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Fifth Column
Only Racists Hate Peace Loving Muslims
2006-06-20
If there is such a thing as definitive Moon-battery, the following Oxford spew gets the big Moon-Howler Award

Monthly Review
15/06/06

The Muslim Presence in the Racist Mind
by Arshin Adib-Moghaddam
"Arse" for short
In one of her last essays published in the United Kingdom, the late Susan Sontag compared the pictures of tortured Iraqi inmates at the Abu Ghraib prison in Iraq with the photographs "of black victims of lynching taken between the 1880s and 1930s, which show smalltown Americans, no doubt most of them church-going, respectable citizens, grinning, beneath the naked mutilated body of a black man or woman hanging behind them from a tree." Sontag was amongst the few voices who opposed the collective transmutation of the transitory mood of anger after 11 September into hatred channeled primarily towards the Islamic worlds. She sensed the dangers of mobilising collective passions for political ends and the dichotomisation of the world into good and evil. It was that period, one remembers, that produced Anne Coulter's demand that "[w]e should invade [Muslim] countries, kill their leaders and convert them to Christianity" and suggestion that, since "[t]here's nothing like horrendous physical pain to quell angry fanatics," "a couple of well-aimed nuclear weapons" can transform "Islamic fanatics" into "gentle little lambs." Coulter was not the only one infusing public discourse with tightly packaged hate messages: Fred Ikle, for instance, alluded to a nuclear war that "might end up displacing Mecca and Medina with two large radioactive craters"; John Cooksey suggested that any airline passenger wearing a "diaper on his head" should be "pulled over"; and Jerry Falwell asserted on 60 Minutes that "Muhammad was a terrorist" and that he was "a violent man, a man of war," a statement for which he later apologised. It was that period, in short, which made the Muslim Vogelfrei culturally and, to a certain extent, legally as well.
Re. "collective transmutation of the transitory mood of anger": gotta watch the "transmuter" denial.
One would have expected many analysts and critics to have understood that hostility to the Islamic worlds stems from the same source that had nourished anti-Semitic ideas; that racism is a grammar with interchangeable referents (Jews, African-Americans, Latinos, the Japanese after Pearl Harbor, the Vietnamese, Arabs, etc.) and interchangeable signifiers (kike, nigger, caffer, greaser, Jap, gook, hadji, etc.). Instead, alas, indiscriminate violence is normalised: in Kabul and Kunduz, Baghdad and Falluja, by organised armies; in Haditha and Abu Ghraib by sadistic individuals; and in New York, Bali, Madrid, and London by nihilistic terrorists. "War you wanted, war you want?" Fallaci writes. "Good. As far as I am concerned, war it is and war it will be. Until the last breath."
Yeah, buy a gun
As a result of this massive upsurge of anti-Islamic sentiments, Muslims are simply not judged as individuals anymore. Their very presence calls for management strategies -- Islam in itself has been turned into a police matter. In other words, the state and its apologists put Islam under permanent surveillance, and we are placed in a state of perpetual alert, because of its alleged potencies to disrupt our everyday life. This obsession with everything Islamic, in turn, has also created a perverse desire for it -- the desire to control it, to liberate it, and, finally, to conquer it as the ultimate imperial prize. Why is this simplistic notion of the Muslim presence amongst us, abstracting as it does from the intrinsic plurality of Islam, so pervasive? In a networked society such as ours, where the "other" can be downloaded with a mouse-click, what explains the re-emergence of latent racism? How can we not differentiate between such disparate objects of analysis as the very real threat of a transnational terrorist sect, the war in Iraq, the war in Afghanistan, and the Muslim next door? Why this tendency to subsume everything under one mnemonic?
Muslims are unicultist - I caught the jargon contagion - in Dar-Islam, and pluralist in Dar-Harb. Like I wrote: buy a gun.
Posted by:Shurt Angaimble9728

#11  "Only Racists Hate Peace Loving Muslims"

I can thank Rantburg for being able to quickly detect the context distortion in the above headline. Muslims are not a race, and playing the race card is one of their supreme "play-the-victim-to-get-special-dispensation" tricks in undermining a host culture. And so, thank you Rantburg!

Islam needs to go buy a huge dildo so it can f&ck itself properly.
Posted by: Zenster   2006-06-20 22:13  

#10  The Anne Coulter position makes a lot of sense.
Posted by: ?????   2006-06-20 16:24  

#9  What about people who hate the other kind of Muslims?
Posted by: gromgoru   2006-06-20 14:00  

#8  Moslems are not a race, they're members of a death cult.
Posted by: Kalle (kafir forever)   2006-06-20 13:34  

#7  "Only Racists Hate Peace Loving Muslims"

True, it's a pity Peace Lovin' Muslims seem to be extinct.
Posted by: Bright Pebbles   2006-06-20 12:49  

#6  Problem is how many muslims are peace-loving? I know a few of them, and they have something in common:

-They work instead of living from welfare
-They don't wear beards (wearing a beard means the guy is an islamist not a mere Muslim)
-They don't have the mark on the forefront from people who don't miss a prayer.
-Their wives are not veiled.

Now are we allowed to hate non peace loving Muslims or Muslims who would side with those nion peace loving Muslims or would not report the terrorist who is trying to kill us or our children?
Posted by: JFM   2006-06-20 12:32  

#5  No, rodents are far to high on the evolutionary chain, try cockroaches.
Posted by: bigjim-ky   2006-06-20 11:38  

#4  Muslims are simply not judged as individuals anymore.

Rodents maybe?
Posted by: Besoeker   2006-06-20 11:08  

#3  Oooooooooh! Susan Sontag as a supporting source!
See ya later, Arse...
Posted by: tu3031   2006-06-20 09:15  

#2  Yeah, think I'll do the slip-n-slide with your daughter, dude. You're the racist bitch. We just be sportin, y'know? Great fun. The more pious and full of wanky shit the Daddy be, they more fun be da daughter, y'know? It's like the Catholic Grrlz Gone Wild like Mega-Sized. bro She's sweet fun, thanks Daddy. you putz.
Posted by: Unainter Graviger8053   2006-06-20 08:57  

#1  Wotta load of shit.

Fuck off.
Posted by: Omogum Javiting9224   2006-06-20 08:46  

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