Attackerman

Two Questions About #OccupyWallStreet

I swear I'm not trolling. I'm sympathetic to #OccupyWallStreet. I just have logistics questions.

1. What was the rationale for a demonstration seeking to physically occupy Wall Street to cross into Brooklyn?

2. How did the NYPD on the Brooklyn Bridge actually arrest 700 people? In this video, the police are vastly outnumbered. If these arrest figures are correct, these were some orderly-ass protesters who would have had to willfully submit to arrest, even after the nets came out on the bridge. Which makes reported incidents of brutality seem even less justified. (Not that police brutality is ever justified, but you get my point, I hope.)

Like I said: logistics questions. I'm not seeing news accounts of the arrests explain. 

Meanwhile, Micah Sifry explains how and why he went from #occupywallstreet skeptic to supporter.

Street Justice

Watch cops beat and then pepper spray Occupy Wall Street protesters for no apparent reason.

On his Facebook page, the Cro-Mags' John Joseph has an appropriate response:

Punk/hardcore has always been about speaking up for injustice and corrupt Gov't, remember, "No justice, Just us?" Or "We Gotta Know?' So just because those of you out there might still have a job, or just don't give a fuck any more cuz becasue you got old and complacent, don't knock those who are at least trying. Cuz i guarantee you if and when the shit hits the fan in your lives and you end up desperate, or your cable gets turned off and you cant watch football all day or reality shows, you'll be out there standing up for whats right too. I'm just saying. Peace!

Quote of The Day

Give Andrew Sullivan the mic:

 ...the fact that these indignities were heaped on a man risking his life to serve this country, a man ballsy enough to make that video, a man in the uniform of the United States ... well, it tells me a couple of things. It tells me that these Republicans don't actually deep down care for the troops, if that means gay troops. Their constant posturing military patriotism has its limits.

The shocking silence on the stage - the fact that no one challenged this outrage - also tells me that this kind of slur is not regarded as a big deal. When it came to it, even Santorum couldn't sanction firing all those servicemembers who are now proudly out. But that's because he was forced to focus not on his own Thomist abstractions, but on an actual person. Throughout Republican debates, gays are discussed as if we are never in the audience, never actually part of the society, never fully part of families, never worthy of even a scintilla of respect. When you boo a servicemember solely because he's gay, you are saying he is beneath contempt, that nothing he does or has done can counterweigh the vileness of his sexual orientation.

Not really anything that I could add, but Santorum's posture that he was against "sexual" conduct by anyone in the military wrankled me with its abject dishonesty. DADT was about way more than sexual activity, as anyone with the slightest familiarity with the law could tell you. It was about having to conceal your identity down to the most minute details that straight people like me take for granted every day. Imagine not being able to put a picture of your spouse on your desk, for instance, let alone inviting him/her to the company holiday party. That was reality under DADT, for people Rick Santorum does not respect. 

Islamophobic Email of the Day

In a weird way, it's worse when they're addressed to me in a respectful tone, because this one gets real ugly real fast.

Spencer,

Contrary to a large group perception, Islam is NOT tolerant or a religion of peace.  Those Muslims who would like to update the religion so that death is not the automatic sentence for every deviation, must themselves face death and there are not many willing to do that.  It is only necessary to consult two sources for verification of the non-peaceful nature of Islam:  their holy writ and history/current events in a country run under Islamic Sharia law.  Islam by it own definition can not tolerate any other religion or law. They do not assimilate--it is against their religion. Islam will always be at war with the world, unless it is able to change the foundational doctrine--which is currently punishable by death.  Even leaving the religion is punishable by death. 

So, while I do applaud the courage of "moderate" Muslims to cooperate with law enforcement, I also have to question their motives and the extent of their cooperation.  Taqiyya is a doctrine of deciet used by Muslims to aid the expansion of Muslim goals.   Our public support needs to be for true moderates and not worry about offending the majority of Muslims who are fully "observant" ("devoted", "faithful", or any other rendition).  

Fully observant Muslims should be encouraged and aided to leave our shores and go to a country with Sharia law, where they will not be offended.  We have the strength (currently) to defend our citizens and beleiving what he Islamic doctrine states of Islamic intent and tactices is NOT discrimination.  It is realism.  Projecting our western mindset on the Islamic world will not make them western.  People are killed by wild animals everyday because they do not apprecaite that wild animals live by a different set of rules than civilized people.  Projecting our human values on bears, poisonous snakes, alligators, or any number of lethal beasts, does not make them human. It only clouds our judgement and makes us vulnerable to attack.  Believe what the Muslims tell you. They ARE out to dominate the world and kill those who will not submit.  

This was all one paragraph -- I know you're surprised by that -- but I broke it up for readability. So religious Muslims are beasts that should be deported. How do you write something like that and not stop yourself? How do you write something like that and then send it off in an email? To a journalist?

Meanwhile, there's a West Bank rabbi who believes pretty much the same thing, and will face pretty much no international condemnation. (h/t Glenn Greenwald.)

Watch The FBI's Anti-Islam Briefer Make His Case

Another Danger Room exclusive. Our full story is here.

 

I would recommend watching this video all the way through.

Quote of The Day, DADT-Death Edition

Clap for 'im:

As one major put it, “We’ve sworn an oath to protect and defend the Constitution. We didn’t join the Marine Corps to lurk in the showers.”

 

How to Not Be An Islamophobe: First, Be A Combat Vet

What follows is pure and unadulterated speculation. I can't prove what I'm about to contend. I have no data, no studies, no statistically-relevant sample. Just anecdotes and a hunch. 

The least Islamophobic cohort in American society -- except of course, for Muslims themselves -- consists of Iraq and Afghanistan veterans between the ages of 25 and 40. 

I'm basing this entirely on my interactions with combat vets over the years -- both downrange and back here in the States. It would be easy --  lazy, even -- to expect them to harbor blood-curdling hatred of Muslims. The insurgents they fought deliberately blended in with the populace, after all. 

Some of them came to war harboring precisely such hatred. They wanted to avenge 9/11, and the average Iraqi or Afghan would do. Not all did, but it would be a whitewash to ignore that some did. I had a long and mournful conversation with one such officer in Mosul in 2007.

Then something unexpected happened. They got familiar with Afghans and Iraqis. "Local nationals" translated for them. They met with local dignitaries and heard plaintive cries for help. They heard locals express bitterness and outrage over the million indignities of war. They found themselves understanding. Then sympathizing. Then wanting to help.

And then they found something more powerful than sympathy: mutual interest. They learned that they couldn't do anything significant in their unfamiliar stretches of a foreign country without the aid -- or at least the acquiescence, or apathy -- of the locals. A choice between working together or failing was no choice at all. 

Some even made friends. Iraqis and Afghans, especially those who work as interpreters or intelligence analysts, often have wonderfully vile and profane senses of humor. (In my experience, this is truer for Iraqis than Afghans, but not unheard-of for Afghans, either.) A dirty joke, a bullshit boast and an unspeakably nasty DVD or video game can bond people in warzones for life. 

Suddenly, those same Americans who barely even knew any Muslims back home -- didn't know that Allah is just the Arabic word for the exact same God many of them worship -- wanted to know more about Iraqi or Afghan culture. It didn't seem so unfamiliar; or if it did, it was the kind of unfamiliarity that posed an appealing challenge to understand. They wanted to debate about the world with the locals, and didn't even mind when the locals debated back and challenged basic points about America.

Some came home and kept up a correspondence with their new friends. Some took classes about the Middle East or South Asia to contextualize their experience. Some didn't come home at all.

Obviously, there are exceptions here. I have no illusion that this a universal experience of two searing wars. I know combat veterans who have neither love nor hate in their hearts for Muslims, just... emptiness. 

But ever since last year's "Ground Zero Mosque" flap, it's struck me that the Robert Spencers and the Pamela Gellars and the lot of them don't have their stock veterans to trot out in service of the idea that the mosque down the street is a threat to your grandmother. I do not believe that is an accident.

Most non-Muslim Americans don't have many interactions with their Muslim neighbors. Or if they do, it's not an issue. I grew up in Brooklyn, one of the most diverse places in the U.S., and it only occurred to me after 9/11 that one of the members of my high school crew was a Muslim. Combat veterans had perhaps the most self-conscious familiarity with Iraqis and Afghans of all Americans. They had no other option. 

And many, if not most, came home understanding that Muslims aren't so different. Muslims don't have heat vision. They're not implacably opposed to freedom and all that shit. They're not looking to join a terrorist group, and "proto-terrorism" doesn't lurk in their hearts. 

Like I said, I can't prove any of this. It's all anecdotal. But the more I think about it, the truer it seems. I can't think of anyone who came home from Iraq or Afghanistan more furious at the average Muslim, which is perhaps of the most surprising and profound aspects of the 9/11 Era.

Tomorrow, you'll understand why this is on my mind. 

Knife To A Gunfight, Pen To A Test, Etc.

Robert Spencer is officially too stupid to argue with Adam Serwer.

Things You Do Not Want To Teach FBI Agents

My Danger Room story today was actively distressing to report:

As recently as January 2009, the FBI thought its agents ought to know the following crucial information about Muslims:

• They engage in a “circumcision ritual”
• More than 9,000 of them are in the U.S. military
• Their religion “transforms [a] country’s culture into 7th-century Arabian ways.”

And this was what the FBI considered “recommended reading” about Islam:

• A much-criticized tome, The Arab Mind, that one reviewer called “a collection of outrageously broad — and often suspect — generalizations“
• A book by one of Norwegian terrorist suspect Anders Behring Breivik’s favorite anti-Muslim authors.

Seriously. Click through to the PowerPoint briefing I published. You'll notice that a great deal of its information is about religious practice and other constitutionally protected, totally legal behavior. And about that reading list, I like the quote Farhana Khera from Muslim Advocates gave me: "It's like asking law enforcement to learn 'the facts' about the African American experience by reading a book by the grand wizard of the KKK."

Fuck You, Pat

Buchanan, classy as ever:

As for a climactic conflict between a once-Christian West and an Islamic world that is growing in numbers and advancing inexorably into Europe for the third time in 14 centuries, on this one, Breivik may be right.

If you feel a sting on the back of your neck, that's me using my (Honorary) Muslim Heat Vision on you through my laptop.