Um, what?
What the entire fuck? I log on to Twitter to see what's what and I'm confronted with this? From someone on my own timeline?
JoNubian is ready to drop some science on you Sand Monkey, so don't get it twisted! ... Sure, if you own a Bodega in Brooklyn you are probably South Asian but the fact that she can't tell the difference will not slow her down. (Just the opposite, apparently. Keep reading son)
Her "humanity." Hm. Right.
Although I was hurt and put off I didn't automatically write her off as a racist. Twitter lends itself to a speak-before-you-think style of posting. I was hoping she'd see that she was acting out and modify her thought. If she'd responded with, "Know what? You are right, I wasn't thinking when I posted that. Peace." we would be good.
So... Jo was offended not because the attention was unasked for and unwanted, but because she thinks an Arab woman in the same circumstance wouldn't also be harassed? Which is why she is "especially" offended by Arab men who act inappropriately on the street? What? Even if she had some way to know what street harassment is or isn't suffered by Arab women (and let's be clear, she doesn't) what does that have to do with anything? I repeat: Jo specializes in writing about race and gender. At this point I thought, wow, that is ten different kinds of fucked up.
Jo, who has over two thousand followers on her feed, then turned to them for a bit of twitter-affirmation...
...And it worked! This thought-- not wrong in general but grotesquely inappropriate in this context-- was retweeted. But here's the thing, if the only way you can articulate your oppression is to oppress me, then we have a problem. Arab men are not "savages" we are just men. Some good, some not--just like everybody else.
To which she responded:
The reality is that Jo doesn't see anything "constantly" in New York, she lives in Houston. She is a tourist in my city and she is trying to school me on how it is in New York. In the, ah, "hood." Right. But even if street harassment by Arab men is a common experience for her making racial generalizations based on a small, unrepresentative group through her unacknowledged bias doesn't lead anywhere good. I am looking at you Dr. Kanazawa. At this point it seemed clear that her pride wouldn't let her admit she was wrong and in her defensiveness she was escalating her racism.
Given that she'd gone from pretending to know what is inside the heads of all "Arab Dudes" to pretending that she knows what's inside of mine I finally got angry and said so:
And to make sure it was clear I wasn't dismissing her justifiable anger at being harassed I wrote:
And then, one last ditch effort to make her understand her actions as racist by asking her to imagine herself n my place:
So she blocked me.
Valie Export, Action Pants: Genital Panic (1969) In conjunction with the exhibition Lorna Simpson: Gathered, this symposium will explore the implications of female artists using images of women in their work, the relationship between popular culture and fine art, connections between women's history and contemporary art, perceptions of race and gender, and representations of beauty. Dr. Wendy Steiner will speak on concepts of beauty, a panel of graduate students will present current research, and a panel discussion with comedian Erica Watson, drag king Shelly Mars, and illustrator Molly Crabapple will follow.
SCHEDULE:
10:15 a.m. Dr. Steiner and panelists arrive (aside from Molly, Erica, and Shelly) for technical check
10:15-11a.m. technical checks, refreshments served
11:00am Auditorium opens
11:25am Introduction and Welcome
11:30am Keynote speaker Dr. Wendy Steiner "Beauty, Woman, Art"
12-2pm Paper session 1: Women and Image
Paula E. Hopkins, Georgetown University: "Subverting the Image: Representations of Black Women in Lorna Simpson's photography"
Shannon Vittoria, CUNY Graduate Center: "Women Artists at Work: Picturing Professionalization in Eighteenth- and Nineteenth-Century France"
Nicole Bebout, Hunter College: "How to Protect Your Virtue: Animal Transformations in the Work of Paula Rego"
Brooke Belisle, UC Berkeley: "Gathered: Portraits of Relational Identity"
Nicole Meyers, Hunter College: "Unpinning the Pinup: Axell’s Vicious Red Circle and the Coca-Cola Company”
Emilia Müller, New York University: "Fashion and Femininity in 1950s Sci-Fi Films"
Li Cornfeld, M.A., New York University: "Shooting Heroines: On Dina Goldstein's Fallen Princesses"
2-2:30pm: Lunch break. Light lunch will be served, cafe is also open.
2:30-4pm Paper session 2: Women and Embodiment
Kristen Lorello, Hunter College: "Kate Gilmore and goldiechiari: Re-envisioning the City in Rome and Beyond"
Joseph Shahadi, Ph.D, New York University: "Mona Hatoum: Foreign Body"
Aliza Shvarts, New York University: "Art, Hair, Beauty"
Thomas Naughton, Harvard University: "Performance Event or Pop Art Product: Lady Gaga's Instafilm Grimace and the new consumerist 'performance art'"
Al Janae Hamilton, New York University, "Radicalizing the Black Female Body: Fashioning Black Power from Olive Morris to Pam Grier"
3:30 p.m. Shelly Mars, Molly Crabapple and Erica Watson arrive
4:30-5:30pm Conversation with illustrator Molly Crabapple, drag king Shelly Mars, and comedian Erica Watson
This handsome devil is Jeffery Wiesnfeld.
Photo by Michael Appleton for The New York Times
The story so far: Jeffery Wiesnfeld, a City University of New York trustee and semi-professional Zionist, got his knickers twisted over the inclusion of Pulitzer Prize winning playwright Tony Kushner among a stack of proposed recipients of honorary degrees to be rubber stamped by its Board. After an impassioned, if factually dubious, recounting of Kushner's criticisms of Israel, (among other things Kushner is the Co-Editor of Wrestling With Zion: Progressive Jewish-American Responses to the Israeli-Palestinian Conflict) the Board caved like a... I'd like to think of a clever metaphor here but currently there is nothing that caves as fast or completely as the CUNY Board of Directors.
What ensued has been a fairly predictable push and pull: Kushner responded. Former honorees Barbara Ehrenreich and Michael Cunningham have returned their honorary degrees to CUNY in solidarity with Kushner. And Wiesenfeld responded to Kushner's response. In the New York Times Jim Dwyer tried to get a defensive Wiesenfeld to clarify his position, which he did by asserting that the Palestinian people aren't human.
Dwyer writes,
I tried to ask a question about the damage done by a short, one-sided discussion of vigorously debated aspects of Middle East politics, like the survival of Israel and the rights of the Palestinians, and which side was more callous toward human life, and who was most protective of it.
But Mr. Wiesenfeld interrupted and said the question was offensive because “the comparison sets up a moral equivalence.”
Equivalence between what and what? “Between the Palestinians and Israelis,” he said. “People who worship death for their children are not human.”
Did he mean the Palestinians were not human? “They have developed a culture which is unprecedented in human history,” he said.
To paraphrase one of my favorite bloggers, Shark-Fu of Angry Black Bitch:
Pause.
Blink.
Right. So how do you engage with someone who believes (and reports that belief to the New York Times) that people like you aren't human? Short answer: you don't.Like their Evangelical Christian brethren (who also do their level best to bend US civil discourse to suit their political concerns) it is pointless to engage rationally with Zionists. So rather than answer the various–-frankly ridiculously inaccurate and/or sensationally distorted–-racist and Islamophobic claims of various post Kushner-kerfuffle commenters (or of Wiesenfeld himself) I’d like to make three points:
1) The particular context of this debate aside, it should be clear that this incident sets a dangerous precedent at CUNY. Our universities are settings for the rehearsal of such arguments–to the great benefit of their students. The threat implicit in Wiesenfeld’s objection is premised on the potential economic consequences for CUNY based on public opinion, which is not fixed. If I were a Zionist I’d be very wary of opening this particular door. The times they are a-changin'.
2) The cultural behaviors, religious beliefs and legal policies of the various nations of the Arab world (and/ or Muslims in general) are utterly beside the point: the actions of the State of Israel toward the Palestinians are still wrong. They are not *less* wrong (or even somehow “right”) because some of the Palestinians do things that you (or Wiesenfeld, or even I) don’t like. Period. Ethnic cleansing doesn’t magically become justifiable when you use it against people with whom you disagree. In other words we don’t say “Well, slavery was okay because we don’t like the way the Africans treated women or gays.” We say, “Slavery is wrong.” Period.
3) This action–described by Wiesenfeld as “boycotting the boycotters”–has achieved nothing except to betray Zionist fear over the growing international influence of the cultural boycott of Israel. Bad move. I have never been more convinced that the Boycott is working than I am at this moment.
If they cannot see that this is not a Zionist “moral” victory but rather a sloppy, public misstep then they are kidding themselves.
William Pope.L
On Friday, March 4th, the Center for the Humanities at the The Graduate Center (CUNY) will host the conference The Scandals of Susan Sontag, in collaboration with Stony Brook University’s Humanities Institute. The event will take place in the Skylight Room, The Graduate Center, 365 Fifth Avenue, New York. The event will begin with registration at 10:00 a.m. and is free and open to the public.
It has been a long process. There were times over the past few years that I thought I would crack from the stress. I wrote about... difficult things. At times they made me soul-sick even though I knew they were important to write about: Guantanamo, self-immolation, suicide terror, torture, hunger strikes. There were times I thought, "What the hell am I doing?" "Why am I not writing about something simpler?" I had nightmares for years.
The landscape of America is littered with bodies.
They’ve been gunned down in Tucson, shot to death at the Pentagon, and blown away at the Holocaust Museum, as well as in Wichita, Knoxville, Pittsburgh, Brockton, and Okaloosa County, Florida.
Total body count for these incidents: 19 dead, 26 wounded.
Not much, you might say, when taken in the context of about 30,000 gun-related deaths annually nationwide. As it happens, though, these murders over the past couple of years have some common threads. All involved white gunmen with ties to racist or right-wing groups or who harbored deep suspicions of “the government.” Many involved the killing of police officers.
In Pittsburgh, three police officers were shot and killed, while two were wounded in an April 2009 gun battle with Richard Poplawski, a white supremacist fearful that President Obama planned to curtail his gun rights. In Okaloosa County, Florida, two officers were slain in April 2009 in an altercation with Joshua Cartwright, whose abused wife told the police that her husband “believed that the U.S. Government was conspiring against him” and that he was “severely disturbed that Barack Obama had been elected President.”
At the Pentagon, an anti-government conspiracy theorist, John Patrick Bedell, wounded two police officers in March of last year before being shot to death. At the Holocaust Museum in 2009, James W. Von Brunn, a white supremacist, gunned down a security guard before being wounded and subdued by two other security guards.
Government officials, of course, have also been targets of the gunmen, as demonstrated so vividly by the recent shootings in Tucson, where Arizona Democratic Congresswoman Gabrielle Giffords and 12 others were wounded, and one of Giffords’s staff members and a federal judge were among the six dead.
Churches Are No Sanctuary from Christian Extremists
Two of these shootings took place within the sanctuary of churches. In Wichita in 2009, Dr. George Tiller was gunned down by anti-abortion extremist Scott Roeder. Tiller was serving as an usher during a Sunday morning service at Reformation Lutheran Church when he was shot. The attack in Knoxville, which left two dead and six injured in July 2008, occurred at the Tennessee Valley Unitarian Universalist Church while 25 children were performing Annie Jr. Killer Jim David Adkisson said he hated Democrats and deemed the church part of the “liberal movement.” Adkisson opened fire with a shotgun on an audience of about 200. In Brockton, Massachusetts, in January 2009, neo-Nazi Keith Luke sought to storm a synagogue, but never made it, authorities claim. According to a prosecutor, Luke wanted to “kill as many Jews, blacks, and Hispanics as humanly possible.” In his rampage, he reportedly murdered two Hispanics and raped and wounded a third before, near the synagogue, he was wrestled to the ground by ordinary citizens.
Since the 1995 Oklahoma City bombing -- initially attributed by numerous media experts to Arab terrorists but actually the work of right-wing militia-movement supporter Timothy McVeigh -- more than 25 law-enforcement officers have been killed by white supremacists, according to the Southern Poverty Law Center.
Extremist Wreckage Pockmarks the American Landscape
Beyond the shootings -- and those enumerated above are only a sample of such incidents since 2008 -- there is a landscape of rubble and carnage. In February 2010, Joseph Stack, infuriated by the IRS and U.S. tax policy, crashed his small plane into an Austin office building housing 200 IRS workers, killing himself and two others and injuring 13. Violence, he wrote in a “manifesto,” is “the only answer” to oppressive government policies.
Sometimes the wreckage left behind from such incidents is easily overlooked, a roadside crash on a springtime day. In Nashville last March, a motorist was so enraged by an Obama bumper sticker that he rammed his SUV into the offending car, pushing it off the road and onto the sidewalk, leaving a man and his 10-year-old daughter terrified inside.
Sometimes the incidents reveal deep emotional wounds. Just before Christmas in 2008, in Belfast, Maine, an abused wife shot and killed her husband, James Cummings, a wealthy California native and Nazi devotee. Loathing Barack Obama, he was planning to join the neo-Nazi National Socialist Movement at the time he was shot. Police and federal agents subsequently found radioactive materials and instructions for the making of a “dirty bomb” in his house, according to an FBI document released by WikiLeaks.
An FBI official said the materials could all be purchased legally in the United States. The police offered assurances that the public was not at risk. Amber Cummings, the abused wife who believed her husband had sexual designs on their nine-year-old daughter, was sentenced to eight years in prison for the shooting, but the judge suspended the sentence.
Sometimes the carnage is vast and events are still playing out. A bomb lab discovered in an Escondido, California, house in November proved so immense that authorities feared removing the explosives. Instead, they closed nearby Interstate 15 and set the property ablaze, sending a towering black cone of smoke skyward and filling the air with the hiss of burning chemicals and the crack-crack of exploding ammunition.
Police are still investigating the supposed architect of this explosive realm, an unemployed Serbian immigrant. As with the apparent plans to build a dirty bomb in Maine, the authorities have not yet declared these efforts in California to be associated with terrorism or possible construction of weapons of mass destruction. WikiLeaks, on the other hand, which released the FBI field report on the Maine incident, has since been termed a terrorist organization by a number of federal lawmakers and officials for bringing classified documents to public attention.
White Men Are Never Labeled Terrorists
That leads to a common thread among these murderous incidents. None has been labeled the work of terrorists by authorities or the media. All involved white men, most of whom -- like Jared Loughner in Tucson -- have been deemed troubled or disturbed by authorities and various media outlets. Even Jim David Adkisson, the unemployed truck driver who attacked the Knoxville church because he believed it was “a cult” and a haven for Democrats and secular liberals, has not been characterized as a political terrorist. Adkisson was a fan of the writings and shows of right-wing media personalities Bill O'Reilly, Michael Savage, and Sean Hannity, according to authorities who searched his residence after the 2008 shootings. However, his primary motivation, according to those same authorities, was the imminent loss of food stamps and inability to find a job.
Joseph Stack, who flew his plane into the Austin IRS building in an eerie echo of the 9/11 attacks, is also not a terrorist -- just a plain old suicide. The Maine dirty-bomb maker, who amassed quantities of hydrogen peroxide, uranium, thorium, lithium metal, thermite, aluminum powder, beryllium, boron, black iron oxide, and magnesium ribbon, a terrorist? No, just a “disturbed individual.”
Arizona, of course, has seen a lot of extremist political activity in recent years. In fact, even as Jared Loughner was gunning down 20 people inside the Safeway on North Oracle Road on January 8th, the murder trial of Shawna Forde, head of the anti-immigrant Minutemen American Defense group, was getting underway in nearby Pima County Superior Court. Forde and two associates have been charged with the shooting death of a man, the wounding of his wife, and the killing of the couple’s nine-year-old daughter during a June 2009 robbery aimed at funding her extremist political activities.
These are America’s killing fields, coast to coast, yet the commentary and debate in the wake of the Gabrielle Giffords shooting revolves around political rhetoric in Washington. Both sides need to tone it down, we’re told. There have been endless discussions on television and radio, newspaper commentary and Internet postings all focused on the issue of overheated political talk -- as if Jared Loughner somehow leaped full-grown from the forehead of Glenn Beck.
Sarah Palin and Glenn Beck did not send Jared Loughner out to kill, even if their extreme lock-and-load rhetoric -- Beck, brandishing a baseball bat, has warned his viewers to watch out during the next “killing spree” -- has helped legitimate such talk. What they have certainly done is help create an inspirational environment where it is perfectly normal for Tea Party extremists to attend political rallies while packing pistols. Indeed, packing pistols is the point, isn’t it?
That said, conservative columnist David Brooks, in an astonishingly superficial argument, wrote in the New York Times that those who drag politics into public debate over the killing of political figures and government officials are leveling “vicious charges” and lack empathy for the mentally ill. Brooks gravely wagged his finger at those -- he singled out MSNBC commentator Keith Olberman, former Senator Gary Hart, and Daily Kos founder Markos Moulitsas -- who have argued that violent rhetoric from the Tea Party and Sarah Palin set the table for the Tucson shootings. (Of course Congresswoman Giffords herself chastised Palin for putting her district in the now-infamous gun-sight crosshairs. Does Brooks include her, too, in excoriating “vicious charges made by people who claimed to be criticizing viciousness”?)
How sugary is Brooks’ argument? Compare it to what he wrote following the shooting rampage that took place at Fort Hood in November 2009. In that murderous incident, Major Nidal Malik Hasan was ultimately charged with killing 13 and wounding over 30. Hasan, a Muslim psychiatrist, was clearly disturbed by the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan (he was about to be deployed to the latter) and his deteriorating mental state had been a concern to officials at Walter Reed Army Medical Center and the Uniformed Services University of the Health Sciences.
That was before Hasan snapped. Despite documented psychiatric worries, the issue of terrorism quickly dominated public discussion of Hasan’s act.
At the time, Brooks derided talk of Hasan’s mental state and characterized those who brought it up as casting “a shroud of political correctness” over the Hasan “narrative.”
“The conversation in the first few days after the massacre was well intentioned, but it suggested a willful flight from reality,” Brooks intoned. “It ignored the fact that the war narrative of the struggle against Islam is the central feature of American foreign policy. It ignored the fact that this narrative can be embraced by a self-radicalizing individual in the U.S. as much as by groups in Tehran, Gaza or Kandahar.”
So much for “vicious charges” and empathy. They are apparently reserved for young white males in Tucson; Muslims need not apply.
Meanwhile, the bodies are piling up in Arizona and Tennessee, Kansas and Pennsylvania. The Homeland Security Department issued a lonely cautionary report in 2009 on the rising tide of right-wing extremism; it was loudly hooted down by right-wing radio celebrities like Rush Limbaugh and Internet pundits like Michelle Malkin. The killings and the attacks went on.
Now, we have arrived at another Martin Luther King Day, the birthday of a man gunned down by a right-wing extremist more than 40 years ago and, while we talk endlessly about rhetoric, we have done a remarkable job of ignoring the growing pile of bodies. The murderous right wing is still with us. The racists and the skinheads and the neo-Nazis are still here. Sales of Glock semi-automatic guns are skyrocketing in the wake of Tucson. The growing piles of bodies is real evidence of growing extremist activity. What could be plainer or starker?
Congressman Peter King, the New York Republican who now heads the House Homeland Security Committee, is planning to hold hearings on Muslim radicalization in America when the new Congress convenes. Muslims, he said in the wake of the Tucson killings, are recruited by "foreign" terrorists, while Loughner is just a "deranged" American, the latest in a long line of deranged Americans.
What place is this? Where are we now?
Stephan Salisbury is cultural writer for the Philadelphia Inquirer and a TomDispatch regular. His most recent book is Mohamed’s Ghosts: An American Story of Love and Fear in the Homeland.
[Note on sources: The FBI field report on dirty bomber James Cummings can be found in .pdf file format by clicking here. The Homeland Security Department report on rising right-wing extremism can be found in .pdf format by clicking here.]
Copyright 2011 Stephan Salisbury
Woven with Her Brush: Where
The Gallery
2425 Virginia Ave, NW
Washington, DC 20037
202.338.1958
Map
click here
When
Jan 21 6:00 pm - 8:00 pm
Quote of the day.
2010 New York Dance and Performance
