Mosque at ground zero?

[JosephH]

Maybe passing out blankets from a smallpox hospital would do the trick - worked for Lord Amherst & co.

[JosephH]

The "problem of Islam" is better stated as the 'problem with Israel and the Palestinians'. As a strategic concern compared to China, it is simply an unfortunate (and entirely self-inflicted) political distraction no different than the "problem with illegal immigration". It serves solely to bring out the correct [Pav]Rovian response in right-leaning electoral sheep.

[j_b]

Can you remember the last time that regressive neanderthals didn't go into an election campaigning on race/religion? I can't remember it. Fearmongering is all they have to keep the peons in line.

[j_b]

"i am not innocent. you are not innocent. no one is innocent"

 

Right, they were especially guilty of not wanting to be tortured and killed for opposing their US propped dictator.

[ivan]

"i am not innocent. you are not innocent. no one is innocent"

 

Right, they were especially guilty of not wanting to be tortured and killed for opposing their US propped dictator.

no suprise you're more of a rage against the machine than a tool fan

[KaskadskyjKozak]

Can you remember the last time that regressive neanderthals didn't go into an election campaigning on race/religion? I can't remember it. Fearmongering is all they have to keep the peons in line.

 

race and religion are the bread and butter for left-wing libtard election propaganda

[JosephH]

Ah, the socialism as fascism double-dog dare reversal. Well executed too, let us know when you want your tongue off that pole.

[j_b]

Neo-Supremacy Chic: Glenn Beck and Sarah Palin’s Tea-Scalding of MLK

by Pierre Tristam

 

They don’t call it white supremacy for nothing.

 

One of the ways this country’s reactionaries have made racism and neo-segregation chic is by co-opting the language of emancipation, equality and civil rights.

 

The “tea party” broods—the richest, most pampered, most welfared generation in the history of mankind—portray themselves as the put-upon victims of high taxes, disenfranchisement and debt, though this is the same generation that since 1981, and more so since 2001, has benefited from the lowest taxes this country has known going back to the 1920s, contributed to the greatest debt it’s known, and is now profiting from the richest retirement benefits this or any other country has ever known. Rich enough, that is, to give rise to sprawls like Palm Coast, which was created to suck on that hog.

 

Almost exclusively white, Catholic, Protestant and old, this most selfish generation discovered in 2008 that it was no longer the swing vote. It was outrun by younger, certainly more colored, more colorful, voters. It rebelled. It declared itself disenfranchised. Already self-segregated in communities physically gated or deed-restricted from the rabble, it was not a leap to self-segregate politically and turn imaginary disenfranchisement into discrimination.

 

The minor genius of the “tea party” movement is to do so by adopting the language and methods of rebellion, albeit in slogans only: reactionaries don’t make rebellions. They crush them. By co-opting the mythology of the original tea party, today’s “tea party” broods have managed to make their over-representation at almost every level of government look like no representation because the man at the helm doesn’t look like them. They go as far as using the language of disenfranchisement, and the protest words of the 1960s.

 

It is supremacy by rhetoric, the sort of supremacy that, in its cruder form, enables some fools to claim that a National Association for the Advancement of White People is no more (or no less, for good measure) racist than the NAACP. It is the supremacy of a Glenn Beck or a Sarah Palin who, as they did Aug. 28, on the 47th anniversary of Martin Luther King’s “I Have a Dream” speech, posed as the nation’s new civil rights pioneers, “taking back” America and “restoring” its honor. Taking it back from whom? Restoring it from what? Don’t ask, though it isn’t the fifth-grade speech-contest skills of a Beck or a Palin that would obscure what they mean: “For too long,” Beck said today, “this country has wandered in darkness, and we have wandered in darkness in periods from the beginning.” Darkness. The darkies, in other words, are back.

 

You don’t need to call the president a * to get your point across in this era of “darkness.” Especially not to a sea of whites joined on the Washington Mall by the single resentment of being led by a darkie president, and there to pay homage to Beck, who called America under Obama “The Planet of the Apes.” Some of Beck’s best friends, obviously, are black. “If we hadn’t elected a black president, do you think they would be doing this today?” the poetically named Joyce White asked a Washington Post reporter covering the event. The answer was all around, punctuated by the lie at the heart of the neo-supremacists’ movement: where the old civil rights wars were about inclusion, these “tea party” reactions are about exclusion. Where the old civil rights movement was about overcoming blood-soaked oppression, the “tea party” broods (which have no Bull Connor dogs chasing after them that I know of) are about keeping tax rates on the richest 5 percent among them from going up a few points.

 

In the “fair and balanced” reasoning behind neo-supremacy, the old master is the new victim, using the old victim’s language. The suffering and disenfranchisement of one has been replaced by the suffering and disenfranchisement of the other. It doesn’t matter that there’s no relationship between the two, that the mere suggestion of white suffering or disenfranchisement in this country, this retiree generation especially, is a supreme offense to those who have genuinely suffered and lived through decades of disenfranchisement until relatively recently. This is the United States of Amnesia, where historical memory is slight and the latest snappy slogan as good as scripture, especially when it’s cloaked in the language of god, as Beck—like a pimp wearing his obligatory crucifix and flag pin as his visas to credibility—did: “We are a country of God. As I look at the problems in our country quite honestly I think the hot breath of destruction is breathing on our necks and to fix it politically is a figure that I don’t see anywhere.”

 

Supposedly, the rally on the mall was not about politics but about the revival of religious virtue. But that, too, was a conceit as transparent as Beck’s camera tears. The country isn’t lacking in religious virtue, religious fervor or religious fixations. It’s drowning in it all, to its detriment: faith-based fanaticism is replacing rational analysis. It’s the sweetener of “tea party” brews: the rational and the analytical is to those brews what daylight is to Dracula. So the rally was a seizure by a master marketer of god as branding, god as divine legitimacy for what was otherwise a slow-motion stampede on the day’s iconic place in the nation’s historic calendar. It turned into the biggest “tea party” rally yet, signaling the arrival of the neo-supremacist political movement in god’s clothing.

 

The day’s nightmare, of course, the supreme act of white supremacy, was the co-opting of King’s day on the Mall to the “tea party”’s uses, and abuses, under the banner of restoration, religious or otherwise. Charles Blow, a columnist for The Times, put it simply in a piece entitled “I Had a Nightmare.” Calling Beck “the anti-King,” in a wordplay too subtle for most tea drunkards to detect, he writes: “I find it curious that many of the same people who object so strenuously to the Islamic cultural center proposed for Lower Manhattan, many on the grounds that it is inappropriate and disrespectful, are virtually silent on the impropriety and disrespect inherent in Beck’s giving a speech on the anniversary of King’s address.”

 

“In fact,” Blow continued, “to even insinuate that the president’s policies are in any way equivalent to the brutality of the Jim Crow South at the time of the civil rights movement is the highest order of insult, particularly to those who lived and suffered through it, as well as to those who live with its legacy. If Beck truly thinks these movements are comparable, I have some pictures of “strange fruit” I’d like for him to see.

 

 

more at: http://www.commondreams.org/view/2010/08/29

[KaskadskyjKozak]

Ah, the socialism as fascism double-dog dare reversal. Well executed too, let us know when you want your tongue off that pole.

 

Who brought up "race" and "racisim" in this thread? The libtard. As usual.

 

Next your mental midget think-alikes will start spouting off on "brown people" and more supposed racism of anyone to the political right of Pol Pot.

[JosephH]

Republican electoral strategy has been almost exclusively about race since they figured out how to turn the South. They haven't changed a single aspect of that strategy since other than to find new and creative wrappings for it. This cycle it's islam and illegals - but only an idiot or an operator would claim it isn't about pandering to racial fears.

[j_b]

Who brought up "race" and "racisim" in this thread? The libtard. As usual.

 

Liberals brought up that muslims shouldn't be able to build a cultural center near ground 0 and made national news for weeks on end out of it? You are a really, really bad liar or a first class moron, probably both.

[KaskadskyjKozak]

Republican electoral strategy has been almost exclusively about race since they figured out how to turn the South. They haven't changed a single aspect of that strategy since other than to find new and creative wrappings for it. This cycle it's islam and illegals - but only an idiot or an operator would claim it isn't about pandering to racial fears.

 

Democrats play the race card at every election throwing "goodies" to whatever minority they think they can buy with big-gov't programs catering to said demographic. Simultaneously, libtards attribute racism - in the most broad-brush strokes - their adversaries.

 

Immigration has nothing to do with race, and everything to do with economics.

 

 

[KaskadskyjKozak]

Liberals brought up that muslims shouldn't be able to build a cultural center near ground 0 and made national news for weeks on end out of it? You are a really, really bad liar or a first class moron, probably both.

 

Has nothing to do with "race".

 

As for your insults, FOAD.

[j_b]

the retard is now playing the semantic card AND he doesn't want to be insulted to boot, after he did exactly that for years on end. Laughably pathetic.

[JosephH]

Democrats play the race card at every election throwing "goodies" to whatever minority they think they can buy with big-gov't programs catering to said demographic. Simultaneously, libtards attribute racism - in the most broad-brush strokes - their adversaries.

 

Immigration has nothing to do with race, and everything to do with economics.

As I said, let us know when you want your tongue off that pole...

[KaskadskyjKozak]

Democrats play the race card at every election throwing "goodies" to whatever minority they think they can buy with big-gov't programs catering to said demographic. Simultaneously, libtards attribute racism - in the most broad-brush strokes - their adversaries.

 

Immigration has nothing to do with race, and everything to do with economics.

As I said, let us know when you want your tongue off that pole...

 

There's nothing you say that really matters.

[KaskadskyjKozak]

Laughably pathetic.

 

That's how I always view you.

[Fairweather]

The "problem of Islam" is better stated as the 'problem with Israel and the Palestinians'.

 

I see you've graciously added Palestinians to your slate of "issues". A nice touch, but you're not really fooling anyone here. Your past rhetoric shows clearly your hatred for Israel in general, and Jews in particular no-matter said issue has less to do with Islam than it does Arab nationalism. If you look in today's news you'll find the latest Hamas response to Israeli (and Obama's) peace overtures. MOTS.

[olyclimber]

Laughably pathetic.

 

That's how I always view you.

 

Wow you guys found common ground! 8D

[JosephH]

I have no 'hatred' for Israel or Jess whatsoever. What I do have is a very specific concern about Israel as an unacknowledged 51st state based on our financial support of it on an annual basis and the deleterious effect that has on our own national security and interests in the world. Israel as a standalone sovereign nation I have no problem whatsoever with - Israel as quasi-US state with AIPAC directly influencing US foreign policy to the detriment of our national security and interests I do.

[Fairweather]

I have no 'hatred' for Israel or Jess whatsoever. What I do have is a very specific concern about Israel as an unacknowledged 51st state based on our financial support of it on an annual basis and the deleterious effect that has on our own national security and interests in the world. Israel as a standalone sovereign nation I have no problem whatsoever with - Israel as quasi-US state with AIPAC directly influencing US foreign policy to the detriment of our national security and interests I do.

 

Of course. The Jewish conspiracy. A cornerstone of the unstable left. (Never mind the $$ we give Egypt, Jordan, etc, etc... that's all well and good. ) Not sure how tools like Joseph and j_b/Prole walk past mirrors these days.

[JosephH]

Want to contrast the funding to Israel with that of Egypt and Jordan for us? Do you want to contrast the political influence of those nations on US foreign policy decisions compared to Israel? How about talking about the number of US troops dying in Iraq and Afghanistan because the neocons thought that would be a clever way to solve the 'MidEast problem' without actually breaking the Israeli / Palestinian impasse. In the end, if it has to do with the MidEast, at it's foundation it's a Israeli / Palestinian problem and until and unless a US president leans on Israel there will be no peaceful resolution of the conflict and by extension the continued risk to US interests in the region and the loss of American lives.

[billcoe]

The "problem of Islam" is better stated as the 'problem with Israel and the Palestinians'. As a strategic concern compared to China, it is simply an unfortunate (and entirely self-inflicted) political distraction no different than the "problem with illegal immigration". It serves solely to bring out the correct [Pav]Rovian response in right-leaning electoral sheep.

 

Palestinians vs Israelis are not the main event for US policy makers IMO. The main event is that according to some in the US - Muslims are living over there right on top of our oil wells and crimping our unquenchable thirst for same. When a billion car-driving Chinese with near empty gas tanks come winging down the road head on towards our 300 million large SUV drivers (numbers approximated) - it's going to be quite the spectacle when they crash.....probably appropo that it would be in the middle east I suppose. Certainly getting a few straws in the ground, even if you are selling some of it to the Chinese as it is a world market, is the goal.

[JayB]

"Islam has been liberal when weak, and violent when strong. Let us not give it credit for what it was merely unable to suppress."

 

Ernest Renan, 1883.

 

My guess is that ever since the West has no longer had the will nor the capability to forcibly repress Islamists, they've simply returned to form - and the norms that have persisted in their faith since its founding - when and where the opportunity presented itself.

 

Hmmm, now where have I heard this sort of thing before? It's telling that you find quotations from the 19th century so appropriate here as the kind of essentializing meme on display is fundamental to the white man's burden narrative. The objects are virtually interchangeable (Islamists, Jews, Vietnamese, Negroes, Natives) as are the terms used to describe them (lazy, stingy, violent, etc.) Whether the "true nature" stems from blood or creed, the pathology always lurks just beneath the surface. So, not suprisingly, it's all about "the will and capability to forcibly suppress" the recalcitrant savage. Bravo Jay, once again you've shown the more you open your mouth the more disgustingly clear your worldview becomes. Good luck with your invasion/forcible deprogramming/Koran-burning campaign (the only prescription that could come from such a rotten foundation), lord knows humanity's track record proves we'll need it.

 

Yes - every person, culture, or nation that's been on the receiving end of Jihad since the seventh century has been a victim of the same "esentializing meme." Yawn.

 

 

[JosephH]

Those are exactly the strategic national interests I'm speaking of when I say our interests are at risk. We will remain at a disadvantage relative to those interests every month there is not a peaceful resolution of the Israeli / Palestinian problem.