On Tuesday, 9/11, two days after we
posted our essay on America vs. Islam, an angry mob attacked the
U.S. Consulate in Benghazi, Libya, killing J. Christopher
Stevens, Washington's ambassador to Libya, as well as three
other Americans at the compound. The violence erupted out of
mass protests in Libya, Egypt, and other Muslim nations over a
little-seen, straight-to-YouTube anti-Islam film called
“Innocence of Muslims,” which depicts the Prophet Muhammad as a
womanizer and pedophile. The “film,” which is actually just a
sub-amateur video posted to YouTube by what appear to be
extremely ignorant self-professed “Christians” (whose shameful
acts demonstrate they are not Christians at all) was further
promoted by Terry Jones, the hate-mongering ignorant,
Quran-burning pastor of less than fifty ignorant folk in
Gainesville Florida, at what he called his “Judge Muhammad Day,”
a “Christian” hate event. That a relative nobody could post a
stupid, home-made “video” to YouTube and another relative nobody
could promote it, inciting global violence which led to murder,
and neither “Christian” express even the slightest regret or
remorse only further underscores my point about the scourge of
religious bigotry, ignorance and extremism in this country.
One of the steepest prices we pay for liberty and freedom is our having to put
up with ignorant hate-speech. Freedom means precisely that, that
each of us is entitled to our own voice, no matter how hateful
that voice may be. A major problem with the so-called Arab
Spring is that oppressed people, yearning for freedom, usually
do not fully understand what freedom actually means or the price
they all must pay for that freedom. The protestors and rioters,
having only recently won their own freedom from oppression, are
demanding only free speech they agree with or free speech which
does not offend them (or, in this case, blaspheme God). There is
no freedom if you pass a law banning speech you disagree with.
In the hands of those who have only known cruelty and
totalitarianism, freedom is a much more fragile, much more
complex, and far more costly thing than many of them understand.
The
Muslim Experience
In 38 years of ministry, I have never once heard any teaching on
Islam (general) or even The Nation of Islam offered from a black
pulpit. These days, when a white person hears the word “Muslim,”
they think of bin Laden or Muqtada al-Sadr. I imagine the
overwhelming majority of white Americans, when they hear
“Muslim,” think “terrorist.” And, thus, Americans of Middle
Eastern descent, of all faiths, routinely fall under the shadow
of suspicion just by being who they are. This is a familiar
story to Black America. Only, I’d imagine when most black
Americans hear the word “Muslim,” we think “Farrakhan,” whom
many of us see as a great black leader, whether we agree with
him or not. Most black people I know associate the word
“terrorist” with a specific person or behavior and do not
slander an entire ethnic group. We certainly don’t blame Islam,
a religion the black church in America has lived in peaceful
cooperation with for half a century. The so-called “Black”
Muslims of the United States are not known for acts of terrorism
beyond political rhetoric and civil disobedience in defiance of
social injustice, so my guess would be that Black America is
having a much different Muslim experience than White America.
I have no quarrel with the Nation of Islam or its leader,
The Honorable Minister Louis Farrakhan, though I must preface my embrace of my
brothers and sisters with my conviction that our paths diverge
at Hagar, Abraham’s concubine who bore him the son Ishmael and
from whom the Islamic faith evolved. I am a Christian, whose
path travels through Isaac and Judaism to the virgin birth,
ministry, death and resurrection of
Jesus Christ. Which should and must not make me an enemy of
Islam any more than I am an enemy of, say, Republicans. As Rick
Warren profoundly said, “We are all betting our lives on
something. I’m betting that the Word of God is true.”
That preface notwithstanding, it is without question that
Minister Farrakhan is the most prolific, demonstrably profound
and effective voice in African American leadership today. Which
is not to in any way impugn intellectuals such as The Reverend
Dr. Michael Eric Dyson (whose voice I pitifully attempt to mimic
in my own writing), Dr. Cornel West, or even The Reverend
Jeremiah Wright. However, what separates Minister Farrakhan from
the crowd is his unflinching willingness if not eagerness to
wear the villain’s black hat. His is an uncompromised and
undomesticated voice. Frankly, you never know what the minister
is going to say next. He seems to have made peace with the
uncontested fact of his being an outcast from mainstream
society, and even politically feared by blacks as well. I have
seen no evidence that the minister can be bought, coerced,
compromised, intimidated, threatened, or mitigated in any way. I
have not heard his comments on the now-infamous Reverend Wright
sound bite, but my instinct suggests Minister Farrakhan’s
biggest problem with the “God Damn America!” rant was that he
himself didn’t think of it first.
We may not agree with everything the minister says, and, yes,
this may be me hedging a little because, frankly, I have not
listened to every single word ever spoken by him. But there is
an undeniable quotient to the minister’s speech: he says things
most of us are afraid to say. He says things virtually all black
Americans have thought at one time or another but have choked
down because of the society in which we live. Much like comedian
Jerry Seinfeld, who has made millions by drawing attention to
everyday things we all see and observe, Farrakhan’s electric,
watchable quality is he draws attention to the distressed
humanity that comprises the black experience in America. And, we
distance ourselves from him and hedge a little against him not
out of some genuine disagreement with his positions but because
of the very engine that powers his dynamism: the overwhelming
power of whites in America and Black America’s forced acceptance
of mainstream values. Hang all the posters of Rick Warren you
like: a public embrace of Farrakhan can cost you your job.
This musing is not intended as a defense of Minister Farrakhan.
Like Mark Antony, I come neither to praise nor bury Caesar but
to jot down my observations on this phenomena of “Islamic Evil.”
Putting Us In Our Place
Since its inception in Detroit by Master Wallace D. Fard
Muhammad in 1958, White America has been suspicious of the
Nation of Islam and America’s *black* Muslims, mainly because
the Honorable Elijah Muhammad preached black independence in
forceful propaganda of his own which was deliberately tinged
with hateful rhetoric about “white devils” and so forth. The
Nation of Islam has toned down much of that rhetoric but the
faith itself (which is not specifically the same as the
extremist fundamentalism practiced by Islamic Boogeyman figures
like the Taliban and al-Sadr) and its leader, Minister Louis
Farrakhan, are still largely demonized by “mainstream” America
because of the Nation’s unapologetic black nationalism and
Farrakhan’s insensitive public remarks. Precious few whites
bothered to review The Reverend Jeremiah Wright’s “God Damn
America” sermon in any context. It is a sermon not untypical of
a Sunday morning in a black church. The demonizing of Wright was
a kind of violence against Black America as they did to Wright
what they’ve yet to successfully do to Farrakhan: put a powerful
black leader in his place.
The church, for Black America, has historically been the one
place we’ve always felt comfortable to speak our mind—within our
own temple of worship. The harsh rhetoric, routine in our
experience, can be shocking to White America, who seize the most
incendiary phrases and broadcast them out of context. This
practice deeply wounds Black America, who feel invaded and
stripped of our one place of safety. We are now accosted and
ordered, under threat, to explain ourselves—parsing and
translating—to a biased and impatient audience none of us were
addressing in the first place. Which, of course, only increases
racial resentment and widens the gulf between the two Americas.
I have expressed the exact same
sentiments Wright does in his now-infamous sermon, and may have
used the same language myself had I been clever or gifted enough
to have coined the phrase. Taking a sound bite from a black
preacher, be it Wright or Farrakhan, and presenting it to
whites—to those of another culture, especially one predisposed
to receive black nationalism as an act of hostility toward
them—is a capricious act. Good preaching, good black preaching
most especially, contains eloquent flourishes of rhetorical
arguments which require context an analysis. Context requires
patience and an open mind. Our present fast-food, Persian Bazaar
flash flood of alleged “news” does not allow for either. Whites
were shocked by Wright’s words, but I know of no blacks who
were. I knew some who were puzzled or curious, but this
language, while incendiary and certainly ratcheted up a notch,
was not uncommon in our experience. I, frankly, failed to see
what the big deal was. While I certainly understood then-Senator
Obama’s need to distance himself from Wright, and his
near-disavowing of Farrakhan, I disagree with either choice. In
order to be elected, the president has had to play the game, to
distance himself from two of the most profound voices in African
American culture. This, of course, is a mark of weakness: the
most powerful man in the world is forbidden to embrace Minister
Farrakhan, arguably one of the most powerful if not the most
powerful man in Black America.
War On Islam
I don’t know if black people understand Islam any more than
white people do, but I would guess most black Americans have a
higher comfort level with their Muslim neighbors than most white
Americans do. I would speculate that most urban blacks have a
personal relationship with at least one person of Muslim faith,
and that that person is welcome in his home, at his place of
business, and, yes, at his church. I have friends and relatives
who are members of the Nation of Islam. I have no quarrel with
them. I’ve never experienced Muslims to be evil or violent, and,
despite the schism in our religious beliefs, we are not in
conflict with one another. Both Islam and Christianity have
roots in Abramic monotheism (faiths which recognize a
spiritual tradition identified with Abraham), but Islamic
tradition denies the deity of Jesus Christ and holds that Jews
and Christians distorted the revelations of God by either
altering the text, introducing a false interpretation, or both.
I am willing to guess I am likely much more comfortable around
persons of Muslim faith than many whites who not only have no
Muslim friends but no black friends. In the Nation of Islam they
see only violence and hate, in spite of the fact the Nation
tends to serve the community even moreso than many Christian
groups do. But this is the Republican (if not the American)
party line: Muslims are evil, dangerous people out to kill us.
This is the latest concoction from America’s political machine
who, once or twice a generation, labels some ethnic group
(Germans, Japanese) or ideology (Communism) as an enemy of
America. This helps them sell whatever war they are selling at
the moment and, at the moment, hating Muslims has been good for
business. White America’s irrational fear and hatred of Muslims
is every bit as wrong as the hatred taught in Islamic madrassas
all over the globe: America is evil and dangerous and out to
kill us.
We fear and hate Muslims, I suppose, because Muslims are evil
and violent. So are nutty, radical, fringe Christians. Most of
the people who hate Obama, who continue to insist Obama is a
Muslim (which they take as some kind of condemnation, using the
word “Muslim” in the same context as they once used the word
“Communist,” as if the president actually being a Muslim would
somehow be “bad”), also claim to love Jesus, which they
demonstrably do not. The Holy Spirit does not foster ignorance
or inspire violence. Radicalized, ignorant Christians are every
bit as dangerous as radicalized, ignorant Muslims. Fanaticism is
fanaticism, whether it’s about Ishmael or Isaac.
America’s traditional disavowal of Black Muslims, including but
not limited to the Nation of Islam, has traditionally excluded
“regular” Muslims, i.e. of Arabic or middle-eastern descent. We
seemed to more or less ignore Muslims as some negligible oddity
from barren worlds of sand. Growing up, I do not recall ever
drawing a straight line from Elijah Muhammad to, say, Lawrence
of Arabia, or 1981’s The Lion Of The Desert. I’m not sure I (or
anyone else) paid Muslims all that much attention before a
little-known radical cleric named Ayatollah Khomeini took 50
American diplomats hostage in Iran in 1978. The Iranian Hostage
Crisis introduced America to a new kind of Muslim. Not the
docile sheep herders of Hollywood film but young, hip, college
kids with a legitimate complaint against the United States whose
CIA had imposed a cruel dictator, The Shah of Iran, upon their
people. However, at the time, America’s complaint was with
Khomeini, not Islam.
Post 911, despite politicians’ claims to the contrary, America
is demonstrably engaged in a war against Islam. The specific
villainous figures come and go, but the Pentagon war machine has
successfully if not ingeniously managed to vilify not a person
but an ideology. Ideologies, whether religious or political,
cannot in and of themselves be either “good” or “evil.” They are
ideologies, a way of thinking, a belief system.
The Great Debate:
Pastor Gino Jennings takes on all comers at a conference with
members of the Nation of Islam.
The Latest Bat-Villain
The motivating factor for most any movement is the existence of
a villain. Regardless of your cause, if you want to get people
marching, focused, and/or writing checks, you have to hang
something or someone out as an antagonist. Somebody with a black
hat or mustache twirl you can point to and demonize as the
enemy. During World War II the villain was, of course, the Nazis
and virtually all Japanese. During the McCarthy era the enemy
was Communism, an ideology.
In the early 1990‘s, George Herbert Walker Bush fought a
successful Gulf War by buying the friendship of a wide swath of
Middle Eastern and European states, successfully ejecting Iraqi
dictator Sadaam Hussein from his unlawful annexation of Kuwait.
For Gulf War I, there was an obvious bad guy: Hussein. Not even
his Arab allies liked him very much, and nobody approved of or
supported his Kuwait invasion, least of all the rich, spoiled
Arab princes this precedent certainly threatened. Bush’s son,
George W., however, prostituted his father’s ingenious
diplomatic and military success by claiming to repeat it. In
reality, the junior Bush’s “Coalition Of The Willing,” was a
fraudulent, hollow mockery of his father’s brilliance,
consisting of a few reluctant European states and a smattering
of tiny sovereign territories bought off by U.S. loan guarantees
and other incentives.
Bush 43 attempted to focus on Sadaam once again as the villain
of the piece, but America was not all that interested in or
concerned about Sadaam. America had suffered a devastating and
shocking attack from a little-known radical Islamic group called
al Qaeda, which was led by a Saudi millionaire who bore a
striking resemblance to the character Kramer from the NBC sitcom
Seinfeld. Try as he did to place Sadaam Hussein at the center of
America’s ire, America was focused on Osama bin Laden. Every
thinking American was wondering why we were spending hundreds of
billions going after Sadaam, when bin Laden was the villain of
this new movie. And, as the Iraq war devolved into folly and
quagmire, the emergent critical voices of radical Imams like
Muqtada al-Sadr, with his uncompromising and unbridled hatred
for all things American, his TV-news-perfect black robes and
demonic scowl, grew in the American conscience, echoing the
scariness and presumed evil of radical Iranian leader Ayatollah
Khomeini.
Khomeini can likely be held historically responsible for
creating The Islamic Fundamentalist Boogeyman, but by the time
of 911, America had largely gone back to ignoring Muslims in
general as an oddity, racked up alongside the Mormons and
Jehovah’s Witnesses as simply odd or misguided religious choices
outside of the Christian mainstream.
911 changed all that, though it did not in and of itself create
the myth of Islamic Evil in our minds. As late as a year later,
most of us were still predisposed toward hatred not toward Islam
but toward those Islamic guys who attacked us. The villains
were the human men who committed heinous acts, not the faith
itself. The demonizing of the faith—despite America’s
transparently disingenuous claims and denials—was, I believe,
collateral damage from Bush 43’s tragic Iraqi misadventure.
Using the Arab bin Laden as an excuse, Bush invaded Iraq and
killed, by conservative estimate, a minimum of thirty *times* as
many people as bin Laden is accused of having killed on 911.
That the demonic-seeming (to our culture) al-Sadr emerged as a
forceful principle in that conflict, ratcheting up hatred for
America (if not specifically love for bin Laden, a disconnect
most Americans ignore), was no surprise. Al-Sadr and his fellow
hate-spewing imams made great TV. The Radical Imam icon,
therefore, overshadowed both bin Laden and Hussein as the
villain of our show. And our fear and hatred applied itself not
only to these specific individuals but to the optics —the
black robes, the burning US flags, the fundamentalist
propaganda—and ultimately blurred into a fear and loathing of
the faith itself.
Politicians, Republicans most reliably, use fear to motivate ad
manipulate the American public. Despite a dismal first term that
placed us in two wars and a spiraling economy, America reelected
George W, Bush in a 2004 squeaker by drowning out Democratic
challenger Senator John Kerry with politically-timed changes to
the ridiculous and useless color-coded Terror Alert Level (see
the essay
The Fear Merchants). Any time Bush seemed to be
foundering, they’d raise the alert and that’s all you’d see on
TV: law enforcement agencies across America scrambling (and, as
it turned out, bankrupting city budgets) to comply with this
meaningless, moronic coloring book. The Republicans just scared
everybody to death, making the tall, handsome, athletic war hero
Kerry seem like a dilettante as compared to the draft-dodging
slacker Bush, whose failure to act upon early warnings of bin
Laden’s attack is what brought on 911 in the first place. This
is what Republicans do: appeal to the most ignorant among us and
play on innate fear: vote for us or else. Democrats have
traditionally appealed to our hope and aspirations, which is a
stupid thing to do. Hope and aspirations send us off in 200
million directions. Fear unites us into a huddled mass
frightened of whatever the Boogeyman of the moment happens to
be.
Making not bin Laden, not Khalid Sheikh Mohammed, not Muqtada
al-Sadr, but their *religion* our national enemy is a stroke of
marketing genius as evil as the nonsense idea that Listerine
actually kills germs or that spinach makes you strong. It is a
lie. A vicious and cruel lie that continues to cost hundreds of
thousands of lives and amass entire continents of bereaved and
thus resentful people, every one of whom wishes death to
America. But Muslim Hate sells. Sells big. It keeps the military
hardware rolling off the assembly line and smoothes the way for
every self-serving military incursion or political assassination
our government desires. Politics relies on propaganda and
propaganda relies on our being stupid and simply believing
whatever we hear in the over-saturation of talking points within
the media echo chamber. Anyone who actually opens a book or
looks something up, asks a question or expresses a differing
view is usually considered fringe and, thus, discounted as some
crazy person with a blog.
Christopher J. Priest
9 September 2012
editor@praisenet.org
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