TheAgitator.com
Press Release of the Day
Friday, November 21st, 2008Delivered to my inbox yesterday:
Al Qaeda Leader’s Anti-Obama Racial Slur Denounced by Black Conservatives
Washington, D.C. – Members of the Project 21 black leadership network are denouncing the racial slur made against President-elect Barack Obama by al Qaeda deputy Ayman al-Zawahiri, and hope al-Zawahiri’s crude action is a sobering reminder for the President-elect and his supporters about the harsh attitudes of our nation’s enemies.
“While no fan of Barack Obama, I am a proud American. I find this terrorist’s remarks directed at our nation’s incoming leader to be highly offensive,” said Project 21 chairman Mychal Massie.
I hear a repentant al-Zawahiri has scheduled a sit-down with Al Sharpton and Don Imus early next week.
It’s bad enough when your enemies are cut-throat blood-thirsty terrorists without them blurting out hurtful things on top of it. After all, people have feelings, you know.
OMG! Terrorists who kill people by the thousands are racist too??
I’m sure they’ll apologize and say there was an error in translation.
Don’t they know that hate speech is a crime? We need a higher class of terrorist.
Did anybody see when Progressive “hero” Ralph Nader essentially called Obama an “uncle Tom” on Fox news. Shepard Smith was good enough to call him on that one. I’m sure it’s on YouTube if anyone is interested. For me it was another sobering reminder that the tactics/rhetoric of those trained (indoctrinated?) by the New Left are often similar to Theocrats.
Nobody mentions the last statement in the press release.
“It is my hope that President-Elect Obama will continue to support our military and the counter-terrorism infrastructure that has kept us safe for the past seven years.”
I whole-heartedly disagree with this statement. It is our 300 military bases in 130 countries along with or imperialism that causes such alignment of philosophical hate, not prevents it.
Eric,
Nice to see you make this point. Can we add in there “Support for Israel”? It seems important enough to call out specifically. Nothing like putting the Brittish in charge of carving up the Ottoman Empire.
Anti-black racism is pretty common in the Arab world based on what I’ve heard from some apostates from Islam who have had dealings there.
Eric,
While I agree that we need to pull our troops out of the vast majority of those bases, you’re a bit naive if you think that’s why we are hated. The people who hate us hold a worldview which makes no sense to the modern secular mind. They really actually do want to finish the religious wars that started with the Islamic conquests of half of the Roman Empire and Persian Empire, and that ended when the Ottoman Empire was finally overthrown by its subject peoples.
We could stop supporting Israel tomorrow, and they would still hate us because their goals are broader and more long term than that. Bin Laden has stated in the past that one of Al Qaeda’s goal is to create a rallying cry in the Islamic world to unite once more as a single entity against the rest of the world.
found the Nader quote: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ibsP6XN2dIo
The chickens have come home to roost.
Black Americans should know that African slavery really kicked into gear when Arab and African Muslims sold African Christians, Jews and Animists to the Europeans. Those Black Africans who were not sold were usually castrated by their Arab and African Muslim masters. It is to be expected that the fellows at AQ would not be fond of Barry, no matter what his middle name might be.
With respect to Israel and the idea that Zionism and American support for it is driving terror- I promise, Muslim extremists have hated Westerners long before 1948.
Iraq war, no Iraq war, Christian president, Muslim president, Jewish president, Black president, White president…none of this matters to the terrorists. They won’t be happy until they’ve taken or destroyed everything we have.
http://rightklik.blogspot.com/
lets not ignore the generalized animosity that our lock-step with Israel causes. it IS true that “Muslim extremists have hated Westerners long before 1948″. extremists of all faiths are problematic, regardless of nationality. i don’t think there is much we can do about that. same for racists and all other xenophobes.
however, the extremists are only a % of the muslim world, and our simplistic foreign policies have done a good job of alienating much of the remainder. we don’t have enough friends and we have ceeded the “moral high ground” on many issues (lets get Gitmo in there too).
It’s funny how people still feel that’s necessary… they’re not used to dealing with people who make racially insensitive comments that they can’t publicly shame or sue into submission. Seems like that statement was pretty self-evident and unnecessary. Were there Americans that didn’t find that offensive? Seems like sort of a “given”.
Kal at The Moor Next Door has a great post on this, the language of racism and anti-Black racism in particular in the arab world, here: http://themoornextdoor.wordpress.com/2008/11/20/why-most-arabs-dont-care-if-zawahiri-casts-slurs-on-obama/
He adds, in a footnote:
There is an irony in the use of abid (lit. ‘slave’, but effectively ‘nigger’) in reference to blacks in North Africa: A great many slaves who came into the Middle East, and North Africa in particular, were white — Europeans, peoples from the Caucus and so on. Most black slaves, brought up through the Sahara, died on the way to the big trading centers. White slaves were far more numerous in Algeria and Tunisia than were blacks. Therefore it is terrifically ironic when a red-haired Tunisian or blond Algerian bitterly refers to an illegal Malian immigrant as abid, while he passes through on his way to Italy or France. And this is not only the case in North Africa, but many other Arab countries as well.
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Z, you have a funny way of looking at cause and effect when you say:
“Black Americans should know that African slavery really kicked into gear when Arab and African Muslims sold African Christians, Jews and Animists to the Europeans.”
You’re right, Arabs and Turks had a long history of taking slaves. But, Europeans and Americans didn’t build the slave trade because the Arabs did such a good job of marketing them, but because colonial agriculture needed the labour.
My understanding of the slave trade out of West Africa, for the Caribbean (sp?) and America was that the suppliers were other Africans, as much if not more than Arabs. You can’t pick one race or religion out of all the different groups that played a role in the slave trade, and say no-one else was to blame: white and black, arab and african, chistian, muslim and animist, were all guilty.
Apparently Ambrose Bierce wasn’t just lampooning conservative Americans.