Juan Love
by digby
I haven’t written about the Juan Williams thing because … oh jeez. It’s just so predictable. As Glenn Greenwald writes in his piece today, there have been dozens of firings in recent years for some dumb thing someone said (or didn’t say) in the media. The only thing that sets this one apart is that it’s a FOX contributor who was fired from a so-called liberal network for saying something dumb about Muslims, which in our current climate is usually considered de riguer. This is manufactured hissy fit.
Consider, however, the reaction of the right to a hissy fit from the left. They rallied unconditionally to Limbaugh when he made his comments about “phony soldiers” even though they knew very well that he had violated their own patriotic correctness doctrines. Unlike the frenzied rush to defund ACORN, when the Democrats tried to get Limbaugh tossed off of Armed Forces Radio they were laughed off the floor. They play this game very well, whether on defense or offense.
On the substance of the Juan Williams matter, I do want to make one observation that’s only been tangentially touched upon (as far as I know.) It’s the fact that part of his comment appeared to say that Muslims are being provocative by identifying themselves in public as Muslims.
“I mean, look, Bill, I’m not a bigot. You know the kind of books I’ve written about the civil rights movement in this country. But when I get on a plane, I got to tell you, if I see people who are in Muslim garb and I think, you know, they are identifying themselves first and foremost as Muslims, I get worried. I get nervous.”
I don’t know if that’s widely held idea, but I think it might be. It fits in with the common conservative gripe about multi-culturalism in general, but takes it to a new level when you say that “refusing to assimilate” is a sign of radical politics. It sounds as though he’s saying that practicing Muslims who wear traditional religious garb are being purposefully provocative.
One of the things that has set the US apart from Europe on this issue is our tradition of religious tolerance and all that it entails, including the ability to literally wear your religion on your sleeve. (The Amish or Hassidim, for instance.) Williams’ comment seems to me to imply that we should enact a “French” solution to the problem, if not in law then in custom, at least as it pertains to Islam. I think that’s a fairly new line of thought among the conservatives, although it’s possible it’s been around a while and I just missed it.
Greenwald hits on this as well:
Gerecht hails Williams as a courageous “dissident” for expressing this “truth”:
[W]hile his manner may have been clumsy, Williams was right to suggest that there is a troubling nexus between the modern Islamic identity and the embrace of terrorism as a holy act.
Above all else, this fear-generating “nexus” is what must be protected at all costs. This is the “troubling” connection — between Muslims and terrorism — that Williams lent his “liberal,” NPR-sanctioned voice to legitimizing. And it is this fear-sustaining, anti-Muslim slander that NPR’s firing of Williams threatened to delegitimize.
Williams and Gerecht are talking about an “identity” which is a new thing. Until Obama’s candidacy when the right realized they were going to have to sublimate their neanderthal’s need to use the “N” word and decided that his middle name provided a nice cover, there was a fairly strong national consensus that we weren’t going to attack Islam and certainly not “Muslim identity.” I think that once they unleashed the beast on Obama, there was no containing it. It’s inexorably leading to an attack on “Muslim identity” which is some dangerous and ugly stuff.
It’s not new in America. After all, immigrants used to have their names capriciously changed by customs officials and it was often considered provocative to refuse to “assimilate” properly. But this is slightly different, due to the fact that the identity is religious in nature and the impulse is driven by a belief that we are in a global religious war. Plus, it’s 2010, not 1910 and we’re supposed to have evolved beyond this ridiculous nonsense.
I don’t know if the GOP will be able to ride this NPR defunding horse after the election. It’s possible, but this has the feel of a fairly short lived hissy fit to me, one more in this series of anti-Muslim manufactured outrages. (Not that it isn’t important — there is a cumulative effect with these things until the Village inevitably demands a sacrifice to the Gods of the Vapors and the Fainting Couch.) The ratcheting up of the fear of the “other” when the country is in economic turmoil is an old and ugly American story. The question now is whether the reactionaries and bigots are going to take control of the American government and actually try to do something about it.
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