How Well-Meaning Americans Are Drawn Into Opposing the Islamic Center

Kathleen Barry — Mon, 04 Oct 2010 20:20:22 +0000

The extreme-right hate campaigns are aimed at reducing all Arabs and all Muslims to Al Qaeda style terrorists in the minds of Americans. In other words, they are doing the public relations work of the military in promoting fear to sustain our support for ongoing war. But that, I suggest, is not enough to pull into their ranks the vast majority of those 80% of Americans who have opposed the Islamic Community Center. When I hear from people who I know are sensitive and caring and they tell me of their opposition to the Islamic Community Center near Ground Zero, and I know many of them do not support the US wars in Iraq and Afghanistan, I have to ask ‘how are they drawn in?”

Selective empathy? How do we break out of it?

Engaging empathy requires consciousness and facts if it is not to turn to selective empathy only for one’s own group – in the case of those fueling the Mosque controversy, that group is primarily white, American and Christian. We begin by asking critical questions, allowing caring and sensitivity to fed by our conscience. Three hundred Muslims were killed in the towers on 9/11. What of their families? As soon as we ask that question, it is clear that this controversy has made empathy selective, confined to one’s own race, nationality and religion – primarily white, Christian Americans. That is the strategy of the right wing fanatics. They use selective empathy to emotionally manipulate well-meaning Americans into fear of all Muslims and Arabs. In what seems like caring, selective empathy is actually the foundation for the racism, hatred of the other that drives extremists into the mainstream. That is what we should fear and must challenge.

How the “Mosque Controversy” is Linked to Ongoing War

Kathleen Barry — Sun, 12 Sep 2010 22:36:05 +0000

When the Muslim community center controversy over its location near Ground Zero otherwise known as the Mosque controversy broke out, my first reaction was a powerful sense of familiarity, almost a feeling of déjà vu. Thinking yes, we’ve seen this before, I remembered the hate and fear that the media and politicians intensified in the hours and days after the 9/11/2001 attack on the U.S., a hatred that has taken the US into almost a decade war, killing more than a million Iraqis and thousands of Afghans who had nothing to do with that attack. They are wars of revenge, and that makes them war crimes for the only valid basis for war in international humanitarian law is the threat of imminent invasion.

Having just finished writing about White House and media emotional manipulation of Americans in the few years after 9/11, my mind was still alert to how fear and hatred escalated until almost 80% of Americans supported a U.S. war against Iraq, a country that had nothing to do with and in fact strongly opposed Osama bin Laden and Al Qaeda. Now, in 2010, 80% of Americans oppose an Islamic community center being built near Ground Zero with the same virulent hatred and paralyzing fears that were engendered by every intentional lie of George W. Bush and Dick Cheney who were building up steam for war. The pressing question is “Why?” and “Whose interests does this anti-Islamic hate campaign serve?”

While many have linked this controversy to the November elections, it is not coincidental that it was manufactured by American extremists at the very same time the U.S. military began a not really full withdrawal from Iraq. At least on TV if not in reality, it began to look like the US was leaving at least one war behind. That kind of sentiment is not good for the business of the US military or its partner, the military industries who dominate White House military policy focused on ongoing war.

Unmaking War » Mosque controversy

How Well-Meaning Americans Are Drawn Into Opposing the Islamic Center

How the “Mosque Controversy” is Linked to Ongoing War