Friday, August 27, 2010
This makes no sense
Digby apparently thinks, all of a sudden, that the reason people started calling Obama a Muslim was so that other people would take their hatred of Obama and start applying it to all Muslims, who they had previously not had any problem with. Or something? I don't know, if anyone can make better sense of it, let me know.
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5 comments:
"I've never met a Muslim myself, but I used to watch Lost, and as I recall, everyone used to like the hot Arab guy on Lost, even in the tense days following 9/11. So what happened? Sure, we've had some torture over here, and a few concentration camps over there, and an ever-escalating series of racist wars against the Muslim world right there, but me, I blame it all on these dudes who're dressing up in powdered wigs and quoting Ayn Rand."
I think it's a twofer, Ethan.
1) Free rein for bigotry-based dismissal of Obama;
2) Bonus tactical plus = generates even more anti-Muslim, anti-Islam sentiment as a generic public attitude.
Note carefully that if "winning" against the Donkle were its only mission, the Elephant Brigade has plenty of ammunition to show that Obama is a liar, is not keeping campaign promises, is representing interests opposite those of people who historically (since WW2, let's say) called themselves Democrats.
But the problem of using Obama's real flaws and foibles as a partisan advantage is that the flaws and foibles reveal that the real mission of Team Obama and The National Donkle is to implement Bush/Cheney's 3d term -- an Elephant Brigade triumph without having to be pasted with hatred of Bush/Cheney!
The anti-Islam sentiment pull has many angles and aims. Consider at a basic level how Islam and Judeo-Christian faiths treat loans and interest imposition. One religion dislikes them; the other two jointly were built on financial arrangements being a core aspect of expanding the religion throughout the world. Read the parable about the "talents" in any current Bible, you'll see the message massaged to support "investment" (put your money to work for you) rather than a lesson about letting your individual abilities go to waste (the real point of the parable).
Plus there's that sticky issue of all that oil and natural gas residing in the ground of those countries and lands held by Islamic people. I mean, that oil should belong to Christians and Jews too! So the Christers and Yahwehians make their battle cries and screech them to their fellow religionists. "Save Israel! The birthplace of Christianity!"
And, as I said, the bigotry points start adding up too.
Keep 'em dumb, keep 'em distracted, keep 'em fighting among themselves!
Ethan, the WaPo article that Digby quotes minimizes intolerance towards Muslims because it taps into one strain of the Arab-American experience: Assimilation. Arab-Americans (and other Muslims) who can pass for WASP generally try to do so, because it's understood you should do this, and not wear your ethnicity on your sleeve.
In a sense there are two US Muslim communities; one that tries its best to "pass for white" as it were, to reduce the impact of anti-Arab and anti-Muslim prejudice, and another which is alienated by the US and has a harder time fitting in. (The former generally comes from a more well-heeled background, so there is also a class frisson operating here.)
But if the WaPo writers just went to the campuses of GWU and Georgetown and the like, they are less likely to see the second group.
Anyway, Digby is less likely to see the 2nd group herself, so that fits.
Lobster, ha!
Charles, that's a good summary of the strategy there.
Jonathan, yeah, it's funny to point at an article who shows people who aren't middle-class white Christians behaving just like middle-class white Christians and say, "see? These people are completely free to be themselves!"
The level on which her nonsense blew my mind, though, was the level where all of a sudden she thinks the Obama=Muslim thing is exactly the reverse of what she's always thought it was, because, what? She read some dumb WaPo article?
I don't know where that "though" came from. It wasn't supposed to be there.
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