We Are All Juan Williams

[Ghareeb_Da_Baal]

By Shankar Vedantam
Posted Monday, Oct. 25, 2010, at 1:27 PM ET


Juan Williams told Bill O'Reilly that he gets nervous at airports when he sees Muslims. For this, Williams has been roundly denounced as a bigot. But Williams' association between innocent Muslims and the perpetrators of the 9-11 attacks was less about bigotry—at least, bigotry conventionally defined—than about his mind working normally. To live in America in the post-9/11 age and not have at least some associations between Muslims and terrorism means something is wrong with you.

I am not suggesting that associating ordinary Muslims with terrorists is either rational or right. It's neither. But the association arises via a normal aspect of brain functioning, which is precisely why so many people entertain such beliefs—and why those beliefs have proved so resistant to challenge.

The left is wrong to wish the association away only by pointing out how unfair it is, because that denies the reality of how our minds work. The right is wrong to believe the association must be accurate merely because it is widespread.

It may be helpful to see how the bias works in a less incendiary context than racial profiling and terrorism. Let's say you have an upset stomach on the morning before you take a flight. (This example comes straight from my book.) You don't make much of it because you know that things that occur together are not necessarily related. Now let's say you have a second upset stomach the following week, right before you have to take another flight. Your conscious mind might still say, "coincidences happen," but now a part of your mind starts to think that flying brings on upset stomachs.

What's interesting about this is not that our unconscious minds confuse correlation with causation—our conscious minds do that all the time, too. What's interesting is that the events our unconscious minds link together are only the unusual ones. On both days you had upset stomachs, a newspaper may have been delivered to your door, but you don't associate newspaper delivery with your upset stomach.

These automatic associations make evolutionary sense. If one of our ancestors was wandering in a desert and came by a snake curled up next to the only tree on the landscape, her mind would connect not just that tree with that snake, but all trees with snakes. Illusory correlations are all about seeking out group patterns based on rare individual incidents: all trees and snakes and all flights with stomach upsets, rather than that one tree and that one snake, or that one flight and that one stomach upset. Scientists say correlation isn't causation, but, from an evolutionary point of view, if the snake-tree link is wrong, all that would happen is our ancestor would avoid all trees in the future. If the link was real and she failed to see it, she could get herself killed. Our ancestors constantly drew conclusions about their environment based on limited evidence. Waiting for causative evidence could have proved costly, whereas extrapolating causation from correlation was less costly.

The terrorist attacks of 9/11 were unusual. (Even if you take all the terrorist attacks in the world, they are still unusual.) In seeking explanations for those events, our minds are drawn to other unusual things linked to them—especially at the group level. When members of a minority group are associated with a series of unusual incidents, our minds inflate the connection between the two. As with the snake and the tree, our association is not limited to the particular members of the minority group but all members of the group.

Juan Williams pointed out on Fox that we do not associate Timothy McVeigh and the rude people who protest about homosexuality at military funerals with Christianity. But he didn't understand why our minds fail to make that connection. Illusory correlations disproportionately afflict minorities because, in making associations, we mainly link unlikely events. Whites and Christians are not minorities; they are like the newspaper delivered to our front door every day. We do not associate McVeigh with Christians any more than we associate our upset stomach with the newspaper.

Muslims are only the latest victim of illusory correlations in the United States. African-Americans have long suffered the same bias when it comes to crime. In every country on earth, you can find minority groups that get tagged with various pathologies for no better reason than that the pathologies are unusual and the minorities are minorities.

Whenever people who strongly believe in illusory correlations are challenged about their beliefs, they invariably find ways to make their behavior seem conscious and rational. Those who would explicitly link all Muslims with terrorism might point to evidence showing that some Muslims say they want to wage a war against the West, that a large preponderance of terrorist attacks today are carried out by Muslims, and so on. This is similar to our longstanding national narrative about blacks and crime.

But even if blacks and whites do not commit crimes at the same rate, and even if Muslims are overrepresented among today's terrorists, our mental associations between these groups and heinous events are made disproportionately large by the unconscious bias that causes us to form links between unusual events and minorities.

The researchers Franklin D. Gilliam Jr., Shanto Iyengar, Adam Simon, and Oliver Wright once conducted a simple experiment that demonstrated how illusory correlations work: They showed volunteers a television news program that featured a violent crime. Some volunteers were shown a white suspect, while others were shown a black suspect, but everything else about the program remained identical. The volunteers who saw the black face were more likely to blame blacks as a whole for rising crime than the volunteers who saw the white suspect were to blame whites for rising crime. (The volunteers in the white scenario blamed that individual suspect for the crime.) The bias showed up among white as well as black volunteers.

People in Thailand will associate white American tourists with pedophilia even though many more acts of pedophilia are committed by Thais. But white Americans are a minority in Thailand, as are acts of pedophilia. So you will hear Thai people shout until they are blue in the face about individual anecdotes showing white Americans who are pedophiles. (The same is true of gay men and pedophilia in the United States.)

When it comes to our associations between Muslims and terrorism, commentators on the left are being wishful when they imagine we can rid our minds of false associations merely by holding consciously egalitarian views. Commentators on the right are doing something much more dangerous, however: They are rationalizing and justifying a mental process that is fundamentally not rational and deeply unjust.

If you know there are 1 billion Muslims on our planet (low estimate) and you've heard of 1,000 incidents where Muslims carried out terrorist attacks (an exaggerated number), and terrorist sympathies were (improbably) distributed evenly across the world, the odds that a particular Muslim is a terrorist are about 1 in a million. A rational Bill O'Reilly should be much more exercised about asteroids striking Earth, or dying from dog bites, than about Muslims being terrorists.

The fact that so many of us subscribe to illusory correlations can be blamed on our unconscious minds. The fact so few of us challenge our unconscious minds? That's on us.
Associating minorities with crime is irrational, unjust, and completely normal. - By Shankar Vedantam - Slate Magazine

 

[Speaker]

Juan Williams didn't do anything illegal, but as a radio host especially on a balanced and respectable station like NPR, he has the responsibility to not reaffirm stereotypes. He is not being judged for what he said, but for the forum and his capacity.

 

[muse]

Excellent but you will find few takers here - if there is a problem in the US with Islam and Muslims, it is the Muslims and Islam that are at fault, after all, Americans don't change the rest of the world has to change to accomodate them or else face the wrath of these modern day bezerkers.

To live in America in the post-9/11 age and not have at least some associations between Muslims and terrorism means something is wrong with you

.

Indeed and yet America will have no conversation about this development until another development has first solidified if you will - this movement is the Muslim as the new N-word in US society, a development that is primarily political in it's inspriation and ultimately dangerous to the idea of America.

But wait, the author has a slightly different take on this, but evolutionary or revolutionary, the end articulated is the same as above, it ends in Nword-dom
:

The left is wrong to wish the association away only by pointing out how unfair it is, because that denies the reality of how our minds work. The right is wrong to believe the association must be accurate merely because it is widespread....These automatic associations make evolutionary sense....Illusory correlations disproportionately afflict minorities because, in making associations, we mainly link unlikely events. Whites and Christians are not minorities...Whenever people who strongly believe in illusory correlations are challenged about their beliefs, they invariably find ways to make their behavior seem conscious and rational. Those who would explicitly link all Muslims with terrorism might point to evidence showing that some Muslims say they want to wage a war against the West, that a large preponderance of terrorist attacks today are carried out by Muslims, and so on. This is similar to our longstanding national narrative about blacks and crime

See it's all explained and we didn't have point any fingers and there are no bad guys or good guys

 

[gambit]

Guess those 'Death to America' rallies are beginning to pay off...But not the way many hoped.

 

[muse]

Whiole the lead piece's author cites Illusory correlations for being responsible for the attitudes and ideas of a majority of "Americans", lets look at another explanation - one that ties this phenomenon into the inter-related politics in Europe and USA --- and soon in Latin America:



Dutch Culture Wars
By CHRISTOPHER BICKERTON
Published: October 22, 2010

Geert Wilders, the Netherlands’ notorious right-wing extremist who is currently standing trial in an Amsterdam court accused of inciting racial hatred — has emerged as the main power broker in an unsteady coalition that has finally been put together, after months of negotiations, between the Christian Democrat and Liberal-Conservative parties. Wilders’ party, the Freedom Party, will provide parliamentary support for the coalition.

Wilders is also is the subject of a best-selling new book by the Dutch academic Meindert Fennema, “The Sorcerer’s Apprentice.”

As Fennema puts it, the Netherlands will very soon have two foreign ministers: an official one, sitting in the cabinet and following the establishment line of Euro-Atlantic moderation; and an unofficial one, Wilders, who says that there can be no moderate Islam and that any belief to the contrary will likely imperil Western civilization.

But Wilders is not solely a Dutch phenomenon. His words chime with a wider set of concerns that pervade contemporary European politics: the problem of integrating Europe’s large minority of Muslim citizens, the fears of workers who see their wages undercut by inflows of cheap labor, and concern that Western values are giving way to self-loathing and ethical relativism.

Fennema has laid out his analysis of the situation in the Netherlands. The great mistake of the Dutch political class, he says, has been to declare Wilders an Islamophobic racist and to dismiss his views as abhorrent and outside the confines of acceptable political discourse.

In attempting to silence Wilders, first politically and now through the courts, the Dutch liberal elite has evaded the thorny question of how to respond to these concerns.

Fennema portrays Wilders as really no more than a republican with a bee in his bonnet about Islam. He thinks liberal leftists are terrified of him because, in the name of multiculturalism, they have repudiated their own sense of national identity.

As Fennema put it, they have no answer to Rousseau’s famous criticism of those “supposed cosmopolitans” who “boast of loving everyone so that they might have the right to love no one.”

As an antidote to the hysterical reaction of many liberal-minded Europeans, Fennema’s insights into the origins of the Wilders phenomenon are valuable.

In an interview for this article, Fennema argued that what we are seeing today is no less than the collapse of social democracy as it was established in the Netherlands after the World War II.

In the corporatist bargain between business and labor, the old business elite maintained control of the economy but in exchange gave up control of the cultural establishment (schools, universities, etc.).

This deal was in keeping with the social democratic hope that society could be changed through culture, and through education in particular.

In the aftermath of 1968, the New Left overtook the Dutch labor movement. Beginning with the social revolution of the 1960s, and given a political voice through the events of 1968 and the movement against the Vietnam War, the New Left espoused a relativistic, cosmopolitan world view of which multiculturalism is perhaps the most concrete manifestation.

Fennema himself left the Dutch Labor Party in the 1970s in reaction to what he saw as the ethereal elitism of the New Left, and joined the Communist Party, a more “down to earth” option at the time. He left the Communist party in the 1980s, publicly recanting his left-wing past in a manner that endeared him to much of the Dutch political right — including Wilders’ mentor, Frits Bolkestein.

In Fennema’s analysis, the answer to the Wilders riddle lies in the collapse of the corporatist bargain. The old business establishment no longer holds the reins of a de-industrialized neoliberal economy. Power now lies in services and in finance rather than in old-fashioned manufacturing.

Those now in control of the economy, a younger generation of newly rich entrepreneurs and financiers, no longer respect the social pact of past decades and chafe at the values so cherished by the 1968 New Left.

As in other countries, from France to the United States, the political legacy of the ’68-ers is under attack.

What is most curious is that these culture wars should dominate political debate at a time when jobs, wages and state welfare are all under threat in the new “age of austerity.”

As budget cuts are being pushed through European parliaments, people fatalistically accept the need for painful belt-tightening. Even in France and Spain, where acceptance is not won and street protests are largest, the move toward fiscal austerity proceeds apace.

And as political parties coalesce over the need to cut public spending, debate still rages over whether or not to ban the headscarf or the burqa. Just when you would expect the battle to be fought in the economic field, culture wars are raging across Europe.

Is the popular outburst of anti-immigrant and anti-Muslim sentiment the complement to the new fatalism over the economy? If so, the current Dutch coalition maps perfectly onto this new kind of populist technocracy.

Mark Rutte, the prime minister in the current coalition and leader of the Liberal-Conservatives, is the embodiment of the technocratic leader. Wilders, his coalition partner, is the populist. Far from being the exception, this curious Dutch coalition perhaps reveals a deeper truth about the contemporary state of European politics.

Chris J. Bickerton is an assistant professor of political science at the University of Amsterdam.

 

[H2O3C4Nitrogen]

oh didnt the jews were segregated in America once they migrated to the land of freedom...!!!!

 

[Jigs]

Just another person that can't comprehend the difference between terrorists and 1.5 billion Muslims. There is no room for error here. If he has trouble understanding exactly where everything is placed then he should not be working for a place like NPR.

Lack of a educated public is the main issue. That and the Media not caring about giving any type of information. Even this administration is to blame. During the Bush administration there was a constant reinforcing of what the goals of the war was and who/what it was being fought for. Since the american public stop hearing that they have gone arrogant once more.

 

[muse]

Fennema portrays Wilders as really no more than a republican with a bee in his bonnet about Islam.

A European Tea Bagger, if you will -- Angry White Guy (read Bezerker) were also Ronal Reagan's constituency - seems as things go from bad to worse in the US, there will be a whole lot of Angry White Guys, plus some acculturated to behave as ones (you know who you are)

On a more serious side, note the political connections, note how a particular "sentiment" is being ridden by a variety of political players all over Europe and the US and note at the core of it, is not some twisted notion of Patriotism but rather cold political calculation - Just when you thought Jamaatis were the....you know what, they don't hold a candle to these Western contemporaries.

 

[muse]

As we try to understand this phenomenon and the multiple explanations for it's continued rise and growth, I invite forum members to read this piece below, again, I would bring your attention to the intellectual and political currents and suggest that these are at work in the US and in pretty much the same manner, while the relationships in the US are not the same, look att the operational effect:


Letter from IslamophobistanBy Pepe Escobar

Last Saturday, German Chancellor Angela Merkel stunned the world by declaring, in front of young members of her party, the Christian Democratic Union (CDU), that multiculturalism - or multikulti, as it is known in Germany - was dead.

The day before, I was in the Lufthansa lounge at Frankfurt airport having a parallel discussion with a group of German businessmen; they had practically handed me down a news alert on what Merkel would soon make public. Not accidentally, the best seller at all airport kiosks was the Islamophobia pamphlet published by a former Bundesbank higher-up, Thilo Sarrazin, who paints Muslim immigrants at best as lazy, welfare cheats and fornicating sub-intelligent beings.

Sarrazin sees Muslims as an existential threat to Germany on a par to hardcore Zionists seeing Iran as an existential threat to Israel.

By that time, after three weeks roving from northern Italy to southern Sweden via Copenhagen, I had no doubts; I was deep inside Islamophobistan - that Europe-wide arc where Islamophobia is being gleefully practiced as an electoral business of fear.

Arbeit macht frei

Among other things, Merkel also said that immigration was prejudicial to the German economy - an assertion which in itself is ridiculous; to fight its severe labor shortages over the past decades the country has successively resorted to gastarbeiter (guestworkers) from Italy, Spain, Greece, Turkey and the former Yugoslavia. But most of all it's those ominous, resurrection shades of a dominatrix German culture which may have sent a chill through many a European spine. What's more ominous, in fact, is that Merkel's words mirror an European-wide response to immigration.

Multikulti was the concept found in the 1980s to accommodate a wave of migrants Germany never wanted to really gobble up - not with all the trouble of assimilating their culture, their languages and their religion. The heart of the multikulti bargain was that an immigrant was allowed to be attached to his native culture, but he had to pledge loyalty to the German state.

The problem is that the ploy basically led to permanent alienation of large swathes of immigrants. And a further problem is that the European definition of a nation is through nationality.

So why is this ballistic "return of the repressed", the ever-so-touchy question of national identity in Germany, exploding now? First of all, because of those masses of Muslim workers, mostly Turkish. In Germany it seems to have coalesced an explosive amalgam of Turkey and Islam - which includes everything from jihadi terror to Turkey's application to join the European Union (EU).

All major polls agree that a majority of Germans is not exactly fond of 4 million resident Muslims (5% of the overall population). 35% believe the nation is "swamped by foreigners" and 10% want the return of a Fuhrer with an "iron hand". In Germany there are scores of neo-Nazi groups with minimal public impact; on the other hand the neo-Nazi National Democratic Party (NDP) has already reached 5% of the votes in Thuringia.

Then there's the deep crisis of the EU itself. If the German government attacks multikulti, it is at the same time affirming the primacy of German national identity. And that identity is certainly not subordinated to the notion of an overarching European identity. Mein Gott; in a nutshell the EU dream is in deep, deep trouble.

If Germany cannot import qualified workers - Merkel said the country needs at least 400,000 high-tech specialists - it may certainly export everything from its production lines to information technology support. But what if these much-needed new high-tech workers came from Russia? And Russia started to receive even more German investment? Now that is a completely different approach to the EU. And as the whole of Europe is now immersed in a severe cultural clash - real or imagined - within the EU borders, no wonder the proclaimed death of multikulti, beyond Merkel's electoral aims, is bound to have immense geopolitical and geoeconomic repercussions.

The new Inquisition

Austrian-American psychiatrist Wilhelm Reich, in his Mass Psychology of Fascism, stressed that racial theory is not a creation of fascism. On the contrary; fascism is a creation of racial hatred and its politically organized expression.

The New (anti-Islam) Inquisition did not hit Europe immediately after 9/11; it has reached critical mass only today. The popular political sport in Europe today is not to watch Real Madrid and AC Milan playing in the Champions Football League; it is to watch populists invoking Islam - depicted as an "ideology that opposes everything that matters to us" - to crystallize all manner of phobias and fears of European citizens.

Fear of Islamization, fear of the burqa - no distraction could be as convenient for people to forget the dire, unending economic crisis that has produced catastrophic unemployment rates all across Europe. This may be part of a deep cultural and psychological crisis within Europe, with not a shred of a real political alternative; but few progressive minds are alert to the fact that this turbo-charging of racism and xenophobia is also a consequence of the overall crisis of neo-liberalism.

Mad against foreigners? Mad against politicians? That's soooo last century. The new groove is mad against Islam. It does not matter that immigration to Europe has been in decline for years; still "they" have to become like "us". An aging, fearful, reactionary Europe is terrified that The Other, issued from younger or more dynamic regions of the world, is catching up.

Asia - not Europe - is the future. A melancholic weekend in a tourist/trash-infested Venice turned into a replica of its Las Vegas mirror provided me the graphic illustration; I did feel like Dirk Bogarde in Death in Venice - and so must feel countless Europeans.

Anyone left?
As much as Sweden invented modern social democracy and the best performing welfare state of the latter part of the 20th century, it was hardly surprising that the extreme right, the Sverigedemokraterna (SD, as in Swedish Democrats) first entered parliament last September 19, with 5.7% of the votes.

The SD, considered by many as "racist and neo-Nazi", is led by Jimmie Akesson, 31, the new young darling of the European extreme right alongside his elder Dutch counterpart Geert Wilders. Akesson stresses that Islam/Muslim immigration is the biggest foreign threat to Sweden since Adolf Hitler. (Wilders for his part was recently invited to Berlin by former CDU member Rene Stadtkewitz, who founded a new party, Die Freiheit ("Freedom"), named after Wilders' own Freedom Party; and he was also recently invited to New York to speak against the proposed Islamic Center in Manhattan near Ground Zero).

This video shows how the SD went no holds barred to get their votes (as it was explained to me, the video was banned, and later one private TV station would air it, but only with the video completely blurred out). No one needs to speak Swedish to understand an elderly lady being overrun to get state benefits by a horde of burqa-clad women.

There's hardly a way to evade a direct link between the historically very low score of the Swedish social democrats and the also historic rise of the extreme right. For American, Asian, Middle Eastern observers this may sound utterly suicidal; how could the Swedes possibly reject an old-school welfare state that assures to everyone the Holy Trinity of health, education and a good pension?

So if the ultra-civil Swedes were not rejecting their model, what was it? Maybe the answer is in a book first published in Italy in 2008 by Italian linguist and essayist Raffaele Simone, whose subtitle literally translates as "Why the West is not leaning to the Left".

In the extremely well-argued book, Simone proves that the European Left is intellectually dead; it simply has not understood the drive of hardcore capitalism (which he defines as "arch-capitalism", or "the political and economic manifestation of the New Right"); it has not understood the correlated primacy of individualism and consumerism; and it has refused to discuss the phenomenon of mass immigration.

From France to Denmark, from Italy to Sweden, it's easy to see how savvy populists skillfully deploy those European values of free speech, feminism and secularism - oversimplifying issues to the point that their take seems logical - as ammunition against mosques, minarets, headscarves and, of course, "sub-intelligent beings".

And then there are local realities. The majority of those voting SD were protesting against overwhelmingly Muslim immigrants, a great deal of them jobless, who come to Sweden, get fat government benefits and remain idle. Sweden is nowhere as tough on immigration as Denmark, Norway or Holland.

In Malmo, a mere 20-minute train ride via the stunning Oresund bridge from Copenhagen, about 80,000 (60,000 of them Muslims) of the overall population of 300,000 are immigrants. There are certified losers in Malmo's carefully calibrated transition from old industrial city to a post-mod consumer haven; the old, the poor, and most of all, immigrants. So Sweden seems to have posed the European-wide question of the necessity for the European welfare state to concentrate less on health care and pensions and more on "including" immigrants. But is this really the real question?

Shoot the minaret
Talk about an European summer of hate - from minarets banned in Switzerland to burqas banned in Belgium.

The populist extreme right has been part of coalition governments in Italy and Switzerland for many years now. And they are represented in the parliaments of Austria, Denmark, Norway and Finland. The National Front in France had 9% of the vote in last spring's French regional elections.

But now everywhere it feels like a Lamborghini let loose. Geert Wilders' Freedom party in Holland has turbo-charged Islamophobia to the point of almost paralyzing Dutch governance. The elegant, eloquent, peroxide-blonde populist Wilders wants to ban the Koran - which he has compared to Hitler's Mein Kampf - and impose a "headscarf tax" (how come no government thought about this in the Middle East or in Pakistan?)

French President Nicolas Sarkozy - now facing his own, self-provoked May '68 remix in the streets over his pension reform - tried to seduce (once again) the National Front by expelling planeloads of Romanian gypsies.

Austrian extreme right stalwart Heinz-Christian Strache, running for mayor of Vienna less than two weeks ago, took no less than 27% of the vote. And Barbara Rosenkranz, who insists anti-Nazi laws should be abolished, came second in Austria's presidential race.

The Islamophobic, anti-immigrant Northern League of Umberto Bossi in Italy is part of the government in Rome and not accidentally the country's fastest-growing party, now controlling the ultra-wealthy provinces of Veneto and Piemonte. During the latest election campaign, La Lega supporters handed out bars of soap to be used "after touching an immigrant".

In Spain, the movement Preventive Reconquista is gaining ground - a perhaps George W Bush-inspired preventive war against the 1 million Muslim immigrants and their allegedly "evil" plans to re-attach Spain to Islam. A "headscarf controversy" already erupted in Madrid last April. Local town councils have been prohibiting the burqa and niqab - French-style (although a national ban was only narrowly defeated in the Spanish Congress last July).

It comes as no surprise that the extreme right is more turbocharged than ever in scores of European post-industrial cities which used to be center-left; that's certainly the case of Wilders in Rotterdam, Le Pen in Marseille, Strache in Vienna and Akesson in Malmo. Simone's assessment is being proven right.

And what makes these populists even more dangerous is their cross-pollination. Austria's Freedom Party copied a game from the Swiss People's Party in which players shoot at minarets popping up in their The Sound of Music-like landscape (with the added Austrian bonus of shooting at the muezzins as well).

The SD learned a lot from Wilders as well as the Danish People's Party and its chairwoman, Pia Kjaersgaard. They are all copying Wilders' trademark tactic of pitting immigrants against old pensioners - Islamophobia mixed with the widespread fear of the welfare state being plundered by foreigners.

In France, the revamped National Front - targeting Islamophobia - may be even more dangerous, now led by non-dogmatic, "intellectual", business suit-wearing Marine Le Pen, the daughter of Jean Marie, the party's founder; Marine wants to conquer the political center, to the point where Sarkozy simply won't be able to win anything without her.

This cross-pollination might even lead to an European-wide alliance, also including the US and Canada; an Atlanticist Islamophobistan. In fact that's Wilders' dream; the outfit is actually called International Freedom Alliance and was launched last July - to "defend freedom" and "stop Islam".

Marine Le Pen is not so hot about it - her preferential agenda is to conquer power in France. The US is also a dodgy proposition - after all Muslims make up only 1% of the US population, leading to the surrealist American phenomenon of Islamophobia without Muslims. Anyway it's troubling that virtually 50% of Americans say they have a negative impression of Islam. Allah needs a good PR firm, fast.

Fear sells

So what to do? We are smack in the middle of the second globalization. The first globalization took place between 1890 and 1914. It's a back to the future scenario mixed with a return of the living dead; then as now the acceleration of capital transfer, migrations and transportation is generating regression - misguided nationalism, xenophobia, racism, and a New Inquisition.

At a recent meeting of writers and journalists organized by the magazine Internazionale in Ferrara, in Emilia - one of Italy's and Europe's wealthiest provinces - arguably the most crucial debate was titled "Islam; a specter hovers around Europe". The key speakers were Tariq Ramadan, professor of Islamic Studies at Oxford and a real academic rock star in Europe, and Olivier Roy, professor at the European University Institute in Florence and one of Europe's top authorities on Islam and jihad. It's fair to say both have provided a road map for sensible citizens to follow through.

Asked about the reasons for the widespread fear of the Muslim immigrant, Ramadan noted that this "perception harks back to the construction of the European project". These immigrants were supposed to have come to Europe just to work. "But now we have immigrants of second, third and fourth generation, they leave their ghetto, they are more visible, they feel at ease to express themselves, and their voices are heard." That causes a tremendous conflict with their overall perception.

Ramadan insists "European Muslims have it very clear in their minds the European concept of freedom of expression." And he is adamant; "Integration is a thing of the past; we are already integrated" (but try convincing Angela Merkel about it, or the citizens of Malmo for that matter).

Ramadan's key point is that Europeans - and Americans as well - should "make a clear distinction about the instrumentalization of these fears by movements and parties, derived from ignorance and fear itself. We should go beyond the theme of integration and stress common values. There is a consensus now in Europe that immigrants from second and third generation are more visible, in the cultural, political and sporting spheres. It's passivity facing instrumentalization that could become a tremendous risk for all European citizens."

Roy attacks the impasse from a different perspective. For him, "now there's a sort of fake consensus. Our consensus on Islam is related to the fact that we Europeans don't agree on what we are. Now in most European parliaments the left and right vote together to forbid the burqa, the construction of mosques ... Left and right seem to be in agreement against Islam, but for different motives. There's a disconnect between a religious marker and everyday life. What is religion? And what is culture? We should say religion is religion, and citizenship is citizenship. That's how it works in Europe. City of Man and City of God. Muslims in Europe have adopted and are adopting the European model of separation between Church and State."

Roy defines "two aspects about the fear of Islamization; immigration and Islamization. For most of public opinion, they are synonyms, but that's not true. In France, for the second and third generations, there is everything, Muslims who pray all the time, some that pray sometimes, those who have no practice but say they're Muslims, Europeans converting to Islam, Muslims converting to Catholicism ... Everything depends on the political culture of the country. Freedom of religion in Europe is not a consequence of human rights. It was defined as a compromise after centuries of religious wars. But this compromise - in each European country - is now in crisis. For two reasons. One, the nation-State is in crisis. Because of globalization, European integration, national compromises overrun by supra-national laws. And now the freedom of religious practice is an individual right. That's something entirely new in European political culture."

Not sure that would be enough to convince Wilders and Akesson. They are not for inclusion; they're for exclusion - and more than ever they know the electoral business of fear sells. The New Inquisition will go on no matter what (and it will go out of control if one of those ghostly al-Qaedas, from Iraq, from the Maghreb, from the Horn of Africa, from wherever, crashes a jet on the Eiffel Tower). With that bleak prospect in mind, I left Islamophobistan the best way I could - boarding a flight to a non-hate, non-fearful, certainly hopeful, boundless dynamic and religious war-free part of the world: South America.

Pepe Escobar is the author of Globalistan: How the Globalized World is Dissolving into Liquid War (Nimble Books, 2007) and Red Zone Blues: a snapshot of Baghdad during the surge. His new book, just out, is Obama does Globalistan (Nimble Books, 2009).

 

[Ghareeb_Da_Baal]

Yesterday NPR fired me for telling the truth. The truth is that I worry when I am getting on an airplane and see people dressed in garb that identifies them first and foremost as Muslims.

This is not a bigoted statement. It is a statement of my feelings, my fears after the terrorist attacks of 9/11 by radical Muslims. In a debate with Bill O’Reilly I revealed my fears to set up the case for not making rash judgments about people of any faith. I pointed out that the Atlanta Olympic bomber -- as well as Timothy McVeigh and the people who protest against gay rights at military funerals -- are Christians but we journalists don’t identify them by their religion.

And I made it clear that all Americans have to be careful not to let fears lead to the violation of anyone’s constitutional rights, be it to build a mosque, carry the Koran or drive a New York cab without the fear of having your throat slashed. Bill and I argued after I said he has to take care in the way he talks about the 9/11 attacks so as not to provoke bigotry.

This was an honest, sensitive debate hosted by O’Reilly. At the start of the debate Bill invited me, challenged me to tell him where he was wrong for stating the fact that “Muslims killed us there,” in the 9/11 attacks. He made that initial statement on the ABC program, "The View," which caused some of the co-hosts to walk off the set. They did not return until O’Reilly apologized for not being clear that he did not mean the country was attacked by all Muslims but by extremist radical Muslims.

I took Bill’s challenge and began by saying that political correctness can cause people to become so paralyzed that they don’t deal with reality. And the fact is that it was a group of Muslims who attacked the U.S. I added that radicalism has continued to pose a threat to the United States and much of the world. That threat was expressed in court last week by the unsuccessful Times Square bomber who bragged that he was just one of the first engaged in a “Muslim War” against the United States. -- There is no doubt that there's a real war and people are trying to kill us.

Mary Katharine Ham, a conservative writer, joined the debate to say that it is important to make the distinction between moderate and extreme Islam for conservatives who support the wars in Afghanistan and Iraq on the premise that the U.S. can build up moderate elements in those countries and push out the extremists. I later added that we don’t want anyone attacked on American streets because “they heard rhetoric from Bill O’Reilly and they act crazy.” Bill agreed and said the man who slashed the cabby was a “nut” and so was the Florida pastor who wanted to burn the Koran.

My point in recounting this debate is to show this was in the best American tradition of a fair, full-throated and honest discourse about the issues of the day. -- There was no bigotry, no crude provocation, no support for anti-Muslim sentiments of any kind.

Two days later, Ellen Weiss, my boss at NPR called to say I had crossed the line, essentially accusing me of bigotry. She took the admission of my visceral fear of people dressed in Muslim garb at the airport as evidence that I am a bigot. She said there are people who wear Muslim garb to work at NPR and they are offended by my comments. She never suggested that I had discriminated against anyone. Instead she continued to ask me what did I mean and I told her I said what I meant. Then she said she did not sense remorse from me. I said I made an honest statement. She informed me that I had violated NPR’s values for editorial commentary and she was terminating my contract as a news analyst.

I pointed out that I had not made my comments on NPR. She asked if I would have said the same thing on NPR. I said yes, because in keeping with my values I will tell people the truth about feelings and opinions.

I asked why she would fire me without speaking to me face to face and she said there was nothing I could say to change her mind, the decision had been confirmed above her, and there was no point to meeting in person. To say the least this is a chilling assault on free speech. The critical importance of honest journalism and a free flowing, respectful national conversation needs to be had in our country. But it is being buried as collateral damage in a war whose battles include political correctness and ideological orthodoxy.

I say an ideological battle because my comments on "The O’Reilly Factor" are being distorted by the self-righteous ideological, left-wing leadership at NPR. They are taking bits and pieces of what I said to go after me for daring to have a conversation with leading conservative thinkers. They loathe the fact that I appear on Fox News. They don’t notice that I am challenging Bill O’Reilly and trading ideas with Sean Hannity. In their hubris they think by talking with O’Reilly or Hannity I am lending them legitimacy. Believe me, Bill O’Reilly (and Sean, too) is a major force in American culture and politics whether or not I appear on his show.

Years ago NPR tried to stop me from going on "The Factor." When I refused they insisted that I not identify myself as an NPR journalist. I asked them if they thought people did not know where I appeared on the air as a daily talk show host, national correspondent and news analyst. They refused to budge.

This self-reverential attitude was on display several years ago when NPR asked me to help them get an interview with President George W. Bush. I have longstanding relationships with some of the key players in his White House due to my years as a political writer at The Washington Post. When I got the interview some in management expressed anger that in the course of the interview I said to the president that Americans pray for him but don’t understand some of his actions. They said it was wrong to say Americans pray for him.

Later on the 50th anniversary of the Little Rock crisis President Bush offered to do an NPR interview with me about race relations in America. NPR management refused to take the interview on the grounds that the White House offered it to me and not their other correspondents and hosts. One NPR executive implied I was in the administration’s pocket, which is a joke, and there was no other reason to offer me the interview. Gee, I guess NPR news executives never read my bestselling history of the civil rights movement “Eyes on the Prize – America’s Civil Rights Years,” or my highly acclaimed biography “Thurgood Marshall –American Revolutionary.” I guess they never noticed that "ENOUGH," my last book on the state of black leadership in America, found a place on the New York Times bestseller list.

This all led to NPR demanding that I either agree to let them control my appearances on Fox News and my writings or sign a new contract that removed me from their staff but allowed me to continue working as a news analyst with an office at NPR. The idea was that they would be insulated against anything I said or wrote outside of NPR because they could say that I was not a staff member. What happened is that they immediately began to cut my salary and diminish my on-air role. This week when I pointed out that they had forced me to sign a contract that gave them distance from my commentary outside of NPR I was cut off, ignored and fired.

And now they have used an honest statement of feeling as the basis for a charge of bigotry to create a basis for firing me. Well, now that I no longer work for NPR let me give you my opinion. This is an outrageous violation of journalistic standards and ethics by management that has no use for a diversity of opinion, ideas or a diversity of staff (I was the only black male on the air). This is evidence of one-party rule and one sided thinking at NPR that leads to enforced ideology, speech and writing. It leads to people, especially journalists, being sent to the gulag for raising the wrong questions and displaying independence of thought.

Daniel Schorr, my fellow NPR commentator who died earlier this year, used to talk about the initial shock of finding himself on President Nixon’s enemies list. I can only imagine Dan’s revulsion to realize that today NPR treats a journalist who has worked for them for ten years with less regard, less respect for the value of independence of thought and embrace of real debate across political lines, than Nixon ever displayed.

Juan Williams is now a full-time Fox News contributor.

 

[muse]

The truth is that I worry when ever I have to be involved in any kind of situation in which people dressed in a manner that identifies them first and foremost as Americans.

This is not a bigotted statement. It is a statement of my "feelings", my fears after having had offered unwilling aid and after unwillingly abetting in the murder of Muslims by US policies and US forces.


Khush?? No? well try this:

My point in recounting this debate is to show this was in the best American tradition of a fair, full-throated and honest discourse about the issues of the day. -- There was no bigotry, no crude provocation, no support for anti-American sentiments of any kind

Don't believe me? Something I said?

 

[Ghareeb_Da_Baal]

Guess those 'Death to America' rallies are beginning to pay off...But not the way many hoped.

Pls elaborate! You havent really indulged yet!

 

[Ghareeb_Da_Baal]

The truth is that I worry when ever I have to be involved in any kind of situation in which people dressed in a manner that identifies them first and foremost as Americans.

LOL.............
Expect for the extreme right wingers, most Americans are very good poeple. I can attest to that as I live there.
As for Uncle Tom Waun Williams, I would indeed be very nervous on a same felite with him. I would have to put my wallet in my Chaddi & hide my KFC bucket! Hey, dont call me a racist, I am just going by the statistics here
that represent way more that .099% & I hate to be a bigot.

 

[muse]

Mr. Williams defense is that he is being "truthful" and being punished for it - Would it be OK to be "truthful about how one "feels" about Jews and blacks, and Evangelicals and such?

Mr. Williams finds that the world is not the "safe zone" that Fox is for bashing Muslims, but Mr. Williams and many more like him will learn that safe zones for bigots come with a price - something the second largest investor in FOX the Saudi Wahabi prince Al-Waleed has yet to learn - when will the Saudi Wahabi prince Al-Waleed learn?

 

[Ghareeb_Da_Baal]

when will the Saudi Wahabi prince Al-Waleed learn?

Muse, why would he?
$$$$$$$