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Pamela Troy's Journal
From the NY Times, 1/31/11, on gender disparity among Wikipedia contributors:
Sue Gardner, the executive director of the foundation, has set a goal to raise the share of female contributors to 25 percent by 2015, but she is running up against the traditions of the computer world and an obsessive fact-loving realm that is dominated by men…
Wikipedia shares many characteristics with the hard-driving hacker crowd, says Joseph Reagle, a fellow at the Berkman Center for Internet and Society at Harvard. This includes an ideology that resists any efforts to impose rules or even goals like diversity, as well as a culture that may discourage women.
“It is ironic,” he said, “because I like these things — freedom, openness, egalitarian ideas — but I think to some extent they are compounding and hiding problems you might find in the real world.” Adopting openness means being “open to very difficult, high-conflict people, even misogynists,” he said, “so you have to have a huge argument about whether there is the problem.” I love Noam Cohen’s implication that what puts women off about the Internet is that it’s a “fact loving realm.” Everyone knows how much we gals hate facts. “Oh you and your silly ol’ facts!” we say, stamping our little feet and pouting adorably when one of those obsessive, fact-loving males tells us that Hitler was a leftist, Virigina Woolf’s “A Room of One’s Own” a work of fiction, President Obama a secret Muslim, and Henry Luce a pinko-commie spy.* (*Yes, these are actual things men have told me on Internet discussion boards.) I also like Joseph Reagle’s admission that the “openness” of the Internet can result in a “culture that may discourage women.” He just can’t come out and say “making the Internet a more comfortable environment for women would piss off the many, many, misogynists that infest it.” Instead, he’s got to sidle up to this reality, presenting it as a sort of brow-furrowing conundrum. It’s a brand of “egalitarianism” that treats the merits of misogyny as just another matter upon which intelligent and moral people can disagree. “…you have to have a huge argument about whether there is the problem,” Reagle says. Well, see, that’s the problem. When the merits of misogyny are open for discussion, attacks on a female poster because she is female get treated with the same weight as reasoned debate about the issue she’s trying to discuss. Online discussions are derailed into long, ugly, personal wrangles. The female poster has to deal with male posters who want to discuss her looks, and/or her age, and/or her emotional and mental stability when she’s trying to talk about gun control, or the war on terrorism, or prison reform, or reproductive rights. That said, there’s a great unspoken looming over this New York Times piece, one that transcends sexual politics, and cuts right to the heart of Wikipedia as an alleged source of accurate information. It’s why, when I’ve considered signing on as a contributor I've ultimately decided against it, even though I’m fairly used to online misogyny, have a zest for argument, and enjoy research and writing. Wikipedia is not, in reality, “fact obsessed.” Wikipedia is consensus obsessed. Facts are sometimes determined by a show of hands. A year or two ago when I was writing a piece on Internet discussions, I decided to include some references to the right wing website, Free Republic. I wanted to discuss one of the most notorious examples of “Freeping” – the behavior of Free Republic towards liberal voting rights activist Andy Stephenson. In 2005, Andy Stephenson was diagnosed with Pancreatic Cancer. He had no insurance, so his friends at the liberal website Democratic Underground quickly assembled a fundraising project top pay for his treatment. The people at Free Republic did not like this. So, they “Freeped” Andy Stephenson. They posted long threads reviling him as a crook and accusing him of faking his illness. It’s a campaign that may very well have affected his paypal account and delayed his surgery. The abuse continued up to the day Stephenson died. It had been a while since Andy Stephenson’s death. I decided to check out Wikipedia’s entry on Free Republic to see what else might have been written on the subject since I’d last done a search on it. There was not a single mention of the Andy Stephenson case in the Wikipedia entry on Free Republic. There still isn’t. None of the facts I mentioned are in dispute. The actual threads reviling a dying man are still up at Free Republic to those who know to look for them. But anyone who looked up Free Republic at Wikipedia would be no wiser about it. It’s kind of like someone posting an article about Joan Crawford without mentioning Mommie Dearest. Perhaps nobody had thought to include it? I checked out the Free Republic history. Yes, it had been included, resulting in a long revert war, and finally a discussion. Ultimately the “consensus” was that references to Andy Stephenson – even thought they were factual and documented -- be removed. In short, supporters of Free Republic were able to stage an extended tantrum that got a profoundly ugly and telling fact about Free Republic removed from a Wikipedia entry. Sorry, but I see no reason to spend unpaid hours and effort writing, documenting, and setting up cites on a subject while batting away the occasional misogynistic troll -- at the risk of having it deleted, not because the facts were in question or badly supported, but because someone rounded up his like-minded buds to render them UNfacts with a show of hands. Crossposted from Thoughtcrimes
From The Daily Show, 1/27/11:
So my point was, contrary to your colleague Ms. Kelly, was to suggest that Fox commentators do use Nazis analogies, and your point seemed to be, 'Yeah but I had a good reason.'
The problem with that is, everybody thinks they have a good reason. Steve Cohen thought he had a good reason. It’s like speeding. I yelled at Steve Cohen for speeding. Kelly yelled at Steve Cohen for speeding and then said, ‘good thing we don’t speed.’ And I said, ‘look at all those f*cking people speeding right there.’ And you said ‘You took that out of context. I was late.’ Dear Jon Stewart, I hope everyone is enjoying their popcorn as they watch you and Bill O’Reilly go at it. For the most part, I’m on your side. Unlike O’Reilly, you do seem to have some grasp of what terms like “context” and “logical consistency” mean. But, in the midst of all the cheering, pompom waving and soft-drink throwing, can I make a very serious suggestion? Uttered in a low voice and rather quickly before I duck under my desk as iced Cokes are thrown at me and people yell about Godwin’s Law? How about… How about we discuss whether or not individual Nazi comparisons are warranted instead of putting a blanket ban on them? And no, I’m not talking here about confining Nazi comparisons to people who murder several million at a time. The problem with that criterion is that it would preclude us calling people like Ernst Rohm, Heinrich Himmler, or even Adolph Hitler “Nazis” before 1941, when the first extermination camp opened in Chelmno. It renders the Niemoller statement, which was aimed not at genocide but at the attitudes that enable genocide, meaningless – unless we’re planning to rewrite it. “First they came for no less than several million Communists…” As much as it kills me to admit it, O’Reilly has a point. There is sometimes, a good reason for speeding, though it's not merely "I was late." "My wife is in labor" is a good reason, as is "my kid is bleeding profusely in the back seat" or "the highway behind me is collapsing." I’m not saying that O’Reilly’s excuse was either germane (as you’ve observed, it wasn’t) or warranted. I’m saying that simply dismissing any Nazi comparison with a wave of one’s hand is as mindless as comparing someone to a Nazi merely because you disagree with hem. The current media fashion is to denounce glib Nazi comparisons in terms that are almost as glib as the comparisons. One argument being offered lately has been that there are plenty of other genocidal regimes to trot out as examples. Stalin and Pol Pot are the most frequent names invoked. But here’s the problem – Both of those regimes came into power through violent revolution and war. Nazi Germany is a powerful object lesson precisely because it’s an example of a cultured and educated people throwing away freedom with their own hands. Hitler did not come into power through the Beer Hall Putsch. He came into power because the doors of power were willingly and legally opened to him. That makes it worth discussing. The “lesson” of the Third Reich is far more complex than the obvious statement “Genocide is bad.” The “lesson,” lies in the question “how did an entire people, citizens of a 20th century western, industrialized nation, come to countenance gross repression and brutality?” One does not arrive at the answer by fast forwarding to 1941 and focusing on the piles of bodies, the barbed wire, and the gas chambers. I realize, of course, that actually examining the merits of individual Nazi comparisons would involve a greater level of effort than most cable news and comedy commentators are willing to put in. It would require coming up with hard facts about history and current events, drawing parallels, using logic, assuming a certain level of literacy among your viewers. That’s a big part of what would make it worthwhile. Crossposted from Thoughtcrimes
From President Obama’s State of the Union Speech:
We know what it takes to compete for the jobs and industries of our time. We need to out-innovate, out-educate and out-build the rest of the world. We have to make America the best place on Earth to do business… I would submit that it’s more important to make America the best place on Earth to live. Which is not always compatible with America being the best place on Earth to do business. In fact, judging from the behavior of many businesses, the “best places” to do business are countries that don’t bother with unions, minimum wage, worker safety regulations, environmental laws, or restrictions against child labor. There are good things in this speech. Obama’s succinct call for religious tolerance, his observation that “American Muslims are a part of our American family,” was badly needed in our current climate. Yes, we need technological innovation, yes, we need to improve our educational system. (We can start by improving the working conditions for public school teachers and reducing our stultifying reliance on standardized tests.) But its general tenor made me uneasy. As Rachel Maddow observed, it came across as a “prayer to the free market system.” The United States seems determined to follow the same path as the late, unlamented Soviet Union. We are staking everything, with starry-eyed religious fervor, on a single, narrowly defined economic system, even though it’s not working for large segments of the American people. For the Soviets it was Communism. For us, it’s an unfettered capitalist system where human beings without money or the ability to make money are treated as meaningless. Note the increasing drumbeat from the right in which the poor and unemployed are reviled as lazy and immoral. Dehumanizing language describing those who don’t fit into the right-wing libertarian utopia has become increasingly common. They aren’t citizens, but “tax eaters,” and “unproductive consumers” (The more concise and punchy phrase, “useless eaters,” was taken about seven decades ago.) We are not a business, the president is not the equivalent of a CEO, and citizens are not the equivalent of employees or customers. When Americans become too sick or elderly to work, they are not “laid off” or “retired” from being Americans. When Americans are too poor to pay taxes, they are not cut off from government services, as are consumers who cannot pay a business for its product. When Americans can no longer make enough money to satisfy the bottom line, their welfare is not suddenly beside the point, as the welfare of a fired or laid off employee is beside the point to a business. The plight of the poor remains the nation’s problem – and not merely because the poor are aesthetically unpleasing to the “customers” who have to edge around them on their way to buying something big and shiny. Blogger Bob Cesca seems to believe that the speech was a calculated, “perfectly orchestrated” trap for the Republicans, a game of chicken in which the Republicans must “vote for the spending freeze they've been demanding, or vote against the spending freeze in order to preserve their earmarks and, thus, saving their asses from being voted out of office.” I hope that’s so, but even if it is, it makes me uneasy. Given the madness that has seized the Republicans since Obama’s election, betting on their logic, their humanity or even their sense of self-preservation may be a losing proposition. Crossposted from Thoughtcrimes
Sheriff Clarence Dupnick, on the shooting in Tuscon: There are a whole lot of people in this country who are very angry at the politics of people like Gabrielle. A writer should not find herself saying “words fail me,” but I’m just about at that point. It’s not just the horror of what happened in Tuscon on Saturday. It’s the flood of rationalizations coming from right wingers and moderates as they struggle to explain why this nightmare is completely unconnected -- honest! – to the rising tide of violent political rhetoric that the right has been exploiting and that moderates have been carefully ignoring. No, this is not business as usual. Spare us the kindly hand-pats and the patronizing assurances that this is all part of being a public official, that this level political violence is normal. Threats against government officials have, in fact, increased dramatically. Gabrielle Giffords herself pointed this out last spring while decrying the inflammatory political rhetoric she was hearing. “In the years that my colleagues have served, twenty, thirty years, they’ve never seen it like this,” she observed when Chuck Todd predictably trotted out this tired old chestnut. No, this is not a matter of increased violent rhetoric across the political spectrum. It’s not “both sides” that need to tone it down. It is not a Democratic candidate who embraced the slogan “Lock and Load.” It was not a liberal Democrat who announced that if ballots didn’t work, bullets would, or who invoked “Second Amendment remedies.” As much venom as I heard aimed at George W. Bush during his presidency, I don’t recall anti-Bush demonstrators showing up at public gatherings with loaded guns, and I don’t believe for one moment that they would have been tolerated if they had. Neither Keith Olbermann nor Rachel Maddow have uttered anything comparable to Glenn Beck’s claim that people in the current administration are plotting to kill 10% of the American population. Sheriff Clarence Dupnick recently summed it up on Fox while refusing to back down from his comments about vitriol. When Megyn Kelly asked him, “Was there something about Congresswoman Giffords that set him off,” he responded bluntly that it was people with Giffords’ politics who were being targeted with venomous, borderline violent rhetoric. No, complaining about over the top, violent rhetoric and saying it could have consequences is not the same as engaging in that over the top rhetoric. I’m not even going to bother to expand on this here because the argument is so stupid it feels degrading to even talk about it. Likewise the argument now spreading across the right-wing blogosphere, that Loughner was a leftist because he listed Mein Kampf as his favorite book. And no, the fact that Loughner is plainly a “madman” does not lessen the responsibility of figures like Sarah Palin, Glenn Beck, Rush Limbaugh, Bill O’Reilly, Sean Hannity, Sharron Angle, and Joyce Kaufman, all of whom have helped to create a vitriolic political environment where violence is presented, both directly and indirectly, as a viable solution. Jared Lee Loughner is part of the unbalanced portion of society that renders that kind of rhetoric irresponsible as all Hell. And yes, this incident should spark a meaningful debate on gun control, given that a “madman” with a police record was able to legally purchase a previously banned automatic weapon that could fire off roughly 30 rounds. Hence the high body count that includes a 9-year-old girl. YES, YES, YES It SHOULD spark meaningful debate about the availability of guns in our society. Just don’t count on it.
Washington Post 1/5/11:
A second person denied transplant coverage by Arizona under a state budget cut has died, with this death "most likely" resulting from the coverage reduction, a hospital spokeswoman said Wednesday. First it was Mark Price. Ever heard the name? Price was a leukemia patient who died late in November from complications while preparing for a privately-funded bone-marrow transplant. It was provided after Jan Brewer cut off funding for such life-saving transplants. See, Price could have had his transplant early in October, when two potential donors became available, but that was the very day Brewer’s cuts went into effect. Time is critical for leukemia patients, and apparently Price just could not physically afford the delay caused by Brewer’s cuts. He was 37 years old.  The name of the second victim has not yet been released. Hope the infinitesimal amount of money “saved” by these deaths is worth it to Brewer and her supporters – especially since Mr. Price left behind a wife who now has to raise six children without a father. Are we used to it yet? Crossposted from Thoughtcrimes
From “Steering city’s homeless focus from sin to sickness,” by Teresa Gowan, at SFPublicPress.com 1/4/11: For many poor San Franciscans, the extraordinary strain of trying to maintain housing was compounded by an absence of strong social ties. As a great destination for cultural, economic and political migrants, more than half of the city’s population were born elsewhere and had no local family members to help them. San Francisco represents a particularly important case of the criminalization of homelessness. Even in liberal San Francisco, the social construction of homelessness as bad behavior became powerful enough to propel large-scale police campaigns against nuisance offenses, repeated attempts to abolish general assistance, and numerous other programs aimed at pushing the “visible poor” back into invisibility. This essay describes a fundamental flaw in dealing with the homeless – homeless people are too often discussed and treated as abstracts, problems along the line of city potholes, litter, and outbreaks of the flu. It’s a mindset that remains in place whether or not the policy makers view the homeless with hostility or pity. In the mind of most politicians, the homeless cannot, must not be viewed as victims of failures in our system -- except in terms of the system’s failure to control them. Back during the Reagan years I watched the evolution of this mindset. First, there were the denials from the right that cuts in the social safety net were going to result in an increase in a rate of homelessness that was already rising. I distinctly remember being told by enthused Reagan fans that, once the cuts were made, all those lazy bums who were enjoying government largess would pull up their socks and get jobs. Why, it would be the best thing for them! Wait and see! Instead, homelessness became even more undeniably visible, and the face of homelessness changed from that of single men – often alcoholics -- to women, children, sometimes even entire families who were simply poor. This did not, of course, result in any reassessment of the changes in society that had led to this epidemic. The question asked was not, “what’s wrong with our society,” but “what’s wrong with them?" And yes frequently there was and is “something wrong” with a person who is homeless. Addiction and mental illness can drive someone onto the streets. So can physical illness and sheer poverty. And if someone were not addicted or mentally or physically ill before they started living rough, I suspect they can very well end up that way after a few months on the streets. It’s been thirty years now, and the visible homelessness that shocked many Americans in the ‘80s is now pretty much taken for granted. The Reagan revolution successfully and significantly lowered the bar that steeply for American expectations. How much lower can it go? Well, consider the current crop of Republicans and their reactions to Americans facing anything from disabling winter storms to life threatening illnesses. New Jersey Governor Chris Christie has blithely disclaimed responsibility for New Jersey citizens who found themselves snowbound in the wake of the last storm while he was vacationing in Florida. He’s pointing the finger at mayors who were forced to divert snow-plows to clear vitally needed state roads. Arizona governor Jan Brewer has deliberately cut state Medicaid to the point where sick Arizonans needing transplants simply cannot get them. When asked about it, she's chuckled and referred to the life-saving transplants as "optional." She knows, and the Republican hierarchy knows that people who could be saved will die because of this laissez-faire, Social Darwinist approach to governance. And that’s okay with them. They’re counting on us getting used to it. Why not, considering what we’ve been willing to throw away over the past three decades? Crossposted from “ Thoughtcrimes
From the Washington Post:
In the version of history being taught in some Virginia classrooms, New Orleans began the 1800s as a bustling U.S. harbor (instead of as a Spanish colonial one). The Confederacy included 12 states (instead of 11). And the United States entered World War I in 1916 (instead of in 1917)…
The review began after The Washington Post reported in October that "Our Virginia" included a sentence saying that thousands of black soldiers fought for the South. The claim is one often made by Confederate heritage groups but rejected by most mainstream historians. The book's author, Joy Masoff, said at the time that she found references to it during research on the Internet. Five Ponds Press later apologized.
The unusual review process involved five professional scholars. The results, said three of those involved in the process, proved disturbing.
Only three found this disturbing? What did the other two say? The right wing war on reality continues -- and where better to attack it than in the way history is taught? The old myth about masses of black Confederate troops fighting for Dixie is especially dear to the heart of conservatives who want to erase the ugly fact that the south’s “cause” was based on white supremacy. The 1st Louisiana Native Guard, a PR stunt by the Confederacy, is cited by these revsionists, in spite of the fact that it lasted only one year and never saw any actual military action. Still, you can find it being cited on right wing sites, usually accompanied by the following picture:  This picture is a carefully cropped fabrication. Here is the original picture before some Confederate apologist retouched it. What it shows are black Union soldiers posing for a studio photo with their white Union officer:  More can be read about the history of this spurious photo in this fascinating essay by Jerome Handler, (identified as Senior Scholar at the Virginia Foundation of the Humanities) and Michael Tuite, who (identified as the former Director of Digital Media Lab at the University of Virginnia Library.) What does it say about a political movement when it attempts to rewrite history to the point of fabrication? What does it say about the inroads extremism has made into our mainstream when a public school textbook includes this blatant level of revisionism? Crossposted from Thoughtcrimes
 For Christmas Eve, we have the combination of a great writer of ghost stories, Montague Rhodes James, with a great actor, Christopher Lee. M.R. James helped create the modern ghost story. Unlike the exotic times and locations and rarified nobles of earlier supernatural fiction, James’ stories are set in what was then contemporary England and Europe, and his protagonists tended to be ordinary (if erudite) academics. His amazing sense of both imagery and timing makes his fiction disturbingly believable, even almost a century later. “Oh Whistle and I’ll Come to You, My Lad” kept me awake as a teenager after my first read, and “Casting the Runes” is an effective exercise in paranoia that was adapted into a Tourneur film, Night of the Demon. “Number 13,” told here by Lee, takes a very traditional story of the supernatural and, by setting it in a prosaic hotel, makes it frighteningly real. This was apparently aired on BBC as part of a Christmas ghost story series. I know most of you will be busy today, but sometime tonight, perhaps, you can pour yourself glass of good red port, turn out most of the lights, and drink in this bit of Yuletide abracadabra. Part 1Part 2Part 3____ Ghostly Countdown -- 2Ghostly Countdown -- 3Ghostly Countdown -- 4Ghostly Countdown -- 5
As anyone who has been lucky enough to see Don’t Look Up will attest, Japanese filmmakers have a good handle on ghost stories. Less tends to be more, and it’s understood that detailed explanations often detract rather than add to the effectiveness of a spooky story. Recently I stumbled on a treasure trove of what amount to 5-minute Japanese horror haikus. I started watching them online late in the afternoon, looked up, and blearily realized that it was long after midnight and I’d just blown several hours on Youtube. Whether these short films have been featured on Japanese television or are intended strictly for the Internet, they are fine exercises in chilling imagery and bare-bones storytelling. Some of are funny, some truly frightening, some almost poetic. Some seem to be based on folktales, one or two on well-known Manga, and some (like I suspect, "The Bombing") on personal anecdotes. No subtitles, but they don’t need much translation. The stories are told mostly through imagery and action – not exposition. Transcripts included on the Youtube posts tend to consist of dialogue that's meaningless out of context. “Hey, Shiori!” “Wait!” “What’s that?” “Oh no!” “Stop!” “Oh my!” “I’ll call you later.” All you really need to know about these two films is a bit about the Japanese tradition of household altars or shrines. These are intended to honor the departed or to protect shintai, which are objects, usually small circular mirrors, within which spirits reside. Don’t Open It A little girl left alone in the house is told by her grandfather, shortly before he leaves with her mother, not to open the family altar. Of course she does. At the end, there are only two things you need to know. She asks her grandfather twice, “where is mother?” Instead of answering he says accusingly, “You opened, it, didn’t you?” Watch it. And tell me what YOU think has happened. “Tsurumi, whatever you do , don’t open the family altar today.”The Bombing A young woman takes a nap on a couch shortly after an earthquake. There’s a word frequently reiterated in this film. “Attention!” The only other line of dialogue you need to know about is what the young woman says near the end. “I’m sorry.” "That day, I had stayed home with a cold. It was a weekday, so I was all by myself…"Ghostly Countdown -- 5Ghostly Countdown -- 4
The countdown to Christmas continues with this nicely done 10-minute chiller from Ireland called The Ten Steps. It's interesting to observe the way these kind of stories adapt to changes in technology -- the classic automobile-age story of the phantom hitchhiker, for instance, seems to have evolved from the 19th century story of "Frozen Charlotte," about a girl who died of cold while riding in a horse-drawn sleigh. The babysitter story that always ends, "He's in the house, get OUT!" could only have taken place in the era of telephones. And this creepy tale could not have been told as convincingly in the era before cellphones --  "You'll have to go and check the fusebox. It's in the cellar..."
So in honor of the upcoming holiday, which my husband and I are spending enjoyably hunkered down at home in San Francisco, I've decided to revive an often neglected Christmas tradition -- the spooky story. After all, it's at base a celebration of the darkest, longest night of the year. What better way to spend it than sitting in firelight (or colored Christmas tree lights), stuffing your face, and getting pleasantly chilled? I know that my readership isn't exactly huge, and that a good many of you are going to be either in transit or involved in more interesting things than reading blogs -- but for those of you who aren't, I thought I'd count down to the 25th with a series of short, sinister clips. We'll begin with one from my favorite Hammer film.  Calling the original Wicker Man an oddity is an understatement. It's a horror musical, and I've learned to be wary about recommending it to people. Viewers either love it, or despise it. The plot is simple. Sergeant Howie, a puritanically devout police sergeant, played by Edward Woodward, goes to the insulated island community of Summerisle to investigate the disappearance of a teenaged girl. It quickly becomes obvious that the hedonistic pagan residents are playing a sinister cat-and-mouse game with Sergeant Howie, and this musical number early in the film lays the foundation beautifully. Note the creepy elements added to this rollicking, ribald song, the fey, barely concealed malice of the landlord (Lindsay Kemp) the slightly off-kilter camera angles. This clip is, by the way, from the infinitely superior UNCUT version, the one that wasn't butchered by the studio before release. If you decide to rent it, check that one out. In the original film the date "1973" is driven home repeatedly, so that both Howie's old fashioned and intolerant piety, and the Summerisle residents' even more old fashioned take on religion are deliberately contrasted with the long sideburns and feathered hair of the early '70s. As for the execrable remake, I'll say nothing except that Nicholas Cage is no substitute for Edward Woodward. I'm unable to embed the clip, but click on the link, and enjoy. Just remember. It's a bit on the adult side. Much has been said of the strumpets of yore,
Of wenches and bawdy house queens by the score,
But I sing of a baggage that we all adore!
The landlord's daughter...
Daisy Kahn, American Society for Muslim Advancement, being quoted on Fox News:
We are deeply concerned because this is like a metastasized anti-Semitism. That’s what we feel right now. It’s not even Islamophobia. It’s beyond Islamophobia. It’s hate of Muslims. And we are deeply concerned, yesterday had a council with all religious, Muslim religious leaders from around the country and everybody is deeply concerned about what’s going on around the nation. Video Here On the national level, commentators who have been promoting Islamophobia tend to be more sophisticated than skittish local news writers reacting to a local hate crime. Consider, for a moment, the Fox News panel’s response to the above quote from Daisy Kahn, and Time Magazine’s cover story entitled “Is America Islamophobic?” The Fox reporter instantly kicks things off by jerking his thumb back at the Muslims.
So much of this, Ellis, I guess revolves around questions that aren’t being answered about this mosque in New York, people want to know where the money’s coming from, who’s paying for it, are there foreign governments involved – is anyone in the media trying to get to the bottom of that?
See, it’s all those Muslims’ fault that their places of worship are being firebombed and vandalized and their personal safety threatened. What else can people do if that “mosque in New York” refuses to tell us where its money is coming from? Ellis Henican of Newsday deserves credit for at least attempting to bring the conversation back to the actual reality of why Daisy Kahn and others are so concerned about American Islamophobia.
Well, yeah, there’s real reporting on it, and I’ve got to tell you John, I’m a little slow to make these sweeping answers like ‘Yes, America is Islamophobic,’ but I covered that hardhat rally down there, and let me tell you, there were some views expressed that I think everyone at this table would find a little troubling.
Note that Henican makes a point of saying he’s not comfortable with that badly worded Time Magazine headline, something that Judy Miller carefully ignores in her response.
But is that America? That’s not America, that’s some people who turned out to protest…Where is there any indication that America as a country is beating up on Muslims or denying them their rights?
The addition of “as a country” is important here. Miller is too smart to deny that Muslims are being attacked and harassed in this country. But so long as we’re not doing this as a country i.e, so long as these things are not being legally sanctioned (as Kristallnacht was in Germany) then no concern is warranted. Fox’s token atheist, S.E. Cupp, chimes in. As is usual with Cupp, all this concern aimed at Islamophobia is really just a way for liberals to be mean to conservatives:
For all of their interest in tolerance and freedom of speech and freedom of religion, the liberal thought police are out in full force to tell you that you cannot have certain opinions. that there’s a line you can cross in a debate, that there’s not…you can’t have one belief, or you’re Islamophobic or racist or nativist. I mean, it’s absolutely, it’s intimidating, it’s akin to censorship!
The sheer narcissism of this statement is a bit staggering. Apparently to Cupp, vandalizing, firebombing and physically threatening Muslim centers, mosques, and people is not cause for concern – but upsetting right-wingers by arguing with them is a form of “intimidation.” Especially striking is her indignation over the notion that certain lines can be crossed in a debate. In the mind of Cupp and Fox viewers, conservatives can cross no lines in debate, while liberals do so merely by debating. Implying or even stating outright that all Muslims are terrorists and disloyal is acceptable. Calling someone a bigot for saying so is not and in fact qualifies as a form of censorship. Once again, Henican tries to inject a little sanity into the discussion by pointing out that bigotry does exist, an uncomfortable brush with reality which prompts Jim Pinkerton of the New American Foundation to ask rather plaintively why everyone’s not talking about the funding for the Cordoba house. Judy Miller says that’s a really good question, an Fox news deserves credit for asking it, while the reporter chimes in again with the damning observation that the developer of the property used to be a waiter. Following the discussion here provides a beautiful little nutshell of classic rationalizations for dangerous levels of intolerance. 1. It’s the Muslims fault, rather than the fault of the people planting bombs, vandalizing Islamic sites, and threatening Muslims. Let’s talk about what the Muslims are doing! 2. We’re not as bad as Nazi Germany was when it came to the Jews, so people shouldn’t be complaining! 3. Calling certain opinions racist or bigoted hurts the feelings of people expressing those opinions and is an obvious attempt at intimidation and censorship. 4. Why aren’t we talking about what the Muslims are doing?... As for that Time headline, “Is America Islamophobic,” it’s either stunningly stupid, or a deliberate attempt at hyperbolizing the discussion to ensure a soothing response. No, America is not, as a country, “islamophobic” in that we have not criminalized Islam or instituted laws penalizing Muslims. The proper question is “How much of a problem is Islamaphobia in this country?” The answer is unlikely to be as reassuring or as simple as many would like it to be.
The fruits of irresponsible and bigoted language are ripening in this country. Some have graduated from rhetoric to action. In addition to the stabling of a Muslim cabbie in New York, there have been a series of crimes committed against mosques and Islamic centers. These include: The defacing of a Nashville Islamic Center last February with the words “Muslims Go Home.” A threatening note was left on the site that included “Every Moslem nation needs to be eradicated that surrounds the Holy Land.: The explosion of a pipe bomb at a Florida Islamic Center in Florida in May. At the time, 60 people were in the building, praying. Though the bomb shook the building and blackened a wall, nobody was hurt. Obscene graffiti spray-painted in the parking lot of an Arlington Texas mosque in June. That same weekend, a fire destroyed playground equipment at the site, and some copper tubing was cut, possibly because the vandal thought it was a natural gas line. (Fortunately it was not.) The threatening signs set up last week at a Madera California mosque, reading “"Wake up America, the enemy is here,” and “No temple for god of terrorism at Ground Zero.” And there’s the recent case in Murfreesboro Tennessee, on the site of a future Islamic Center and mosque. Federal agents were called in after someone doused construction equipment with flammable liquid and tossed a match. One of the myths that Americans seem to treasure about America -- in utter defiance of history -- is that, in the face of prejudice, the conscience of Americans as a whole will intervene before serious damage is done. After all, it’s pointed out most Americans don’t commit these crimes. That’s certainly true. It’s also true that (depending on the level of violence) there are almost always some Americans of conscience and good will who will come forward and offer their support to the victims. The problem is that the people of conscience who step up to the plate and denounce hate crimes are frequently in the minority, and do so at risk to themselves. The problem is that the vast majority of Americans are, either because they are afraid, because they are uncaring, or because they are sympathetic to the criminals, likely to be silent. Or worse, when they do speak, it’s to deny, to minimize, or to directly or indirectly blame the victims. Sometimes it’s done obliquely. Consider, for a moment, this local TV news coverage of the recent vandalism in Murfreesboro. Arson in MurfreesboroI’m not sure who’s responsible for the various telling “clunks” in the copy. It could be the writer. It could be a nervous editor who waded in and altered it. But those “clunks” trend in a consistent direction, one avoids directly acknowledging the crime and focuses attention on the victimized Muslims. For instance:
Narrator: The scene? The site of the future mosque, say Muslims who’ve existed here twenty some years…
That’s a bit odd. Not just “the site of the future mosque” but “the site of the future mosque say Muslims… It’s not an objective fact that it’s the site of a future Mosque? That’s just something the local Muslims tell everyone? This could be shrugged off as a slight blip in the writing, but the reporter goes on:
There’s strong opposition. The site’s sign’s even been destroyed twice. But this takes it to a whole new level, local Muslims proclaim…
Surely setting a fire and destroying construction equipment can objectively be described as kicking it up a notch from simply breaking a sign. And the “local Muslims proclaim?” Writers of copy will certainly, late in a story, start casting around for synonyms for “say,” but when the writer chooses a loaded word like “proclaim” over more colorless terms like “observe,” “state,” “aver,” etc. suspicion is warranted. “Proclaim” is a term generally used to subtly denigrate what someone is saying. The implication is that the “proclaimer” is exaggerating, making a big deal out of nothing. It’s just a couple of notches below the word “whine.” And finally: Narrator
Spokeswoman Camie Ayash says it’s another violent act in which Muslims haven’t been the villain.
Camie Ayash: this is definitely something we do not deserve” -
Narrator: in her words -- they are the victim. God forbid it should be in the reporter’s words that the Muslim community is the victim when someone sets fire to construction equipment on their building site. Taken as a whole, this sounds as though some paranoid news writer or editor was afraid to say outright and simply, “Local Muslims were the victim of an apparent hate crime when someone escalated the vandalism of a planned Islamic center by setting fire to construction equipment.’ Instead, the thumb is repeatedly jerked at the Muslims themselves. “Hey,” the local station seems to be saying “ We’re not the one’s saying it! It’s those Muslims!” (To be continued)
From An Anti-Defamation League Press Release, 7/28/10:
We regard freedom of religion as a cornerstone of the American democracy, and that freedom must include the right of all Americans – Christian, Jewish, Muslim, and other faiths – to build community centers and houses of worship. That’s nice. We categorically reject appeals to bigotry on the basis of religion, and condemn those whose opposition to this proposed Islamic Center is a manifestation of such bigotry. “Categorically reject” and “condemn” in the same sentence, followed by clause implying that opposition to the proposed Islamic Center might be based on something other than raw bigotry? Uh oh. I sense a qualifier, some enormous “HOWEVER” or “BUT” heading towards us at full speed. However… There ya go. … there are understandably strong passions and keen sensitivities surrounding the World Trade Center site. We are ever mindful of the tragedy which befell our nation there, the pain we all still feel – and especially the anguish of the families and friends of those who were killed on September 11, 2001. See, it’s not them! It’s not the ADL! It’s… well… all those other people who feel soooo strongly about it because they lost family and friends in 9/11. It’s not that the ADL is prejudiced, or anything like that. No, not at all! It’s that the ADL feels just so bad for all those people who are sad and traumatized by the relatives they lost. They categorically reject all those other people (Ick!) who are motivated by bigotry. The ADL isn’t like that at all!For them, it’s all about compassion for the victims! That’s what it is! Because we all know that no Muslims were among the victims killed by terrorists in the World Trade Center. Unless you count these people. (This is only a partial list of the Muslim victims of 9/11.) Shabbir Ahmed, 47, waiter at Windows on the World. Tariq Amanullah, 40, VP Fiduciary Trust International Touri Bolourchi, 69, passenger on board United Airlines Flight 175. Fled Iran’s Fundamentalist Muslim regime with her family 21 years ago. Abdul K. Chowdhury, 30, worked at Cantor Fitzgerald Mohammed Salahuddin Chowdhury, 38, waiter at Windows on the World. Left behind a pregnant wife and a young daughter Syed Abdul Fatha, 54, Pitney Bowes Copy Center at Aon Insurance Salman Hamdani, 23. A trained emergency medical technician, he apparently rushed to the burning towers to assist in the rescue. His remains were found at the site. Mohammed Jawara, 30, MAS Security Sarah Kahn, 32, Cafeteria Manager for Forte Food, left behind a husband and two children Nurul Huq Miah, 35, audio-visual audiovisual technologist, Marsh & McLennan Cos. Inc. Boyie Mohammed, 50, Carr Futures Ehtesham U. Raja, 28, TCG Software, was attending a conference at the World Trade Center Amenia Rasool, 33, accountant, Marsh & McLennan Cos. Inc. Left behind a husband and four young children Rahma Salie, 28, died with her husband Michael Theodoris, 32, on American flight 11. They were expecting their first child. Mohammed Shajahan, 41 computer administrator, Marsh & McLennan Cos. Inc. No mealy-mouthed "explanation" is going to change the fact that the ADL has embraced the kind of bigotry it was originally founded to fight.
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