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the creating of a division between members of the (white, christian--presumably) national community and muslims (including those who are citizens of the same nation-state, who are in every real way as much a part of the "national community" as anyone else) is a central effect of neofascist discourse.
that folk adopt it does not mean that they are themselves of that political position--it is simply a recapitulation of an ideology that has been knit into "common sense"---this is one way in which discourse operates, and shows why controlling a discourse is the strongest type of cultural power--folk think through rather than about it, more often than not.
footage of protests gets knit into other image-based assumptions about islam. the basis for this knitting is dispositional. those dispositions are socially structured. therefore most discourse about islam in the states and western europe is not about empirical islam, but about its image double. and why critiques of it need to be directed at the image-double.
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a gramophone its corrugated trumpet silver handle
spinning dog. such faithfulness it hear
it make you sick.
-kamau brathwaite
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