Kimberly Lowe, a Creek Native American, stopped her car to confront a group of white males who had yelled, “Go back to your own country,” when they pinned her down and then drove over her till she died. She was mistaken for the wrong kind of Indian.
…as Islam becomes imperialist globalization’s Green Menace, “Muslim” has come to stand in for those who look or sound like immigrants.
[…]
Many who are not Muslims try to tell the country that they are not the bad ones, that being Sikh or Hindu or even atheists they should not be harassed. But the gaze of imperial whiteness does not discriminate between the dusky bodies. In its eyes, we are all Muslims.
”“The repression post-9/11 is akin to McCarthyism, but here the target is not Communism, but Islam - and ancillary to it, all political ideologies that challenge the hegemony of imperialist globalization. If guilt by association became acceptable due to McCarthyism, it returns once again after 9/11 to make those who are Muslim culpable for 9/11.
And by doing so, it erases the role played by imperialist globalization in the manufacture of those who conducted 9/11: Bin Laden was a Saudi asset well loved by the CIA until the U.S. Army marched into Saudi Arabia in 1990; most of al-Qaeda comes from among the ultra-right Islamic organizations set-up with U.S.-Saudi money in the 1960s and 1970s in their effort to thwart radical nationalism (under the flag of Egypt’s Nasser) and of Communism in the oil lands.
[…]
Like McCarthyism, the main agent for social oppression is not the state, but it is private institutions and our neighbors. The state allows them to act in this way, and does its work through their preying eyes.”
(via fariyah)
(via jayaprada)
