Once again iGoogle surprised me and linked this bit ‘o’ honey about Joe Lieberman gamely defending his title as “Biggest Douche in the Universe” by introducing legislation that would allow any American citizen with “ties” to terrorism to be stripped of their citizenship. People are wisely pointing out that a law such as that would be ruled unconstitutional. But let’s take some time we could be spending actually getting something done in Congress and spend it on reactionary political posturing.
This is pathetically and unsurprisingly vague. “Ties” and “affiliations” can mean way too many things for that to be the language they’re using. This bill appears to be just another way we can single out Arab or Muslim Americans and Other the crap out of them. How precarious is their citizenship? Thousands have already been detained without habeas corpus. I don’t know how much more effectively you can marginalize a community than the government and society in general have done with Muslims.
So while I’m at CNN reading about that, I come upon Bill Mahr’s interview on AC 360. I like Bill Mahr some of the time but his views on Islam are seriously, intensely problematic. I’m specifically referring to what he says in this video in which he attempts to explain why the Times Square bomber turned to terrorism and says that Islam right now is where Christianity was during the Dark Ages. You don’t have to watch it all the way through, just trust that there is a whole lot of postcolonial fail going on up in there. He straight up says that Western culture is better than Islamic culture, that “our” (and by “our” I assume he’s referring to himself, Anderson Cooper, and any other overprivileged rich white men) fundamentalist preachers don’t kill people, on and on. Seriously Islamophobic (if that’s not a word it is now) bullshit. Anyone who feels like saying some fucked up shit like that about Muslims needs to test its equivalent with a group whose oppression they believe in. Because they’re obviously not recognizing that Muslims are being seriously oppressed here, and that saying those kinds of things is not like talking about the Russians during the Cold War, it’s more like how Japanese Americans were treated after WWII. Has the Texas schoolbook committee removed that from our history books yet?
Sometimes you just have to take a deep breath and scream into a damn pillow.
