I was accosted this evening with an email from someone who is close enough to hurt me - and there are not that many people in my life who have retained that luxury. Regardless of my choices, however, there is a commonality that will never allow me to remove this person from my immediate circle. And it is times like this that we must recognize the value of receiving a piece of information that tells more about the sender than the content of the message sent. Still, the content was inflammatory enough for me to respond (below) and my response was volleyed back with a monologue of rhetoric that could only have been equaled by mainstream media.
The email was entitled 'The Arabs Are Not Happy'. I will not re-print it in its entirety, as one need only turn on Fox News to get the gist of what it says. The document was titled 'The Arabs Are Not Happy'. Its premise was that 'the Arabs' are not happy and it is their own fault, the fault of 'their' religion, and the fault of 'their' leadership. And since the 'Arabs' are not happy, they come over to "England, France, USA, Germany, (and other countries) where they can "live comfortably, don't have to be productive, can pray in the streets, and exploit social services', etc.
My response, a bit of a rant, is below. Yes, there are many points I could have made, but didn't. There are perhaps some points I made that were unnecessary. I only hope this person takes the time to read the response. The sickness I felt within the pit of my stomach after this exchange is difficult to describe and it leaves me wondering why it's there. I know this world well enough to understand quite clearly and quite personally its cruelty, its institutional hatred, its nationalistic filter that drives the throngs, waving flags of patriotism, to the consumer trough. But the underlying self-righteousness that rules today's world and the lies that are the wind in its sails, create the type of individuals that support a government that wields the weapon of racism - and the ammunition for that weapon is the very people that support or oppose it. And when the machine that controls that weapon determines the time has come, all that is necessary is to turn the people on one another based on the filters through which they've been fed.
Religion is made to divide. Politics are devised along the same lines, with the same defined goals; divide and conquer. When religious and political idealism take the place of common sense, when propaganda and interpretive prophecy become the rationale utilized to guide the moral compass, when truth is never even sought, let alone identified for what it is as it stands right before our eyes, then we recognize that we can no more replace darkness for light than we can replace light for darkness. People take a stand and there is no reasoning, no reconciling - only a reckoning that unwinds in a time that seems often not to be our own.
What we are called to do now is to not allow our own position to be watered down or influenced by those by whom we are overpowered or outnumbered. This makes me think of the Goldstone Report and how he caved after being isolated and ostracized. And I know the feeling. There are people who have read what I've written in the past few months and have walked away from me. I've drawn inward and reflected on my own statements, essays, and narratives and have returned at all times to my original position; educate and inform yourself from as much a position of objectivity as possible, establish a position, keep an open mind and heart, and yet be resolute and stand firm, hearing the inner voice that transcends propaganda and hyperbole - the inner voice that tells you quite simply that right is right and wrong is wrong - and it's rarely as complex as people try to make it.
Here is my response:
I don’t know who sent you this, but it’s pure Islamaphobic racism.
The idea that anyone lumps ‘Arabs’ into a group is, in and of itself, a racist concept. The idea that one can ignore the stark reality of (true) history that shows that ‘Arabs’, when left to their own existence, have experienced periods of relative peace, especially compared to the warmongering, bloodlusting Anglo Saxon trek across the globe. ‘Arab’
countries have also been subject to probably more colonization (exploitation) projects than any other people on the planet. The first four places mentioned in the list of your email are all included in the fourth (Israel), which incidentally is a country that is nothing more than an illegal occupation on ‘Arab’ land.
‘Arabs’ are not happy because white Christian Europeans, Americans, and Zionist Jews (no, this is not an anti-Semitic term, rather a term that identifies a racist group that literally has a racist apartheid state that is based on a prophetic belief that they are God’s chosen people). Indeed, Palestinians are spread throughout many of the countries in the list as a result of genocidal practices by ‘Israelis’, also known as Zionists, also known as racists and murderers. The only group that has murdered more ‘Arabs’ under the guise of prophecy and religion and simple plain racist nationalistic hatred, always the cover for the ulterior motive of power and profit, is Christian Zionists. Erik Prince, the leader of Blackwater, now called XE and operating under several other names, is a self proclaimed ‘Christian Crusader’. The US claims this is not a ‘holy war’, a claim that is coupled with a claim that these wars on Islam are to spread democracy and that these wars are humanitarian efforts to ‘free’ the people. Indeed, the US ‘freed’ over one million innocent Iraqis by murdering them over the past ten years. This does not include the first Gulf War and the 8 years of sanctions that starved the innocent civilian population.
The ‘Arabs’ are tired of looking around them at their diseased and dying children, as they suffer from generational genocide. They are tired of attempting to stop the burn of white phosphorous as it drips through the flesh of their children, eating bone and anything else until absolutely deprived of oxygen or until the limb is severed from the body. They are tired of waking to bombs that say ‘USA’. No, the ‘Arabs’ are not happy. They are not happy with the US and others paying off the leaches of their own people in efforts to divide and conquer; paying off (and creating) a wealthy elite class that will sell them out to Western powers, who will rule over them and commit their resources to the slave masters in the West.
The ‘Arabs’ are not happy – nor should they be. They tire of neoliberal economic oppression designed to destabilize economies toward the goal of creating slave labor markets, while feeding the ‘middle class’ enough to create ‘developing economies’ (which is, by the way, just another form of slavery, the type of slavery commonly known in the US as consumerism). The ‘Arabs’ are not happy. They run from us to us. Perhaps we should leave them alone, stop murdering them, stop raping their people and their land, and let them work out their own issues. Perhaps we should stop importing weapons and supporting terrorism. Perhaps we should stop committing war crimes against them.
Imagine any of their children as your own. Love that child as you do your own. Dream for him. Hope for him. Cry for him. Weep for him. For he is killed each and every day by drone attacks or by occupying forces. His dreams are dashed. He is starved. His limbs are severed. His future is seen through the lens of “why us, why us ‘Arabs’”.
The fact that we, as Americans, can witness the horrific war crimes that have been committed by our government in our own lifetime, while we live in relative peace with no internal warfare, and still pass judgment on a group of people we term ‘Arabs’, is a sad reality – but it is the reality we live. It only speaks toward our complacent apathetic racist nationalism. We are sold on the lie that if we weren’t trampling innocent people across the globe that they would be here trampling us. It is a lie. Since World War II the US has been on a quest for hegemony. The propaganda that is spewed by mainstream television tightens the shackles of consumer slavery while feeding us the hate we wish to ingest so that we can spew it out against other people.
God help us. God help the ‘Arabs’.
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