It seems another demographic group Democrats once took for granted is snapping out of Obama fever. At the Daily Beast, David Graham reports that American Muslims don’t think the president’s actions match his pro-Islam rhetoric. Aside from insisting that Islam is a religion of peace and appointing a few Muslims to important positions, Obama hasn’t met enough with American Muslim groups or “remade the political landscape for Muslims”:

“Just like the last time, we’re quite happy if any president offers positive rhetoric toward the Muslim world or Islam, but it really needs to be backed up with concrete policy initiatives,” says Ibrahim Hooper, communications director for the Council on American-Islamic Relations, a leading American Muslim group. “We’re still in Afghanistan, we’re still in Iraq, the Israeli-Palestinian situation has gone south. We’re not there—we’re just continuing with the previous policies.”

It’s not just foreign policy. Across the board, Muslims are expressing disappointment with Obama’s progress on issues relevant to them in the domestic policy realm. What they express is not so much anger as disillusionment, a recognition that the president hasn’t remade the political landscape for Muslims. (American Muslim opinions mirror international opinions. A Pew survey released Tuesday finds that citizens in majority Muslim countries remain skeptical of Obama.)

[…]

Exhibit A is the Park51 project, the proposed mosque and Islamic center in Lower Manhattan that opponents dubbed the “ground zero mosque”. After delivering what appeared to be a full-throated defense of the project, he walked back his comments the next day, saying, “I was not commenting, and I will not comment, on the wisdom of making the decision to put a mosque there.” It was a crucial litmus test for many American Muslims—and one that Obama failed. “He’s still missing the political courage to stand up for communities, and not just Muslim communities,” says Shireen Zaman, the executive director of the Institute for Social Policy and Understanding, a think tank on Muslim issues.

As the Left always does when discussing different ethnic groups, it’s simply assumed at the outset that the positions cited are intrinsically anti-Muslim.

Whatever you think of the wisdom of starting or continuing the Iraq and Afghanistan wars, both conflicts were waged against specific governments the United States determined to be enemies, not against Muslims generally; indeed, both wars liberated their Muslim populations from nightmarish despots and gave them a genuine shot at liberty, so one could just as easily call a premature withdrawal from either theater anti-Muslim for enabling a descent back into totalitarianism.

Similarly, supporting the Ground Zero Mosque is only “pro-Muslim” to the extent that we associate that particular mosque with the radicalism of its organizers. Do Graham and Zaman mean to suggest that most American Muslims want sharia to be preached from a bloody site of Islamic conquest? The implication is far more Islamophobic than anything the average conservative has to say on the subject. And yes, that is the implication—considering that over 100 mosques have gone up in New York City without a peep from right-wing hatemongers, why make this particular mosque the litmus test for American tolerance?

Aside from CAIR-approved action on the preceding issues, just what are these groups looking for? What would a “remade political landscape for Muslims” look like? I submit that the United States doesn’t need to become more pro-Muslim. Polls indicate that the American people overwhelmingly distinguish between peaceful Muslims and jihad sympathizers, and a comprehensive study from the Center for Security Policy reveals that Muslims are targeted by hate crimes at comparable levels to Christians, and to a much lower degree than Jews. If anything, we go overboard in our fear of offending Muslims, as in the case of Ft. Hood shooter Major Nidal Hasan. We bend over backwards to avoid discussing the theological roots of our terrorist enemies.

For Obama, this is another demonstration that it takes a lot more than the sparkling personality of The One to satisfy people—responsible policymaking can’t help but offend somebody, and not every special-interest demand is susceptible to reason.

For the rest of the country, this should highlight the folly of leftist identity politics. Human beings are first and foremost individuals, and should evaluate political issues based on the facts and principles involved, not on superficial affinities for particular stances and groups that have been imposed by the Left.  The Founders warned us about such exploitation of factional impulses—it not only confuses and oversimplifies issues, all but guaranteeing worse policy, but it also conditions us to divide into insular cultural camps and practice the very us-vs-them thinking the Left claims to oppose.

As the White House deals a devastating blow to one Obama conspiracy theory, leave it to leftists to dig up another one to browbeat allegedly-bigoted conservatives with. At the Daily Beast, pseudo-feminist Michelle Goldberg “traces the far-right history of the claim” that something funny’s going on with Barack Obama’s academic background:

Claims about Obama’s educational history date back to September 2008, when The Wall Street Journal attacked him for not releasing his school records, writing in an editorial, “Some think his transcript, if released, would reveal Mr. Obama as a mediocre student who benefited from racial preference.” Since then, Orly Taitz, queen of the birthers, has developed elaborate theories about Obama’s college years. As Taitz argues, Obama himself acknowledged that he was directionless when he started college. How, then, did he get himself accepted into the Ivy League?

Despite purporting to refute the right-wing “fever swamps,” Goldberg won’t actually reference the WSJ piece again, so it’s worth mentioning that it makes substantive points, among them that the ambiguity of Obama’s college days doesn’t square with the prominence of his personal story in his claim to fame. And as Andy McCarthy points out, Obama has a habit of modifying details of his biography for different audiences. (Ace has more solid analysis of Obama’s college days here.)

But not a peep about any of this from Goldberg. Instead of addressing what serious Obama critics have said, she spends the next couple paragraphs shooting down the theories of Orly Taitz, an especially destructive Birther attorney, who speculates that Obama attended Columbia as a foreign exchange student, attended for a mere nine months instead of two years, and even that he got into Harvard Law thanks to the machinations of a Saudi prince.

Whatever the fact-to-crap ratio of Taitz’s allegations may be (the Saudi connection seems outlandish, but the explanation of the National Student Clearinghouse rep, who says Taitz got bad results from submitting queries to NSC’s database incorrectly, doesn’t seem adequate either), it’s ultimately a sideshow. The point is, Goldberg is making clowns like Orly Taitz the face of the opposition rather than McCarthy or the Wall Street Journal editorial board because she wants to delegitimize their argument without addressing it. Why? Why else—race-baiting:

It’s easy enough to see why this particular narrative has endured. Not only does it position the president as a Muslim Manchurian candidate with longtime ties to agents of the caliphate, but it also assures resentful whites that this seemingly brilliant black man isn’t so smart after all. In that sense, it’s of a piece with the right-wing obsession with Obama’s use of a teleprompter, and with the widespread suspicion that he didn’t really write the eloquent Dreams From My Father, a claim Trump recently made at a Tea Party rally. Obama, in this view, is both sinister and stupid, canny enough to perpetrate one of the biggest frauds in American history but still the ultimate affirmative-action baby.

Trump is clearly not as intelligent as Obama, but he’s not an idiot, either. When he blows this particular dog whistle, he knows exactly what the Republican base is hearing.

No, the Right’s desire to knock Obama’s brain down a peg is a reaction to the endless mainstream media narrative that conservatives and Republicans are morons, while Obama is a genius (indeed, look no further than Goldberg’s own unsupported claim that Donald Trump’s intellect “clearly” pales in comparison to The One’s). To demonstrate the absurdity of claiming this is about Obama’s race, let’s perform a little thought experiment.

Imagine for a moment that instead of black Democrat President Barack Obama, we currently have white Democrat President Barry Osborn, who, aside from his racial and ethnic background, is identical to Obama in every way—same handling of the economy, same healthcare plan, same treatment of Israel, and the same positions on abortion, guns, etc. Then take any of the claims listed above—the president isn’t that bright, he didn’t write his book, he’s helpless without a teleprompter. Regardless of their particular merits, simply ask yourself: do you really think we’d be treating Osborn any more favorably than Obama? Do you think we’d pull these punches against a white ideological opponent, or be more open to left-wing ideas just because they came from a white leftist?

Of course not. Leftists understood from the start that Obama’s skin color would make a potent weapon for smearing opponents instead of engaging their ideas, which is exactly what Michelle Goldberg has done here.

Alas, Andrea Mitchell still hasn’t gotten the memo. NewsBusters’ Alex Fitzsimmons reports that the MSNBC host and her Democrat guest see the specter of bigotry behind Rep. Paul Ryan’s (R-WI) 2012 budget proposal:

“Representative Paul Ryan’s 2012 budget, released today, includes reforms, what they call reforms, and also big cuts in housing assistance, job training, and food stamps,” warned Mitchell. “All of which would have a very big impact on particularly poor and minority communities, some say.”

Mitchell was mum as Rep. Emanuel Cleaver (D-Mo.) bandied ludicrous assertions about the 2012 Republican budget, which would slash spending by nearly $6 trillion over 10 years mostly by reforming unsustainable health care entitlement programs.

“It’s clearly a nervous breakdown on paper and it will do enormous damage, I think, to the vulnerable populations of this country,” predicted the chairman of the Congressional Black Caucus, who added that the House Budget Chairman’s proposed cuts to non-defense discretionary spending would “devastate the poor,” particularly in America’s racial minority groups.

Citing a concise Jennifer Rubin piece, Fitzsimmons points out that the Ryan plan’s welfare reductions are modest by historical standards, and that it in fact merely “pare[s] back such programs to 2008 levels.” If anything, it sounds like the Ryan plan can be best described as a welcome opening act, but not enough to escape the hole we’ve dug for ourselves. CATO’s Michael Tanner writes that it “cuts spending by $6.2 trillion over the next ten years” yet “still adds $6 trillion to the national debt.”

Whatever the merits or shortcomings may be, crying discrimination about attempts to seriously address the problem are as unserious and irresponsible as they are dishonest and malevolent. Of course the many people who are currently getting money from Uncle Sam would like to keep it coming, but if we can’t afford it, we can’t afford it. Do Mitchell and Cleaver not believe balancing the budget is a necessity? If so, then please, show us where else to come up with the money (and no, “tax the rich” is neither more noble nor more practical). That they instead choose the tired, worn route of casting privileged white Republicans against downtrodden minorities suggests that they simply don’t care. No wonder a whopping 25% of the country has confidence in our media.

Fortunately, this is where leftists collide with the law of diminishing returns. The first few times you allege racism, you’ll turn heads. But new acts of “racism” popping up every day? There are that many outright bigots thriving in government, on TV and radio, and in the newspapers, and enough Americans are okay with it to sustain their careers? That’s harder to swallow. It becomes increasingly obvious that all the label really means is “I hate you and what you stand for.” The more people realize that the accusers don’t take the label seriously, the more they’ll stop taking it seriously, as well. If everything is racist, nothing is.

On Friday, as many as 20 United Nations staffers were killed in Afghanistan. Reuters reported it this way (emphasis added):

(Reuters) – Afghan protesters angered by the burning of a Koran by an obscure U.S. pastor killed up to 20 U.N. staff, beheading two foreigners, when they over-ran a compound in a normally peaceful northern city on Friday in the worst ever attack on the U.N. in Afghanistan.

Note the bolded part. ABC News reported it like this:

U.N. Staffers Killed in Afghanistan Over Terry Jones Koran Burning, Police Say

At least eleven people were killed, including some United Nations officials, today in Afghanistan, apparently in response to Florida pastor Terry Jones burning the Koran last month, Afghan police and U.N. officials said.

…

Police told ABC News the protest started peacefully but took a violent turn after a radical leader told those gathered that multiple Korans had been burned. In a fury, the people marched on the nearby U.N. compound despite police firing AK-47s into the air in hopes of subduing them.

You see, it is not the fault of the barbarians who murdered 20 innocent people, beheading two of them. It’s the fault of some unknown hick pastor – because he burned a book. President Obama himself furthered this odious meme with his own statement:

“The brave men and women of the United Nations, including the Afghan staff, undertake their work in support of the Afghan people,” Obama said. “Their work is essential to building a stronger Afghanistan for the benefit of all its citizens. We stress the importance of calm and urge all parties to reject violence and resolve differences through dialogue.”

Oh, really President Obama? They killed 20 people because of “differences” (like the burning of a Koran) that can be resolved if only people would have a nice rap session? I suppose he can now pat himself on his smug back for being such a good multicultural Citizen of the World ™. While President Obama and the media prostrate themselves at the altar of multiculturalism, what they are actually doing is proving themselves to be fools and racists.

Because what they believe, and what they expect us to believe, is that the killers in Afghanistan are just poor dumb “brown people” who don’t know any better. They are so simple-minded, in fact, that they can be led astray and led to commit heinous acts of murder by one unknown pastor. Never mind the fact that they behead their own people and stone women to death for the horrendous crime of baring an ankle. Or, you know, being the victim of a rape.

We philistines just don’t understand the nuance of their culture and the religion of Islam, you see.

Rep. Peter King’s announced congressional hearings on Muslim extremism have brought on a tidal wave of condemnation of the level to which America allegedly embraces anti-Islamic bigotry, so it’s important to take a look at how American Muslims are really treated in this country.

We’ve noted before how polling data indicates that the American people don’t consider most Muslims to be terrorism supporters and FBI numbers show that Muslims actually comprise a very small share of the nation’s annual hate crime victims. And yesterday, the Center for Security Policy released a new report on religiously motivated hate crimes between 2000 and 2009, which “contradicts the false assertions that hate crimes against Muslims have increased, and that the alleged cause is widespread Islamophobia in America.” CSP president Frank Gaffney says:

This report is important because it exposes a false belief perpetuated by a few vocal groups that religious bias crimes against Muslims are on the upswing.  The truth is quite the opposite.  These arguments, unsubstantiated by hard factual data, are corrosive to community relationships at every level of American society, and a potential threat to national security.

First, the report’s summary chart [download here] shows that the overwhelming majority of Americans are peaceful to members of all faiths. There were a total of 6,319 anti-religious hate crimes perpetrated against Americans of all faiths in the last decade. As despicable as every single act was, that number is well within the range we should expect in a free society of over 300 million people (consider that in 2008 alone there were 16,272 murders, 89,000 rapes, and 441,855 robberies). Neither Jews, Christians nor Muslims are suffering any kind of hate-crime epidemic.

That alone should suffice to demonstrate that Muslims are hardly getting the second-class citizen treatment—even if they were disproportionately targeted, the discrimination would still be among an astoundingly small subset of the population. But as it turns out, not even that’s true. The worst year for Muslims, predictably, was 2001, the year of the September 11 attacks, which saw 546 anti-Muslim offenses (up sharply from 33 the previous year). But over the next eight years, offenses dropped almost as sharply, fluctuating between a low of 123 and a high of 193. This is pretty consistently higher than anti-Christian offenses, though not by much, and Christians were actually victimized more than Muslims in 2000 and 2008.

The real story, though, is how those numbers compare to anti-Semitic offenses:

[In] 2009, Jewish victims of hate crimes outnumbered Muslim victims by more than 8 to 1 (1,132 Jewish victims to 132 Muslim victims). From 2000 through 2009, for every one hate crime incident against a Muslim, there were six hate crime incidents against Jewish victims (1,580 Muslim incidents versus 9,692 Jewish incidents).  Even in 2001, total anti-Muslim incidents, offenses and victims remained approximately half of the corresponding anti-Jewish totals.

The data soundly refutes the prevailing myths surrounding intolerance in America (“a Pew poll conducted in 2009 found that 58% of Americans believe there is ‘a lot of discrimination against’ Muslims, opposed to 35% who thought the same for Jews.”). And just as importantly, the report notes the sinister use to which jihadists and their allies put such misinformation. An example:

Turning to the modern Islamic scholars, Louay Safi is a Muslim author and scholar who has served at the top ranks of Muslim Brotherhood affiliates in the U.S. He formerly was the Executive Director of the Islamic Society of North America (ISNA)’s Leadership Development Center, Executive Director and Director of Research for the International Institute of Islamic Thought (IIIT), editor of the Journal of Islamic Social Sciences, and President of the Association of Muslim Social Scientists (AMSS) (1999-2003). ISNA, IIIT, and the AMSS all appear on the Muslim Brotherhood’s own list of “our organizations and the organizations of our friends.”[50] Safi currently serves as Common Word Fellow at the Prince Alwaleed bin Talal Center for Muslim Christian Understanding at Georgetown University. His credentials, in other words, would seem impeccable to speak to Islamic rulings on defensive warfare.

The slim 2001 paperback book, “Peace and the Limits of War,” was authored by Safi and published by the IIIT in response to the post-9/11 surge in public awareness of Islam and jihad. While Safi attempts to distance himself from the classical Islamic scholars on the topic of mandatory offensive jihad, he has no such compunctions when it comes to “War in defense of Muslim individuals and property.” He writes:

“When wrong is inflicted on a Muslim individual by a member, or members, of another political community….the Islamic state is obligated to make sure the individual, or his family, is compensated for his suffering, and that his rights are upheld…it suffices to say that the Islamic state should ensure that justice has been done to the wronged Muslim, even if that take a declaration of war…”

If anyone has been victimized by a widespread wave of hatred and fear-mongering, it’s the American people. For all our failings, we are a well-meaning, compassionate, decent people, who have nothing against people who look, think and believe differently, and honestly want America to be a land of freedom and opportunity for everyone. That they are defamed as bigots for their efforts to expose the villains hiding behind peaceful, liberty-loving Muslims is a more despicable act of hate than anything Peter King has in mind.

I once ate a Shabbat meal in Salt Lake City, where my hosts—staunch Republicans and Orthodox Jews—talked with wonder about the extreme courtesy with which their Mormon neighbors accommodated their religious needs. Conservatives, they explained, were actually more tolerant of minority faiths than liberals. I’d like to believe that a Muslim family in Utah or Alabama could say the same today. In a sense, the Republican Party’s honor depends on it.

My, that does sound serious! Whatever could have been the catalyst for this clarion call?

[Rep. Peter] King, a Long Island Republican, will hold hearings this week on terrorism by American Muslims. Think about that for a second. King isn’t holding hearings on domestic terrorism; he’s holding hearings on domestic terrorism by one religious group.

Yes, think about that for a second—and you’ll apparently have reflected on the issue more than Peter Beinart. As Center for Security Policy President Frank Gaffney explains, one of the reasons King’s hearings are so important is that they present the opportunity to “explore the extent to which virtually every prominent group that purports to speak for that community is a front for the Muslim Brotherhood or sympathetic to its agenda.” And if you know anything about the Brotherhood or other Islamist organizations, you know this is hardly an answer in search of a problem. Gaffney makes the following point:

[C]onfusion about the true nature and intentions of the Muslim Brotherhood is much in evidence at the moment.  The Director of National Intelligence, James Clapper, contributed to it, first by testifying last month that the Brotherhood is “a largely secular organization.”  He subsequently recanted that preposterous characteri­zation, but nonetheless downplayed concerns about the group by insisting that it is “heterogeneous,” has “eschewed violence” and is engaged in good works, like hospitals and day care.

Such contentions are, presumably, contributing to the Obama administration’s intention – as reported on the front page of the Washington Post last Friday – to establish relations with Muslim Brotherhood-dominated or other Islamist governments emerging from the revolutions sweeping the Middle East.  The implications of that decision would be incalculably problematic for our homeland security, as well as our foreign policy interests.

But Beinart can’t be bothered to actually analyze and address the reasons for King’s hearings, and continues on:

Is most American terrorism Muslim terrorism? Actually, no. Over the last decade or so, there’s been at least as much domestic terrorism by folks like Timothy McVeigh, Theodore Kaczynski, Eric Rudolph (who bombed the 1996 Atlanta Olympics), Bruce Edwards Ivins (the main suspect in the 2001 anthrax attacks), and most recently, Jared Lee Loughner. But even if American Muslims are statistically more likely to commit terrorism than non-Muslims, it is still wrong to define the problem in religious terms. I’m pretty sure that in the 1950s, Jews—given their overrepresentation in the American Communist Party—were overrepresented as Soviet spies. Italians may have been overrepresented in organized crime. Yet for a member of Congress to define either Soviet subversion or organized crime as the province of a particular religious or ethnic group would still have been wrong.

The likes of McVeigh and Loughner were not acting on behalf, or with the support of, a global movement with millions of members, political control over an entire region of the planet, and foundations in the core texts and early history of one of the world’s major religions. (Likewise, Communism is not rooted in Jewish principles or theology.) Even if, just for the sake of argument, we were to concede that the jihadists are practicing a theologically unsound version of their faith and Islam really is a religion of peace, that still wouldn’t invalidate King’s efforts—even bad theology can still be influential enough to demand attention.

Nor would King be wrong even if Islamic terrorism was no more than a matter of statistical correlation. Maybe Beinart will take the word of American Muslim journalist Asra Nomani more seriously than he takes that of a white, Christian right-winger like me:

According to a terrorism database at the University of Maryland, which documents 60 attacks against airlines and airports between 1970 and 2007, the last year available, suspects in attacks during the 1970s were tied to the Jewish Defense League, the Black Panthers, the Black September, the National Front for the Liberation of Cuba, Jewish Armed Resistance and the Croatian Freedom Fighters, along with a few other groups.

In each of these groups’ names was a religious or ethnic dimension. For that time, those were the identities that we needed to assess. Today, the threat has changed, and it is primarily coming from Muslims who embrace al Qaeda’s radical brand of Islam.

Back to Beinart:

But wait, you say, there’s a difference: It wasn’t their Jewishness that made Jews disproportionately join the Communist Party or their Italianness that made Italians disproportionately join the Mafia. Well, in a sense, it was. At a certain moment in time, certain aspects of Jewish-American or Italian-American sociology disproportionately predisposed Jews and Italians to certain problematic behavior. That may be true for Muslims today, but what the government should be targeting is the behavior, not the religious or ethnic group.

Earth to Peter: assessing radical ideologies explicitly rooted in religion and appeals made overtly on the basis of ethnic identity is “targeting the behavior.”

Were it only King and his committee, perhaps all this might be laughed off. But anti-Muslim bigotry is not a fringe view in today’s GOP. Most of the party bigwigs denounced the “ground zero mosque,” insisting that Muslims should have the good taste not to practice their religion in a place where non-Muslims might be offended, no matter how irrationally. Across the country, Republicans are rushing to head off the threat that America will soon be governed by Sharia (Islamic law). What’s next? The threat represented by Halacha (Jewish law)? After learning that the University of Michigan offers foot-washing stations to facilitate Muslim prayer, Mike Huckabee recently declared that “the accommodation we’re making to one religion at the expense of others is very un-American.”

Beinart can repeat “criticizing the Ground Zero Mosque is bigoted!” until he’s blue in the face, but that won’t make it true. For all of his caterwauling about Islamophobia, I’m still not convinced Beinart has ever familiarized himself with the radicalism of the Cordoba House’s head honcho. As for the likelihood of America falling to Sharia law, I don’t think it’ll happen “soon,” either, if it happens at all, but you don’t need an ETA to recognize something as a credible threat—after all, de facto Islamic speech control is already happening in parts of Great Britain, and Sharia has its defenders on this side of the pond, too. The way you keep outlandish possibilities outlandish is vigilance.

Smearing conservatives as bigots has been going on forever, and defending ourselves against defamation is getting old. But as long as people like Peter Beinart insist on recycling these memes, we’ll be there to take out the trash.

For the better part of the past decade, moviegoers have gotten a new batch of comic-book adaptations every summer. The trend continues in 2011 with Captain America, Thor, Green Lantern, and the latest film in the X-Men franchise, X-Men: First Class.

Set in the 1960s, First Class goes back to the origins of the mutant team, before leader Professor Xavier and archenemy Magneto became foes. And as the just-released trailer for the film reveals, this prequel has an unexpected political twist.

It seems that the X-Men intervene in the Cuban Missile Crisis. Now, there are a couple different directions this could go: a) President John F. Kennedy is, for whatever reason, unable to stop Soviet aggression himself, so it’s up to our heroes to save the day, or b) the X-Men have to get involved because the United States and the Soviet Union are both hell-bent on settling their differences in the most violent way possible rather than talking to each other. Either scenario could pan out—we all know how Hollywood feels about America and Communists, but we also know how much leftists revere JFK, and may be reluctant to portray the country as too evil under him.

The trailer doesn’t give us much to go on—we see Magneto taking out a Soviet soldier and lifting a (American?) submarine into the air, though given that his increasing hatred of all humanity is sure to factor into the plot, these can’t yet be declared representative of what the movie says the good guys should have done. We also see an unidentified character fighting a few gun-toting men in black suits—Secret Service, maybe? But again, we don’t know how the action fits into the story.

The X-Men franchise has always been politically charged—the original story of people hated and feared because of the mutant powers they were born with was originally meant as an allegory for racism, and this theme showed up in the previous films as well, with critics inferring messages about everything from gay rights to McCarthyism. These parallels have never been a perfect fit, in part because Russian spies really were out to get us, but mostly because fearing people who can level entire city blocks if they’re not careful is just a teensy bit more rational than fearing people with different skin colors or sexual orientations.

Still, the core message is a valuable one which gave the films a bit more depth than the average superhero blockbuster, and the trilogy actually turned out to be fairly pro-American—X2: X-Men United’s villain was a renegade acting largely against the president’s wishes and without the president’s knowledge, and the X-Men fought alongside American soldiers to ward off Magneto’s forces in X-Men: The Last Stand.

Perhaps future X-Men films could freshen up the prejudice theme by taking a cue from The Incredibles and exploring how hatred of those with extraordinary abilities is sometimes rooted not in fear of newness and change, but in jealousy and radical egalitarian impulses to erase every kind of natural inequality. But before we start speculating about how conservative the X-Men’s future could get, we’ll have to see how far their First Class drifted to the left.

Remember Katie Couric’s insipid suggestion that Americans needed a Muslim version of The Cosby Show to help us get over our seething Islamophobia? It earned derision in the blogosphere for its condescending view of the country as a hive of bigotry and its refusal to give the Islamic world any share of the blame for Islamic image problems, but PopEater reports that the idea is picking up steam among Muslims in the television industry:

“We want to see a typical Arab-American family that is just like every other family in America,” said Arab-American comedian Dean Obeidallah, who has developed a pilot for Comedy Central. “Television has had the ability to demonize Muslims and Arabs, but we realize that it also has the ability to humanize us.”

Couric’s suggestion might not be as radical or as far off as her critics decried. In fact, Muslim-American writers say that broadcast and cable networks are starting to be more receptive to scripts prominently featuring both Arabs and practitioners of Islam. A decade-removed from the September 11th terrorist attacks, television may finally be ready to portray Muslim-Americans as more than terrorists and taxi cab drivers.

“Hollywood would definitely embrace a Muslim ‘Cosby Show’ with one caveat: It would have to be really good. It’s the one factor that has linked shows about minorities like the ‘Cosby Show’ or even ‘Will & Grace.’ Currently, I believe Americans are open to any minority as long as the show speaks to universal human truths and makes them laugh,” said Muslim-American Hollywood television and movie producer Tariq Jalil, the executive producer of the comedy ‘Marmaduke.’ [Emphasis added.]

That’s true—as we discussed on January 3, neither the words nor the deeds of the American people indicate hostility toward American Muslims—and it’s nice to hear Jalil acknowledge what Couric didn’t, but that also undermines the alleged need for more Muslim programming in the first place.

“For a Muslim-American child to see people who look like him or her, a normal family living in the U.S., will make them feel a genuine sense of acceptance. Talking to a child about the constitution and their rights will go right over their head, show them a 30-minute sitcom and they will understand tolerance, acceptance and even equality,” said Linda Sarsour, director of the Arab American Association of New York and mother of three.

Playwright Aizzah Fatima, who wrote and performs the one-woman show ‘Dirty Paki Lingerie’ in New York City, just hopes such a program would combat the general ignorance about Islam that Couric was referring to. “Just as the Cosby show debunked stereotypes about African-Americans, so could a similar show do for Muslim-Americans. We are just like everyone else. Some of us are religious, and others aren’t. We do not want to impose Islamic law or anything else on our neighbors of different faiths.”

It’s a free country; if somebody comes up with a quality series with a Muslim cast, more power to him. But merely presenting Muslims in a positive light won’t prove the show’s worth. The true test will lie in how it tackles the violent fanaticism that makes Islam so controversial. Will the jihad angle simply be ignored, or will our heroes be presented as perpetual victims, with ignorant caricatures of middle America serving as the butt of most of the series’ jokes?

Upon reflection, I can envision a valuable sitcom about a Muslim family after all, but The Cosby Show wouldn’t be the best template. Instead, allow me to humbly suggest an alternative: All in the Family.

Picture it: just as All in the Family lampooned prejudice through Archie Bunker’s sparring with his meathead son-in-law, a new show could center around a cantankerous old Muslim immigrant, his well-meaning yet traditional wife, and his Westernized college-age kids who think it’s time to ditch the burqa and don’t mind the Jews who just moved in across the street. Not only would it entertain and present a balanced, honest view of Islam, but the subject also serves as a rare instance where Hollywood’s beloved tradition-versus-tolerance theme is still socially relevant.

On second thought, scratch that. It would never work—Archie was a cab driver.

Sometimes outside-the-box thinking proves invaluable in solving the controversies that plague us, but sometimes it turns out to be a minefield of useless self-embarrassment. CBS anchor Katie Couric’s novel approach to combating alleged Islamophobia falls firmly in the latter camp. During a panel review of 2010’s biggest stories, Couric lamented the American people’s clueless intolerance:

“The bigotry expressed against Muslims in this country has been one of the most disturbing stories to surface,” Couris said. “Of course, a lot of noise was made about the Islamic Center, mosque, down near the World Trade Center, but I think there wasn’t enough sort of careful analysis and evaluation of where this bigotry toward 1.5 billion Muslims worldwide, and how this seething hatred many people feel for all Muslims, which I think is so misdirected, and so wrong — and so disappointing.”

One wonders how Couric is measuring this “seething hatred.” By what Americans say? Doubtful—Newsweek’s latest poll on the subject found that 67% of Americans believe that “only some” or “very few” American Muslims “support the goals of Al Qaeda and the Islamic fundamentalists,” and 62% believe “most” or “many” are “peaceable and do not condone violence.”

Is she judging by what Americans do? Equally dubious—according to the FBI’s most recent statistics, Muslims were the victims of 7.7% of all religiously-motivated “hate crimes in 2008,” as opposed to Jews, who were the victims of 65.7%.

Her only concrete evidence is the nation’s strong opposition to building a mosque near Ground Zero. But even this fails. The project’s leader, Feisal Abdul Rauf, desires a “sharia-compliant” America, wrote a book whose original title explicitly called for Islamic proselytization “from the World Trade Center Rubble,” and refuses to condemn Hamas as a terrorist organization. Legitimate questions were raised about the mosque’s funding. Indeed, many mosques have gone up in New York without a peep from the “bigots”; suggesting their motives are simply sensitivity toward the placement of a cultural artifact near the site of a terrible crime committed by members of that culture, and an entirely-warranted suspicion that the mosque’s true purpose is to mark the site of a victory in the global jihad.

Admittedly, it’s kind of silly to expect Katie Couric to be aware of all this; I mean, it’s not as if she’s one of the nation’s top news anchors or anything…

Fellow panelist and NPR regular Mo Rocca noted that societal changes need to be made when “really smart,” well educated people like him don’t know much about Islam.

“I’m pretty smart, and I can’t tell you … I mean I went to really fancy schools and I cannot tell you five things about Islam. I know almost nothing about a major world religion that sits at the intersection of so many issues that all are undeniably relevant to all of us.”

And these guys consider themselves fit to judge everyone else’s views of Islam?

So common are accusations of racism from the Left that everyone with a right-of-center political disposition should expect to be accused of hating people with different skin colors at some point in his or her life. This week, it’s Haley Barbour’s turn. The Republican Governors’ Association chair is in hot water for comments that allegedly downplay racial strife in segregation-era Mississippi:

Both Mr. Mott and Mr. Kelly had told me that Yazoo City was perhaps the only municipality in Mississippi that managed to integrate the schools without violence. I asked Haley Barbour why he thought that was so.

“Because the business community wouldn’t stand for it,” he said. “You heard of the Citizens Councils? Up north they think it was like the KKK. Where I come from it was an organization of town leaders. In Yazoo City they passed a resolution that said anybody who started a chapter of the Klan would get their ass run out of town. If you had a job, you’d lose it. If you had a store, they’d see nobody shopped there. We didn’t have a problem with the Klan in Yazoo City.”

In interviews Barbour doesn’t have much to say about growing up in the midst of the civil rights revolution. “I just don’t remember it as being that bad,” he said. “I remember Martin Luther King came to town, in ’62. He spoke out at the old fairground and it was full of people, black and white.”

At the Daily Beast, Michelle Goldberg finds Barbour guilty of first-degree bigotry:

Writer Andrew Ferguson takes Barbour at his word, arguing that if Barbour’s segregationist roots become an issue in his presidential campaign, it will be because of “Washington political reporters who enjoy moralizing about race and public education while sending their own children to progressive schools like Sidwell Friends and St. Albans.”

The piece is an exquisite example of the conservative racial two-step: a blatant expression of racism, followed by aggrieved wailing at the mere thought of being called a racist. It proves that Barbour is either dishonest or so blindly ignorant that one can scarcely imagine how he’s managed a successful political career.

Of course, Goldberg has falsely smeared conservatives as racists before, undermining the idea that she’s accurately identified some common right-wing trope in the “conservative racial two-step.” But what of Barbour’s case? Goldberg says it’s “not surprising that Barbour didn’t find segregation ‘that bad,’ since he supported segregation.” She doesn’t provide a source for the claim, and I have been unable to find independent confirmation of Barbour’s stance on segregation. She does, however, go on to paint a rather less rosy picture of the Citizens Councils and race relations in Yazoo City:

At the beginning of the century, Yazoo was a violent enough place to earn prominent mentions in almost every history of lynching, with 19 men dying at the hands of white mobs before 1930. Anti-black violence continued through the 1950s, when Barbour was growing up. In 1957, for example, a white farmer murdered a black soldier for the crime of sitting at a table with the farmer’s sister […]

It’s true that in Yazoo, the local Citizens Council stood against the Klan—because it was worried about the competition. Citizens Councils were white supremacist organizations that were formed in the 1950s to defend segregation. They tended to be more upscale and respectable than the Klan, but they didn’t disagree with Klan racism. In his book Local People: The Struggle for Civil Rights in Mississippi, John Dittmer wrote, “The Yazoo City chapter of the Citizens Council went on record opposing the Klan, adding that ‘your Citizens Council was formed to preserve the separation of the races, and believes that it can best serve the county where it is the only organization operating in this field.”

Rather than resorting to terrorism, the “town leaders” of the Citizens Councils used more genteel methods to punish African Americans who dared demand civil rights. When black parents in Yazoo filed petitions to desegregate county schools, the Citizens Council took out a full-page newspaper add with their names and addresses.

]]> http://www.newsrealblog.com/2010/12/22/do-haley-barbours-racial-recollections-expose-a-bad-memory-or-something-worse/feed/ 6 http://www.newsrealblog.com/2010/12/03/dr-laura-schlesinger-set-to-return-to-radio-tackle-race-baiting-head-on/ http://www.newsrealblog.com/2010/12/03/dr-laura-schlesinger-set-to-return-to-radio-tackle-race-baiting-head-on/#comments Fri, 03 Dec 2010 14:00:25 +0000 Walter Hudson http://www.newsrealblog.com/?p=103013 Dr. Laura Schlessinger, the outspoken radio talk show host who was derided into resignation over an August on-air controversy, is set to return “uncensored, expanded, and exclusive to” SiriusXM Satellite Radio in January. True to form, Schlessinger plans to come out swinging on the very topic which drove her from terrestrial airwaves.

In confirming the exclusive arrangement to bring her talk show to satellite radio beginning Jan, 3, Schlessinger said Monday she intends to introduce roundtable discussions. Within the first three weeks one topic will be race relations and free speech.

“Racism, bigotry and hate,” Schlessinger told the Hollywood Reporter, “what they really are, instead of the politically-inspired efforts to eliminate dissenting opinions or state facts.”

This is a worthwhile and timely topic. However, Schlessinger must approach it from an angle which keeps the message intact upon delivery.

The content of Schlessinger’s argument, during the now infamous call which nearly ended her career, was completely subverted by her use of the n-word. There are certain cultural triggers which abruptly end rational discourse, and a 63-year-old white conservative’s use of the n-word (no matter the context) is one of them.

The introduction of roundtable discussions is a wise move. It will enable Schlessinger’s views to be refracted by others and better understood.

If she focuses upon the definition of words and their legitimate function, she will be able to provoke precisely the kind of debate we need on race relations. Here’s the argument I would make.

Though they are often used interchangeably, there are important differences between prejudice, discrimination, racism, and bigotry. Prejudice is simply a snap judgment informed by instinct and previous experience. Another word for discrimination is discernment. We discriminate rightfully and necessarily every day. Neither prejudice nor discrimination are inherently wrong.

Where we arrive at a problem is when prejudice is held – irrationally – in light of evidence to the contrary, and then informs discrimination. It is enlightening to consider how Random House defines racism.

a belief or doctrine that inherent differences among the various human races determine cultural or individual achievement, usually involving the idea that one’s own race is superior and has the right to rule others.

Note racism is not merely the belief that there are “inherent differences among the various human races.” How else would race be defined? Instead, racism is the belief that such differences “determine cultural or individual achievement.” The final component of racism is the belief that such differences in potential achievement justify unequal treatment under the law.

This is a very specific definition that, when considered honestly, is rarely applicable in modern American society. Yet, the term is bandied about with reckless abandon, often in reference to matters of simple discernment.

Bigotry is a word likewise misused. Random House is once again clear.

stubborn and complete intolerance of any creed, belief, or opinion that differs from one’s own.

The willingness to discuss such creeds is therefore antithetical to bigotry. In fact, as Schlessinger points out in her latest blog post on the subject, it is the intransigence of her critics which best exemplifies bigotry.

Attacking cultural Marxism in this manner, appealing to definition and its application, Schlessinger will be able to provoke much needed debate on a crucial cultural topic. The N-word needn’t be included.

—

Walter Hudson is a political commentator and co-founder of Minnesota’s North Star Tea Party Patriots, a statewide educational organization. He runs a blog entitled Fightin Words. He also contributes to True North, a hub of Minnesotan conservative commentary. Follow his work via Twitter, Facebook, and YouTube.

]]> http://www.newsrealblog.com/2010/12/03/dr-laura-schlesinger-set-to-return-to-radio-tackle-race-baiting-head-on/feed/ 2 http://www.newsrealblog.com/2010/11/30/muslim-patriot-on-national-security-profile-me-profile-my-family/ http://www.newsrealblog.com/2010/11/30/muslim-patriot-on-national-security-profile-me-profile-my-family/#comments Tue, 30 Nov 2010 19:04:36 +0000 Calvin Freiburger http://www.newsrealblog.com/?p=102523

In the wake of the Transportation Security Administration’s outrageous new pat-downs and full-body scans at airports, several prominent conservatives, including Sarah Palin and Charles Krauthammer, have called for racial/ethnic profiling as a more effective, less intrusive alternative security measure. But while leftists will react to them as they always do—call them simple-minded, knee-jerk bigots—they’ll have a harder time making that case with racial profiling’s latest advocate.

Asra Nomani is an American Muslim journalist and author who has written an important post for the Daily Beast, arguing, “Profile me. Profile my family”:

As an American Muslim, I’ve come to recognize, sadly, that there is one common denominator defining those who’ve got their eyes trained on U.S. targets: MANY of them are Muslim—like the Somali-born teenager arrested Friday night for a reported plot to detonate a car bomb at a packed Christmas tree-lighting ceremony in downtown Portland, Oregon.

We have to talk about the taboo topic of profiling because terrorism experts are increasingly recognizing that religious ideology makes terrorist organizations and terrorists more likely to commit heinous crimes against civilians, such as blowing an airliner out of the sky. Certainly, it’s not an easy or comfortable conversation but it’s one, I believe, we must have.

Nomani (of whom Hot Air has more video here) offers over a dozen examples of attempted and successful terrorist attacks over the past couple decades, all of which, oddly enough, had something in common: religious affiliation and country of origin. She of course acknowledges that religion, race, and nationality alone can’t constitute an effective security program, but contends that it’s only common sense to at least take these factors into account, and that it’s insane to pretend they have no relevance.

Is this somehow intrinsically demeaning to peaceful, freedom-loving Muslims? Nonsense:

According to a terrorism database at the University of Maryland, which documents 60 attacks against airlines and airports between 1970 and 2007, the last year available, suspects in attacks during the 1970s were tied to the Jewish Defense League, the Black Panthers, the Black September, the National Front for the Liberation of Cuba, Jewish Armed Resistance and the Croatian Freedom Fighters, along with a few other groups.

In each of these groups’ names was a religious or ethnic dimension. For that time, those were the identities that we needed to assess. Today, the threat has changed, and it is primarily coming from Muslims who embrace al Qaeda’s radical brand of Islam.

Asra Nomani can’t be dismissed as a mere Islamophobe like the Left usually does with profiling defenders. But because she thinks outside the box of pre-approved opinions leftists allow Muslims to have, she’ll either be simply ignored, or condemned as some self-hating traitor to her faith (she says one Muslim viewer called her an “Uncle Tom”). The truth is, Nomani is no traitor; in fact, her courage should be an inspiration to her fellow American Muslims. The ones who, like her, are truly repulsed by what is done in their name should stand by her side.

_____

Hailing from Fond du Lac, Wisconsin, Calvin Freiburger is a political science major at Hillsdale College.  He also writes for the Hillsdale Forum and his personal website, Calvin Freiburger Online.

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