If Standing Up For Muslims Is Wrong, I Don't Want To Be Right

Somebody is going to be killed.

This somebody, named Ahmed H. Sharif, was almost killed by a man who asked "are you a Muslim?"

The ugliest thing about this whole incident, the thing that makes me understand even more why Emmett Till's mother wanted the world to see how her son had been savaged, is how little attention it is getting from the press, as if we are characters in a Quentin Tarantino's Pulp Fiction, in that famous scene I have never liked, debating whether or not there is a "dead Muslim storage" sign on the lawn instead of the phrase "dead nigger storage" that was used in the movie.

Is the entire country just looking the other way?

I rummaged through the front pages and the op-ed pages of the New York Times, the Washington Post, The Chicago Sun-Times, The L.A. Times, and found nothing, nothing at all, not a damn word on Ahmed H. Sharif and this human travesty, just thousands of words speculating on the outcome of the fall elections, as if knowing their outcome two months early really matters.

My man over at Alias Bruce put it about as good as it could be said:

72% of Americans don't think it's appropriate to build an Islamic Center and mosque
two blocks from Ground Zero, a CBS poll shows.


This is horrifying, and it naturally leads to such questions as, "Should Americans be allowed to reproduce without international supervision?"


The stabbing of a Muslim cabbie, allegedly by a white man who asked the man's religion before attacking him, underlines the atrocity. And understand me: this is not just about addle-brained white Americans. As an African American, I have heard downright wicked remarks about Muslims out of the mouths of black people, including one of my own late relatives.


alias Bruce

Michael Enright

I don't know if the perpetrator's background didn't fit into the narrative the media needs to sell, because he wasn't wearing Tea Party underwear or wasn't a member of a white supremacy group, or because that tuft of blond hair reminded many of our fair haired political pundits and social commentators of their own drunken frat boy days. Whether he had liberal leanings or associations, is a member of the Green Party, or an avowed atheist, none of which would matter, even if they were true, this is still wrong.

Killing a man who is driving a fucking taxi cab for being a Muslim, as much as it reflects the perverted reality of America's long history of racial atrocities against minority groups, is not what America and Americans need to stoop to accepting, not after the long way we have come these last fifty years.

Mr. Enright, consider THIS a checkpoint - a checkpoint for the kind of backwards assed thinking that has got your ass in handcuffs right now.

As for the media, what will it take to get their heads out of their asses and write about shit that matters? Do two Muslims have to be attacked at the same time? Three? Four?

Should the next victim be a pregnant Muslim woman?

A Muslim who is an Iraqi war veteran, who came back home alive only to die at the hands of a fellow citizen?

Or maybe I haven't hit upon the narrative that your editors have posted on their wall, the one determines how much blood and gore a story about minorities has to have to equal a story on Lindsay Lohan's latest whereabouts.

All I can say is, if standing up for Muslims, especially Muslims who are here in America, is wrong, then I don't want to be right.

 

The Miseducation Of Maureen Dowd

Today's topic at my blog "Resurgence" on BigThink.com:


The Miseducation Of Maureen Dowd

Most white women in America work their asses off. I live smack dab in the middle of stay at home mommy land, complete with the high priced tennis outfits and Mercedes station wagons, but I know this is not reality for the vast majority of white women in America. Most of them work just as hard as their African American counterparts, and in many respects, deal with the exact same issues, concerns and problems.

What amazes me, whenever I read anything by Maureen Dowd, is how the stuff she ultimately gets printed at the New York Times, like last week’s Feliz Cumpleaños, and Adiós even passes editorial muster. It is as if she and her ilk are the new millennium’s equivalent of the 1940’s B-girls, paid to lure readers in off the streets or the web with shiny, showy prose that illuminates nothing so much as the lack of substance in their columns. Dowd has become nothing more than a classic guttersnipe, an op-ed columnist who writes pieces more suited to a Rupert Murdoch tabloid style paper than the New York Times. But the paper keeps paying her to churn out this kind of mindless drivel, as if she is their resident Elizabeth Hasselbeck, minus the perkiness and blonde hair.

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