posted by Damozel | This Pew poll is causing a stir in some quarters. Consider the title of British blogger/correspondent Toby Harnden's (The Telegraph) blog, used completely unironically: American Muslims: the enemy within? I call that a bit offensive, among other reasons because the poll clearly shows that most American Muslims aren't sympathetic to terrorism.
But setting aside my disposition to get outraged on behalf of Muslims who absolutely don't deserve to be tarred with that particular feather, let's take a look at what Harnden has to say.
Principally, he seems to think we need to be focusing on the percentage of American Muslims who---I suppose, based on his title---might be seen as constituting an "enemy within.".
[quote begins from Toby Harnden, "American Muslims: The Enemy Within? (May 23, 2007)]
[I]f a quarter of a certain group of people think the slaughter of civilians is OK in certain circumstances then that's the story - not that the other three-quarters totally reject it.
Yes, the problem seems to be twice as bad in Europe. But that doesn't mean it's just fine and dandy this side of the Pond.
The researchers state that "native-born African-American Muslims are the most disillusioned segment of the US Muslim population".
I know from talking to US government officials that one of their biggest fears is that a black American who converted to Islam in prison could strike within the US.
When I interviewed Michael Chertoff, US Homeland Security chief, last month he told me: "Prisons are areas which are very fertile for recruiting because you have a population that is alienated.
"They've already been pre-selected for willingness to violate the law...So that is a population that we do worry about and that we are actively monitoring to make sure we are aware of any activities within prison settings that could lead to radicalisation, and I think it's something the Europeans are focused on as well."
There are an estimated 2.35 million Muslims in the US. A quarter are converts and nearly two-thirds of the converts are blacks
[quote ends].
All righty then: putting on my worried face. Now what, Mr. Harnden? Now what? He doesn't say.
And actually, knowing what I know about certain of my fellow citizens, the poll definitely troubles me.
Of course, assuming the poll to be an accurate reflection of reality and all its conclusions to be true---which I'm not prepared to do without more--- I somehow wouldn't necessarily infer that the radicalism of American black Muslims springs primarily from the same thinking as that of actual Al-Quaeda operatives.
I realize that the only acceptable explanation among certain Republicans (mentioning no names!) for Islamic jihadists is "evildoers; hate our freedom and our values"; so let's go with that. And these same people---being very frightened and ever ready to argue for self-preservation over principle--could argue, using the sort of logic or "logic" on which they generally rely---that ex-cons who become Black Muslims are, or may be, or are more likely than not to be evildoers (because: ex-con) who hate "our" (whoever the "we" whose "our" it is may be) freedom and values. .
But even if I provisionally accept this "give a dog a bad name and hang him" circular reasoning, surely even the most craven right-winger would concede that the first causes/underlying reasons why an African-American might end up in prison and convert to Islam because he is an America-hating evildoer are fundamentally different from the reasons why actual foreigners do so? I mean, surely they'd concede that the disenfranchised young men of America's underclass---citizens like the rest of us---wouldn't end up alienated and filled with undifferentiated/nondifferentiated rage for exactly the same reasons as someone who is not an American citizen? And that when it's our own citizens we have to fear, we have a different sort of duty to inquire into first causes?
Ha ha ha ha! Kidding. The really frightened right wingers are never going to answer "yes" to any question regarding any person they regard as a potential threat to their safety, because whenever they perceive such a threat they lose the ability to reason and just go into all-out safety-at-all-costs mode (disguised as swagger about the nasty things they'll do to the bad guys, though by "they" they generally mean "the government I normally affect to believe should stay out of the private lives of citizens and its agents.") They didn't actually learn a lot, in general, from Katrina or from the Virginia Tech incident and they rather guilelessly seem to assume that if we'll just give the government enough leeway, the government can keep us safe from terrorist threats.
And of course terrorism is an ongoing threat. Of course it is. It's one that we're going to have to learn to live with, I imagine, for as long as we continue to fail to inquire into first causes or to deny that there are first causes and maybe after, assuming we can't do anything about the causes or can't do anything without violating other principles. The question is how far we go in revising our values in order to be more safe from this one specific threat. In my experience, the same sort of people who swagger and bluster a and call the rest of us names (which is okay, since my name for them is "abject cowards") are capable, as history and my own observations show, of just about anything if only they become frightened enough). I can play the give-a-dog-a-bad-name-and-hang-him game too, if that's what we're onto.
I missed the McCarthy years (in the sense that I wasn't alive then), but I lived through the Sixties and the Seventies. Then and now, this was always the hallmark of the extreme right winger: extreme fear and extreme anger at the faceless "they" who are coming to get us all because they hate our way of life.
Any hint that "they" might actually be individuated human beings with disparate motives---or God forbid, that they might have a point of view capable of being rationally analyzed---sends them into panicked fury. I got a taste of this in 10th grade, actually, when I got sent to the principal of my high school because a rumor went around that I was reading some book or other that explained the historical context of the Vietnam War and didn't paint Ho Chi Minh as an Oriental demon who inexplicably hated America and Americans. I must have said something in class or been overheard discussing it, because I was really surprised and disconcerted, good girl that I was, to be so summoned. In the principal's office, I was lectured on the evils of Communism and told that I shouldn't be overheard expressing the view (I hadn't, but he didn't care) that Ho Chi Minh had at any time reached out to the American government (even to FDR). My dad---who to his credit never tried to control my reading--told me that if I must read that sort of thing, I should at least never mention it to anyone---he might lose his patients. Yes, friends: In my little SC milltown town, I was Hanoi Damozel, all because I expressed surprise that the history books didn't agree with what I was hearing in school. That's when I first started going off "the right," i.e., the political philosophy of every adult I knew.
Speaking as a freedom-loving, shoot-if-you-must-this-old-red-head-but-don't-piss-on-the-constitution-and-the-Founders sort of a Democrat, this poll scares the bejesus out of me.
Consider Exhibit A, Michelle Malkin .
The world's dorkiest cheerleader wrote a book called In Defense of Internment: The Case for "Racial Profiling" in World War II and the War on Terror" which is actually taken seriously in some quarters (and even my beloved Bill Maher seemed to agree with her about racial profiling during one of the most ridiculous ever segments of Real Time Transcript for August 13, 2004 Real Time with Bill Maher ).
So: Malkin thinks the poll should be "a wake up call."
In The National Review Online, she wrote:
[quote begins from The National Review, Tiny Minority, Big Problem by Michelle Malkin (May 23, 2007)]:
The poll found that while 80 percent of U.S. Muslims believe suicide bombings of civilians to defend Islam cannot be justified, fully 13 percent said they can be justified, at least rarely. One in four younger American Muslims find suicide bombings in defense of Islam “acceptable at least in some circumstances.”
About 29 percent of those surveyed had either favorable views about al Qaeda or did not express an opinion. Yes, they either gave al Qaeda thumbs-up or had no opinion about the terrorist group responsible for slaughtering nearly 3,000 of their fellow Americans on 9/11 and responsible for a global bloodbath from Bali to Britain, the Middle East, and beyond." Etcetera.
She doesn't say what we should do about it when we wake up.
So I am waiting to hear: what should we do about, Michelle? Should we intern all the Muslims---or only Black Muslims---and if so, for how long? Till we "win" in Iraq? Till we "win" "the global war on terror"? If not that, what do you propose? Extending the power of the government to monitor fellow citizens who happen to be Muslim on the theory that this isn't going to make any of the really angry and really alienated etc. etc.?
I wonder if the nervous scaredy-cats of the far right---who apparently fear death much, much more than dishonor, it seems---will realize that the best way to bridge the gap is through building empathy and rapport rather than taking measures (such as what? such as what? The possible answers are what are worrying me much more than fear of my fellow citizens, many of whom were and are pretty scary without being Muslim....Oklahoma City, anyone? The madman Cho at Virginia Tech?
At Salon, Glenn Greenwald, being fond of lefty devices such as "reason," suggested that the poll is probably not dispositive and that the reaction to it is mostly "hysterical." [Salon, Large number of Americans favor violent attacks against civilians] But he also focused on the much uglier emotions underlying some of the excitement. (Note his ironic use of a title quite similar to Harnden's unironic use).
[Glenn Greenwald, Salon, The Islamic Enemy Within]
Pew released a new poll today regarding the political beliefs and attitudes of American Muslims and -- needless to say -- our right-wing warriors, within hours of its release, have exploded in shrieking alarm. These revelations about American Muslims are "hair raising!," and the warrior-pundits are working in unison to milk every ounce of anti-Muslim fear-mongering that can be squeezed from this new poll.
It is literally difficult to overstate the prominence that fear and hatred of Muslims assumes in the worldview of these right-wing war proponents. They frantically search every news story for any possible angle to seize in order to exploit anti-Muslim hysteria. It is the centerpiece, the animating "principle," of the vast bulk of their public commentary.
[quote ends; links in original]
About Malkin, he said:
Malkin's Hot Air site has as one of its central purposes the scouring of news wires in order to find possible stories of Scary Violent Islamists in the U.S, resulting in one inane and hysterical item after the next....Satirical though that may be, it is quite representative of the standard daily fare that spews forth from those precincts -- all led by the woman who expressly defends the internment of innocent American citizens based on their ethnicity and who is now the most frequent guest host of America's most-watched cable news show.
[quote ends]
Because Greenwald is fond of quaint tools such as "logic" and isn't a coward, he calmly analyzes the poll, discussing the ways in which the poll data is, or might be, faulty.
But I doubt seriously that the hysterical element of the right will be able to hear reason over the panicky pounding of their hearts. A hint of danger and they start screaming for Big Brother (whom they otherwise affect to despise) to protect them----as if they had never heard of the Oklahoma City Bombings or Hurricane Katrina or a young man called Cho at Virginia Tech. Anything, including the betrayal of our nation's most fundamental values (which traditionally was rumored to include the courage to die in the cause of freedom and before abandoning this principle), that threatens them sends the gun-loving portion of our society scurrying to the government for protection.
I mean: shouldn't the Japanese who were interned during the War understand that it was for everyone [else's] good? Shouldn't they be okay with that? Shouldn't we be okay with the idea that while brave men and women were overseas fighting for our way of life, we were basically betraying it?
The internment was a disgraceful moment in American history when frightened Americans let their fear override their principles (though naturally they had the usual endless lists of reasons why they had to do what they had to do). And I mention this because I'm back to thinking about the swaggering, macho, self-justifying, furious, yet very, very frightened "warriors" of the far right are going to propose we do about the poll to make the world safer for them and theirs.
The price of freedom is eternal vigilance, a certain great American once said. The vigilance Jefferson had in mind was vigilance against threats to the values underlying freedom, including respect for the freedom of the individual, protection of the individual from the power of the state, and due process of law.
He meant something different, I think, than the people prone to quoting this line mean. He and his cronies took for granted that sustaining a free society comes at a price and requires the citizens of the nation to accept certain risks... Our institutions, the ones on which our nation and our history as a people are founded require a special type of courage: the courage to accept some risk to one's own interests or safety in order to maintain the freedom and dignity of others and to restrain (not encourage) the state from taking any action against an individual, even one accused of a crime, that fails to protect and affirm the dignity of that individual. That is what the Bill of Rights is about; that is what America is meant to be about. We shouldn't be making fear into a necessity and then attempt to make a virtue of it...and I'll leave it there.
PS. A FURTHER MOMENT OF MALKINISM. By the way, and apropos of nothing at all, my favorite Malkin videotape is this June 9, 2006 one, in which Chris Mathews of Hardball nearly makes her cry (at least in my interpretation) and certainly rattles her badly by failing to be like all those nice, chivalrous Fox interviewers by not letting her get away with a nasty, gratuitous insinuation about John Kerry Vietnam service. . It is choice. "YES OR NO, MICHELLE?"
Malkin has really begun to replace Ann Coulter in my affections as "Intellectual Women from the Right" who make me laugh out loud---Coulter having perhaps gone too far and ruined (for now her standing as an intellectual or, as some (not me; I loves me some Coulter) would have it, "intellectual."
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