While we have already posted several telling interviews from our filming at Glenn Beck's 828 Restoring Honor Rally, but we haven't yet posted our most emotional, interactive, and intense experiences. Towards the end of our day downtown, we stopped to chat with some folks from the crowd- as we did throughout the day. When we began our interview with Madonna from Indiana, we were in the exact center of a circular cement area that is the entrance way to the World War II Memorial. Our conversation started with Madonna, the only person in her group of 5 or so who decided to stop and chat with us. Quickly, however, not only did several of her friends decide to join our discussion, but several onlookers decided that they belonged in our conversation as well. Before we knew it, we were encircled by 30 or so rally goers who decided to engage us (verbally) in an effort to try and convert us to Glen Beck's White Christian Civil Rights Utopia. Below is the majority of the half hour experience in 6 parts and at the very bottom is all 30 minutes of our discussions unedited.
Switzerland's landslide vote to ban Muslim minarets surprised many pundits and commentators, more familiar with the nation's image as a bastion of tolerance and European enlightenment.
These results, in fact, are not so surprising. They derive from the peculiar structure of Swiss democracy, which effectively creates a voter base less diverse than the general public. These voters are generally predisposed to support such initiatives as the minaret vote.
I am specifically talking about Swiss citizenship. Becoming a Swiss citizen implies that one has become part of the Swiss people, and the Swiss have a very strict definitions of what this means. Since - of course - only citizens may vote, this strictness directly impacts the Swiss electorate.
This humble diary is simply to suggest that the United States use it's muscle to force the countries of the Middle East with which it has close relations, to air 1 hour per week of their 'enemy's' TV programs, simultaneously across all major TV stations, during prime time. The programs need to be politically and socially significant. The end goal is to engender empathy for 'the other' as human beings, without which there's no long-term basis for confidence in treaties for peaceful-coexistence, no matter elaborate and positive they may seem to be.
Fatemeh Fakraie writes at Racialicious blog: I just finished reading Sherene H. Razack's Casting Out: The Eviction of Muslims from Western Law & Politics (2008). And I gotta say, it blew me onto my ass.
Razack is the author of several books, including Looking White People in the Eye: Gender, Race, and Culture in Courtrooms and Classrooms, and her work in race theory definitely shows in Casting Out. She uses plenty of theory and excellent cross-racial examples to illustrate that what's currently happening to Muslims in the West (racialization that results in "the expulsion of Muslims from the political community, a process that takes the form of stigmatization, surveillance, incarceration, torture, and bombing") has happened to other groups before.
She first argues that Muslims are racialized through "race thinking", which "divides up the world between the deserving and the undeserving, according to descent." The racialization of Islam and Muslims is something the editors and I have been wanting to address on Racialicious for awhile, but I haven't quite known how to begin; Razack's book provides the perfect springboard.
Islam is represented in mainstream media as South/West Asian brown-skinned people who are bearded and turbaned or veiled and hidden: this racializes Islam.
Now, before you start typing a response that there are non-West Asian Muslims and that Muslim isn't a race, re-read what I just wrote. There are Muslims in every country in the world, and they are all colors and sizes. But Western media representation of Islam and Muslims simplifies this world-wide group of people into one picture: that of a brown guy with a beard and a keffiyeh. His female counterpart is a brown woman with a veil. Reducing an entire group of people to these static images that have no context or history creates flat attributes (such as the incorrect assertion that West Asia = Muslim) that can be applied to anyone deemed in the "Muslim" category.
Razack argues "the eviction of Muslims from [the Western] political community is a racial process that begins with Muslims being marked as a different level of humanity and being assigned a separate and unequal place in the law." (her emphasis) When Islam is racialized, the presentation of terrorism as Islamic thus racializes terrorism, especially when terrorism is illustrated by brown-skinned bearded South/West Asians. So, if terrorism is equated with Muslims, then we come to "widespread condemnation of bodies marked as 'Muslim,' and heightened support for punitive measures against them."
....
I had a difficulty with her focus on "Arabs and Muslims," which I think is a bit reductive, given the heightened media attention on Iran and Pakistan, two non-Arab but predominately Muslim countries. Though I agree that Islam and Muslims have been racialized into being "brown" and perhaps even "Arab," I still think it would be more beneficial to the argument if Razack had clarified that she was focusing on the treatment of North African and South/West Asian Muslims. Though she posits that all Muslims are racialized, I get caught up in her use of "Muslims" because most of her examples deal with North African and South/West Asian Muslims.
Also, the inclusion of John Walker Lindh and Jose Padilla in her argument about the racialization of Islam and terrorism would be an interesting one; they have been convicted as terrorists, but neither are North African or South/West Asian. Both are American citizens. Lindh is white and Muslim; he was treated just as badly as North African and South/West Asian detainees because he is Muslim. Padilla is Latino and Muslim. He was detained and his habeaus corpus was suspended just like North African and South/West Asian Muslim detainees. They are presented as having their American citizenship and ethnicities taken over by "brown" Islam, which Razack notes is often compared to disease with panicked media allegations that Islam is "spreading."
Only a few election cycles ago, the trend in the Muslim American community (at least the 2/3rds of it that come from an immigrant background) was to vote Republican. The argument was that the combination of socially conservative personal values and free-market economic views (many immigrants came to the US as entrepreneurs) made Muslims and the GOP, at least in the eyes of the first generation immigrants, a natural fit. This movement culminated in the ill-conceived idea to create a Muslim "block vote" that would back George W. Bush in the 2000 presidential election. About 80% of the Muslim electorate went with the prevailing logic, and nearly 50,000 of them cast their vote for Bush in Florida alone, arguably making our community responsible for many of the ills to befall it in the coming 8 years. (On behalf of my community, I apologize to America for this profound error in judgement.)
Given that profile, one might reasonably conclude that immigrant Muslims would be alienated and antagonistic toward unions. That's why this story today may be important:
Workers at the Tyson Foods poultry processing plant in Shelbyville will no longer have a paid day off on Labor Day but will instead be granted the Muslim holiday Eid al-Fitr.
According to a news release from the Retail, Wholesale and Department Store Union, a new 5-year contract at the plant included the change to accommodate Muslim workers at the plant.
Tyson's director of media relations Gary Mickelson said the contract includes eight paid holidays, the same number as the old contract.
Eid al-Fitr, which falls on Oct. 1 this year, marks the end of Ramadan, the Muslim holy month of fasting. Union leaders say implementing the holiday was important for the nearly 700 Muslims, many of them Somalis, who work at the plant that employs a total of 1,200 people.
Now pickup again with Amanullah, who goes on to explain that the Muslim community rapidly found a new political home:
Fast forward four years, and Muslim voters backpedaled considerably, voting nearly 90% with Bush's Democratic rival John Kerry and creating what is most likely the greatest demographic shift in US political history. This, of course, begs the questions - where will Muslim voter sensibilities eventually settle along the political spectrum?
Recoiling from conservative excesses won't be enough to make a coalition that lasts. Like all of the communities that vote majority progressive, Muslims must have affirmative reasons to identify as progressives if they are to build their permanent political home in our camp. Even among the entreprenuers, good works on behalf of Muslims by powerful players in progressive politics such as the Labor Movement will reinforce the coalition. Affinity for and identification with a strong labor movement can be one enduring reason (among many) for Muslims to continue voting progressive after the current conservative movement collapses and the memory of its excesses recedes.
Trying to make sense of tribal politics in the Middle East can't be done with simple bumper sticker slogans. The history, entangling relationships, religious dimension, shifting alliances, geography and multiple cultures are a Byzantine maze of complexity. Specifically, the Muslim world is often regarded by people in the west, especially Americans, as a large bowl of alphabet soup. As a result, policy makers who look for quick and easy fixes by force in the region overreach and miscalculate.
One tragic example of miscalculation and overreach is Lebanon. Once regarded as the "jewel" of the Middle East, Lebanon endured a brutal civil from 1975 to 1990. Surrounded by the Mediterranean Sea, Syria and Israel, this small country the size of Connecticut has flummoxed leaders in Jerusalem and Washington for two decades.
