Currently viewing the tag: “Been”
Yup, she said it.
Sarah Palin was in New Delhi, India March 19 for the annual India Today conclave, where she gave a speech on “My Vision for America.” The theme for this years conclave was “The Changing Balance of Power.” After her speech, Palin sat down for a Q and A session with India Today Editor-in-Chief and Session Chairman Aroon Purie, during which she blamed McCain for losing 2008, among other mildly amusing indications that she is running for President in 2012. When asked why she lost 2008, Palin snapped, “I wasn’t the top of the ticket!” Palin’s speech, by the way, was nothing new: Palin bashed green energy, called for more oil drilling, and made sure to blame Obama again for high gas prices (I suspect they know about the global market in India and might not be as prone to buying this jingle as Americans are). I have no idea how they translated her word salad; I couldn’t follow it in English.
(Via – Pam’s House Blend)
Subscribe to Joe.My.God.![]()
So much for loyalty and Sarah Palin:
Republicans would have been more successful in the 2008 presidential elections if she was at the top of the ticket, former Alaska Gov. Sarah Palin suggested Saturday.
Speaking at the India Today Conclave in New Delhi, Palin was asked why the GOP ticket did not defeat then-Sen. Barack Obama (D). Palin said that Obama ran a strong campaign and effectively billed himself as a change candidate.
Pressed by India Today editor Aroon Purie that she also represented change, Palin replied, “I wasn’t at the top of the ticket, remember?”
The 2008 vice presidential nominee said she was not claiming she should have been the nominee over Sen. John McCain (R-Ariz.), but her comments provide a glimpse of her potential appeal to voters should she choose to run for the nomination in 2012.
This is unlikely to win her any friends among the growing number of GOP conservative establisment types who oppose her.
Some tough words from Mayor Giuliani.
From decisions on the economy to energy, and to the current crisis in Egypt, as well as many foreign affairs’ decisions, this president was a failure in almost everything he has done says the former NYC Mayor.
Giuliani also had some good things to say when it comes to energy independence and the Tea Party.
“Annual growth in atmospheric CO2. Data from Mauna Loa.”
Finally, the anti-science crowd at WattsUpWithThat and I finally agree on something: “The rate of atmospheric CO2 growth has been increasing,” as WUWT writes in a post Thursday accompanying the above graph. But in a bizarre, error-riddled, and callous piece even by WUWT standards, they insist that this is a good thing.
Indeed, these two sentences by Willis Eschenbach that Anthony “shout them down” Watts posted may be the single most uninformed assertion ever made on WattsUpWithThat [put on your head vises]:
The claim is often made that the poor will be the hardest hit by warming. As someone who has never been poor, but often broke, I can assure you that’s nonsense.
Claim? Nonsense?
I realize that Watts and Eschenbach reject the 99.9% of the scientific literature that disproves pretty much everything they post on a daily basis. But I think you’d be hard pressed to find even “mainstream” deniers who’d agree with that assertion.
Obviously the poor have the fewest resources with which to adapt to the multiple catastrophes from unrestricted CO2 emissions — catastrophes that Watts and Eschenbach are cheering on in this ill-informed post. The poor often live in the places that are most vulnerable to warming. Bangladesh, anyone? (See JPL bombshell: Polar ice sheet mass loss is speeding up, on pace for 1 foot sea level rise by 2050).
And the poor lead the most marginal, undernourished existence that is vulnerable to probably the biggest threat of climate change for most of humanity — food insecurity (see Half of world’s population could face climate-driven food crisis and S. Korean President: “There is an increasing likelihood of a food crisis globally due to climate change”).
But it’s not enough for the extremists of WUWT to deny climate science, now they have to deny the suffering of its largest group of victims.
Memo to Eschenbach and Watts: Being occasionally “broke” in a rich country ain’t nothing like being poor in a poor one.
Why would Watts publish a piece agreeing with a central scientific point I’ve been making only to make such an absurd argument?
By way of brief background, I just ran a post on a new draft analysis not written by climate scientists, “Evidence for super-exponentially accelerating atmospheric carbon dioxide growth.” At first WUWT tried to ignore the central point of the analysis and focus on some sloppy wording about population trends and an error in a footnote, none of which were germane to the CO2 conclusion.
But I spoke to a co-author who explained to me it was a first draft and was happy to make some fixes, so I updated my post (courtesy of the “anti-science crowd,” as I noted — that was WUWT). And there was a sort of positive outcome in that WUWT finally felt obliged to examine and concede the whole point of the post and the original analysis.
To understand their basic thesis, we have to get past their terminology. What does “super-exponentially accelerating” mean?
Well, it means that the growth rate is increasing. Why didn’t they say that? Hey, they’re climate scientists. Their motto seems to be “don’t educate, obfuscate”.
Uhh, no, the authors aren’t climate scientists. That was clear from my post, had WUWT read it, or the masthead of the study itself, had WUWT bothered to look, “A.D. Husler and D. Sornette
Department of Management, Technology and Economics.”
So finally, WUWT posted the top figure above and admitted, “yes, the rate of atmospheric CO2 growth has been increasing.” Now here is where WUWT makes its biggest blunder (emphasis in the original):
Both Joe Romm and the authors of the paper seem to think that this is a Very Bad Thing™. Let’s stop a moment and consider what the numbers really mean. We know what the population numbers mean. But what does a “super-exponential acceleration” in CO2 growth mean in the real world?
Consider that at some point not long after 2050 the world population will stabilize. The population of a number of countries has already stabilized (or is dropping). Suppose (as seems quite possible) that atmospheric CO2 rates continue to rise after the population has stabilized. What would that mean, rising atmospheric CO2 growth rates at a time of stable population? What would be happening in the real world to cause that?
Simply put, it would mean that the growth rate of energy use per capita was increasing. Whoa, can’t have that, speeding up the rate at which people get more energy.
Ahh, how the master anti-science rhetoricians like to immediately equate CO2 with energy.
Actually this WUWT post contains two major blunders. First, of course, CO2 isn’t energy.
Second, the CO2 growth rate can rise faster even if the growth rate of CO2 per capita was not increasing. How? The CO2 sinks could saturate, of course, land and/or ocean — potentially even turning into sources. And, relatedly the carbon-cycle amplifying feedbacks could accelerate.
Of course, it’s not like there’s any evidence that could be happening now or anytime soon — assuming you don’t believe in science that is:
- NSIDC bombshell: Thawing permafrost feedback will turn Arctic from carbon sink to source in the 2020s, releasing 100 billion tons of carbon by 2100
- Science: Second ‘100-year’ Amazon drought in 5 years caused huge CO2 emissions. If this pattern continues, the forest would become a warming source.
- Science: Drought drives decade-long decline in plant growth
- Nature review of 20 years of field studies finds soils emitting more CO2 as planet warms
- Science: Global warming is killing U.S. trees, a dangerous carbon-cycle feedback
- Nature: “Global warming blamed for 40% decline in the ocean’s phytoplankton”: “Microscopic life crucial to the marine food chain is dying out. The consequences could be catastrophic.”
And of course we have these:
- The drying of the Northern peatlands (bogs, moors, and mires).
- The destruction of the tropical wetlands
- Decelerating growth in tropical forest trees — thanks to accelerating carbon dioxide
- Wildfires
- Nature on stunning new climate feedback: Beetle tree kill releases more carbon than fires
- The desertification-global warming feedback
And let’s not even worry about this at all:
- Science: Vast East Siberian Arctic Shelf methane stores destabilizing and venting: NSF issues world a wake-up call: “Release of even a fraction of the methane stored in the shelf could trigger abrupt climate warming.”
So it is entirely possible that the CO2 growth rate in the coming decades will rise faster than the growth rate of energy or CO2 per capita.
And so WUWT’s false choice is debunked: “Joe Romm and the authors of the paper think that’s a bad thing. They think the unknown distant future dangers of CO2 outweigh today’s desperate need for energy for the poor people of the planet … which means most of the people of the planet.” Not.
Sadly, the dangers of CO2 aren’t unknown nor are they distant. And every major independent study — including the once-staid and conservative International Energy Agency shows that one can stabilize atmospheric concentrations of carbon dioxide while the poor countries develop (see “Introduction to climate economics: Why even strong climate action has such a low total cost” and Must read IEA report: Act now with clean energy or face 6°C warming. Cost is NOT high).
For Watts and Eschenbach, the only thing the poor need is energy, no matter how much pollution is generated, because for them, like so many anti-science, pro-pollution advocates in rich countries, pollution has no cost. It does not harm and might even be good for the poor.
The poor, however, need much more than energy — they need food, and potable water, an ocean without ever widening dead zones, and land that isn’t flooded or parched, in short, a livable climate.
By rejecting that truth, the extremist deniers would seek to destroy even the basic consensus that if we keep doing little or no mitigation at least we must provide adaptation support for the poor (since presumably that money to would come at the expense of delivering more CO2-spewing energy).
WattsUpWithThat wants to condemn countless future generations to needless impoverishment. Well, they’ve made a small first step into reality by conceding that “The rate of atmospheric CO2 growth has been increasing.” Someday they’ll acknowledge that humans are warming the planet, that failing to act risks multiple catastrophic impacts, and “the poor will be the hardest hit by warming.”
Of course it will probably be too late to help hundreds of millions of the poorest, most vulnerable people by then. But hey, WUWT can sympathize, since they’ve been broke a few time.
In an emotional exchange at a congressional hearing with Congressman Walter Jones (R-NC), General David Petraeus was challenged to “be honest” about when US troops will come home from Afghanistan. ”You know, 15, 16, 17 years, for God sakes, how much more can we take, how much more can we give treasure and blood?” asked Jones.
Petraeus replied, ”I may not be at this table, probably won’t be, in 2015, but I’ll tell you that my son is in uniform, and Lieutenant Petraeus just completed a tour in Afghanistan.” He noted that they were able to keep his service “very quiet” so his son would not receive special treatment….or be targeted by the enemy.
Lt. Stephen Petraeus on a mission in Wardak Province, Afghanistan
Second Lt. Stephen Petraeus served in Afghanistan as a member of Alpha Company, 3rd Platoon, 1st Battalion, 503rd Infantry, 173rd Airborne Brigade Combat Team. God bless him and thanks for his service.
Perhaps this will silence critics who continue to attack Petraeus personally. Disagree with his policy? That’s fine. But don’t question the man’s commitment or character. He knows the stakes.
Well, that’s the conclusion one reaches upon reading the following in the St. Petersburg Times: ‘Sagging pants’ bill passes House committee.
Well, that’s the conclusion one reaches upon reading the following in the St. Petersburg Times: ‘Sagging pants’ bill passes House committee.
In this post, I want to unpack a bit more the claims of Timothy Shah made in a Christianity Today op-ed posted yesterday. Overall, I think it was a mistake for Christianity Today to publish an article making so many factual claims without sourcing or evidence. I have been following this story since March, 2009 and do not recognize the narrative advanced by Shah.
In this post, I want to address this paragraph:
But the legislation has received widespread attention not primarily because of its draconian provisions, whose very harshness has repelled virtually all of Uganda’s major political and religious leaders—including the President, the Catholic Bishops Conference, and a parliamentary committee that recommended the bill be thrown out as unconstitutional, effectively stopping it in its tracks. Instead, a major reason for the attention focused on the bill is that many believe it is the fruit of American evangelical homophobia.
Shah claims the bill was “stopped in its tracks” due to opposition from “virtually all of Uganda’s major political and religious leaders.” There are two fact problems here. One, the bill was not stopped and two, bill was not opposed by all of Uganda’s political and religious leaders.
As I have documented, the bill is still alive and may be considered before the end of this Parliamentary session in May. While the committee chair, Stephen Tashobya has expressed some uncertainty about the fate of the bill, he has refused to say that the bill is dead.
Shah says “virtually all” religious and political leaders were repelled by the bill. This is about as uninformed as statement as an observer could make. Going back to April 29, 2009, David Bahati asked the Ugandan Parliament for permission to introduce his private member’s bill. According to the minutes of Parliament, his request was approved without substantial concerns.
At the time, in the gallery were several religious and political leaders:
THE DEPUTY SPEAKER: I am aware of the matter and it is very important. I am going to give you time. There is a matter he wants to raise concerning the community and I am going to give him time. Let us have that motion quickly, get rid of it and get back to the statement. Afterwards we can stay here till midnight and talk about East Africa and all the other things. I am appealing to you.
Let us hear from hon. Bahati. In connection with the motion he is moving, we have in the gallery Apostle Julius Peter Oyet, Vice-President of the Born Again Federation; Pastor Dr Martin Sempa of the Family Policy Centre; Stephen Langa, Family Life Network; hon. Godfrey Nyakaana; the Mayor of Kampala City Council; Julius, a young boy who was sodomised, and his mother. His story has been in the press. They are all here in the gallery. Please, let us deal with them so that they can leave. There is also George Oundo who came out to speak against homosexuality. Please, let us balance the public good and our good since all of them are important. We shall do them all very quickly. Hon. Bahati.
6.24
MR DAVID BAHATI (NRM, Ndorwa County West, Kabale): Thank you, Madam Speaker, for the opportunity to move a motion seeking leave of Parliament to introduce a Private Members Bill moved under Rule 47, 105 and 106. Some of the few copies available are going to be circulated in a minute. I beg the indulgence of Members that I move on.
The only way Mr. Shah can be correct is to dismiss Martin Ssempa, Julius Oyet, and Stephen Langa as religious leaders. How about the mayor of Kampala’s city council? Reading the minutes, it is abundantly clear that no MP offers more than procedural concerns. The Parliament had copies of the bill and gave Bahati permission to introduce it.
When Bahati did finally table his bill on October, religious leaders came out in support. For instance, Martin Ssempa told me that the bill had his ”total support” and that he hoped it would pass. The day after I posted Ssempa’s views, Minister of Ethics and Integrity, Nsaba Buturo publicly expressed support for the bill in an article on the official government media website with the headline, “Government Vows to Fight Homosexuality.”
In late October, 2009, Parliament’s Presidential Affiars committee held hearings on the bill and included religious leaders. Those leaders objected to the death penalty but did not call for the removal of the bill or a reduction in the sentence of life in prison:
Homosexuals should not be killed but instead imprisoned for life, religious leaders have suggested.
Making their input in the Anti-homosexuality Bill 2009 yesterday, the clergy said the clause on death as a penalty for homosexuality be scrapped.
“If you kill the people, to whom will the message go? We need to have imprisonment for life if the person is still alive,” said Rev. Canon Aaron Mwesigye, the provincial secretary of the Church of Uganda.
These religious leaders did not like the death penalty but were not repelled by the rest of the bill. Then in December, a coalition of religious leaders (including the Roman Catholic church) led by Martin Ssempa expressed strong support for the bill.
The first recorded opposition to the bill by President Museveni was on December 18, 2009 in a AFP report. According to that article, Museveni assured the US of his opposition.
The top US diplomat for African affairs said the bill, if passed, would not only violate human rights, it would also “undermine the fight” against HIV and AIDS by stigmatizing homosexual acts.
He added that it is premature for US government to consider withdrawing aid from Uganda because Museveni himself said he does not support the legislation and the battle is not yet lost.
However, Museveni did not address the bill directly until January, 2010 when he spoke to his party conference about the bill. Museveni did not express direct opposition but advise a dialogue, saying
So therefore, I strongly advise you that you agree to the idea that the cabinet sit down with Bahati, a subcommittee, and see how best to handle this issue because…because… it is a foreign policy issue. It’s not just our internal politics. It is a foreign policy issue, and we must handle it in a way which does not compromise our principles, but also takes into account our foreign policy interests.
This statement is not opposition but rather direction to his party about how he wanted to handle deliberation on the bill.
Then, on March 15, 2010, a small cabinet committee headed by Minister of Local Government, Adolf Mwesige issued a report critical of the AHB, saying it was redundant and that it might have been introduced illegally. However, the committee recommended keeping some of the good portions of the bill, namely the provisions on penalizing promotion of homosexuality.
I have just scratched the surface of this topic. There is so much evidence of the support for the bill from many religious and political leaders over the life of this bill that it is stunning that anyone could seriously claim otherwise. Shah paints a picture that is just untrue. Reading this article, one would come to the conclusion that the AHB was stopped by Ugandan opposition. One might think that Bahati’s bill was widely criticized by religious and political leaders. Although some concerns have been raised, opposition to the death penalty is not the same as being repelled by the bill. The burden is on Mr. Shah to provide evidence for this narrative. I do not believe he can.
As far as I can tell, Shah’s conspiracy theory relies on demonstrating that Ugandans killed the bill. He needs to show this so that he can blame the uproar on something other than the real need to oppose an unjust proposal. Instead of finding some evangelicals involved in supporting what turned out to be a draconian bill, the whole reason Uganda is in focus is because the left loves to bash evangelicals. If only.
Another fact Shah has to ignore to make his case is the existence of a strong reaction from evangelicals around the world to the Ugandan proposal. Opposition to the AHB has not come solely from the left. Readers of this blog will surely attest to that. Shah’s article is not simply misleading, it ostracizes and marginalizes the persistent and growing evangelical opposition to the AHB and criminalization of homosexuality which has grown over the last 2 years. I will return to this point in my next post.
As strife continued in Libya, and Japan dug out from an epic earthquake and tsunamis leaving one of our largest trading partners in the midst of a nuclear crisis, Barack Obama went golfing this past Saturday.
Obviously clueless about the President's numerous golf outings and vacations since Inauguration Day, comedienne Wanda Sykes actually asked Jay Leno on Tuesday's "Tonight Show," "Has Obama had one relaxing day since he's been in office?" (video follows with transcript and commentary):
WANDA SYKES: I just want to know, has the President, has Obama had one relaxing day since he's been in office? Has he had, I mean, just look. Soon as he got in office, just one thing after the other, just, you know, the banks, the housing. Now he's got Boehner coming in his office crying every day. [ Crying ]
[ Laughter ]
SYKES: You know, it's just everything. And just like has he had one day where he could just put his feet up and go, "It's good to be me," just – no! Not one day. And I just hope Michelle is growing some weed in that herb garden.
JAY LENO, HOST: Really?
I guess this brainiac missed what was all the buzz this weekend when our illustrious President decided to go golfing in the middle of a nuclear and humanitarian crisis in Japan.
As ABC's Tahman Bradley reported Saturday:
For the second week in a row, the most powerful man in the world stepped away from the White House to hit the golf course.
Even as his administration and the U.S. military help Japan recover from a devastating earthquake, and as the world worries about Fukushima's nuclear reactor, the president could not resist taking advantage of the 48-degree weather in the Washington, D.C., area. […]
Last fall, Obama went golfing darn near every weekend.
You hear that, Wanda?
"Last fall, Obama went golfing darn near every weekend."
And the first family has had its share of vacations, too. As CBS's Political Hotsheet reported last August:
This is Mr. Obama's 9th vacation since taking office. As of today, he has spent all or part of 38 days on "vacation" away from the White House. He has also made 14 visits to Camp David spanning all or part of 32 days. It brings his total time away to all or part of 70 days.
70 days.
As that was written on August 19, that means in his first year and a half in office, the President had 70 days to "just put his feet up and go, 'It's good to be me.'"
Somehow Sykes missed them all as well as the ones that have come since – including just three days ago!
Color me very unsurprised.
As strife continued in Libya, and Japan dug out from an epic earthquake and tsunamis leaving one of our largest trading partners in the midst of a nuclear crisis, Barack Obama went golfing this past Saturday.
Obviously clueless about the President's numerous golf outings and vacations since Inauguration Day, comedienne Wanda Sykes actually asked Jay Leno on Tuesday's "Tonight Show," "Has Obama had one relaxing day since he's been in office?" (video follows with transcript and commentary):
WANDA SYKES: I just want to know, has the President, has Obama had one relaxing day since he's been in office? Has he had, I mean, just look. Soon as he got in office, just one thing after the other, just, you know, the banks, the housing. Now he's got Boehner coming in his office crying every day. [ Crying ]
[ Laughter ]
SYKES: You know, it's just everything. And just like has he had one day where he could just put his feet up and go, "It's good to be me," just – no! Not one day. And I just hope Michelle is growing some weed in that herb garden.
JAY LENO, HOST: Really?
I guess this brainiac missed what was all the buzz this weekend when our illustrious President decided to go golfing in the middle of a nuclear and humanitarian crisis in Japan.
As ABC's Tahman Bradley reported Saturday:
For the second week in a row, the most powerful man in the world stepped away from the White House to hit the golf course.
Even as his administration and the U.S. military help Japan recover from a devastating earthquake, and as the world worries about Fukushima's nuclear reactor, the president could not resist taking advantage of the 48-degree weather in the Washington, D.C., area. […]
Last fall, Obama went golfing darn near every weekend.
You hear that, Wanda?
"Last fall, Obama went golfing darn near every weekend."
And the first family has had its share of vacations, too. As CBS's Political Hotsheet reported last August:
This is Mr. Obama's 9th vacation since taking office. As of today, he has spent all or part of 38 days on "vacation" away from the White House. He has also made 14 visits to Camp David spanning all or part of 32 days. It brings his total time away to all or part of 70 days.
70 days.
As that was written on August 19, that means in his first year and a half in office, the President had 70 days to "just put his feet up and go, 'It's good to be me.'"
Somehow Sykes missed them all as well as the ones that have come since – including just three days ago!
Color me very unsurprised.
The great trick of the last few years has been convincing private and public-sector workers that their interests somehow diverge from one another. Public workers look at the rising pay in the private sector and ask why they can’t have that. Private workers look at the benefits in the public sector and fume about the underfunded 401(k)s they’ve been left with. But as Larry Mishel and Heidi Shierholz write, the truth is both more upsetting and less divisive. “Neither private-sector workers nor state and local government employees have seen their pay rise much over the last two decades, and what meager pay growth they have experienced has been far outpaced by growth in productivity — the increased goods and services that they themselves have generated.”
The numbers are pretty stark. Between 1978 and 2009, the hourly wage for the median worker grew by only 10.1 percent — and most all of that came between 1996 and 2002. Meanwhile, productivity grew by 80 percent. More growth hasn’t translated into better wages, and that’s been true for both private and public-sector workers, and both skilled and unskilled workers (as you can see in the graph above).
There are a number of reasons for this. A lot of the money that would’ve gone into wages went into health-care costs — but our health didn’t improve by very much. The rich began demanding bigger salaries and lower taxes and managed to get both. Unions have weakened. Profits in the economy tilted away from sectors that shared gains widely, like manufacturing, and towards sectors, like finance, that concentrated them narrowly. Some think central bankers have been so obsessed with inflation that they’ve hewed to overly tight policies for most of the last 30 years.
But whatever your explanation, or bunch of them, it’s been happening to workers in both the public and the private sectors. The effort to raise one or another up as a privileged class is smart politics on the part of those who want elections dominated purely by corporations, but it doesn’t point toward any answers for either group. Quite the opposite, in fact. The Walker agenda — which plenty of other governors would like to emulate — is to take both benefits and power away from public-sector employees, and then use the political space opened up by weakening unions to tilt policy toward corporate interests and away from poorer constituencies. That’s a world in which both private and public-sector workers end up worse off.
What could go wrong? Plus: Radiation leaked directly into the air.E
Twenty-four hours ago I asked, “How sure are we that the containment vessels at Fukushima can contain a full meltdown?” Twenty-four hours later, the answer appears to be: Not very. In 1972, Stephen H. Hanauer, then a safety official with the Atomic Energy Commission, recommended in a memo that the sort of “pressure-suppression” system used […]
Has Atlantis Been Found?
What’s Going On At Uproxx
Tony Woodlief remembers the birthday of a daughter who died 12 years ago, at the age of three:
I suppose we all of us have shadowed places in our lives, places where reside only the ill-formed shapes of what might have been, never clear and untouchable and framed only by their absence of light. But we have what has yielded those shadows as well, or at least the memories of them. I can’t know how her voice would sound today, but I can recall her singing ABCs; I can’t know what it’s like for her head to reach my shoulder, but I can remember carrying her on my shoulders.
In every life there are the things we have and the shadows that haunt us, and which we call could have been. Maybe part of enduring is looking where the light is, rather than where it is not.
Fakhruddin Ahmed starts out well in this op-ed, explaining the genesis of “Islamophobia” with a greater degree of honesty than most Muslim spokesmen in the U.S. have ever displayed. But he soon enough resorts to the familiar Islamic supremacist tactic of evading responsibility, pointing fingers at non-Muslims who dare to point out how Islamic jihadists use the texts and teachings of Islam to justify violence and supremacism and to make recruits among peaceful Muslims. By the end of the piece he has run off the rails entirely, flinging wild charges of racism and bigotry, and blaming Pamela Geller and me for the fact that non-Muslims in America are looking at Islam and Muslims with open eyes, instead of buying into the full-blown campaign of deception, disinformation, and soothing lies that the mainstream media continues to pursue. He never connects up the first half of his piece with the second — in other words, he never explains why Islamic jihad terrorism and Islamic supremacism are real, and yet any resistance to them constitutes racism and hatred.
Yeah, sure, Fakhruddin — as if Pamela Geller and I inspired Khalid Aldawsari, the would-be jihad mass murderer in Lubbock, Texas, or Muhammad Hussain, the would-be jihad bomber in Baltimore, or Mohamed Mohamud, the would-be jihad bomber in Portland, or Nidal Hasan, the Fort Hood jihad mass-murderer, or Faisal Shahzad, the would-be Times Square jihad mass-murderer, or Abdulhakim Mujahid Muhammad, the Arkansas military recruiting station jihad murderer, or Umar Farouk Abdulmutallab, the would-be Christmas airplane jihad bomber, or Muhammad Atta, Anjem Chaudary, Omar Bakri, Abu Hamza, Abu Bakar Bashir, Zawahiri, Zarqawi, bin Laden and all the rest.
The Times of Trenton should be ashamed to print such a farrago, but it isn’t really anything special — just another mainstream media outlet printing a deceptive, disingenuous piece claiming victim status for Muslims in order to deflect attention away from jihad terror and Islamic supremacism.
“Examining a painful history fraught with transgressions,” by Fakhruddin Ahmed in the Times of Trenton, March 12 (thanks to James):
There are cogent reasons why roughly half of Americans, according to polls, harbor an unfavorable opinion of Islam. Besides perpetrating the most horrendous crime on American soil on 9/11, Muslims have been responsible for some pretty ugly incidents lately.
The Ayatollah Khomeini challenged one of the West’s core values, freedom of speech, by issuing a “fatwa,” or religious decree, in 1989, for the murder of Salman Rushdie over his controversial book, “The Satanic Verses.”
The attacks of Sept. 11, 2001, were quickly followed by Muslim terror attacks in Bali, Indonesia (2002), Madrid (2004), London (2005) and Mumbai (2008). And when some Muslims went berserk, burning and boycotting in reaction to the Danish cartoons of the Prophet Muhammad in 2006, the rest of the world held its collective breath in consternation.
Muslim terrorists’ attempts to blow up planes, airports, tunnels and subways in America were thwarted. And if Qur’ans had actually been burned by Pastor Terry Jones in Florida last fall, as he threatened to do, some Muslims would have reacted by creating mayhem. Clearly, there is a less-enlightened, fanatically violent underbelly at work in the name of Islam. Understandably, the Judeo-Christian polemic against Islam centers on terrorism.
Submerged in an all-encompassing anti-Muslim hysteria, when non-Muslim Americans see signs of increasing Muslim presence around them, they feel besieged by an intimidating culture. That America’s complexion is transforming from shades of white to brown is difficult for many Americans to stomach; when some of those brown faces belong to Muslims, the transformation becomes downright frightening.
With no prominent Muslim-American voice to assuage those apprehensions, fear begets fear, spawning more virulent anti-Muslim vitriol.
Are Muslims, their religion and their culture a mortal threat to America? Is this the vaunted “Clash of Civilizations” between the West and Islam, as Harvard’s Samuel Huntington had predicted in 1993?
Civilizational narratives are rarely one-dimensional. Western democracies, especially Britain and France, exploited and repressed most Muslim nations as colonial powers over the centuries, souring Muslim taste for democracy. Conceivably, America’s more recent interventions in the Islamic world are fueling Americaphobia. The invasions of Iraq and Afghanistan, with the concomitant collateral death of thousands of civilians, have exacerbated Muslim-American relations, as have the al Qaeda-seeking drone attacks inside Pakistan that inadvertently kill civilians and whose legality stands on shaky grounds.
We may consider ourselves to be the “good guys” eliminating the “bad guys” before they attack us; but to the child of the civilian we kill in Afghanistan, we are the bad guys. He or she may vow to exact vengeance.
Quid pro quo is in vogue in international relations. America garnered the Muslim world’s gratitude when it rushed to bolster the Afghans after the Soviet invasion of 1979 (which led to Muslim participation in Gulf War I in 1991), and liberated the Bosnians (1995) and the Kosovars (1999) from the Serbs. Muslims were not thrilled, however, when America attacked Afghanistan in 2001 (and has occupied it since); the neoconservatives fabricated WMD “evidence” to facilitate President George W. Bush’s attack of Iraq in 2003; and America started waging an undeclared war inside Pakistan.
Excluded from the debate about them inside America, and reduced to passive observers, Muslim-Americans are chagrined at the spectacle unfolding right before their eyes. Right-wing Republicans see no downside to demonizing the Muslims. It energizes their base, carries no political penalty, and forces the Democrats to defend a progressively unpopular minority.
Democratic defense of Muslim-Americans has not been stellar either, perhaps because they, too, secretly covet the bigot vote. Deprecators realize that Muslim-Americans, who number only 7 million, cannot retaliate electorally, making Muslim-baiting a win-win proposition.
Sarah Palin tweeted last July, imploring “peaceful Muslims” to “refudiate” the proposed New York City mosque near Ground Zero. Other Republicans and some Democrats jumped on the bandwagon, attaching intellectual heft to an originally ignorant far-right-fringe viewpoint.
A “moderate” Muslim is being redefined as one who condemns on demand. Detractors are not interested in Muslim points of view; they want Muslim condemnation of Islam. For them, Islam-bashing is the new normal, the new acceptable form of racism. If any other ethnic or religious group was so maliciously mauled, the attackers would be branded incurable racists.
What astonishes Muslim-Americans is that those hurling imprecations at them on television, on the radio and in the blogosphere do not seem to care that Muslim-Americans are watching and listening. It’s as though Muslim-Americans are apparitions that do not really exist or have feelings. Muslims feel like screaming: “Hey, I am in the room. Stop backbiting!”
The virus incubated by right-wing bloggers Pam Geller and Robert Spencer has been spread so far and wide by Fox News that all of America is now infected with an anti-Muslim epidemic. It hurts Muslim-Americans to see their patriotism questioned, their faith defined, distorted and defiled beyond recognition by anti-Muslim bigots through blatant lies. It is un-American to attempt to sacrifice an entire America-loving community, already reeling under vicious attacks, at the altar of higher television ratings.
