his life in danger. In an interview for Broadly at Vice, Claire Wardle, Research Director at the Tow Center for Digital Journalism at Columbia's School of Journalism and expert in digital verification, likens the photo-shopping of Jubbal's image to "revenge porn." She also finds it "pretty unbelievable" that anyone would manipulate an image in this way. But Arthur Chu is also a favorite target of Gamergaters as well, and he isn't surprised at all. As Chu has repeatedly pointed out, this kind of online harassment goes far beyond shits and giggles. In response to the vicious hoax targeting Jubbal, Chu observes: "Even a small-scale social media shitstorm can easily lead to one particularly zealous person crossing the line to get a SWAT team sent to your house—or to your family’s," he notes. "The trolls who are intent on denying that games and media and Internet “bantz” should be treated as real or have real-life consequences keep pushing the envelope." With nothing to keep this behavior in check, Chu worries that the harassment will keep on escalating until someday, someone is going to end up really hurt or even dead in real life. Yet the fact that Chu is in the U.S., Blacktric is in Turkey, and Jubbal is in Canada, helps shed some light on the complexities of forming laws to govern online behaviors with the potential to become crimes in physical space. Online postings and interactions are not place bound in any meaningful sense of the word. Do free speech laws apply to a man in Turkey participating in an online forum hosted by an American company? Will Facebook nation have to implement its own set of laws, declaring itself a virtual geography for digitized minds without recourse to national boundaries? As for Jubbal, he maintains an unflappably optimistic and polite stance. In response to the doctored photo, he tweeted: "Learn the difference between me being a Sikh, and a Muslim. Cry in mug, while I use your tears to water my garden. I am valuable, and rad." He added: "I am cute as gosh."
The left has an Islam problem: If liberals won’t come to terms with religious extremism, the xenophobic right will carry the day
It’s becoming increasingly difficult to talk honestly about Islam. For liberals in particular, it’s a kind of heresy to suggest that Islam, at this particular moment in history, has a problem. This is unfortunate, and it has to end. All religions are not the same. All faith traditions are not equally wise or equally tolerant or equally peaceful. A fundamentalist Jain is not the same as a fundamentalist Christian. A devout Quaker and a committed Wahhabist have very different ideas about justice and equality and morality. And to the extent that Quakers and Wahhabists live by the light of these ideas, the differences between them are vast and consequential. All of this should be obvious to anyone paying attention, and yet it isn’t. What happened in Paris last weekend was both tragic and banal. And like mass shooting incidents in America, the response to it was as depressing as it was familiar. The bigots on the Right, many of whom are Christian fascists, were quick to condemn Islam as such. These people hate Muslims already, and they hate them precisely because they’re Muslim. The religious right is animated by tribalism and hatred, and so anything they say or do as it relates to Islam is irremediably tainted. Commentators on the Left, reacting against the bigotry and historical amnesia of the Right, focused on our own complicity and on the need to counter "Islamophobia." Unlike the commentary on the Right, however, this serves a purpose. It's essential to note that America has radicalized this region with decades of plunder and interventionism. It's essential to note that there are 1.6 billion Muslims in the world, and that the overwhelming majority of these people are peaceful and tolerant. It's essential to note that it's unjust to blame all Muslims for the acts of ISIS, whose vision of Islam is not shared by the rest of the Muslim world. And it's essential to note that Christianity is also replete with Iron Age dogmas, many of which are as regressive and toxic as anything you’ll find in the Quran. All of this is true, and the point can’t be made enough. But there’s a broader and more nuanced conversation to be had about Islamic extremism, one free of religious tribalism and ideological bias. And that conversation is about specific ideas, ideas that are operative in groups like ISIS and Boko Haram. This isn’t a war against a religion or a people or a culture – although the purveyors of hate want to make it such. When liberals attack the illiberal values of Islamic extremists, who turn women into cattle and children into martyrs, this isn’t a defense of white liberals or even Western culture; above all it’s a defense of the hundreds of thousands of Muslims who continue to suffer under the yoke of theocracy and repression. We’re defending the gay Muslims being hurled off of rooftops; we’re defending the young girls being pelted with battery acid for the crime of receiving an education; we’re defending the freethinkers and the secularists and the advocates for equality and free speech in the Muslim world, who are, in almost every way, braver and more important than their Western counterparts. There’s a persistent taboo on the Left which demands that every incident of terror be attributed to American foreign policy. Terrorism is a hydra-headed problem, and it's not reducible to a single cause - religion and politics and economics and foreign policy and institutional corruption are critical variables. Does America’s history of looting and corruption in the Middle East matter? Absolutely. Is the world and the region currently paying the price for the West’s self-interested partitioning of the Middle East after World War I? Without question. But Islamists aren’t killing cartoonists because the U.S. invaded Iraq. And ISIS isn’t exterminating the Yazidis because of America’s sordid relationship with Saudi Arabia. We can and should acknowledge our hypocrisies and our injustices and our complicity in creating the menace that is Islamic extremism. But if you think ISIS is merely a reaction against U.S. foreign policy, you’re dangerously misguided. ISIS’s concerns aren’t primarily political. They are committed to a prophetic theology of seventh-century Islam, and everything they do and say confirms their desire to incite an apocalyptic confrontation with the modern world. Their hatred of infidels and their belief in martyrdom and armed Jihad have a scriptural basis, and it’s dishonest to pretend otherwise. And their brand of Islam isn’t radically different from the Wahhabism practiced in Saudi Arabia. Most Muslims aren’t Wahhabists and don’t share this vision of life, just as most Christians aren’t stoning adulterers, even though there are biblical injunctions to do so. But it’s disingenuous to say ISIS has no connection to Islamic tradition. The problem isn’t Islam so much as Jihadism. Islam is a rich and complicated religion, with countless sects and denominations and readings. Almost all of these manifestations of Islam are peaceful and perfectly compatible with a free and pluralistic society. But Jihadists and certain Islamists want to impose their interpretation of Islam on the rest of society, including the West. This is a real problem, and it’s not reducible entirely to Eurocentrism or Western imperialism or neoconservative aggression or illegal and murderous drone strikes – although these things are real and matter a great deal. And it’s not “Islamophobic” to admit this. The fact is, most Muslims are our allies in this fight, and that fact gets obscured when only Christian theocrats are critiquing Islamic extremists. Liberals and progressives and humanists ought to be able to say that there's a problem within Islam, not unlike problems within Christianity and other religions at various periods in history, without being accused of bigotry. And we have to a draw a distinction between doctrines and people, ideas and communities. ISIS doesn’t represent true Islam, just as the Westboro Baptist Church doesn’t speak for Christianity. But both are religious problems, and one is clearly more dangerous and ascendant than the other. Insofar as Jihadists believe in specific ideas about apostasy and prophecy and martyrdom and blasphemy and religious freedom, we have to take them seriously, and we have to criticize those ideas. These critiques are not of all or even most Muslims, but only of the tiny minority who hold and act on these ideas. The fundamentalists on the Right won’t acknowledge this distinction, which is exactly why the Left has to make it. Watch Muslims respond to the portrayal of Muslims in the media: [jwplayer file="http://media.salon.com/2015/11/Muslim..." image="http://media.salon.com/2015/11/Screen...] It’s becoming increasingly difficult to talk honestly about Islam. For liberals in particular, it’s a kind of heresy to suggest that Islam, at this particular moment in history, has a problem. This is unfortunate, and it has to end. All religions are not the same. All faith traditions are not equally wise or equally tolerant or equally peaceful. A fundamentalist Jain is not the same as a fundamentalist Christian. A devout Quaker and a committed Wahhabist have very different ideas about justice and equality and morality. And to the extent that Quakers and Wahhabists live by the light of these ideas, the differences between them are vast and consequential. All of this should be obvious to anyone paying attention, and yet it isn’t. What happened in Paris last weekend was both tragic and banal. And like mass shooting incidents in America, the response to it was as depressing as it was familiar. The bigots on the Right, many of whom are Christian fascists, were quick to condemn Islam as such. These people hate Muslims already, and they hate them precisely because they’re Muslim. The religious right is animated by tribalism and hatred, and so anything they say or do as it relates to Islam is irremediably tainted. Commentators on the Left, reacting against the bigotry and historical amnesia of the Right, focused on our own complicity and on the need to counter "Islamophobia." Unlike the commentary on the Right, however, this serves a purpose. It's essential to note that America has radicalized this region with decades of plunder and interventionism. It's essential to note that there are 1.6 billion Muslims in the world, and that the overwhelming majority of these people are peaceful and tolerant. It's essential to note that it's unjust to blame all Muslims for the acts of ISIS, whose vision of Islam is not shared by the rest of the Muslim world. And it's essential to note that Christianity is also replete with Iron Age dogmas, many of which are as regressive and toxic as anything you’ll find in the Quran. All of this is true, and the point can’t be made enough. But there’s a broader and more nuanced conversation to be had about Islamic extremism, one free of religious tribalism and ideological bias. And that conversation is about specific ideas, ideas that are operative in groups like ISIS and Boko Haram. This isn’t a war against a religion or a people or a culture – although the purveyors of hate want to make it such. When liberals attack the illiberal values of Islamic extremists, who turn women into cattle and children into martyrs, this isn’t a defense of white liberals or even Western culture; above all it’s a defense of the hundreds of thousands of Muslims who continue to suffer under the yoke of theocracy and repression. We’re defending the gay Muslims being hurled off of rooftops; we’re defending the young girls being pelted with battery acid for the crime of receiving an education; we’re defending the freethinkers and the secularists and the advocates for equality and free speech in the Muslim world, who are, in almost every way, braver and more important than their Western counterparts. There’s a persistent taboo on the Left which demands that every incident of terror be attributed to American foreign policy. Terrorism is a hydra-headed problem, and it's not reducible to a single cause - religion and politics and economics and foreign policy and institutional corruption are critical variables. Does America’s history of looting and corruption in the Middle East matter? Absolutely. Is the world and the region currently paying the price for the West’s self-interested partitioning of the Middle East after World War I? Without question. But Islamists aren’t killing cartoonists because the U.S. invaded Iraq. And ISIS isn’t exterminating the Yazidis because of America’s sordid relationship with Saudi Arabia. We can and should acknowledge our hypocrisies and our injustices and our complicity in creating the menace that is Islamic extremism. But if you think ISIS is merely a reaction against U.S. foreign policy, you’re dangerously misguided. ISIS’s concerns aren’t primarily political. They are committed to a prophetic theology of seventh-century Islam, and everything they do and say confirms their desire to incite an apocalyptic confrontation with the modern world. Their hatred of infidels and their belief in martyrdom and armed Jihad have a scriptural basis, and it’s dishonest to pretend otherwise. And their brand of Islam isn’t radically different from the Wahhabism practiced in Saudi Arabia. Most Muslims aren’t Wahhabists and don’t share this vision of life, just as most Christians aren’t stoning adulterers, even though there are biblical injunctions to do so. But it’s disingenuous to say ISIS has no connection to Islamic tradition. The problem isn’t Islam so much as Jihadism. Islam is a rich and complicated religion, with countless sects and denominations and readings. Almost all of these manifestations of Islam are peaceful and perfectly compatible with a free and pluralistic society. But Jihadists and certain Islamists want to impose their interpretation of Islam on the rest of society, including the West. This is a real problem, and it’s not reducible entirely to Eurocentrism or Western imperialism or neoconservative aggression or illegal and murderous drone strikes – although these things are real and matter a great deal. And it’s not “Islamophobic” to admit this. The fact is, most Muslims are our allies in this fight, and that fact gets obscured when only Christian theocrats are critiquing Islamic extremists. Liberals and progressives and humanists ought to be able to say that there's a problem within Islam, not unlike problems within Christianity and other religions at various periods in history, without being accused of bigotry. And we have to a draw a distinction between doctrines and people, ideas and communities. ISIS doesn’t represent true Islam, just as the Westboro Baptist Church doesn’t speak for Christianity. But both are religious problems, and one is clearly more dangerous and ascendant than the other. Insofar as Jihadists believe in specific ideas about apostasy and prophecy and martyrdom and blasphemy and religious freedom, we have to take them seriously, and we have to criticize those ideas. These critiques are not of all or even most Muslims, but only of the tiny minority who hold and act on these ideas. The fundamentalists on the Right won’t acknowledge this distinction, which is exactly why the Left has to make it. Watch Muslims respond to the portrayal of Muslims in the media: [jwplayer file="http://media.salon.com/2015/11/Muslim..." image="http://media.salon.com/2015/11/Screen...] It’s becoming increasingly difficult to talk honestly about Islam. For liberals in particular, it’s a kind of heresy to suggest that Islam, at this particular moment in history, has a problem. This is unfortunate, and it has to end. All religions are not the same. All faith traditions are not equally wise or equally tolerant or equally peaceful. A fundamentalist Jain is not the same as a fundamentalist Christian. A devout Quaker and a committed Wahhabist have very different ideas about justice and equality and morality. And to the extent that Quakers and Wahhabists live by the light of these ideas, the differences between them are vast and consequential. All of this should be obvious to anyone paying attention, and yet it isn’t. What happened in Paris last weekend was both tragic and banal. And like mass shooting incidents in America, the response to it was as depressing as it was familiar. The bigots on the Right, many of whom are Christian fascists, were quick to condemn Islam as such. These people hate Muslims already, and they hate them precisely because they’re Muslim. The religious right is animated by tribalism and hatred, and so anything they say or do as it relates to Islam is irremediably tainted. Commentators on the Left, reacting against the bigotry and historical amnesia of the Right, focused on our own complicity and on the need to counter "Islamophobia." Unlike the commentary on the Right, however, this serves a purpose. It's essential to note that America has radicalized this region with decades of plunder and interventionism. It's essential to note that there are 1.6 billion Muslims in the world, and that the overwhelming majority of these people are peaceful and tolerant. It's essential to note that it's unjust to blame all Muslims for the acts of ISIS, whose vision of Islam is not shared by the rest of the Muslim world. And it's essential to note that Christianity is also replete with Iron Age dogmas, many of which are as regressive and toxic as anything you’ll find in the Quran. All of this is true, and the point can’t be made enough. But there’s a broader and more nuanced conversation to be had about Islamic extremism, one free of religious tribalism and ideological bias. And that conversation is about specific ideas, ideas that are operative in groups like ISIS and Boko Haram. This isn’t a war against a religion or a people or a culture – although the purveyors of hate want to make it such. When liberals attack the illiberal values of Islamic extremists, who turn women into cattle and children into martyrs, this isn’t a defense of white liberals or even Western culture; above all it’s a defense of the hundreds of thousands of Muslims who continue to suffer under the yoke of theocracy and repression. We’re defending the gay Muslims being hurled off of rooftops; we’re defending the young girls being pelted with battery acid for the crime of receiving an education; we’re defending the freethinkers and the secularists and the advocates for equality and free speech in the Muslim world, who are, in almost every way, braver and more important than their Western counterparts. There’s a persistent taboo on the Left which demands that every incident of terror be attributed to American foreign policy. Terrorism is a hydra-headed problem, and it's not reducible to a single cause - religion and politics and economics and foreign policy and institutional corruption are critical variables. Does America’s history of looting and corruption in the Middle East matter? Absolutely. Is the world and the region currently paying the price for the West’s self-interested partitioning of the Middle East after World War I? Without question. But Islamists aren’t killing cartoonists because the U.S. invaded Iraq. And ISIS isn’t exterminating the Yazidis because of America’s sordid relationship with Saudi Arabia. We can and should acknowledge our hypocrisies and our injustices and our complicity in creating the menace that is Islamic extremism. But if you think ISIS is merely a reaction against U.S. foreign policy, you’re dangerously misguided. ISIS’s concerns aren’t primarily political. They are committed to a prophetic theology of seventh-century Islam, and everything they do and say confirms their desire to incite an apocalyptic confrontation with the modern world. Their hatred of infidels and their belief in martyrdom and armed Jihad have a scriptural basis, and it’s dishonest to pretend otherwise. And their brand of Islam isn’t radically different from the Wahhabism practiced in Saudi Arabia. Most Muslims aren’t Wahhabists and don’t share this vision of life, just as most Christians aren’t stoning adulterers, even though there are biblical injunctions to do so. But it’s disingenuous to say ISIS has no connection to Islamic tradition. The problem isn’t Islam so much as Jihadism. Islam is a rich and complicated religion, with countless sects and denominations and readings. Almost all of these manifestations of Islam are peaceful and perfectly compatible with a free and pluralistic society. But Jihadists and certain Islamists want to impose their interpretation of Islam on the rest of society, including the West. This is a real problem, and it’s not reducible entirely to Eurocentrism or Western imperialism or neoconservative aggression or illegal and murderous drone strikes – although these things are real and matter a great deal. And it’s not “Islamophobic” to admit this. The fact is, most Muslims are our allies in this fight, and that fact gets obscured when only Christian theocrats are critiquing Islamic extremists. Liberals and progressives and humanists ought to be able to say that there's a problem within Islam, not unlike problems within Christianity and other religions at various periods in history, without being accused of bigotry. And we have to a draw a distinction between doctrines and people, ideas and communities. ISIS doesn’t represent true Islam, just as the Westboro Baptist Church doesn’t speak for Christianity. But both are religious problems, and one is clearly more dangerous and ascendant than the other. Insofar as Jihadists believe in specific ideas about apostasy and prophecy and martyrdom and blasphemy and religious freedom, we have to take them seriously, and we have to criticize those ideas. These critiques are not of all or even most Muslims, but only of the tiny minority who hold and act on these ideas. The fundamentalists on the Right won’t acknowledge this distinction, which is exactly why the Left has to make it. Watch Muslims respond to the portrayal of Muslims in the media: [jwplayer file="http://media.salon.com/2015/11/Muslim..." image="http://media.salon.com/2015/11/Screen...]
