Colonialism With A Kindly Face

If you needed any further proof that Amnesty International is to the 21st century what rum-swigging bearers of the White Man's Burden were to the 19th, look no further than its current campaign for a global arms trade treaty. 

Amnesty is basically agitating for the West, which it considers civilised and responsible, to prevent the rest, or what Amnesty euphemistically refers to as the "wrong" people, from getting their hands on guns and bombs. 

It is a call for a colonial-style carve-up of the world, between those judged decent and grown-up enough not only to own guns but also to determine who else may own them (us), and those judged too infantile and brutal to be let anywhere near a gun lest they unleash "the worst kind of atrocities" (them).

Given that America has used its vast armoury to cause more destruction around the world than any other nation over the past 10 years, it is bizarre that Amnesty should be pleading with it to lead the way on restricting the flow of guns to the "wrong" countries. 

Amnesty wants Washington to give its blessing to a treaty that would restrict the global sale of weapons if there is a "substantial risk" that those weapons will be"used to commit serious human rights violations". (I'm not being funny, but what else would the weapons be used for? To tickle people?) 

Amnesty says Washington should "demonstrate true leadership" on the issue of arms trading and "send a clear message to other world leaders" that it will not tolerate weapons falling into "the hands of human rights violators".

Why ask a nation that has committed numerous "atrocities" and "human rights violations" to authorise a treaty that will allegedly prevent those kind of things from happening elsewhere by taking guns out of the "wrong hands"? It is because, like its moral forebears in the colonial movements of the nineteenth century, Amnesty believes that the fundamentally decent West, whose wars are but an aberration of its normal character, has a moral responsibility to disarm and pacify and by extension to civilise the gun-toting hordes over there, whose wars are an expression of their innate warped character.

What Amnesty is calling for is the concentration of weaponry in the hands of powerful, allegedly trustworthy nations, and also for those nations to play the role of global governors of war and peace by granting the flow of weapons to some nations but not to others. 

Probably the most patronising thing about Amnesty's campaign is its belief that simply by removing weapons from chaotic warzones around the world, we might stop war. 

Amnesty says the cause of global conflict today is the fact that we live in "a world awash in weapons and military hardware that are too easily obtained". From this moralistic viewpoint, weapons themselves cause wars; guns are the actual drivers of conflict Over There; the "wrong" people see that these weapons are pretty easy to buy and so they buy them and kill people with them – for a thrill, presumably. 

In truth, the wars being fought in Africa and elsewhere are fundamentally political or territorial; they're struggles for power or resources, just as Western governments' wars are. 

War is the pursuit of politics by other means over there just as much as it is over here. 

By depicting these conflicts as a product of the arms trade itself, Amnesty further robs foreign peoples of their status as adult actors, as creatures of politics and power, and reduces them instead to overgrown kids playing with dangerous toys simply because they can.

Political conflicts need political solutions, not white-skinned do-gooders in Gap jackets decreeing which Johnny Foreigners may be armed and which may not. 

It is more than a hundred years since Kipling, in his poemThe White Man's Burden, described certain foreign peoples as "half devil and half child". How depressing that groups like Amnesty still cleave to such an outlook.

Via: "The Telegraph"

Stereotypes

Posted by guest blogger "Sayf Maslul"


You can't classify me
You can't label me
I'm original
You have never seen anything like me before
I broke the mold
I am a new creation
You cant place me in a group,
I don't belong.
I am an individual
I set the trend
I don't fit in with your pretty misconceptions
I don't follow your rules
Instead I break them
I am my own person
Stereotype someone else
[By Jamie Pierce]

Mosques, Muslims and America In Darkness

By: William Rivers Pitt,
Thursday 19 August 2010
Courtesy Of "Truth-Out"

Things have come to a pretty pass when I'm the guy saying it would be really helpful if George W. Bush were still around. I'm saying it, and I mean it, because this country could really use his brand of wisdom right now.

Let me be clear: I despise the man. Loathe him. He was quite simply the worst president in all of American history; if a future president wants to outstrip his deplorable record, they will literally have to crash the Earth into the Sun to pull it off. He is a thief, a liar and a murderer, and I consider the fact that he has not been called to account for his serial crimes against the American people and the world to be a failure of leadership equal to Hitler's decision to open a second front. If George W. Bush were on fire in front of me, I would not piss on him to put him out.

But I'd really like to hear from him right about now. Whatever else he did wrong, Mr. Bush went out of his way during his eight years in office to tell us that we are not at war with Islam and Muslims, the "crusade" gaffe notwithstanding. His rhetoric regarding Islam and Muslims after 9/11 was uniformly conciliatory, couched as it was between his WMD fabrications and pro-war grandstanding, and as the leader of his party, he kept the lid on an explosion of virulent hatred against fellow citizens who prayed to Allah instead of Jesus or Yahweh. It was bad enough after 9/11, with many assaults on Muslims and mosques to go around, but it could have been far, far worse had Bush not spoken as he did.

Well, he's gone now, and the dogs are off the leash. The proposed construction of the Cordoba House two blocks from the World Trade Center site has given the far-right the opportunity to unveil the one flag they really salute: hatred, divisiveness and fear. For whatever reason, Mr. Bush has chosen to remain silent while his former minions drag the GOP and the country even further into darkness - his spokesman issued a "no comment" on Tuesday regarding the matter, in fact - so it falls to cooler heads to try and prevail. The problem is, my head isn't all that cool. I'm furious and disgusted over this situation, over the fact that once again, the far-right media establishment has successfully dragged us all to the edge of a cliff, over the fact that too many of us are wallowing in our worst selves.

So let's get a few things straight.

First of all, the Cordoba House is not a "Ground Zero Mosque." It is a Muslim community center, it is two blocks away from the site, and in a neighborhood that already has a mosque...and a strip club, and a lot of other stuff that makes talk about "desecrating hallowed ground" sound like the nonsense that it is.

Oh, and by the by, a lot of the people quacking about "hallowed ground" are the same cretins who refused to pony up funding for 9/11 rescue workers who desperately need health care when the bill came before Congress. I'm pretty used to broadband Republican hypocrisy - the core of their power in politics, after all, is their utter and complete lack of shame - but this just sends me over the moon. Money for continuing the Bush-era tax cuts for rich people? Sure. Money for people who charged into the fire and dust and smoke on that day, who are now dying by inches because of their heroism? Not so much. And P.S., all Muslims are bad. Got that? It's the Republican way.

As for the idea that the Cordoba House is going to be a nest of radicals, well, the Imam in charge of the project - Feisal Abdul Rauf - is as sensible and progressive and sane as anyone you know. For God's sake, Mr. Bush hired the man to help America try to treat with the Muslim world, and Rauf advised the FBI on counter-terrorism tasctics, which are a pretty interesting couple of line items on the resume of a so-called fanatic. I'd like to thank The Rude Pundit for putting together a collection of Imam Rauf's observations on women's rights, terrorism, and murder. Because he's a Muslim, too many people will immediately expect his views to be along the lines of those seventh-century lunatics who give Islam the bad name it enjoys.

Not so much:

Really, oh, sweet, imbecilic right-wingers? Imam Feisal Abdul Rauf of the Cordoba Initiative, which dares to want cheap real estate in New York City in order to build a Muslim community center, is a radical? Really? Does anyone actually understand the meaning of "radical" anymore?

Here's what he's said over the last few years. Mullah Omar, he ain't:

"The issue of women's rights is more than an issue for women or about women. It involves everyone...The best of you are those who are best to their women. Consequently, the worst of men are those who are worst to their women."- From the Yemen Times, August 9, 2009, at a conference on advancing the cause of women in Islam.

Rauf believes in "showing those who resort to violence that it is counter to the very idea of Islam." - From the Khaleej Times (UAE), July 5, 2009.

"Islam denounces suicide of any sort, especially suicide bombings that kill innocents. Even in a defensive war sanctioned by Islamic law, suicide is expressly forbidden." - From a June 2009 commentary by Rauf.

"The Quran expressly and unambiguously prohibits the coercion of faith because that violates a fundamental human right - the right to a free conscience. The Quran says in one place 'There shall be no compulsion in religion.' And in another it says, 'To you your beliefs and to me, mine.'"- Same as above.

"Rauf was one of the few Muslim leaders who appealed for calm and tolerance after the Regensburg speech." From the New Yorker, April 2, 2007, regarding Pope Benedict's 2006 lecture where he quoted a Muslim-hating Byzantine emperor. Riots ensued.

Young Muslims "are deeply frustrated by what's going on in the name of Islam. They feel they are paying a price for actions done by a very, very negligible minority, but which capture the attention of the media. Terrorism done in the name of Islam has hurt Muslims as much, if not more, than it has hurt Westerners." - From a June 2006 U.S. State Department press release on a conference regarding Muslim youths.

Wow, what a total madman. Or not.

There is no better place on Earth for a progressive Muslim facilitty than near the site where Islam was horribly stained by the actions of a few motherless bastard renegades. Imam Rauf seeks, in his own words, to "push back" against the radicals within his faith through the Cordoba House. It is, in a way, an apology for what happened on 9/11, a repudiation of the perversion of Islam that inspired it, and an avenue for reconciliation and forgiveness. I'm no Christian scholar, but I do recall hearing some stuff about forgiveness in my CCD classes.

Speaking of apologies (and motherless bastards), it was Newt Gingrich who injected an incredible dose of stupidity into this disgusting debate. Newt said, "You know, Nazis don't have the right to put up a sign next to the Holocaust Museum in Washington. We would never accept the Japanese putting up a site next to Pearl Harbor. There's no reason for us to accept a mosque next to the World Trade Center."

Yeah, this one has me ballistic. Pearl Harbor and the Holocaust were perpetrated by two militarized, nation-based, nationalistic empires. 9/11 was pulled off by a small cohort of fanatics who, thanks to the gross negligence of the Bush administration, got incredibly lucky on one single day. Germany and Japan, it should be noted, apologized for their actions in World War II, and we accepted those apologies, even though their actions killed millions. 9/11 was terrible. World War II was by many orders of magnitude worse, and was made possible by entities that are in no way comparable to a handful of misogynistic throwbacks on the far fringes of Islam.

This whole ridiculous thing is nothing more or less than a midterm election Trojan Horse deployed by the GOP to try and win back the power they lost in 2006 and 2008, and the "mainstream" media appears all too happy to go along. People in this country are justifiably terrified right now, thanks to the results of Republican economic theory we are currently enduring, and the temptation to lash out at something, anything, is all too close to the skin. For two years now - more, actually, if you count the '08 campaign - the GOP has been calling President Obama (and through him, the Democrats) a Muslim terrorist fanatic. The blogger most responsible for this mosque frenzy went so far as to claim Obama's father was Malcolm X, so this whole crapshow is right in their wheelhouse. They are preying on our fears, and have found fertile ground due to the circumstances we find ourselves in, and it is as deplorable as anything the GOP has pulled in their long and sorry history.

A lot of this bad noise is coming from the so-called Christians on the right, who think all of Islam is coming to destroy America, who call that faith a cult, who paint every Muslim as a murdering radical, and who make no bones about the internment-camp solutions they have for this so-called "problem." I think it fitting to remind those people that it was good Christians who enslaved and murdered millions of Africans, who gave blankets infected with smallpox to Native Americans and very nearly annihilated them all, who thought "separate but equal" was a bully idea, and who did all of these things because the victims were the non-Christian/dark-skinned "other." We're knocking on that door again, and only Hell lies behind it.

A little bit of Scripture from the newest "other":

A true Muslim is the one who does not defame or abuse others; but the truly righteous becomes a refuge for humankind, their lives and their properties.

- Mohammad

Be wary of malice, for malice consumes virtues, just as fire consumes fuel.

- Mohammad

The ink of the scholar is more sacred than the blood of the martyr.

- Mohammed

The most excellent jihad (struggle) is that for the conquest of self.

- Mohammed

Especially if you are well-to-do, see that no one goes hungry or naked.

- Mohammed

Believers, Jews, Sabaeans or Christians - whoever believes in God and the Last Day and does what is right - shall have nothing to fear or regret.

- the Quran

Sounds a lot like the Bible, right? There's a reason for that. Sure, the Quran has plenty of verses that seek to kindle the worst activities of humankind, but guess what? I can point you to five dozen Bible verses that advocate slavery, murder, hatred, and violence to a degree that puts what is in the Quran in deep shade. Exodus and Leviticus leap nimbly to mind. In short, Christians and Christianity are in no position to judge anyone, anywhere, ever.

The philosopher Denis Diderot once said, "Men will never be free until the last king is strangled with the entrails of the last priest." I don't go that far, but for sure this whole sad, sorry issue makes me want to strangle myself with my own intestines. In so many ways, including this mosque issue, we are falling backwards into a darkness from which there is no recovery. Well-meaning people can object to the building of a Muslim facility near the World Trade Center site, but the way this has played out is a blot on the soul of America. We have to be better than this.

Martin Luther King Tells Us Why The Mosque Must Be Built

By Stephanie J. Jones
Saturday, August 21, 2010
Courtesy Of "The Washington Post"


 Lost in the furor over the proposed Islamic cultural center near Ground Zero is a simple fact: The opposition to the center is the strongest argument in favor of it going right where it is planned. By most accounts, much of the opposition is based on an inaccurate conflation of Islam with terrorism, stemming from ignorance about the Muslim religion, culture and people. While troubling, this is hardly surprising in a nation in which a significant minority of Americans believe that our Christian president is Muslim (and so what if he were?).

Exiling the center to another part of Manhattan will expand and deepen the gulf between the Islamic community and its neighbors. The best way to bridge this gap is to help people understand that their trepidation is based not in reality but born of a myth that has been cruelly exploited. The Islamic cultural center can help span this chasm.

Of course, it's not fair to expect a minority community to educate the majority, especially when the majority is so hostile to it. Sadly, minorities have long shouldered the burden of proving to the majority that they pose no threat, that they are not inferior and that they, too, deserve everything the majority takes for granted as its due -- while patiently enduring misunderstanding and even abuse. They do all this in the face of demands that they are going too fast, pushing too hard and making life too uncomfortable for others.

That was the case in 1963 when white ministers in Birmingham, Ala., accused Martin Luther King Jr. of exacerbating racial tensions by leading protests against the city's segregation laws. They called his actions "unwise and untimely." Dr. King responded with his "Letter from Birmingham Jail," in which he wrote: "Frankly, I have yet to engage in a direct-action campaign that was 'well timed' in the view of those who have not suffered unduly from the disease of segregation. For years now I have heard the word 'Wait!' It rings in the ear of every Negro with piercing familiarity. This 'Wait' has almost always meant 'Never.' "


 Nearly 50 years later, it is Muslims who are being told to wait, to go away and remain out of sight until their presence can be tolerated by others. While much has changed in the past five decades, the drumbeat against the Islamic center echoes the calls of the well-meaning but misguided Birmingham ministers. Following in the footsteps of those who called for King and his "outsiders" to retreat, opponents of the cultural center urge that it be banished to another neighborhood because its presence near Ground Zero is unsettling and potentially dangerous.

But forcing the Islamic center out of sight will only allow ignorance and fear to fester and grow. It will keep more Americans from learning a lesson that King shared with the ministers: "Anyone who lives inside the United States can never be considered an outsider anywhere within its bounds."

If the center is established in Lower Manhattan, the people most opposed to it now will eventually have a chance to learn that Muslims aren't the enemy. That they aren't dangerous or terrorists or even, in fact, outsiders. They are the lady who smiles at them in the grocery store; the teenager who roots for the Yankees; the little girl who plays with their daughter. Muslims are their neighbors. They are Americans. They are their friends.

The Islamic center needs to be right where it is planned because that's where human change will come about -- one parent, one child, one friend at a time. Instead of demanding that the Muslims get out, the residents of Lower Manhattan should be grateful that their fellow Americans are willing to stay put and make the effort, under difficult circumstances, to build bridges so that, as King said, "the deep fog of misunderstanding can be lifted from our fear-drenched communities."

The writer, a public affairs and government relations strategist, was executive director of the National Urban League Policy Institute from 2005 to 2010.

The Downtown Mosque & America's Moment Of Shame

Posted by Charles Cooper
August 21, 2010 12:39 PM
Courtesy Of "CBS News"

Protesters outside of the building that is the proposed site of the Park51 mosque and cultural center, (Credit: Spencer Platt/Getty Images)

The controversy over plans to build a mosque in lower Manhattan near the World Trade Center site continues into yet another week. If this was a black-and-white movie, a cinematic hero in the Gary Cooper-Jimmy Stewart mold would ride into the picture just about now to dispense a dose of American common sense and stamp out our fears.


Too bad the real world can't borrow a page from the silver screen. Still, we are the inheritors of a rich tradition of political pragmatism. That counts for a lot in uncertain times. Or it should. Over the decades, when things threatened to get out of hand, that shared common good sense has usually been enough to help us keep our bearings.


But I wonder whether we're going to remain true to our better angels this time around. Instead of Jefferson, Lincoln and Roosevelt, the media pulpit is being hijacked by the shrill and the stupid, exploiting the moment for predictably pedestrian political or financial gain (or both).


As Bob Dylan wrote, you don't need a weatherman to know which way the wind blows. The timing was surely coincidental but the faux controversy ginned up over the proposed mosque - planned on the site of a former Burlington Coat Factory outlet - came as a Gainsville, Fla., church said it still plans to burn copies of the Quran even after local city officials denied a burn permit. Repeat: They want to burn copies of the Quran.


This may be a fringe group but the ugly motive they embraced didn't materialize in a vacuum. Politicians are, well, politicians and from Murphy Brown to the Terry Schiavo case, there's a contemporary history annotated by the use of the latest "outrage" to work up passions for political gain. One assumes that the few grown-ups left in the GOP leadership know what's going to happen if they let the hacks continue to fan the flames. Nearly one in five Americans now believe that that President Obama is a Muslim. For coming attractions of this fall's "Obama-as-alien" theme, check out this innuendo-filled piece by Byron York. See how this works: Obama - make that Barack Hussein Obama - is a secret Muslim and the Muslims, as Newt Gingrich has pointed out are "trying to make a case about supremacy" by building a mosque "right next to a place where 3,000 Americans were killed by radical Islamists."


Gingrich, mentioned as a possible 2012 presidential candidate, also had no problem reaching for the Nazi analogy to argue against the mosque:


"Nazis don't have the right to put up a sign next to the Holocaust Museum in Washington. We would never accept the Japanese putting up a sight next to Pearl Harbor. There's no reason for us to accept a mosque next to the World Trade Center."


Another out-of-office politician, former Pennsylvania Sen. Rick Santorum, who also is mentioned as a potential future presidential candidate, picked up on the same theme, casting this as part of a larger offensive on the part of political Islam to advance Shariah law.

"...what we have is an Imam who believes not only in the "religious" part of Islam, the faith and the relationship with Allah. What he is trying to accomplish is political Islam, so he has a political agenda which is Shariah. That's the most important thing for people to understand. That unlike Christianity which is a faith that is about the next world, the next kingdom, the relationship between you and your maker. And that while there certainly are moral components to Christianity that apply to living your life like the Golden Rule and the Ten Commandments, there is not a political code, there is not a governmental structure ... there is not the kind of detailed structure of how to run a worldly kingdom in Christianity that there is in Islam and that's what Shariah is, and that's what this man is advocating. So you have not just someone who's advocating a religious doctrine but he is also advancing a political doctrine under the guise and protection of religion, and that is problematic.

Santorum doesn't have the guts to spell it out too bluntly but his reading of Islamic jurisprudence points to the conclusion that Islam's fundamental charge is to force the submission of the Dar al Harb which exists here in the U.S. So if this religion-cum-ideology is fundamentally hostile to American pluralism, why indict this one imam - they're all part-and-parcel of the same conspiracy. Call it a Muslim version of the Protocols of the Elders of Zion.

 
In this sort of atmosphere, is it any wonder that political pygmies are tempted to play for short-term gain? The New York Republican gubernatorial candidate Rick Lazio is now out there hammering Feisal Abdul Rauf, the imam behind the mosque construction as a terrorist sympathizer. ( For the record, the New York Police Department last week told the Associated Press that it had "identified no law enforcement issues related to the proposed mosque"). As usual, the Democrats don't have a stomach for this fight. Harry Reid, facing a strong challenge for his Senate seat, this week broke with the president this week and said the mosque should get built elsewhere. At least he had the good grace not to paint them as the enemy.


Even if they apparently represent the other for so many "real" Americans.

It's America's War On "The Other."

It's Not About The Mosque!

By Will Bunch
August 18, 2010 11:15 pm ET
Courtesy Of "Media Matters For America"

A few months ago, I spent a Sunday morning in the parking lot of the Wal-Mart on Thomas Road in East Phoenix, just on the cusp of the immigration flare-up over racial profiling and Arizona's repressive law called SB 1070. It was quieter then -- a weathered 39-year-old Mexican in a wool cap with a New York Mets logo named Roberto Valdez who told me of his trek across the desert to seek work in Phoenix as a day laborer. Weeks earlier, Mexican day laborers like Valdez had been harassed on the weekends by angry white nativists, but in March of 2010 the nativists had moved on. Many had joined the Tea Party, and some were campaigning for GOP anti-immigration zealot J.D. Hayworth for U.S. Senate. Why waste time on "the Other" Roberto Valdez, when America now had "the Other" daring to occupy the Oval Office in the person of Barack Obama.

Five months later, the American political debate -- in a time of crushing 9.5-percent unemployment, record foreclosures and bankruptcies, and climate change linked to catastrophes from Moscow to Pakistan to Iowa -- has been hijacked over the arcane question of whether to allow an Islamic cultural center in lower Manhattan. The controversy is stunning -- but it should not be. The national brouhaha over the $100 million Muslim Park51/Cordoba House proposal is not an anomaly but rather the culmimation of an alarming downturn in America's mood, its discourse, and even our former ambitions as a beacon of religious and political tolerance. In 2010, a large swath of the American public -- led by ratings-mad media mavens and immoral politicians like Newt Gingrich and Sarah Palin -- had declared out all-out war on "the Other" in America in all its alleged forms, from immigrants to Muslims to non-white aides working in the West Wing of the White House and of course the president himself.

And it is threatening to rip America apart in a way that we have not seen in 145 years.

Over the last year, I traveled across the country seeking the sources of right-wing outrage and anger in the Obama era as I researched my new book -- The Backlash: Right-Wing Radicals, High-Def Hucksters and Paranoid Politics in the Age of Obama -- that will be published at the end of the month. What I discovered was fear -- some of it innate and much of it whipped up by high-def hucksters on TV and in talk radio and even in the corridors of political power in America. Much of that fear centered on one simple fact: That America is increasingly becoming a non-white-dominated country. While many Americans take no issue with that, the prospect of an America with an increasingly non-Caucasian face is a deeply disturbing one to millions of people -- people for whom a unified and traditional culture is a source of solidarity and comfort, even -- according to some sociologists -- a bulkhead of immortality.

In the mid-2000s, an anti-immigration frenzy took root across right-wing talk radio. It seemed largely a matter of entertainment and most likely changing the subject, since the George W. Bush presidency was at low ebb because of Iraq and Katrina. The increasingly paranoid conversation about the threat from brown-skinned, Spanish-speaking people grew in a way that was completely disconnected from realities, that immigrants were growing the economy in places like Arizona and Nevada, thatcrime rates among immigrants were quite low, and that these arrivals were paying more in taxes than they received in services.

But the bottom line was that for many, reports that whites will be a minority of Americans by the year 2050 carried the shill ring of an alarm bell. But this concern about the submersion of a dominant white culture in America spiked prematurely in 2008 with the political rise of Obama. In researching the book, I spoke with many conservative voters who talked of their "discomfort" the first time they watched Obama speak on television, who said that in particular they were alarmed at the future president's use of the specific word "transformation." These voters were egged on by political "leaders" like vice presidential candidate Palin, who didn't just voice traditional policies differences with the Democrat but accused him of "palling around with terrorists."

It is no surprise that by mid-2009 I was hearing from the leader of the anti-Obama group the Delaware 9-12 Patriots that the 44th president of the United States "is absolutely not American" while his neighbors were screaming at town hall meetings: "I don't want this flag to change. I want my country back!" These rank-and-file citizens were often echoing what they heard in a 24/7 right-wing media bubble of ratings-driven irresponsibility -- outlandish neo-McCarthyite allegations that Obama had Commies and Maoists working in the West Wing, Glenn Beck's notorious claim that the president has "a deep-seated hatred of white people" and, perhaps more tellingly, of "white culture," and most recently radio's Rush Limbaugh's bizarre charge that Obama is probably the "best anti-American president the country's ever had."

In this paranoid environment, the president looked as much "the Other" as the day laborer Roberto Valdez in the Wal-Mart parking lot. High-employment and the destruction of the working class in America is increasingly demanding a scapegoat, and the right-wing media and an increasingly erratic GOP establishment is more than happy to direct people's palapable anger down the economic ladder. The result is something like the most un-American piece of garbage legislation that most of us have seen in our lifetime -- Arizona's racial profiling law SB 1070, whose sponsors admit they were seeking to drive Mexican immigrants out of the Grand Canyon State in droves, which is exactly what is happening.

But the modern-day American Diaspora is only the beginning. Once the Pandora's box of emotion and rage against "the Other" has been opened so wide, it is almost impossible to close. Now the backers of Arizona's hideous law want to rip apart the 14th Amendment -- the one that ended slavery, once a high point of American history, especially for the extinct brand of Republican that drafted it -- in order to prevent children of Mexican immigrants from becoming American citizens. The xenophobia has reached the point where a U.S. congressman took to the House floor -- with zero supporting evidence -- to charge that terrorists had a scheme to breed future U.S.-citizen bombers in maternity wards here.

Which brings us to the present crisis: Mosques in America. It should tell you something that the backlash against Muslims practicing their faith in America is far greater in 2010 than it was in the months immediately following the Sept. 11, 2001 attacks. That's because the political firestorm with its epicenter in lower Manhattan really has nothing to do with 9/11 or its aftermath, and everything to do with "the Other" the awful forces and fears that have been unleashed in the last couple of years -- fears that craven politicians like Gingrich, Palin and the formerly rational Tim Pawlenty of Minnesota are eager to surf into the White House in 2013. If the Manhattan mosque controversy were really about our 9/11 sensibilities, how does one explain the opposition to other Islamic houses of worship from Tennessee to California to Staten Island?

America, we are in for the bumpy political ride of a lifetime. It will take enormous courage for defenders of two centuries of religious freedom and tolerance toward both religious and economic refugees to stand firm in the face of the kind of raw public anger and emotion that have caused backbone-impaired politicians like Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid or supposed progressive stalwart Howard Dean to wither in mere days. Our determined minority may be barely clinging to our cherished traditions -- as best expressed by President George Washington in 1790 when he wrote "the Government of the United States, which gives to bigotry no sanction, to persecution no assistance, requires only that they who live under its protection, should demean themselves as good citizens" -- in the face of this onslaught for the next few years.

Let's face it: This country has long had its Know-Nothings and its Birchers and its McCarthyites, but it never had gizmos like Fox News or Sarah Palin's Twitter feed to fuel toxic ideas so far so fast. It's time we admit these seemingly disconnected battles over "anchor babies, mosques, and a black man in the Oval Office are all part of the same war against "the Other," and that we are in the fight of a lifetime.  

Copyright © 2009 Media Matters for America. All rights reserved.