Post by maruf on May 7, 2004 4:35:18 GMT -5
As-salaamu'alalykum!
This is a good article to read to get a understanding of the role racism plays in American institutions and leadership. Mr. Solomon hits on an important point that is difficult to sidestep, which is America's bankrupt corrupt manmade ideological worldview. What they call Democracy/Capitalism/Freedom which breeds and fosters racism in society.
Human beings behave according to their views about life, man, etc. Due to the corrupt worldview that one is socialized with in America, quite naturally it leads to problems with man, women, children, and other nations.There is no correct basis to bring the red,black, yellow, and white man together in America. Capitalism put a premium on money and detached itself from God and his laws.
The basis of it being whatever those "Gods" in government tell you, you do or you do not. And btw, this is your right or freedom to feel comfortable while others experience racism, poverty,war, death, rape. Remember you are free and all you should care about is material/benefit (if that is what you want, you determine the good or bad in something), not if something is wrong or right because those are subjective things left up to the State to define or not define.
So there is no justice that America provides at home to its peoples, how could it provide justice to those aboard?
Islaam on the other had gives us (as Muslims) a basis to unite and care and to spread its belief system to the world (Fear of Allah, fear of his punishment, hope for his mercy,
forgiveness for our sins) thus providing justice wherever it goes. Running the "Rat race" to sustain economic security in the absence of spirituality or connection with Allah is not allowed or even encouraged in Islaam.
A Muslim would engage in war with the understanding of the limits acknowledged from Allah, he would obey because he has accepted this worldview. His material actions are not disconnected from his spirituality.
The Kafir is disconnected, even if he says he is not, fore he would fight with those and under those who do not rule and administer by his faith, but by capitalism/materialistic worldviews that have corrupt views about race, gender, trees, children, and other creations of Allah. The idea of Democracy further takes the people down a dead end, for only
Allah knows the future, thus what is the best way to proceed in life. Democracy masks arrogance (to actually think I know what is best for me over who I call the Creator of me
(Allah) in the name of "If I am free to choose, then it must be best for me." If we as Muslims thought this way...think of all the corruption it would be...marry when we want, eat what we want, kill who we feel like, pray sometimes, put on hijab half the times,marry eight wives, etc.
Life under Islaam and its ruling system is what the entire world needs as a Rahmah Li'alameen! And it is clear by this article that individuals alone are not the ones who set policies, but those in power that rule and control our lives. The sincere Islaam State would implement policies not on indifference because a people did not look like them, but on agendas set by Islaam not, nafs or whims dictated by material gain as the West as done time and time again in history. The case for Islaam is clear and this one reason those who have embraced its creed have submitted and carried to others (Black or White, Arab or Turk, Asian or Persian).
was-salaam
Ma'ruf
Net | Iraq
This war and racism
by Norman Solomon; May 06, 2004
www.zmag.org/content/print_article.cfm?itemID=5468§ionID=15
Among the millions of words that have appeared in the U.S. press since late April about abuse and torture at the Abu Ghraib prison in Iraq, one has been notably missing:
Racism.
Overall, when it comes to racial aspects, the news coverage is quite PC -- as in Pentagon Correct. The outlook is "apple pie" egalitarian, with the media picture including high-profile officers who are African-American and Latino. Meanwhile, inside the policy arena, Colin Powell and Condoleezza Rice are frequently in front of cameras to personify Uncle Sam in blackface.
The U.S. government doesn't drop bombs on people because of their race. Washington's geopolitical agendas lead to military actions. But racial biases make the war process easier when the people being killed and maimed aren't white people. An oversize elephant in the American media's living room is a reality that few journalists talk about in public: The USA keeps waging war on countries where the victims resemble people who often experience personal and institutional racism in the United States.
In the American media coverage of the uproar after release of the Abu Ghraib photos, one of the only references to race was fleeting and dismissive, midway through a Wall Street Journal opinion piece on May 3: "So far the alleged grotesqueries are more analogous to the nightmares that occur occasionally at American prisons, when rogue and jaded guards freelance to intimidate and humiliate inmates. The crime, then, first appears not so much a product of endemic ethnic, racial, or religious hatred, as the unfortunate cargo of penal institutions, albeit exacerbated by the conditions of war, the world over."
That essay, by the Hoover Institution's Victor Davis Hanson, typifies media denial about what's happening in the hellish American cells populated so disproportionately by low-income blacks and Latinos. In the world of the Journal editorial page's convenient fantasy, guards "occasionally" choose to "freelance to intimidate and humiliate inmates." In the world of prisoners' inconvenient reality, guards frequently intimidate, humiliate -- and brutalize.
Media denial lets the U.S. military -- and the U.S. incarceration industry -- off the hook. Yet it's significant that a man implicated as a ringleader in the Abu Ghraib crimes, Staff Sgt. Ivan Frederick, "had also worked for six years as a guard for the Virginia Department of Corrections," according to Seymour Hersh's article in the May 10 edition of The New Yorker. A special agent in the U.S. Army's Criminal Investigation Division, Scott Bobeck, testified that Sgt. Frederick and a corporal apparently "were put in charge because they were civilian prison guards and had knowledge of how things were supposed to be run."
That knowledge came from working as guards in an American system of incarceration that now has 2,033,000 people behind bars -- 63 percent of them black or Latino. With racial minorities vastly over-represented in federal and state prisons and local jails, such numbers reflect profound institutional biases that converge at the intersection of racism and unequal justice based on economic class.
A public-interest group, The Sentencing Project, notes that "black males have a 32 percent chance of serving time in prison at some point in their lives; Hispanic males have a 17 percent chance; white males have a 6 percent chance." Most of the people sentenced to prison are poor, while the affluent and wealthy are very infrequent guests.
Conditions are often inherently abusive behind bars. Many prisoners must cope with violence and duress. At the Stop Prisoner Rape organization, executive director Lara Stemple points out: "For women, whose abusers are often corrections officers, the rates of sexual assault are as high as one in four in some facilities."
The same government that runs this prison system also conducts foreign policy that during the past four decades has resulted in bombing and invading the Dominican Republic, Vietnam, Laos, Cambodia, Grenada, Panama, Afghanistan and Iraq. More circumscribed Pentagon missions landed in Somalia and Haiti. In 1999, a major U.S.-led bombing campaign caused enormous suffering among civilians in Yugoslavia. Sudden missile strikes hit Libya and Sudan. And U.S.-funded military forces on several continents -- from Nicaragua, El Salvador and Guatemala to Angola to Indonesia -- took many lives.
This is a good article to read to get a understanding of the role racism plays in American institutions and leadership. Mr. Solomon hits on an important point that is difficult to sidestep, which is America's bankrupt corrupt manmade ideological worldview. What they call Democracy/Capitalism/Freedom which breeds and fosters racism in society.
Human beings behave according to their views about life, man, etc. Due to the corrupt worldview that one is socialized with in America, quite naturally it leads to problems with man, women, children, and other nations.There is no correct basis to bring the red,black, yellow, and white man together in America. Capitalism put a premium on money and detached itself from God and his laws.
The basis of it being whatever those "Gods" in government tell you, you do or you do not. And btw, this is your right or freedom to feel comfortable while others experience racism, poverty,war, death, rape. Remember you are free and all you should care about is material/benefit (if that is what you want, you determine the good or bad in something), not if something is wrong or right because those are subjective things left up to the State to define or not define.
So there is no justice that America provides at home to its peoples, how could it provide justice to those aboard?
Islaam on the other had gives us (as Muslims) a basis to unite and care and to spread its belief system to the world (Fear of Allah, fear of his punishment, hope for his mercy,
forgiveness for our sins) thus providing justice wherever it goes. Running the "Rat race" to sustain economic security in the absence of spirituality or connection with Allah is not allowed or even encouraged in Islaam.
A Muslim would engage in war with the understanding of the limits acknowledged from Allah, he would obey because he has accepted this worldview. His material actions are not disconnected from his spirituality.
The Kafir is disconnected, even if he says he is not, fore he would fight with those and under those who do not rule and administer by his faith, but by capitalism/materialistic worldviews that have corrupt views about race, gender, trees, children, and other creations of Allah. The idea of Democracy further takes the people down a dead end, for only
Allah knows the future, thus what is the best way to proceed in life. Democracy masks arrogance (to actually think I know what is best for me over who I call the Creator of me
(Allah) in the name of "If I am free to choose, then it must be best for me." If we as Muslims thought this way...think of all the corruption it would be...marry when we want, eat what we want, kill who we feel like, pray sometimes, put on hijab half the times,marry eight wives, etc.
Life under Islaam and its ruling system is what the entire world needs as a Rahmah Li'alameen! And it is clear by this article that individuals alone are not the ones who set policies, but those in power that rule and control our lives. The sincere Islaam State would implement policies not on indifference because a people did not look like them, but on agendas set by Islaam not, nafs or whims dictated by material gain as the West as done time and time again in history. The case for Islaam is clear and this one reason those who have embraced its creed have submitted and carried to others (Black or White, Arab or Turk, Asian or Persian).
was-salaam
Ma'ruf
Net | Iraq
This war and racism
by Norman Solomon; May 06, 2004
www.zmag.org/content/print_article.cfm?itemID=5468§ionID=15
Among the millions of words that have appeared in the U.S. press since late April about abuse and torture at the Abu Ghraib prison in Iraq, one has been notably missing:
Racism.
Overall, when it comes to racial aspects, the news coverage is quite PC -- as in Pentagon Correct. The outlook is "apple pie" egalitarian, with the media picture including high-profile officers who are African-American and Latino. Meanwhile, inside the policy arena, Colin Powell and Condoleezza Rice are frequently in front of cameras to personify Uncle Sam in blackface.
The U.S. government doesn't drop bombs on people because of their race. Washington's geopolitical agendas lead to military actions. But racial biases make the war process easier when the people being killed and maimed aren't white people. An oversize elephant in the American media's living room is a reality that few journalists talk about in public: The USA keeps waging war on countries where the victims resemble people who often experience personal and institutional racism in the United States.
In the American media coverage of the uproar after release of the Abu Ghraib photos, one of the only references to race was fleeting and dismissive, midway through a Wall Street Journal opinion piece on May 3: "So far the alleged grotesqueries are more analogous to the nightmares that occur occasionally at American prisons, when rogue and jaded guards freelance to intimidate and humiliate inmates. The crime, then, first appears not so much a product of endemic ethnic, racial, or religious hatred, as the unfortunate cargo of penal institutions, albeit exacerbated by the conditions of war, the world over."
That essay, by the Hoover Institution's Victor Davis Hanson, typifies media denial about what's happening in the hellish American cells populated so disproportionately by low-income blacks and Latinos. In the world of the Journal editorial page's convenient fantasy, guards "occasionally" choose to "freelance to intimidate and humiliate inmates." In the world of prisoners' inconvenient reality, guards frequently intimidate, humiliate -- and brutalize.
Media denial lets the U.S. military -- and the U.S. incarceration industry -- off the hook. Yet it's significant that a man implicated as a ringleader in the Abu Ghraib crimes, Staff Sgt. Ivan Frederick, "had also worked for six years as a guard for the Virginia Department of Corrections," according to Seymour Hersh's article in the May 10 edition of The New Yorker. A special agent in the U.S. Army's Criminal Investigation Division, Scott Bobeck, testified that Sgt. Frederick and a corporal apparently "were put in charge because they were civilian prison guards and had knowledge of how things were supposed to be run."
That knowledge came from working as guards in an American system of incarceration that now has 2,033,000 people behind bars -- 63 percent of them black or Latino. With racial minorities vastly over-represented in federal and state prisons and local jails, such numbers reflect profound institutional biases that converge at the intersection of racism and unequal justice based on economic class.
A public-interest group, The Sentencing Project, notes that "black males have a 32 percent chance of serving time in prison at some point in their lives; Hispanic males have a 17 percent chance; white males have a 6 percent chance." Most of the people sentenced to prison are poor, while the affluent and wealthy are very infrequent guests.
Conditions are often inherently abusive behind bars. Many prisoners must cope with violence and duress. At the Stop Prisoner Rape organization, executive director Lara Stemple points out: "For women, whose abusers are often corrections officers, the rates of sexual assault are as high as one in four in some facilities."
The same government that runs this prison system also conducts foreign policy that during the past four decades has resulted in bombing and invading the Dominican Republic, Vietnam, Laos, Cambodia, Grenada, Panama, Afghanistan and Iraq. More circumscribed Pentagon missions landed in Somalia and Haiti. In 1999, a major U.S.-led bombing campaign caused enormous suffering among civilians in Yugoslavia. Sudden missile strikes hit Libya and Sudan. And U.S.-funded military forces on several continents -- from Nicaragua, El Salvador and Guatemala to Angola to Indonesia -- took many lives.