From: Jasper
Date: 10/16/03
Time: 1:21:27 PM
Remote Name: 68.73.205.216
Charlie,
Demagogues have used the power of labels to promote themselves from the beginning of recorded history. When you hear a black politician these days scream “racism” when he gets caught dirty, there is a good chance that he his doing it to focus attention away from his dirty dealings. We have seen, thought, that the chances he is right are just as good.
You might not have noticed but the jerks who sound off all the time about racism where race is not really the issue have been very prominent in the media for a long time. They have become so prominent that it is extremely difficult to raise legitimate issues of racism without getting accused of being one of them. To understand what is going on you have to know the individual players involved, the politicians and the people who report the stories you use to think with. Sometimes you have to dig deep. Most people simply will not do that. The politicians know it and so do the reporters.
I see a red flag every time I hear about targeting Arabs or Moslems for special government scrutiny and investigation. The initial news reports say that only individuals or groups within those communities with suspected links to terrorist organizations are being targeted. You see pictures of “suspicious-looking” Arabs or Arab-Americans and the preliminary evidence against them appears to justify the scrutiny. But all too often, later reports buried deep in the local newspapers and never sent out on the news wires as the first reports were, admit that these people were completely innocent.
In the name of security, the United States rounded up Americans of Japanese decent on the West Coast and sent them to concentration camps in Montana and Indiana. No such camps were established for German-Americans or Italian-Americans. The German citizens who were here legally were not deported simply because of their German citizenship and German-Americans were only targeted for special attention where they were known to be active in the Nazi party. If you want a good example of the danger of Americans who put the old country ahead of their new one, you couldn’t pick a better example than German-American Nazis. The operative word is “Nazi,” not German.
In the current national security debate about Arabs and Moslems, the operative word should be “terrorist.” Most Arab-aliens and Arab-Americans in the city of Detroit, for instance, are Christians. Most of them in our bordering suburb of Dearborn are Moslems. Most people outside of Eastern Michigan lump them together. They see an Arabic face or hear an Arabic name and think “Moslem.” When they think “Moslem,” they also think “terrorist.” Sure they know that most of these people are not terrorists any more that most Catholics in Northern Ireland are terrorists but they sill fear them as “a” group.
As George Bush finally said after 911, all of these terrorist groups (except the JDL, of course) work together. We are supposed to be fighting a war against terrorism, not against Arabs or Moslems. It does not help us in that fight for most Arabs and Moslems to rightly perceive most non-Arab or Moslem-Americans as being hostile to them. The only people it helps are the real terrorists – white ones, black ones, brown ones, yellow ones or red ones who label themselves atheists, Christians, Jews or Moslems. –Jasper