Quote:
|
People don't want to hear what its like to be a Muslim in America. We all struggle through life enough just being who we are. Come watch my show: "Being an Average Joe In America For A Day!" People want to hear Muslim politicians, Muslim clerics, Muslim countries, Muslim scholars, Muslim organizations speaking out against islamic terrorism. Which they aren't doing enough of if you ask me. Playing the victim card - while your people are blowing up other people all over the world - is not a helpful way to improve your image in my opinion.
|
powerclown:
this is exactly the type of response i expected the dominant politics on the question of "terror"---which in the hands of the bush squad really is the question of "islam"--so it is "us" (who?) versus "them."
if one were to take on the right's "terror" discourse on its own level, the greatest challenge to it is division--the fragmentation of terms--from this one could derive the hysterical responses to opposition to the war in iraq from the outset from the right--it threatened the unity of the "us"--now from powerclown you get the other term being defended as unitary--so according to him, presenting what is in fact something of the reality of the matter--the groups that carry out attacks in the name of islam are no more representative of islam as a whole than the christian identity whack-jobs are representative of christianity as a whole--presenting this obvious fact is to "play the victim card"....
the implications of your post are to a certain extent mitigated by your repetition of thomas friedman's editorial line from about a week ago in the ny times. in it, friedman disengenuously blames all of islam for "terrorism" because islamic organizations did not do more to isolate the groups responsible for it---in his view of course-- but if the correlate of a unified "us" is a unified "them" then what space would you imagine would be given to spokesmodels for various muslim political organizations on american television? zero. if you add to this the simple fact that the political terms within which the bushideology of "terror" operates requires that one concede its legitimacy in order to be able to speak from within it--and that like the many msulim folk that i know, those cited in the article above understand that bushideology as misguided from its inception--then why would you be surprised to find that not alot of spokesmodels have made it onto fox news?
given that the existing order within islam, in particular contexts, is the primary target for these groups that organize various "terrorist" actions, of course the dominant order has been reacting--they reacted earlier than the americans did--they have reacted all along. that you were not paying attention, powerclown, means only that you were not paying attention. that you would use a footnote to thomas friedman or his equivalent as a footnote to rationalise the fact that you were not paying attention changes nothing about the facts of the matter that you were not attending.
who are these "people" you talk about who "dont want to know about being muslim in america" because they are too caught up in their own problems?
"people" are entirely caught up in the minutae of their everyday lives--that might be true--but this distractedness does not stop folk from acting as though their experience offers then an adequate basis for a politics.
in a context of intense economic pressure and factoid-style information, of distractedness shaped by generalized paranoia in the form of the bushwar on "terror" it should not be surprising that many people derive purely racist conclusions from the outlines of this ideology.
this would seem like a general statement about the preconditions for the problem this show tries to address.
but you, pc, go from there to denounce one of the more effective ways to demonstrate how and why these conclusions are in fact racist--simply by showing that not all muslims are "terrorists"...this is incomprehensible.
what it seems to me that you are doing, powerclown, is defending the prerogative shaped by the war on "terror" to be racist, and unapologetically so. you seem to be arguing this by criticizing the production of dissonant information---even if all this information really does is show something of the diversity of the muslim community in the united states.
is this really the position you are trying to defend?
it seems different from previous exchanges on this kind of topic....
maybe you could explain it differently--it would be a pleasure to see this post be mistaken.