I have continued to receive email from the "Chill Out" post in CounterPunch. Here's one that I thought I would address in public.
You miss the real points of why people are pissed.
1 The hypocrisy of restricting "hate speech" regarding Israel and Jews, while encouraging dehumanizing caricatures of Muslims as mad bombers.
*I think hate speech laws are a bad idea. Why give the state the power to police what anyone thinks? Let people say what they will and confront the ideas if you want or ignore them if you want. If a government or powerful institution advocates racist or discriminatory policies then there is more of a priority for us to protest and confront these ideas or policies.
2 The social apartheid in these EU countries where the Muslims are considered "other"
*No doubt this is an issue but let's protest unemployment, racist laws, lousy housing, favoritism in hiring, police brutality not symbolic "blasphemy." Do you think that there are no allies for minorities in Scandanavia? I'm not an expert here but anecdotally I met lots of them when I was Sweden last year. I also read a lot in the left press about how these ploicies need to change.
3 The continuity of vilifying someoneÂ’s beliefs with vilifying them as a people
*I have not ever, at least consciously, said Muslim world or all Muslims do this... My comments were addressed to an extreme group of mad killers (they want to kill me by the way because of my beer drinking, naked women appreciating, Milwaukee living atheism) whom I flippantly called Jihadis.
As a Jew, I am reminded of the comedian in the movie Cabaret who steadily tells more and more racist jokes about Jews while the audience becomes ever more Nazi. And in our modern society, we watched the rise of Dennis Miller as he moved from being the witty bohemian to being the shitty anti-muslim racist.
*Do you really believe that we are in a pre-Nazi state here or in Denmark? Lots of people have made this point to me. I reject it out of hand. Abu Ghraib and Guantanamo and other "detention" centers are horrible places where torture is commonplace but they are not Auschwitz or Dachau. Bush and company are not at war with Muslims or for racial reasons and they don't employ racial or religious reasons to defend their policies, they want the resources, or control over them, where Muslims happen to live. Overt racism is roundly condemned in my community and in the US in general whenever it is uttered. Not to say that racism doesn't exist or that code words for race are not widely used but sensitivity to minority groups has NEVER been higher in Western society. Dare I say ever in human history? Have you traveled anywhere in the US and seen how this society actually works?
Your desire to treat equally (and you are not unique in this childlike effort) societies at different stages of economic and social development and power is of identical flavor to those, who during the Vietnam era, said "all nationalism is reactionary," as a basis for not supporting the Vietnamese people.
You and your civil liberty sophists fail to address the driving forces for religious identification within advanced capitalist societies by both Christians, Muslims and Newage-ists: alienation with a system that strips people of a sense of community, a sense of a guiding morality, a sense of trust that one's fellow man is not trying to screw you at every turn.
*A long discussion is due here but I'd say that I think that the elimination of secularists and the left, with US help, has given an opening to fundamentalists in the region which has created a classic blowback. But so what, should we then support reactionaries who oppose corrupt Western backed movements just because they oppose imperialism?
The Scando countries that you are sympathizing with took in ‘those people’ not out of compassion but to leverage their cheap labor in keeping an aging society functioning.
*Agreed. They also have the most progressive societies ever created by humans.
The world as a whole has this dynamic hiding underneath the gated communities of national citizenship. Whether this struggle happens within the gates or is waged across them, the tension will continue to grow and explode.
All efforts toward world democracy will have to address these sensibilities.
*Agreed and we should continue to try to understand why certain retrograde movements have and will develop as a result of the current regime. But should we ally with and pander to the most reactionary elements in this struggle or work with those who are working towards an egalitarian, democratic and secular end?