Islamofascism week at UW

It's been a physically and emotionally intense week, and the weekends, even more so cos thats when we flush out the contradictions/tensions that have accumulated during the past five days. Its Monday morn, and thank goodness I dont have work today and was able to sleep in. I dont know how M does it with waking up at 530am everyday...
Last week was Islamofascism week. All horrors. David Horowitz, a neo-con who was once a supporter of the civil rights movement, albeit with leftist authoritarian attitudes. So now, he's shifted from the left to the right, maintaining his authoritarianism nonetheless as a rabid conservative. He riled up everyone w his white supremacist message of "Ten Reasons why Reparations is a Bad Idea." One of the reasons was: Blacks are better off in America than they are in Africa so, implying they should be thankful for slavery that brought them here...this man is crazy and off the wall.
Look at the path he's taken...
So this past week Horowitz organized a national Islamofascism week that took place in 100 different campuses around the country. The two main messages were

1) Islam is a primitive religion that breeds violence, as compared to Christianity and Judaism

2) Radical Muslims need to be distinguished from Moderate Muslims. By "radical Muslims," Horowitz means anyone who engages in violence, conflating Al Qaeda, Hezbollah and Hamas. He makes no distinction between Al Qaeda and Hezbollah -- the former which is a vanguardist, terrorist group and the latter, which is a legitimate self-defense force that successfully stopped the Israeli invasion of Lebanon 2 summers ago.

By "moderate Muslims" Horowitz means the silent, goody goody two shoes Muslims who keep quiet and let the white supremacists step all over them, and their brothers and sisters. We have seen these forms of "moderate" factions in EVERY liberation struggle -- other words for them are Liberal, Collaborationists, who *like* to see themselves as the more "rationale" alternative to the freedom fighters. But truth be told, many of the times, these "moderate" factions are usually the elite, the middle-classes who hold back the self-governing aspirations of everyday people. For their own status quo politics, the "moderates" will even resort to violence to squash the more radical tenets of the liberation struggles to broker a compromise w the colonialists...

Organizing this week at University of Washington, we got to see how cowardly the College Republicans -- ie. Horowitz's lackeys, were. We saw how they were only good at talking loud but then cannot deal w anything else. Lame duck poster-child w tails between their legs...They showed a film called SUICIDE KILLERS which portrayed all Palestinians as crazed violent mad-dogs rampant on streets infested w rabies ready to bit on the next Israeli that comes along. They interviewed Israeli Border Patrol guards to talk about how violent the Palestinian villagers, common people, were. As if the Border patrol guards are any less violent, as if they are the most neutral people who could give a fair scientific assessment of the Palestinian mind! And then they went ahead and said that the reason why Palestinians have such a tendency toward violence is cos their Islamic laws prevent them from having sex w Muslim women and thats why they take out their sexual libido on the PHALLUS: aka the AK 47s...
How cruel is it that this racist film director belittles people's sense of desperation, tragedy, poverty, hopelessness, into a mere Freudian analysis?? Its EXACTLY like what Freud said about women back in the day, that they had bouts of HYSTERIA cos of their sexual disposition, their passiveness during sexual intercourse, and not because of the day to day accumulation of stress related to sexism that women face in everyday life.
Enough said about the film. What mattered was that the College Republicans refused to take any Questions and Answers and literally just ran out of the room as quickly as they came in. They tried to pacify the crowd by saying that the main speaker, Michael Medved, will come in the next day to entertain questions. The crowd was ANGRY! we were all chanting: NO MEDVED NO GUTS! Everyone BOO-ED at the "documentary" and called out the CRs for the COWARDS that they were....

The next day at Medved event --- most of the people of color -- about 100 of us, were locked out of the talk cos the space was too small, and many of us had been protesting downstairs. It was a strategic mistake I agree. We should all have come up early to take the seats. However, it was infuriating to have the scenario where most of the people indoors were white, Medved and College R supporters, and outside, you had all the people of color. Is this segregation? We protested. We chanted: WE WANT MEDVED! WE WANT THE DIALOGUE! But the chicken that he is, Medved did not come out to meet us. He was happier talking indoors to those who already supported him. He didnt have the guts, just like all the other CR folks, to come out and meet his REAL crowd.

I must say tho, the time spent outside w the other people of color and Muslims was both frustrating and powerful at the same time. A Muslim guy called Alizeera came up and stood in the middle of the crowd singing the Muslim call to prayer. It was a very powerful moment....
We also had v good conversations w some Palestinian international students who were really angry with the way their people had been portrayed. They seemed to show much more courage in confronting racists than the leadership of the Muslim Student Association. I was thinking alot about Assata Shakur's autobiography. She talked about the process in which she was politicized and how it was so important for her, growing up in NY in the early 60s, to be meeting with all the charismatic anti-colonial international African students who had been studying in the community colleges. They brought a piece of their anti-colonial, freedom fighter mindset and analysis to the folks they met in Harlem, in Brooklyn and many regular people were politicized like this. I hope the same happens w these young Palestinian students I am meeting at UW these days. T, one of the folks we met, said this one line that really stuck w me. I had asked him about how he felt about the possible repression that him, as an international student could face, and he said, he thought that local Muslims were underestimating their own powers and numbers, and that "When you kneel, someone will walk over you. But when you stand tall, the enemy will be afraid."

peacing out for the day
jomo