…is to be called an ‘Arab.’ At least that is my take away from the latest Obama ad to appease bigots. In today’s Electronic Intifada, editor Ali Abunimah notes how easily and breezily this slips by the sensible Eastern Establishment censors:
But The Hill fails to note the blatant anti-Arab racism in the ad. It features a clip of an 11 October 2008 exchange at a Minnesota town-hall style campaign event between McCain and a woman in the audience. The exchange can be seen starting 15 seconds into the ad:
WOMAN: “I have heard about him [Obama]. He’s an Arab.”
MCCAIN: “No ma’am, no ma’am, he’s a decent family man, citizen, whom I just happen to have disagreements with.”
If the bigotry contained in the exchange is not obvious, try replacing the word “Arab” with “Jew” and then imagine what the response would have been to how McCain handled it then, and to Obama using it now.
Freedom Report’sAustin Petersen elicits surprisingly sensible and sober responses on U.S. foreign policy from film producer Sean Stone on his recent trip to Iran. Stone, the son of Platoon director Oliver Stone, made headlines for making similar statements to Bill O’Reilly last month.
I don’t know how my arcane little post on Frank Gaffney’s World War I theories launched a discussion of Shariah law, bikinis, “executive gays,” and Ted Nugent, but Eric Dondero dropped in, so…
Dondero is raving about, among other things, a county in Maryland providing twice-weekly women-only swim times at public pools. (You can read a reasonable account of what’s happening here, or you can get frothed on over at Pam Geller’s site.) My failure to wet my swim trunks over this issue ultimately led Dondero to demand that I stop calling myself a libertarian.
Now, this strikes me as a little ironic, since the doctrinaire libertarian position on public pools is that there shouldn’t be any. They hardly seem like an essential function of the night-watchman state, after all (and don’t even get those crazy anarcho-capitalists started). Let individuals and organizations build their own pools and swim however they like, whether in the buff or in burqas.
But public pools aren’t really that central an issue to any libertarians I know, even the misguided, pro-war ones. What a luxury it would be to live in a time and place where abolishing the parks and rec department was even arguably a priority! And note that Dondero doesn’t call for privatizing the pools — he just wants to make sure that a state agency that shouldn’t even exist doesn’t in any way accommodate a certain subset of taxpayers.
And Dondero doesn’t stop there:
Or, maybe we should kick these Islamic “immigrants,” out of our country?
If you do not wish to assimilate into American culture of tolerance, open sexuality, and freedom to live as you please without a nanny-state telling you how to live your life, than why in the bloody hell are you here in the first place?
But as the article I linked to explains, it’s not just Islamofascists who like the women-only swim times. In fact, there’s a worldwide market for women-only gyms, and the biggest provider started right here in the USA. But in their hatred of Muslims, these twisted libertoids end up enemies of the open society they’re supposedly defending. Like the puritans they claim to despise, they feel oppressed by the consensual activities of others. That’s why most libertarians disdain Dondero and company.
Full disclosure: I sometimes swim at a local public pool, so when the revolution comes, I will dutifully drown myself by tying a copy of Man, Economy, and State to my ankle and jumping in the deep end. Now rock out to the Nuge in better days.
NOAM CHOMSKY: The Brookings Institute just a few months ago released extensive polls of what Arabs think about Iran. …They show that Arab opinion …—holds that the major threat in the region is Israel, that’s 80 percent; the second major threat is the United States, that’s 77 percent. Iran is listed as a threat by 10 percent. With regard to nuclear weapons, rather remarkably, a majority, in fact, 57 percent, say that …it would have a positive effect in the region if Iran had nuclear weapons. …
+ When they talk about Arabs, they mean the Arab dictators, not the population, which is overwhelmingly opposed to the conclusions that the analysts here, Clinton and the media, have drawn. There’s also a minor problem. That’s the major problem. The minor problem is that we don’t know from the cables what the Arab leaders think and say. We know what was selected from the range of what they say. So there’s a filtering process. We don’t know how much it distorts the information. But there’s no question that what is a radical distortion is—or not even a distortion, a reflection of the concern that the dictators are what matter. The population doesn’t matter, even if it’s overwhelmingly opposed to U.S. policy. This shows up elsewhere…. –Noam Chomsky: WikiLeaks Cables Reveal “Profound Hatred for Democracy on the Part of Our Political Leadership”
AMY GOODMAN: A former US Marine who killed two unarmed Iraqis is running for a congressional seat in North Carolina… Ilario Pantano has said he has no regrets about fatally shooting the two at point-blank range after detaining them near Fallujah in April 2004.
JUSTIN ELLIOT: These two Iraqi men had been searched. They didn’t have any weapons. And he was — Mr. Pantano was having them search their own car when he opened fire, and shooting as many as fifty or sixty rounds at them. And that includes reloading his M-16 rifle.
AMY GOODMAN: Despite his admission, the military cleared Pantano of wrongdoing in 2005. He is now in a tight race with incumbent Democrat Rep. Mike McIntyre in North Carolina’s 7th Congressional District. –From Murder to Congress?
Do you think this sort of thing might be why they hate us?
