In an otherwise good column about Marty Peretz and associated Islamophobes, Nick Kristof says this:
This is one of those times that test our values, a bit like the shameful interning of Japanese-Americans during World War II, or the disgraceful refusal to accept Jewish refugees from Nazi Europe.
No it isn’t, not even remotely. This isn’t life and death (which is was for some Jewish refugees), nor is anyone seriously contemplating stripping Muslims of their property and shipping them to concentration camps in the desert.
We’re arguing about where people can build a fucking church. When you amp up the drama about it, you’re playing the haters’ game — they’re the ones who want to take a discussion that should be happening at the local zoning board and turn it into a national debate about our very survival.
mclaren
Intriguingly, this provides evidence for the argument that things are actually getting better in America.
As bad as the reign of error of the drunk-driving C student and his torturer sidekick was, those eight years were nothing compared to the McCarthy era. Hundreds of thousands of people got fired from their jobs and blacklisted in the McCarthy era because they belonged to organizations like the ACLU. That didn’t happen this time.
Stephen Pinker’s classic TED talk A History Of Violence shows that rates of violence have actually declined over the last few centuries, not increased. In fact, violence has declined drastically — and the rate of decline has accelerated just over the last 50 years or so.
So the evidence would seem to suggest that America and the world is actually improving. Less violence, less destructive wars, less genocide, less intolerance. Yet everyone seems to believe the opposite.
Paradoxical, isn’t it?
El Tiburon
No, this has nothing to do with building a church. This is about setting a precedent that the Muslims will do what we white, Christians tell them to do. And as some have suggested, they may have to submit to stricter searches at airports. And god forbid another ‘muslim’ terrorist attack, then the malkian race to intern them inside of razor fences will be on.
El Cid
If one cannot suggest that such ethnosectarian hatreds stirred up can’t even be a “bit like” some historical events that some average Americans recall, not even the sentiments that led to such things as Japanese internment or refusals to accept Jewish refugees, you can’t really have a sensible discussions of much things.
By the way, if this was limited to a discussion of one fucking church, that would be correct. But it’s not. It’s being ginned up as a right wing national crusade of ethnosectarian hatred, including incidents of property damage and threats against Muslims (or people who somehow look Arab or Muslim) nationwide.
Ahasuerus
Permit me to disagree with your assessment. While the end result of this attitude (internment/extermination vs. opposition to a building) may not currently be the same, the attitude is exactly the same; it is the assumption that the other is less than human, and therefore not deserving of being treated as such. What
drives me into a spittle-flecked rageupsets me about this is the fact that Mr. Peretz probably lost family members not too long ago for this very same reason. This apparently willful blindness to recent and personal history is something which I will never be able to comprehend.Ahasuerus
Permit me to disagree with your assessment. While the end result of this attitude (internment/extermination vs. opposition to a building) may not currently be the same, the attitude is exactly the same; it is the assumption that the other is less than human, and therefore not deserving of being treated as such. What
drives me into a spittle-flecked rageupsets me about this is the fact that Mr. Peretz probably lost family members not too long ago for this very same reason. This apparently willful blindness to recent and personal history is something which I will never be able to comprehend.geg6
Disagree, mm. This is the start of the slippery slope that leads to atrocities and such. When you start advocating that members of a particular demographic (religion, race, nationality, etc.) don’t deserve fundamental rights enshrined in the Constitution for all American citizens, you are beginning the slide to exactly the sort of things Kristof uses as illustrations. It’s exactly the same thing that to Japanese Americans being interned and what led to American anti-Semitism keeping Jewish refugees from being allowed into America (Germany argued that German Jews were not “real” Germans or even real people).
I could not disagree with you more.
Persia
@Ahasuerus: Agreed. And bigotry is still bigotry, and our acceptance of it as a society says something about us.
Ahasuerus
Ah crap, I double-posted. My apologies.
arguingwithsignposts
Got to agree with the others above, mistermix. “a bit like” is a pretty tepid comparison. Nothing like Pete Hoikstra’s famous equation of the House GOP with the Iranian protesters, for instance.
Shalimar
Of course not. Why stir the hornets up that much just for control of Congress? We will have the concentration camp “debate” during the 2012 Presidential election cycle. Obama is an evil socialist and must be defeated at all costs, you know.
beltane
Ethnic cleansings do not happen overnight. My husband works with a few Fox News cultists who are convinced that Islam is an organized, centrally controlled movement to strip Americans of their freedom and force them to worship a strange God who has darker skin than Teh Jeebus. They do not see Muslims as people of a different religion, but as bots, members of a Borg collective who are genetically programmed to kill and enslave Christians. Seriously, you need to hear these people to understand the kind of crap they believe. People who are this terrified and misinformed are capable of anything, and it would be nice for once to prevent atrocities from happening rather than doing nothing and listening to the sorry details that emerge from some variant of a future Truth & Reconciliation Commission.
mcd410x
It very well could be about life and death.
Growing expectations meeting a plummet in reality: a prime ingredient in violence. Wouldn’t it be ironic if the fear/stupidity expressed by some Americans about their countrymen creates the very terrorism they’re afraid of?
arguingwithsignposts
@beltane:
What really gets me is the sheer terror involved. Outside of two attacks on the WTC, and some failed attempts here and there, the vast majority of America has experienced nowhere near the terrorism that other parts of the western world have experienced (say, Britain during the IRA years). I live smack in the middle of flyover country and I can’t say I’ve been worried about any seekrit muslim attacks on my town ever.
Violet
Just look at how things progressed with the Jews in WWII. It wasn’t like someone woke up one morning and decided to ship everyone off to a concentration camp. It was a slow denial of rights and turning into “the other.” Register with the state. Wear stars on your clothes. Live in certain areas only. Each step was supposed to be the last step, be good enough. Until it wasn’t.
You’re right that at the moment the comparisons aren’t not really accurate. But that’s because the anti-Muslim sentiment is only now just coming out of the closet and starting to be discussed in public by “serious people.” It’s trying to get a foothold. The time to squash this sort of thing is now.
inkadu
mm: “nor is anyone seriously contemplating stripping Muslims of their property and shipping them to concentration camps in the desert.”
I’m not sure this is generally true. Lots of people are seriously contemplating kicking Muslims out of the military and would like to see them expelled from their country and sent to the muslim homeland of Toronto. And lots of these people have the tacit support of leaders of the Republican party. The leaders might not be “seriously” considering it, but they sure don’t give a shit about Muslims and if they could sacrifice them on the altar of an election, they would do it gladly.
Odie Hugh Manatee
Like others here, I have to agree to disagree MrMix. While the current situation is not as devastating as past situations have been, the intent and will is there to exploit and exploit is what the rabid right are doing. My wife’s 89 year old aunt was angrily shaking and her thin lips were pressed together when I disagreed with her about muslims and their intent (evil) and she spat out “They should all be deported!”. I asked her if she meant American citizens who were muslim and she vehemently said “YES!”. The hate and fear was clear to see and there was no arguing with her or trying to change her mind.
It was pure white rage and hate. If our government imprisoned them today she would be out there cheering them on, as would many others like her. She eats Faux News for breakfast, lunch and dinner. Her husband was Air Force and like her, a lifelong Republican.
We are headed down a path that our forefathers probably never envisioned, being led by a press that they probably never envisioned, not in their wildest dreams. Our country is a mess and our press want a brawl, they want conflict.
They want dirty laundry, even if they have to dirty it for us.
stuckinred
@arguingwithsignposts: The fact that “America has experienced nowhere near the terrorism that other parts of the western world have experienced” combined with 9/11 is a selling point for these morons.
Liberal Sandlapper
@mister mix: sorry, but this IS just as big as the Jews in Germany and the Japanese internments. Those issues didn’t start out with ovens and concentration camps. They started out with whisper campaigns and victimization of the sort we are now seeing with Muslims around the world, and especially here in the US.
Waiting until a bunch of people die before we start calling it out and putting an end to it is TOO LATE!
inkadu
@Violet: My theory is that the anti-Muslim sentiment was dormant during the Bush years because we were happily killing, bombing and torturing Muslims; the blood lust was sated. Now that we have a president with the middle name of Hussein who says we really shouldn’t torture people, even if they are brown, and earnestly seems to want to end wars, the haters feel disenfranchised and must take matters into their own hands.
schrodinger's cat
I have to chime in with others who have disagreed with mm. I have seen this movie before and it does not well. This is just the beginning if the people who oppose the mosque get their way, it will embolden them, and who knows what they will demand next and where they will stop.
mistermix
First, slippery slopers, you’re applying a hell of a lot of grease to get down that slope. Yes, haters hate vehemently, but they are not aided and abetted by government — nobody’s turning a blind eye to anti-muslim violence (not that there’s been much of it).
Second, if Kristof wanted to put this in real perspective, he’d pick moments from the fight for minority civil rights, not WWII. A small, mainly Southern minority is fighting the dirty brown people who are going to do scary things to us, aided and abetted by some DC elites who will profit from whipping up their hatred. The only place where a mosque is in real danger of not being built is in Tennessee, not NYC — the latter community center is still approved and looking for funding.
But it makes better copy to talk about internment camps and holocaust victims, so he did it.
beltane
@arguingwithsignposts: My ex-husband saw the whole 9/11 attack from his office window. While he was shaken by what he saw, the only direct effect he experienced was a very crowded train ride home. No one outside the immediate area of the attack went without food, water, or electricity or any other of the basics of life. To compare 9/11 to what the Europeans endured in WWII is utterly shameful and ignorant. Someone here responded to a comment of mine yesterday by implying that 9/11 was like the Holocaust. Have we no shame?
Emily L. Hauser/ellaesther
I think it’s very important that he used the words “a bit like.”
It’s not exactly like — nothing is exactly like.
But it has elements that are frighteningly, chillingly similar, and this is the one useful role that historical analogies can play: To remind us that we have been down roads that look an awful lot like this one — or at least the start of those roads looked an awful lot like the start of this one — and it’s our choice to stay on, or wrestle ourselves off.
Also, as has been pointed out: Not a church. A mosque. And that slip is more offensive, right there, than I think you can imagine.
inkadu
I wonder how long it will take before we start hearing about honor killings in the American (immigrant) muslim community. I bet you the next one will make national headlines. Not, of course, that I’m OK with honor killings, just that it only becomes news as xenophobic exploitation.
schrodinger's cat
@mistermix: Do you know about Babri Masjid or Babur’s mosque in Ayodhya, India and how the Indian version of the wingers used it to inflame devout Hindus and the chain of the events that followed?
ChrisB
I disagree too. When Peretz says things like
and
which Kristof quotes at the top of his op-ed, it is something that tests our values. It’s the view of Muslims and the defense of religious and individual freedom that is at issue here. The “Ground Zero Mosque” is only the catalyst.
mistermix
@Emily L. Hauser/ellaesther: I hope I’ve offended. All religions should be offended, regularly, and with gusto.
inkadu
@Emily L. Hauser/ellaesther: Not a church. A mosque. And that slip is more offensive, right there, than I think you can imagine.
If calling a mosque a church is unimaginably offensive, what is calling it a synagogue?
They are building a church. But in Islam, a church is called a mosque. Just like God is called Allah. No biggie.
arguingwithsignposts
@beltane:
Words almost fail. Because ~3,000 people dying in a coordinated terrorist attack is EXACTLY LIKE the systematic extermination of 6 million “unwanted” people.
head/desk
arguingwithsignposts
@inkadu:
I don’t know why I’m feeding the troll, but:
They are building a community center, within which is a prayer room. It is not a mosque.
beltane
@schrodinger’s cat: That’s a very good point and is the situation most analogous to one we are experiencing now. As I recall, the aftermath of that incident was particularly bloody.
inkadu
@mistermix: I’m an atheist and am really torn by the hatred of Islam. On the one hand, I’m like, “hooray! people attacking religion!” and on the other, “uh-oh, religious people starting a religious war.” I’ve decided that Christian bigots looking to take away basic human rights are way worse than muslims who want to bounce their foreheads off the floor five times a day in their own very special head-bouncing house.
Did I say head-bouncing house? I meant church.
sherparick
Most of us are like Britanicus from Shaw’s “Caesar and Cleopatra,” of whom Caesar comments:
“Pardon him. Theodotus: he is a barbarian, and thinks that the customs of his tribe and island are the laws of nature.” Certainly Marty Peretz barbarizes himself more every day.
And that is the eventual problem. The holocaust against the Jews by the Germans, the internment of Japanese-American citizens by arbitrary executive order (by my hero, FDR), was not the work of one moment, but the result of decades of word being spent to dehumanize them, and to make the most inhumane actions and violence seem right and proper when the moment to commit them came.
Odie Hugh Manatee
“Have we no shame? “
No, we don’t. We are about as shameless a country as there has ever been. We are the absolute best at anything and everything. The same goes for disasters, we have had the absolute worst of the worst happen here. The rest of the world gets off easy compared to the difficult existence we brave patriots have slogged through.
We’re the best, fuck the rest! At least we were shameless until that serial apologist usurper Barack HUSSEIN Obama seized control. Now he wants to get along with the rest of the world, as if those other nations are as great as we are!
MikeJ
Remember kids, even when people are rounded up and put in boxcars, you can’t compare anyone to Hitler until the death toll hits 6,000,000. Say something at 5,999,999 and you’re a drama queen.
beltane
@arguingwithsignposts: You know, I was so disturbed by that comment yesterday that I was almost going to give up posting here. Both my husband’s and my own family suffered tremendously as innocent civilians during the war. The glib heartlessness of some people is too hard to take at times.
Odie Hugh Manatee
@arguingwithsignposts:
Fix’t.
inkadu
@arguingwithsignposts: You’re right about Cordoba House (which I had remembered somewhere in the back of my head); I haven’t read the Kristoff article, so wasn’t sure if it was about CH or about two of the other mosques elsewhere in the country garnering protests.
I also don’t feel I’m trolling with the church stuff(*). If you’re trying to explain to dumb America why Muslims should be allowed to build a mosque. People can easily say, “I’m fine with banning mosques; I’m not muslim and minarets are tacky.” If you call it a church, you’re putting people more in their own shoes and understanding Muslims from a more familiar perspective.
Ditto God and Allah; different names, same exact thing. If you want to make headway in making Americans accept Islam, you say Muslims worship God, not Allah. I don’t find these things offensive in the context of defending religious rights to the general public.
(*well, ok, my most recent comment was a bit of a poke in the eye, but I can only defend religions for so long)
Jon H
The Hartford city council was supposed to have an imam give the invocation thingy before starting work Monday, rather than some Christian type person.
That’s been canceled due to vehement and often bigoted complaints, and instead there will be a moment of silence.
Mike in NC
A nation of spineless busybodies and bed wetters.
PurpleGirl
Lost in the circus around the Lower Manhattan Islamic cultural center, two other mosque projects have been objects of protests. Protests in Staten Island forced the Archdiocese of NY to back out of the sale of a no longer used convent to a Muslim congregation. And protests in Sheepshead Bay Brooklyn look to have quashed plans for a new mosque there as well.
beltane
@Jon H: I agree with that. Why do we have to have any prayers at all at official government functions?
Emily L. Hauser/ellaesther
@mistermix: Wow. Honestly?
Offending by showing the depths of your ignorance regarding the most basic facts about a faith that is precious to 1.5 billion people is a goal? A thing you think is good?
You’re a child, and I’m stepping off the train.
Jon H
@beltane: “I agree with that. Why do we have to have any prayers at all at official government functions?”
You don’t get it. They’re going to still have Christians on other days.
Emily L. Hauser/ellaesther
@inkadu: And yours is a train I never get on.
schrodinger's cat
@beltane: The worst rioting took place in Bombay as it was known then. Businesses looted just because they were owned by muslims, people killed just because they were muslim, while the police did little or nothing. I never thought it could happen, not in Bombay, India’s most cosmopolitan city. India’s New York if you will. But it did happen, the city burned for days, until finally the army was called in to quell the violence.
ETA: The violence in Bombay took place a month after the initial incident.
inkadu
@Emily L. Hauser/ellaesther: I still remember some really annoying conversation with you from about two years ago. We don’t see eye-to-eye.
But cheers to BJ for having such a stable group of commenters.
Odie Hugh Manatee
The Repubs updated FDR’s speech for the America of today:
The only thing we have to fear is fear.
That’s our country today; a nation of strong, individualist, pull yourself up by the bootstraps type of bedwetting pansies who are scared of anything not white and right.
arguingwithsignposts
@Odie Hugh Manatee:
Fixed that for ya.
Amir_Khalid
I agree with the consensus of commenters here. Nick Kristof isn’t equating the controversy over Park51with the Holocaust or the internment of Japanese-Americans in severity. He’s saying that questioning a minority’s entitlement to its civil rights is an expression of the same bigotry that denies it those rights, or that resorts to outright persecution. Maybe it is a slippery-slope argument, but that doesn’t make it false or overstated.
Linda Featheringill
Kristoff may have exaggerated a little but he did not lie.
Some folks in this country are not far from supporting internment camps and even more people would not accept a ship load of refugees that are “different.”
MM, I don’t understand why you are angry with him. Even if he is a “flawed vessel,” he is coming down on the side of the angels. He is doing the right thing.
[Okay, maybe I am using cliches a little too much but I still don’t understand why mm objects so strongly.]
Odie Hugh Manatee
@arguingwithsignposts:
Works for me. Too. :)
geg6
@inkadu:
You know what? I’m an atheist, too. I hate religion of all stripes. But I’m also a liberal and a humanist and don’t see any benefit in going out of my way to insult others for their beliefs, especially if they aren’t insulting me. Being an asshole is not any way to gain respect for your own beliefs. I hate the Catholic church, but I don’t hate many Catholics.
Ahasuerus
@mistermix:
Absolutely correct. We are nowhere near the levels of government-mandated inhumanity which characterized previous injustices. And that gives me hope that this, too, shall pass.
I respectfully disagree – while the focus of anti-muslim hatred may currently be located in the south, there seems to be an awful lot of rancid bigotry bubbling up over a much larger area of the country. Islam and immigrants are the xenophobes targets du jour, gays are regularly denounce by theofascists, and blacks are dog-whistle demonized by “states-rights” and “entitlement reform” hucksters. And this vile crap is tacitly condoned by the GOP leadership and actively promoted by their ostensibly “independent” propaganda organs. In other words, it’s national.
What I find disturbing is that the GOP seems to have been almost taken over by these bigots, and that same GOP may actually be in the majority for one or more cycles in the near future. Such an outcome may very well provide the grease for a ride further down that slope, and I don’t think that ride will be a pleasant one.
beltane
@Jon H: Oh, I thought they were doing away with the prayer thing entirely. That would have been a good thing.
mistermix
@Emily L. Hauser/ellaesther: I’ll eagerly await your impassioned defense of the feelings of people like me, the millions of atheists who don’t give a shit about religions but wish they would stop taking up all of our public bandwidth. We’re shat upon rhetorically every day, yet we’re not supposed to be offended, because our heathen souls aren’t worth of salvation.
Also, too: I pretty much agree with @inkadu‘s analysis: “church” and “god” are generic terms that de-escalate this nontroversy.
arguingwithsignposts
@Ahasuerus:
I will second that this is not a deep south phenomenon alone. Pam racist Gellar lives on Lawnguyland if I remember correctly.
arguingwithsignposts
@mistermix:
For the last time, it is not a *church*!
The mosque in Tennessee is not the center of the controversy, and wouldn’t even gain national attention if not for Cordoba House. The nexus of the controversy is goddam Ground Zero. So trying to deescalate with “church” isn’t going to do a damn bit of good.
MikeJ
@mistermix: I see no reason why atheists shouldn’t take offense when offense is offered, but I see no reason for us to cause offense unduly.
Violet
@mistermix:
Not at the moment they aren’t. But Newt Gingrich was an elected official in our national government. And not just a minor figure either. He was Speaker of the House. And he’s ginning up all sort of anti-Muslim sentiment. Sure he’s not in the government now, but he’s got plenty of friends who are. He equates Muslims with being anti-American. It’s not really a leap to speculate where that could lead.
mistermix
@MikeJ: You clearly don’t understand that the treatment of atheists in America a bit like the shameful interning of Japanese-Americans during World War II, or the disgraceful refusal to accept Jewish refugees from Nazi Europe.
arguingwithsignposts
@mistermix:
I understand that is meant as snark, but when the atheists start having large groups of bigoted yahoos protesting them building a non-god non-church because some atheist somewhere blew up a building, you can get back to us on that.
inkadu
@geg6: I don’t hate any one because of their religion. I just think they’e being stupid about one thing. We all have our individual stupidities, and with the exception of religion, nobody seems to have a problem pointing them out.
Fred Beloit
“I can’t at the moment think of another mainstream publication whose editor-in-chief has expressed similar sentiments — whether about Muslims or blacks or Jews or women or any other class — and not had to apologize or step down. ”
Well now, one supposes that Cristopher Hitchens will be sternly repremanded by SLATE for saying terrible things about ALL religions. Go get him Kinsley.
mistermix
@arguingwithsignposts: Get back to me when there’s an atheist who can practice his non-religion as openly and forcefully as Keith Ellison and still be elected to federal office.
Jay C
Let me add my two cents to the “disagree” side: Nick Kristof may have stretched the similes a bit in his NYT column, but, reading the whole thing, his fundamental point is still valid – i.e., that the current anti-Muslim hatefest being ginned up by various bad actors around the country is a disgrace to this country, and a serious backtrack on one of its fundamental principles. No, it’s not quite the Japanese Internment, but the same mindset is in operation here (IMO).
MikeJ
@mistermix: Sorry, my 58 should have read “shouldn’t”instead of should. Sorry.
inkadu
Atheists vs Muslims. Who will win gold? The Opress-o-lympics are on!
schrodinger's cat
The current hate fest is not aided and abetted by the government as mistermix rightly points out, but is everyone confident that won’t change if GOP wins the next Presidential election?
mistermix
@MikeJ: Fixed it for you. But I still think Atheists have the right to piss on other religions, just as they are pissed on, even if they do it spontaneously without obvious provocation, just as religions seem to do from time to time.
Speaking of that, here’s an Obama quote that should piss off Muslims and Atheists:
You’d think a Muslim would understand that it’s “Allah”, not “God”.
Slide
You can put me on record as well as thinking that Mistermix is way off base. Its not just about “building a fucking church” and if you don’t see the larger implications of what is going on that is a failure on your part. The column you sited was discussing a supposedly respectable journalist wondering whether constitutional rights should apply to Muslims. I don’t know about you, but that seems somewhat concerning, doesn’t it?
The only thing that seems to be overstated was your rather stupid headline, “This Generation’s Hiroshima, Gettysburg and Nagasaki, Rolled Into One”
MobiusKlein
we don’t have to go the ‘full Goodwin” to be afraid of what’s happening to the discourse about Muslims. (and treatment)
Point: The US is not going to kill all the Muslims in our country.
But, there certainly could be a KKK style reaction to terrorize and hound some of them, especially in certain locals.
Slide
Fred Beloit
Can you show me where Christopher Hitchens wondered if certain groups should be afforded the protections of the US Constitution like Perez did?
Emily L. Hauser/ellaesther
@mistermix: I’ll get back on the train to say:
Here – here’s my impassioned defense: http://emilylhauserinmyhead.wordpress.com/2009/09/09/on-godless-heathens/
It ran in the Dallas Morning News three years ago, I posted it on my own blog not long ago, and I’ll be guest posting it on someone’s own blog very shortly.
You might also want to read the couple-three posts I wrote about MLK’s Strength to Love and the frustration I feel over his disdain for atheists, because even Dr. King doesn’t get to express disdain.
Like you’re expressing here.
bootsy
@mistermix: As if Keith Ellison hasn’t been attacked for being a Muslim?
I’m an atheist too, but this whole thing is much more like the examples Kristof points out, which were also by political parties to maintain or gain power. Hitler did sincerely want to kill all the Jews and other minorities, but he also campaigned on a platform of the purity of the German Volk. Gingrich et al. probably don’t care as much about pure hatred, but if they felt they could gain more power by advocating even harsher treatment of Muslims, they’d do it in a heartbeat.
This is not about some religious dispute anyway. The fact that those idiots yelled at a Puerto Rican construction worker who “looked Muslim” proves it. That imbecile who wants to burn Korans hasn’t read them. This is about an Us and Them conflict, which some people love to have, and are overjoyed that 9/11 gives them the excuse they need.
arguingwithsignposts
Side “meta” note: I love the fact that FPers get pushback and response here at BJ, and the overall tone is pretty civil (for the Internets).
Carry on.
asiangrrlMN
@bootsy: I agree with your statement. It’s not about religion, really, though that’s just the convenient veneer. And, I do think the mentality behind the sentiments is a bit like what led to the interment of the Japanese in WWII. Furthermore, we have prominent politicians saying, “Hey, it would be the good thing for the Imam to move his not-a-mosque building out of sensitivities.” So, no the government is not ignoring anti-Muslim hatred, but they are not exactly taking a hard stance against it, either (for the most part. I know there have been exceptions such as my own Al Franken). And, as Violet, said upthread, if the Republicans regain control, all bets are off.
Shalimar
@mistermix:
Not yet. Because we currently have a Democrat in the White House. And for all the horrible things you can say about Bush and Rove, they were too worried about getting minority votes to really demonize and dehumanize anyone other than GLBTs.
The next Republican administration will take a very different attitude than the last one. Hatred is building, and it is politically profitable. It will be aided and abetted by government when Republican leaders are in charge again.
John
1. A mosque, not a church.
2. A community center, not a mosque.
Helps to start from the correct place.
Citizen Alan
I really am astonished at the naivete that underlies this post. There is almost no question in my mind that, should Obama lose to a Republican in 2012, we will have internment camps before the end of this decade. Hell, it might not even be a Muslim vs. Christian thing by then — it’s quite possible that the first internment camps will be for undocumented Latinos (and the occasional citizen who doesn’t have proof of citizenship), with Muslims and other “undesirables” added later.
This is also why it really annoys me when people respond to Teabagger lunacy with snide, mocking posts about “Teatards” that don’t treat them with the deadly seriousness they deserve. In the early 1930’s, I imagine most Americans laughed at that silly-looking German with the Charlie Chaplin moustache as well. Ten years later, no one was laughing.
Objective Scrutator
While it doesn’t endorse Islamic internment, we all need to remember this ‘classic’, largely because it goes to extreme lengths to endorse racial profiling.
gil mann
Gotta tell ya, dude, a keenly-honed sense of smug superiority makes it go down a lot easier.
I’m pretty bummed out by how a lot of atheists with soapboxes are responding to all this, as though a target’s being softened or something. I hate religion the way hipsters hate Nickelback but fuck, man, you’re not striking a blow for reason by siding with fundy bigots, and I don’t care if the siding-with part is incidental.
Plus, you do realize we’re talking about Sufis, right? They’re like Unitarians–they believe in God, but they don’t really give a shit. Take away the escuse to socialize, they’d be agnostic within the week.
HyperIon
deleted…
tkogrumpy
@beltane: Please do not think of it. Your comments here are of inestimable value to me.