2 posts tagged “fear mongering”

Just over 150 years ago, Abraham Lincoln warned us that "a house divided against itself cannot stand". While the image of national disunion, prophetic as it was, was what captured the national imagination, his actual message was not that the house would fall, not that the Union would crumble, but that

It will become all one thing or all the other. Either the opponents of slavery will arrest the further spread of it... or its advocates will push it forward, till it shall become alike lawful in all the States...

His speech was a call to action, a warning that the Union was on a path that would lead to that which the North felt was inconceivable, the full legalization of slavery. It was a warning of the course the Republic was on, unless direct and strong action was taken to avert it. Sadly his speech was not strong enough to rally him the support needed to attain the Senate, let alone achieve his goal. Rather, it wasn't until the house actually began to fall, that states seceded, that a war was fought, that he achieved his goal and then paid its price.

I can easily imagine the horror he felt as his nation trod relentlessly towards slavery or disunion. I can imagine it because our house, our houses today are divided. The nation is divided, the Republican and Democratic parties are each divided, the proponents of civil liberties are divided. Polarization is rampant, and it endangers what we cherish.

A bit over 250 years ago Franklin wrote the following

As to the other two acts. The Massachusetts must suffer all the hazards and mischiefs of war, rather than admit the alteration of their charters and laws by parliament. "They who can give up essential liberty to obtain a little temporary safety, deserve neither liberty nor safety".

The last quote, which he published in slightly altered form a few years later, is reminiscent of his maxim of 270 years ago to "Sell not virtue to purchase wealth, nor Liberty to purchase power."

All of this is advice that is extremely timely. All of it came to mind as I read Glenn Greenwald and Keith Olbermann, two staunch and outspoken defenders of our civil liberties and tradition of the rule of law not men, bickering with each other, sparked by Senator Obama's abandonment of his pledge to fight against retroactive immunity and the expansion of presidential power, presumably to increase his chances of being elected. All this while we as a nation take step after inexorable step away from habeas corpus, away from posse comitatus, away from the separation of powers, away from the rule of law towards the rule of men, the ever strengthening unenumerated inherent power of the man who is the decider in unitary executive.

The time has come to put aside the bickering between Obama Democrats and PUMA "Clintonians" and put a stop to the Republican advancement of the authoritarian destruction of our civil liberties. The time has come for civil libertarians such as Greenwald and Olbermann to put aside the bickering between them. The time has come for Obama to refuse to sell liberty to purchase power. The time has come for virtue over greed. The time has come to realize that it is not immigrants, legal or illegal who are stealing our jobs, but corporations and wealthy CEOs that are shipping those jobs overseas. The time has come to realize that Islamic radicals cannot steal our freedom, only we can sell it out of fear and greed.

The time has come for Republicans to stop sacrificing every conservative principle, every liberty in the name of party loyalty. Authoritarian rule by a unified executive that can at a whim nationalize the National Guard, and employ the Armed Forces in the US in "other circumstances", augmenting that with mercenaries who operate outside both American law and that of the nation they are "helping", and law breaking public carriers immunized at the word of the unified executive--these are not conservative values. Crippling national debt is not fiscal conservatism whether it is brought on by a spendthrift congress or a Commander in Chief who refuses to budget or collect taxes for America's longest war.

The Supreme Court recently reaffirmed that the Constitution valued habeas corpus even before it affirmed the Bill of Rights. And out of party loyalty, and fear of stateless terrorists, Republicans and Conservatives pilloried them for it. What conservative principle is served by fear mongering, of surrendering our most fundamental rights? None! The only reason that Liberals and Conservatives are fighting over this issue is because of what side the other is on.

A house divided against itself cannot stand. PUMA, Greenwald, Olbermann, Get A Grip! Sell not Liberty to purchase power. Obama, stand firm! Do not capitulate on principles for fear of being soft on terrorism. It is not "Strong on Terrorism" to give up essential liberty to obtain a little safety! It certainly isn't soft on terrorism to hold law breakers accountable--even if they were asked to break the law by the president.

We have allowed polarization to divide our country and our parties. We have allowed fear to cause us to sell out our principles and our liberties. Great Republics do not fall to small bands of fanatics. They fall when fear and divisiveness cause the people to surrender their rights and freedoms to the Leader, the Dictator, the Emperor. They fall when they allow their armies, their mercenaries, their spies, their police to be turned on them. They fall when they allow the government to keep a "little list" of people who cannot move freely, when they allow free speech to be confined to zones, when the leader's agents are immune from the law. They fall when the wealthy can buy the law.

Franklin, Jefferson, Washington, Hamilton, Lincoln, Eisenhower all have warned us repeatedly against fear, greed, manipulation, the combination of money and military power. People! Stop! Think! Stop hating the enemy. Stop fearing the bogeyman. Dear me. Obama and Clinton differ in the details. Greenwald and Olbermann are on the same side of all the issues. They're calling each other names over who should be blamed for what. It doesn't matter who is blamed! What matters is what we do! Anthony Kennedy is a Conservative for great Ghu's sake.

When did it become a great Conservative value to fear monger!? Scalia says that Americans will die if we follow habeas corpus? The McCain campaign thinks it would be good for Republican political aspirations if after 8 years of the Republican Bush administration a terrorist attack was successful!? Republicans are rooting for Al Qaeda? Huh? The failure of the Republicans to keep us safe means we need more years of them? What?

Stop! Take a breath. Let's take a quick survey: Small government, low taxes, balanced budgets, states rights, free market economics, original intent, strict constructionism. Aren't those conservative values? Where did they go? The Republicans are so afraid of dissent among the ranks that they are willing to sell conservative principles for party unity and loyalty and follow a Republican president wherever he will lead.

The Democrats have so sanctified and so demonized their own leaders that they are willing to follow the Republicans into the same unprincipled "rule by men, not laws" future. The Dems, and the advocates of civil liberties are so focused on casting blame that they will attack their own allies.

Fear and division.

A House divided against itself cannot stand.
Sell not virtue to purchase wealth, nor Liberty to purchase power.
We have nothing to fear, but fear itself.

Please, get a grip.

Thank you. I'll be quiet now. We return you to the civil war, already in progress.

Sigh. It has been far too long since I wrote here, and my review of John Yoo's "The Powers of War and Peace" has sat incomplete too long. My apologies. It seems that life happens while you are busy making other plans. The Yoo review will, sadly, continue to be delayed. Reviewing and critiquing political and legal theory takes more concentrated research and thought time than I seem to be able to muster in a single lump of late. So, please forgive me if I fall back for a moment on a simpler task, and write about media fear-mongering and cultural ignorance.

I was reading this morning, a little piece over in Think Progressive regarding Fox News's fear mongering coverage of the Khalil Gibran International Academy (KGIA), a new school opening in Brooklyn that will teach the Arabic language (in a special 2 our session after normal school hours) and Arab culture. When I saw the article and the Fox video, I knew nothing about the KGIA, but it seemed a little surprising to to me to hear the phrases "Muslim school",  “Islam 101?” , “Funding Fatwa?,” and “Coming soon to a classroom near you, Al Qaeda!" used with regards to a school named after Khalil Gibran, a Lebonese Christian, excommunicated from his church and exiled from his Ottoman Turk-controlled homeland for his attacks on the corruption of the nobility and the church, so I did a little research.

On the one side I found a blog by Daniel Meeter, paster of the Old First Reformed Church, who along with Rabbi Andy Bachman had accepted the invitation of the school's designated principal, Debbie Almontaser to serve on tKGIA's advisory council, in which he described her as an American Patriot. On the other, I found an article by Daniel Pipes in the New York Sun entitled "A Madrassa Grows In Brooklyn", which described Ms. Almontaser as an extremist. This article and a whole series of articles at pipelinenews.org are echoed in blogs all over the Web.

As I said, I know nothing of the school or Ms. Almontaser, but was suspicious of claims that someone who invited a pastor and a rabbi onto the advisory council of a school named after an iconoclastic Christian was pushing a fundamentalist Islamist agenda.  After a couple of hours Googling and reading, it seems pretty clear that Fox News, Pipes, Pipline and the others are either engaged in fear mongering or are its victims.

Take, for instance, the following description of the Ms. Almontaser from a hyscience.com article entitled "The Dangerous Islamist Leftism Of Dhabah (Debbie) Almontaser And The Proposed Khalil Gibran School In Brooklyn":

According to Dhabah Almontaser, the principal designee of the proposed Khalil Gibran School in Brooklyn, the 9/11 Attacks America's Fault, and "terror is the last resource of a desperate and oppressed people" (as in oppressed by America). Almontaser's views and objectives are so bizarre that the school will be a government funded madrassah...

and contrast it with this slightly longer quote from the interview:

Terror is the last resource of a desperate and oppressed people, but that does not mean that it is acceptable. People who do terrorist acts have lost the sense of right and wrong, each individual committing such acts should be punished with the maximum extent of the law. Only Allah is entitled to take lives.

Just a little bit of a difference. She sound less of a "Dangerous Islamist" when she disapproves of terrorism and killing. When asked, "How do you think terror can be combated?" her reply was

- At least not by bombing a country into pieces! We did not bomb the hometown of Timothy McVeigh to combat terror when he exploded the Oklahoma bomb in 1995. Great Britain does not bomb North Ireland to fight down the IRA, and Spain does not kill hundreds of civilians in their search for ETA terrorists. So which right do we have to kill Afghan women and children, old and young in the search for Al Qaeda?

- Terror is combated by finding the terrorist cells, break them down and bring the responsible to justice. I am sure that our intelligence can find them. With the technology of today they survey what ever they want and are infiltrated in all kinds of communities.

At the time she said this, a little more than a year after 9/11, it was a point of view that would have been shocking or hard to swallow for a great many, but today as an ever-growing majority of Americans turn against the President's "War on Terror" it seems more mainstream.

On the other hand, her view on the causes of the 9/11 bombing are still not mainstream, and I can see how some, perhaps even many, would find them shocking or a little threatening. Asked "Why do you think terrorists attacked the USA?", she replied,

- A year ago I could not answer such a question. To me it was just impossible to comprehend how someone could do such terrible, totally sick atrocities. Many said they were not surprised that terrorists attacked the US. That hurt me deeply. Today I believe that the terrorist attacks can have been triggered by the way the USA breaks its promises with countries across the world, especially in the Middle East and the fact that it has not been a fair mediator with its foreign policy. It is not true that the people in the Middle East and Southeast Asia hate our lifestyle, our freedom and our democracy. What disturbs them is that we in order to secure our own well being, deprive them of the possibility of achieving the same high living standard and freedom of choice that we have in the western world.

[This is the point where she made the oft-quoted statement about terror being the last resource.]

This sort of candid criticism of American policy is the kind of thing that gets liberals and progressives accused of "hating America", and is an accusation that is hard for many of us to hear, but that makes it all the more important for us to listen to it and to understand where it comes from, rather than react with fear or anger. Rather than focusing solely on the extent that she holds her country responsible and not her faith or language, seeing it in a conext that starts and ends with a staunch disapproval of terror ("such totally sick atrocities... should be punished with the maximum extent of the law.") and on religious and ethical grounds in the context of her religion, can help us understand world culture and how it affects us all.

This brings me back to the thing that fist caught my ear, the fact that the Fox commentators and the critics in The New York Sun and the blogosphere all talk about the Khalil Gibran school and don't bother to mention that it was named after an anti-traditionalist Lebanese Christian, most likely because they don't even know. They fear and hate, but do not understand.

And that is not all that surprising. Gibran became quite popular in the late 60's but was generally viewed as a smaltzy poet, a source of pop aphorisms thanks to the popularity of The Prophet in both abridged and unabridged versions. In fact, though, he was really something of a radical and iconclast. Two of his works that I enjoyed while growing up were Spirits Rebellious, and Broken Wings. The first story in Spirits Rebellious, "Madame Rose Hanie" and Broken Wings address the same theme, a beautiful young woman in love with one man but in an arranged marriage with another older richer one. In Rose's case, Gibran argues explicitly that in leaving her rich husband to live with the poor one she loved, Madame Hanie was being faithful. Had she stayed, her motives and actions would be hardly different from that of a whore. Broken Wings is told from the perspective of the young man, whose beloved Selma dies in childbirth having stayed with her older husband. It was my favorite of his stories, even before I met and married my own Selma. How could I not appreciate:

In every young man's life there is a "Selma" who appears to him suddenly while in the spring of life and transforms his solitude into happy moments and fills the silence of his nights with music.

The final story in Spirits Rebellious, "Khalil, the Heretic", is of a young peasant man who stands up to a corrupt sheik and church. It's not a subtle story, but it is the one that got him exiled from his country and excommunicated from his church and the passion of its attack on church and state in the name of Jesus and the people helps one to understand his other works. (By the way, the title is not quite so self-referential as one might think, as Gibran's name was actually Gibran Khalil Gibran--Khalil Gibran was his father's name. His American publisher didn't think people would understand the double name.)

I bring up who and what Gibran was because, Anglo-Germanic Celt though I may be, his poetry, his faith, his art and his rebellion were all a part of my childhood, and it is perhaps due to that as well as all the other diverse influences that make me believe in this country and its E Pluribus Unum philosophy. The fear mongers would have us believe that the only part that matters is the "one", that foreigners should cast off their old languages and culture and become one, but that misses the great strength that there is in the "out of many". The great miracle of this country's founders was that Puritans, Anglicans, Catholics, Quakers, and Deists could all agree that their religion need not be the established one, that we could have many, or even chose none. Louisiana could join the Union with a legal code that owed more to French law than British Common Law. French-speaking enclaves could exist in New Orleans and northern New England, three Republics with Spanish traditions and histories and Spanish-speaking citizens could join the Union. We can be different and be Americans, love America.

A prayer offered by the title character of "Khalil, the Heretic" seems particularly appropriate to Vox Libertas.

Hear us, Oh Liberty;
Bring mercy, Oh Daughter of Athens;
Rescue us, Oh Sister of Rome;
Advise us, Oh Companion of Moses;
Help us, Oh Beloved of Mohammed;
Teach us, Oh Bride of Jesus;
Strengthen our hearts so we may live,
Or harden our enemies so we may perish
And live in peace eternally.

But, as ever, don't believe me. Read the works of Gibran. Read Debbie Almontaser's own words and think about them. Compare them to what is said about her. Learn something of the history of the Middle East, study from the Anglo/French, Turkish, Jewish and Arabic perspectives. See if you can synthesize a holistic view of that history from the varied versions.

Be a free voice, the voice of liberty, cry "Freedom!" till it rings.
Vox Libertas