Tags
disingenuous speech, First Amendment, freedom, freedom of speech, language, Mark Gonzales, Pamela Geller, poetry, Transportation Poster Wars
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The second video may confuse language a little bit — today, in fact, it takes contemporary state power to genuinely protect uncontacted peoples (there are few around) and pockets of primitive tribes that have had some missionary and trade contact (I’ve the Pirahã and Dan Everett in mind) but, so far, and of their own volition, have chosen to remain put. What I believe Geller has in her sites is a political program, the one driving Hamas and Hizbollah and Jamaat-i-Islamia; also the one whipping up a maelstrom of death, displacement, and destruction between Shia and Sunni sects and others in Pakistan, Iraq, and Syria; and then the fans of the 7th Century, who would seem to transgress all limits with the killing of their own and of innocents, even in mosques.
If ye olde white man says, “This is just cowboys and Indians”, he might be rightfully rebuked as ignorant and racist.
But if a hip black poet says the same thing, summoning up the white ghost of Rousseau’s revered noble savage, then it is a war against “indigenous” — who was really of-the-land provides an endless topic for the expression of vitriol in the middle east hate-peace peace groups on Facebook — and the modern, thank God, have an unfair advantage in military power.
This is how the hip, fashionable, and devolutionary (also, alas, romantic) of the New Old Now Old Lost and Far Out Left find themselves upside-down and, most ironically, extending the conflicts and warfare they proclaim to protest.
When the “indigenous” of Gaza (minus the Jewish indigenous of Gaza) get really sick, they’re not necessarily stuck with crying out for mud plasters and prayer (or revolutionary poetry): they may find themselves in a modern hospital more amply prepared (than Gaza’s also modern medical system) to receive them in Israel.
So, back to the Transportation Poster Wars: how representative are CAIR and ISNA of the Muslim voice?
Same question: Muslim Canadian Congress? American Islamic Forum for Democracy?
Will North America, for starters, witness a shift in volunteered civic alliance?
How long will the violence accepting, enabling, or promoting behaviors of one or two (or more) key Muslim civic organizations be keeping Steve Emerson, Pamela Geller, Robert Spencer and others rightfully — dutifully, ethically, morally — in business, i.e., out of the obsessive (would there were not so much material to keep it going) “Jihad Watch” business?
Other Reference
IPT News. “CAIR Loses IRS Status.” The Investigative Project on Terrorism, June 22, 2011.
IPT News. “CAIR’s Next Generation Radical.” The Investigative Project on Terrorism, August 29, 2012.
Rogell, Daniel E. “ISNA to Host Ghannouchi.” The Investigative Project on Terrorism, May 11, 2012.
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