Letters to the Editor
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Nancy Ott: Amen and Double-Ditto to every single word
What a bunch of spineless crybabies!
If we'd have acted this lame during WWII, the free world would have fallen to the Nazis. Certainly Islamic terrorists are dangerous and need to be taken seriously, but they don't present the same kind of existential threat to America's existence that Nazi Germany -- or, for that matter, the USSR (which had the capability to destroy all human life on the planet) -- did. (And while we're on the subject of totalitarian dictators, substitute the word "Jew" or "bourgeois enemy of the people" for "Muslim" in their diatribes and tell me who it sounds like.)
I'd say that the biggest existential threat we face is not posed by Islamists at all -- it's posed by the Bush Administration and its enablers like Kirchick, Coulter, and their fellow travelers, who are destroying our freedoms and society from within. The terrorists won't have to lift a finger to destroy America because our power-mad leaders, corrupt neocon fifth columnists, and their sissy wannabe torturer mouthpieces will have done it for them. Heck of a job!
-- Nancy Ott
Thursday, September 13, 2007 07:22 AM
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Christofascists and neoconfascists
are now agitating for a nuclear attack on Iran, an attack that would surely produced a horrendous number of dead Muslims, almost all civilians. While they can't wait for an attack that kill tens, if not hundreds of thousands of innocent Muslims, they keep whining about Islamofascism. One wonders if their hypocrisy is greater than their lunacy or if it's the other way around.
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Imprison murders; laugh at whiners...... a pie for a pie, a spoof for a spoof
They freely traffic on a daily basis in the most strident anti-Muslim commentary with no consequences of any kind, yet simultaneously insist, with operatic melodrama, that anyone who does so is subject to fatwas and must live in seclusion, fearing for their lives.
When this is pointed out, anti-Islam propagandists immediately bring up instances and incidents of bullying & violence that occurred in Western Europe or within Muslim-dominated states to "refute" your point. You will see letters that go on in this way in response to this post. However, the death threats against prominent critics of Islam, the violence-tarnished street protests over cartoons -- these contemptible episodes are not occurring in the U.S.. People who subject us to these drama queen rants should be called on it.
There is a grave threat to human rights posed by extremist Islam -- in the Mideast, in Pakistan, in the Sahel and the Maghreb. You know -- where people may be killed for speaking their minds, or uncovering their faces, or holding hands in public. Where their killers can get away with murder, and then! puff themselves up as great defenders of virtue and culture by playing off of their social status as "pure" men.
People stateside who pretend that their public displays of anti-Muslim bigotry protect us against a future under the thumb of violent Islamists are just mirror images of these Islamist bullyboys. They deserve........ the same kind and degree of public regard as their bearded Doppelganger* in Saudi Arabia. They're pure as New York snow -- and they deserve Bronx cheers.*can someone show me how to force Salon's letters page to accept the umlaut numeric entities? Or the named entities?
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Tiberius:
Riiiiiight,
the threat from islamic terrorists isn't as bad as it's being made out to be, absent 9/11 of course, but that's a small thing.
Do you fear that they'll be a fatwa issued against you for saying this?
Are you walking around with bodyguards today? Is that why you post under a psuedonym?
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Kirchick is a fool and a hypocrite
As always, another spot-on, excellent post Glenn.
What bothers me even more than these right-wingers' endless whining and rending of garments about how they're "persecuted" is how they conveniently ignore some of the appalling, grotesque crimes against humanity committed against fellow American citizens by members of their own religion on U.S. soil, starting with the Oklahoma City bombing in 1995. That atrocity differs from 9/11 only by a matter of scale, not gruesomeness; 19 of McVeigh's victims were children. Add to this any number of abortion clinic bombings, constant calls to murder federal judges, Ann Coulter's wish that McVeigh had bombed the New York Times building, John Bolton's desire to see the U.N. building leveled, and on and on. Obviously these people represent Christianity's lunatic fringe, not the religion as a whole, yet immature fools like Kirchick somehow see only Islam's extremist element as a "threat." The hypocrisy is repulsive.
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You've forgotten about Muslims unleashing the most potent WMD in America - the lawsuit.
And wouldn't it be ironic if hate-crimes statutes were invoked. You know, the ones that add penalties for wrongful thinking. From Wikipedia...
On August 1, 2007 the imams' attorney Frederick Goetz announced that in the in U.S. District Court a motion to amend the complaint to include the names of the individuals responsible for the imams' removal had been entered.[25] The list of names included employees of the airline and police officers, but not passengers.[25] Previously the suit named as defendants those who had reported the suspicious behavior (listing them as John Does) and then amended that to identify them as individuals who "may have made false reports" against the clerics with the intent to discriminate.[25] Goetz said "We've identified the people we think are responsible" and stated that amending the complaint had "absolutely nothing to do" with the bill in Congress.[26]
As if. Thanks Congress, you've provided another reason to be rated lower than even Bush.
We are fortunate in one respect though, the emigration of basic workers in Europe is Muslim, while here it's Latinos. Geography may save us once again. -
Quotations for understanding the afraid
SusanMc
Thank you for reminding me of some of my favorite quotes, very applicable to the armchair warriors:
The mind is its own place, and in itself can make a heaven a hell, a hell a heaven.
--John Milton. Paradise Lost
I could be bounded in a nutshell, and count myself a king of infinite space, were it not that I have bad dreams.
--William Shakespeare, Hamlet
To sum: Living in a nutshell inhabited by their bad dreams, making a heaven a hell.
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Secular Criticism of Islam Mutated Into Fearmongering
I find it fascinating that the hysterical fearmongering perpetuated by the right has co-opted a seed of the secular, liberal criticisms of Islam, and of fundamentalism in general. I can't count how many times I've read right-wing pundits mocking Muslim myths regarding the afterlife or criticizing the treatment of Muslim women. The right wing has been very clever about co-opting the rhetoric of religious skeptics, religious liberty advocates, and the human rights movement. They have used this language--and numerous valid criticisms--as a launching point for revolting religious bigotry, racism, fearful fantasies about Muslim conquest of the West, and even violent, eliminationist rhetoric. And, of course, for advocating unlawful and unfettered surveillance at home and endless war against Muslim nations abroad.
Look, I don't have a problem with calling a spade a spade. Osama bin Laden is a batshit religious lunatic whose medieval fever-dreams have driven him to pursue murder and extortion on a global scale. Fuck him, and fuck anyone who would die for him and his sociopathic fairy tales. However, the right wing is suffering from comparable fever-dreams when it makes the leap to a monolithic tide of keffiyeh-clad Brown People, roaming the Hollywood Hills in search of Kathy Griffin.