My Soapbox
What follows will be another post about politics, race, religion, and other controversy. Leave a comment if you wish and discuss. You've been warned.
I just got an email warning me that Barack Obama has a muslim upbringing, and that muslims want to destroy this country from within. I'm not going to say who it was from, but I will say that I was surprised to get it from them.
My opinion is that ignorance is not bliss. It's deadly.
Rob mentioned once that his class of kids thought Iraq attacked us on 9/11. That would justify the Iraq war, if it were true.
This email made the assumption that muslims are the terrorists, and not that the terrorists are muslims. Last week's attack at Virgina Tech was done by a highly unstable student of South Korean descent. It does not mean all South Korean college students are going to kill us. The Oklahoma City bombing was done by a highly unstable white guy from Michigan. It does not mean all white guys from Michigan are terrorists.
Yeah, terrorists. The word has somehow become synonomus with al Qaeda, or radical muslims. But a terrorist is someone who engages in the act of terrorism, the organized threatening of violence or act of violence against civilians in order to get your way or make a political statement. Timothy McVeigh was a terrorist. The Centennial Olympic Park bombing in 1996 was a terrorist attack done by Eric Robert Rudolph. Rudolph was part of a group called "The Army of God," a right wing CHRISTIAN extremist group, which partakes in the organized bombing of abortion clinics the nation over. These are also terrorist acts, done by terrorists. Christian terrorists.
Yet we don't see christians and "keep our eyes on them." We don't send out mass emails saying they may commit acts of terrorism if elected president. Why do we do this for muslims?
On the morning of September 11, 2001, I was working at Croyden Avenue Schools. I was in class standing next to a kid named Habib, a friend of mine, a really funny guy, and a muslim from Afghanistan, when we heard what had happened. He was just as horrified as I was.
But we came up with the Patriot Act. And we jailed muslims all over the country on warrantless causes, denied them access to lawyers, and investgated. We suspended our rights as Americans, and took away our own freedoms, all out of fear. Which is very interesting...
We paint this picture of al Qaeda, as these thoughtless barbarians who live in caves. But we don't give them enough credit. They're smart enough to pilot planes very accurately. They're smart enough to launch a very organized attack and hijack four planes all simultaneously. They are smart enough to time the second hit on the World Trade Center with enough time after the first so that all the news media would broadcast their attack live to the whole world. And they are smart enough to know that you don't destroy America by knocking down a few buildings, just as you don't kill someone from the wound from a poison dart. The dart causes the noticable damage and pain, the hit is swift and painful, but not at all fatal. Then you slowly die from within.
America is the beacon of freedom, Liberty Enlightening The World, give us your tired, your poor, your huddled masses yearning to breathe free, the freedom of speech, the freedom of religion, and the freedom from religious persecution, all of which we gave up out of fear after seeing the World Trade Center fall. All those things America was built on, those principles that made us who we were, are all dead or dying slowly.
If al Qaeda wanted to destroy us from the inside, they are succeeding.
They are smart enough to know that to knock down all the dominos, you only need to knock down the first one.
We cannot continue to let this terrorist attack justify the transformation of this country from what is was to what it is becoming. I hate to draw this parallel, but there was another terrorist attack on February 27, 1933 in Berlin when the Reichstag Building, the equivalent of the Capitol Building in the USA, burned. Afterwards a new law was put into place, "justified" by the attack, called the Reichstag Fire Decree. It suspended human rights, just like the Patriot Act. It was also used to single out an entire race. Today it's the Muslims, back then it was the Jews.
They say if you don't learn from history you are doomed to repeat it. So please, let's stop this before we get really carried away.
It wasn't the Muslims who attacked us on Sept. 11, just like it wasn't the Christians who attacked Centennial Olympic Park. The goal of any religion on earth is peace and love. You'll always have the occasional asshole who is a homicidal maniac, and reads it wrong. Don't blame them all for it. Because I'm a white guy from Michigan, and I don't want my freedoms taken away because of Timothy McVeigh.
-j
I just got an email warning me that Barack Obama has a muslim upbringing, and that muslims want to destroy this country from within. I'm not going to say who it was from, but I will say that I was surprised to get it from them.
My opinion is that ignorance is not bliss. It's deadly.
Rob mentioned once that his class of kids thought Iraq attacked us on 9/11. That would justify the Iraq war, if it were true.
This email made the assumption that muslims are the terrorists, and not that the terrorists are muslims. Last week's attack at Virgina Tech was done by a highly unstable student of South Korean descent. It does not mean all South Korean college students are going to kill us. The Oklahoma City bombing was done by a highly unstable white guy from Michigan. It does not mean all white guys from Michigan are terrorists.
Yeah, terrorists. The word has somehow become synonomus with al Qaeda, or radical muslims. But a terrorist is someone who engages in the act of terrorism, the organized threatening of violence or act of violence against civilians in order to get your way or make a political statement. Timothy McVeigh was a terrorist. The Centennial Olympic Park bombing in 1996 was a terrorist attack done by Eric Robert Rudolph. Rudolph was part of a group called "The Army of God," a right wing CHRISTIAN extremist group, which partakes in the organized bombing of abortion clinics the nation over. These are also terrorist acts, done by terrorists. Christian terrorists.
Yet we don't see christians and "keep our eyes on them." We don't send out mass emails saying they may commit acts of terrorism if elected president. Why do we do this for muslims?
On the morning of September 11, 2001, I was working at Croyden Avenue Schools. I was in class standing next to a kid named Habib, a friend of mine, a really funny guy, and a muslim from Afghanistan, when we heard what had happened. He was just as horrified as I was.
But we came up with the Patriot Act. And we jailed muslims all over the country on warrantless causes, denied them access to lawyers, and investgated. We suspended our rights as Americans, and took away our own freedoms, all out of fear. Which is very interesting...
We paint this picture of al Qaeda, as these thoughtless barbarians who live in caves. But we don't give them enough credit. They're smart enough to pilot planes very accurately. They're smart enough to launch a very organized attack and hijack four planes all simultaneously. They are smart enough to time the second hit on the World Trade Center with enough time after the first so that all the news media would broadcast their attack live to the whole world. And they are smart enough to know that you don't destroy America by knocking down a few buildings, just as you don't kill someone from the wound from a poison dart. The dart causes the noticable damage and pain, the hit is swift and painful, but not at all fatal. Then you slowly die from within.
America is the beacon of freedom, Liberty Enlightening The World, give us your tired, your poor, your huddled masses yearning to breathe free, the freedom of speech, the freedom of religion, and the freedom from religious persecution, all of which we gave up out of fear after seeing the World Trade Center fall. All those things America was built on, those principles that made us who we were, are all dead or dying slowly.
If al Qaeda wanted to destroy us from the inside, they are succeeding.
They are smart enough to know that to knock down all the dominos, you only need to knock down the first one.
We cannot continue to let this terrorist attack justify the transformation of this country from what is was to what it is becoming. I hate to draw this parallel, but there was another terrorist attack on February 27, 1933 in Berlin when the Reichstag Building, the equivalent of the Capitol Building in the USA, burned. Afterwards a new law was put into place, "justified" by the attack, called the Reichstag Fire Decree. It suspended human rights, just like the Patriot Act. It was also used to single out an entire race. Today it's the Muslims, back then it was the Jews.
They say if you don't learn from history you are doomed to repeat it. So please, let's stop this before we get really carried away.
It wasn't the Muslims who attacked us on Sept. 11, just like it wasn't the Christians who attacked Centennial Olympic Park. The goal of any religion on earth is peace and love. You'll always have the occasional asshole who is a homicidal maniac, and reads it wrong. Don't blame them all for it. Because I'm a white guy from Michigan, and I don't want my freedoms taken away because of Timothy McVeigh.
-j
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