As Rosh Hashanah begins, and Ramadan ends, the virulent Muslim-baiting continues.
The controversy over the so-called "Ground Zero Mosque" is only a pretense to express the hate that was already there. On Wednesday, the Republican leader in the House of Representatives refused to condemn the burning of Qurans by a deranged fanatic in Florida. He even suggested a moral equivalence between the building of the Islamic center in Lower Manhattan and the burning of the Qurans. He refused to condemn the Quran burning despite the echoes from Berlin in the 1930s and despite General Petraeus' warning that defiling Qurans would endanger American troops in Muslim countries.
It's getting bad.
This past spring, the radical right and its mouth pieces (especially Fox News) were all about immigrant bashing. But, by summer, the illegal immigrant bogeyman was replaced by the "Sharia-imposing" Muslims. As we've learned, there is absolutely nothing one cannot say about Muslims, no lines that can't be crossed when it comes to them.
But while Muslim-baiting has become part of the right's platform, that doesn't mean liberals are guiltless.
Take for instance Marty Peretz, owner of the New Republic. Peretz is no right-winger. In fact, he is on the left on most issues and so is his magazine. As long ago as 1968, he took a considerable chunk of his wife's fortune and put it into the anti-Vietnam war movement and Eugene McCarthy's candidacy for president.
But he hates Muslims. Initially, he limited his hate to Arabs, particularly Palestinians. But once the Israeli government came around to accept the legitimacy of Palestinians as a negotiating partner, Peretz began to lose it. He felt betrayed by Israelis -- he is positively obscene in his loathing for Israeli President Shimon Peres -- who for some reason are not as willing to fight to the last Israeli as he is.
Yesterday, Peretz wrote that American Muslims should not be entitled to the protections of the First Amendment. Here is the full quote, which also includes the observation, standard for Peretz, that "Muslim life is cheap" (it is to Peretz).
According to him:
But, frankly, Muslim life is cheap, most notably to Muslims. And among those Muslims led by the Imam Rauf there is hardly one who has raised a fuss about the routine and random bloodshed that defines their brotherhood. So, yes, I wonder whether I need honor these people and pretend that they are worthy of the privileges of the First Amendment which I have in my gut the sense that they will abuse.
In this quote, Peretz manages to outdo Sean Hannity, Glenn Beck, Rush Limbaugh, Steve Emerson, Pam Gellar, and even Daniel Pipes.
In general, the right invokes the Constitution (and particularly the First Amendment) as protection for all Americans and then segues into the argument that although Muslim Americans have First Amendment rights, they should show "sensitivity" and not invoke them.
But not Peretz. He believes Muslims are unworthy of the rights that even protected Nazis marching in Jewish neighborhoods and those Kansas lunatics who loudly picket the funerals and publicly cheer the deaths of US soldiers killed in Iraq and Afghanistan. Peretz suggests that the First Amendment does not guarantee a right but rather offers a "privilege" to which Muslims are not entitled.
At a time when prejudice and hate seems to have taken a hold in public discourse unlike anything seen since the days of Jim Crow, a quasi-liberal publisher in Massachusetts has taken mere hatred and raised it to the level of advocating the denial of constitutional rights to millions of Americans because of their religion.
Because Peretz is still known as a Democrat and even a liberal by those who have not followed his relatively recent descent into racial paranoia, his proposal for stripping Muslims of First Amendment rights will have traction.
Peretz has now unambiguously joined some of the most hateful elements in America, many of whom would strip adherents of his own faith of constitutional protections, too. He is now beyond the pale.
Nonetheless, on Sept. 25, Peretz is being honored by "former [Harvard] students, friends, business colleagues, fellow faculty and journalists" who will be endowing the "Martin Peretz Undergraduate Research Fund."
According to an e-mail sent out by an organizer of this tribute, "The Fund will support undergraduate thesis research, special projects and the kinds of intellectual inquiry that Marty encouraged in his students. We will honor Marty at the 50th anniversary celebration in Cambridge on September 25, 2010."
Here is the list of those soliciting support for the Peretz honors. Some you will recognize.
Bill Ackman, Michael Alter, Linc Caplan, Gerry Cardinale, Susan Carney, Jim Cramer, Alan Dershowitz, EJ Dionne, John Driscoll, Daniel Dusek, Dan Ertel, Joe Finder, Frank Foer, Donald Gogel, Russell Goldsmith, Al Gore, Jamie Gorelick, Larry Grafstein, Don Graham, Marc Granetz, Amy Gutmann, Glenn Hutchins, David Ignatius, Janno Lieber, Donal Logue, Charles Nesson, Fern Nesson, Rob Oden, Steve Pinker, Lisbet Rausing, Henry Rosovsky, Nitza Rosovsky, Abigail Thernstrom, Stephan Thernstrom, Craig Turk, Sherry Turkle, Judith Walzer, Michael Walzer, Rich Waldhorn, Leon Wieseltier, Tom Williamson, Juan Carlos Zarate, Leonard Zax, Edward Zwick, and Jesse Zwick
To be fair, none of these Peretz associates knew what he would write yesterday. But surely all or most of them know that Peretz has been virulently racist in his writings about Muslims and Arabs for years, even decades. As the Washington Post's Ezra Klein pointed out, "Peretz is rarely held to account, largely because there's an odd, tacit understanding that he's a cartoonish character and everyone knows it."
But he's not so cartoonish anymore. He has become a thuggish racist who, at a dangerous moment in our history, is doing everything he can to fan the flames of hatred.
The progressives on the list should get their names off, and fast.
As Rabbi David Saperstein said at yesterday's interfaith event in Washington denouncing Muslim-bashing, "We know what it is like when people have attacked us physically, have attacked us verbally, and others have remained silent. It cannot happen here in America in 2010."
But it is. It is time to fight back.
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To my Jewish and Muslim friends: L'Shanah Tovah and Eid Mubarak!
Follow MJ Rosenberg on Twitter: www.twitter.com/mjmediamatters
Asma Uddin: What's Behind the Negative Characterization of Muslims?
Brian D. McLaren: Instead of Burning, Try Learning
Sherman A. Jackson: What Is Shariah and Why Does It Matter?
Compare this to Helen Thomas:
http://www.boston.com/bostonglobe/editorial_opinion/oped/articles/2010/09/22/peretz_thomas_and_the_middle_east_double_standard/
It took the Helen Thomas a couple of days to play out.
And unlike Peretz, she did great things and great journalism:
http://www.nieman.harvard.edu/reportsitem.aspx?id=100453
Much as black Americans have always loudly fought for more peaceful neighborhoods, better education, and more anti-violence initiatives and that too can be confirmed with a simple Internet search. But when the only time you talk about black people is to criticize them or to use Sharpton or Jesse for a ten second soundbite so you can pretend you care about "black issues" or that they speak for the black community as a whole - I suppose that kind of willful ignorance can be understood though not supported. The parallels are pretty striking IMO.
Coming from anyone else, this might be worth debating. But most readers know by now that Marty Peretz usually approaches such subjects with his mind made up.
For all his early "liberalism," he has long since acquired a well-deserved reputation as a rather one-dimensional, reflexive Zionist -- perhaps a little more urbane than Alan Dershowitz, but no less obsessed with his own ethnicity.
Of course that is the very opposite of "liberal."
As a former tutee in Marty's Harvard Social Studies department back in the 1960s, I was also invited to that upcoming Cambridge confab. But I'm not going. This was a painful decision for me, but I made it long before Marty's latest off-the-wall remarks.
The fact is that many of us deeply admired Marty for his inspiring intellect and progressive values back in the late 1960s.
Since then, however, we've watched him gradually evolve into someone who is basically consumed by parochial loves and hates. That isn't unique -- many other once-liberal American Jews and non-Jews, blacks and whites, of that era also set out to find justice and peace in the world, and they also got lost. But we'd really prefer to remember Marty Peretz as he once was.
And anyway, how would you know if Muslims remain "mute" about violence in their various countries? It is pretty apparent to me that they are screaming at the top of their lungs about the atrocities going on in that part of the world.
The way we perceive things over here is so completely through our own lenses, it is no wonder our foreign policy initiatives are in the toilet.
Someone like this should know better than to hate based on religion or ethnicity....seems he forgot about the events of WW II....short memory.
I am concerned that these folks from gainsville are going to get some folks killed and possibly expand the war. i am assuming the war in afganistan is a declared war. that being said the u.s. should be under the war powers act. this gives our president sweeping authority to do things. like stop lunatics from enciting a billion people against us(even more)
Turkey has limits on the practice of Islam.
These nations limit free-speech right because they know the damage ideology does.
It is treason to advocate overthrowing the US government.
The First Amendment guarantees that government will not be a theocracy.
It is clearly illegal to advocate that Sharia or Christian law be implemented in the US.
It is treason. There is a limit on all free speech, even here in the US.
So cut him some slack, he is not completely irrational, assuming he applies same to Christianity.
Interestingly enough you left Judaism off your little list up there...so his religion is exempts from your "limits".
Typical.
Polling is funny that way, and if you have ever taken a course on it, you will of course find that the questions skew the outcome. I just checked out Pew's homepage and didn't immediately see anything like you mentioned - so pls direct us to your poll. I did however see a recent poll that showed almost a fifth of Americans believing Obama is a Muslim - and that number keeps growing. Obviously there is a huge amount of ignorance and intolerance in this country - we probably should tackle that first before pointing fingers at others.
Think of the right to marry: you're not born with that right, marriage is a social invention. Belongs to everybody, not to you.
Throughout history humans have been tribal, the idea of individual versus group rights was absurd to them. You followed the tribes rules or you left. Same here: Ayn Rand is wrong. Society is what matters, not the individual. We'll all be dead 130 years from now, but hopefully society will still exist. People then won't give a fig about us as individuals, just as a group: did we wreck their planet?
So, with all due respect to M. Rosenberg, what needs to be addressed is the impact of this on our economy, and jobs, and young lives sacrificed as a price for keeping that interest going in the Middle East, and not, the ravings of an unbalanced individual.
Time to abandon Israel to its fate.
You tell us, Ergon.
It should be no surprise that liberals are just as capable of bias and hatred as conservatives. The condition has nothing to do with politics, though a person's politics is influenced by their hatreds (as well as other things, obviously).
http://zionism-israel.com/zionism_definitions.htm