Maajid Nawaz and the Problem of the Well-Meaning Racist

Maajid Nawaz very eloquently explains something that has bothered me for awhile, but which I feel is difficult to talk about as a white radical.

It's also a good example of why I try to hold my own 'side' to higher standards, not because I'm against them but because I expect better. When what is holding back the growth and development of the Muslim Left if our own Western Left, we need to reaffirm our principles and abandon the same tribal group-thinks we spend so much time criticising the Right over.

'This is the “racism of the anti-racists,” the new Orientalism. Increasingly today, it is the defenders of everything black and brown, every Oriental and exotic religious and spiritual practice, those who have taken to portraying their cultural sophistication by being able to pronounce Eastern culinary dishes with correctly accented syllables, who are guilty of the most patronizing and debilitating form of racism and bigotry.'

As Maajid Nawaz says, these aren't Western Liberal Ideas, they are human ones. And if we succumb to parochial instincts of tribal identity and continue to stimy those struggling for what we already take for granted, then we fail not just our brothers and sisters in the Muslim community, but advancement of the entire human family.

Merry Christmas.

Hitler Was Not Donald Trump

You would think this would go without saying, but liberals, my people, you are fucking embarrassing me. Adolph Hitler developed an ideology based around what is essentially blood magic that caused the murder of millions and the misery of hundreds of millions. Donald Trump is a racist buffoon.

If Hitler had been as dangerous as the Donald, the world would have been a better place. There would be more people alive today (especially Jews, Gypsies, and homosexuals), because at least so far Trump has not advocated anything like the cultic murder religion embodied by National Socialism’s sadistic race theories. He’s your drunk uncle who doesn’t know very much and is scared of brown orphans.

But you know who did do things similar to what Trump has said? Franklin Delano Roosevelt. That’s right, the great liberal hero locked up thousands of Americans and their families for the crime of being of the same racial background as some other people who attacked us. It was a little something called the Japanese Internment, and it was a horrific crime. Donald Trump wants to do that to Muslims--he does not, as far as I can tell, want to exterminate them from the face of the Earth. So let’s criticize him for what he has actually said he wants to do by comparing it to something actually similar to what he said.

To do otherwise is just as dishonest as what the reactionary right tries to do by comparing Sanders’ socialism to the terror of the Bolsheviks. It’s called poisoning the well, and it’s a fallacy when they do it, and even more so when we do it. Because if we’re going to claim to be on the side of reason, we’d damned-well better act like it.