Juan Williams was on the Bob Edwards show yesterday promoting his new book. He stated again that people in Muslim garb in airports do frighten him (without any caveat this time) and that his saying this is part of Honest Debate.
If you’re truly interested in such debate, the first rule is to question the validity of your premise beforehand.
The Muslims who conducted the 9/11/2001 attacks were wearing button-downs and khakis, while the people who held Mumbai hostage in November of 2008 wore jeans and tshirts. Unless you’re actually in, say, Basra or the Swat valley, your chances of being attacked by a person in a dishdash or chador are slim to none. Not only is this a horribly inefficient method of profiling, the attitude is also extremely silly. My aunt had “dothead” yelled at her in New Jersey by a man tattooed with a German Iron Cross, while a fellow geophysicist of Indian origin was recently beaten up in London by a bunch of punk thugs wearing Union Jack tshirts and bandanas as they referred to him as a “Paki.” These are attacks that occur almost everyday in the western world. At the gym the other day, I saw a guy with a giant iron cross tattooed on his right leg. A colleague put up the British flag in his office. By all rights, I should be frightened by these outward symbols of identity, correct? If I had then gone on the Rachel Maddow show and freaked out about it, I would have been laughed off the set.
The best way to fight fundamentalism is to get rid of it in yourself first. Each time I hear paranoid squawks about the growing Islamization of the West, I don’t fear Muslims. All I think is, “Hey, these guys sound exactly like those old mullahs in Kuwait who fumed and incited their young over the growing Westernization of the East.” Don’t sound like a fanatical mullah, for starters.
Next time: “Collective guilt” for you, but not for me.
Right on target. I have no doubt that Juan Williams and many others are “frightened” by what they perceive. But that’s all it is–perception. What has this got to do with the national dialogue on building a greater and safer democracy? As you note, nothing. Time for these people to grow up.
Peace,
Tim
Well said. (I’d love to see you on the Rachel Maddow Show talking about this, for example.)
Symbols are powerful items, and aren’t often found hand in hand with rational means of expression or actual events. Folks like Juan Williams make their living intentionally confusing symbols to promote fear and cultural panic among specific demographics. The actual garb of terrorists matters little. As the Norwegian attacks are demonstrating, actual examinations of violence are less important than labeling “bad” violence a trait of the cultural “other.”
To that end, I wonder what Williams opinion of the Rebel Battle Flag would be. Does he fear the bearers of that standard, as well? As a southerner who grew up amidst a debate regarding a symbol specifically used as a means of intimidation by both America’s most destructive homegrown terrorist organization and state governments planning to resist legal equal rights, I’d like to hear his opinion on that matter.
“Collective guilt”. That is the word I was looking for the other day.
It grieves me to hear the specific examples of hatred and violence you mentioned above, as if to say that not having heard such recently, allowed me to think that maybe things were getting better in Western society during my extended absence.