Wednesday, August 11, 2010

What will be remembered...

It's like America has no sense of history.  The irrational prejudice against Muslims today is no different than the irrational hatred of Japanese or Native Americans or Blacks or pick a minority.  What is sad is that this is going to be one of those things that we read about in History books (except maybe in Texas) and think, "wow, those people back then were really ignorant."  The Japanese internment camps, the Indian Removal Act, the enslavement of blacks, have we no memory?  Oh, but we have "reasons" to distrust Muslims.  So did those people back then, or so they thought.  Blacks & Native Americans needed civilization. The Japanese were our enemy.  Neither of these was true then, any more than the "reasons" given today.

But my words are insufficient to the cause I feel.

Hendrik Hertzberg did a great comment in the New Yorker titled Zero Grounds.  It's fun to make something out to be scary, damn the facts.  Fighting a straw man is so much easier than fighting real people.  For instance, the people who want to open a Muslim community center, terrorists? radicals? No:

Like many New Yorkers, the people in charge of Park51 (the Muslim community center), a married couple, are from somewhere else—he from Kuwait, she from Kashmir. Feisal Abdul Rauf is a Columbia grad. He has been the imam of a mosque in Tribeca for close to thirty years. He is the author of a book called “What’s Right with Islam Is What’s Right with America.” He is a vice-chair of the Interfaith Center of New York. “My colleagues and I are the anti-terrorists,” he wrote recently—in the Daily News, no less. He denounces terrorism in general and the 9/11 attacks in particular, often and at length. The F.B.I. tapped him to conduct “sensitivity training” for agents and cops. His wife, Daisy Khan, runs the American Society for Muslim Advancement, which she co-founded with him. It promotes “cultural and religious harmony through interfaith collaboration, youth and women’s empowerment, and arts and cultural exchange.”


Hertzberg lays out the case against fear and prejudice pretty well.  But for Humor and Facts, nobody does it better than Jon Stewart:


I couldn't have said it better.  No seriously, I couldn't.  If the facts are not on your side, then all you're left with is irrational prejudice.  Irrational prejudice and fear-mongering.  I don't need history to show me that "Wow, these people are really ignorant."

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