Officials Right to Damp Down Muslim Terrorism Fear in Boston Marathon Bombing

 

Earl Ofari Hutchinson

President Obama’s first official statement on the Boston Marathon bombing couldn’t have been plainer on this point: “We still do not know who did this or why. And people shouldn’t jump to conclusions before we have all the facts.” Yet all it took was an isolated and scantily detailed report that Boston Police were questioning a young Saudi national to set off the standard rush to judgment finger point by some at Muslim terrorists. The Saudi national as it turned out is here on a legal visa and had no criminal record. But that didn’t stop some Muslim advocacy groups from quickly issuing statements condemning the attack as “cowardly.” This was both defense and precaution. One that Muslim groups feel is mandatory given the predictable speculation that they are the culprits in any violence virtually anywhere in the world that’s labeled “terrorist.”  

The good thing is that government officials and many in the media have learned the lessons of the past and that’s to pause, take a breath, and wait until more is known about why an attack happened, and who the likely perpetrator(s) are. This spares officials and the media the ultimate embarrassment of pointing fingers in a direction that often prove wildly in the wrong direction.

Obama applied the wait and see approach to a heinous act nearly four years in the immediate aftermath of the Ft. Hood, Texas bloodbath. The pack of shrill rightist bloggers and talk radio chatterers jumped all over the shooting of several military personnel at the military base and gleefully fanned anti-Muslim passions. It didn’t take much to get the hate juices flowing. A legion of writers on web sites spewed the ritual anti-Muslim slurs, profanities, and insults at the alleged shooter Major Nidal Hasan and by extension all Muslims.

Obama quickly admonished the public not to rush to judgment about the shooting and the shooter. Obama took a page from then President’s Clinton and Bush’s playbook when mob hysteria was building after the bombing of the Oklahoma City Federal Building in 1996 and the 9/11 attacks. Clinton and Bush cautioned the public not to finger point Muslims for the attacks.

The Oklahoma City bombing was the handiwork of Timothy McVeigh, a loose screw, red blooded American fanatic. The 9/11 attackers were mostly Saudi nationals. Yet, that still didn’t stop the murmurs, and finger pointing at and bashing of all Muslims.

That’s no surprise. American Muslims have been the repeated targets of verbal digs, physical assaults, and profiling. They are just too inviting a scapegoat for the fears and frustrations many Americans have had over two failed and flawed wars, a stagnant Middle East peace process, and even more frightening to many, the increasing presence of more and more Muslims in their neighborhoods, schools, and work places, especially when wearing Muslim attire.

Beyond the need for caution and just plain good sense in making public or official pronouncements on who committed a heinous act of violence and the motive behind it, there’s also the sobering reality that much of the recent mass violence in the country has nothing to do with alleged crazed, vengeful Muslim terrorists. It’s been home grown and the perpetrators have been young, loose screwed, gun nuts. Or, they have been right wing, racist loons that have a beef against a judge or a federal official. This has tragically awoken millions of Americans to the grim reality that mass terror can be inflicted just as easily, maybe even easier, by the withdrawn, delusional kid, next door as a foreigner sneaking into the country bent on mayhem and murder.

This also should not surprise when we consider that the US has poured a king’s ransom during the past decade into foreign and homeland security, surveillance, monitoring, and arrests, and detention of countless individuals with known or suspected terrorist group connections. Government officials periodically note with pride that the money is not a total waste since there have been no known successful terrorist attacks that could be positively traced back to a Muslim terror group since  9/11 on US soil. But this doesn’t mean that an attack couldn’t happen despite mountainous spending to stop it and world class, state of the art security measures.

The Boston Marathon bombing could be as some officials cautiously said the work of a foreign or a domestic terror group or even a lone terrorist, or crackpot. This much is known. Police and government officials don’t know anything yet. And they have been wise not to do or say anything that will fan anti-Muslim hysteria. And that’s a very good thing.

Earl Ofari Hutchinson is an author and political analyst. He is a weekly co-host of the Al Sharpton Show on American Urban Radio Network. He is the author of How Obama Governed: The Year of Crisis and Challenge. He is an associate editor of New America Media. He is the host of the weekly Hutchinson Report on KTYM 1460 AM Radio Los Angeles and KPFK-Radio and the Pacifica Network.

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What’s Next--Muslim Only Lines at Airports?

Earl Ofari Hutchinson



Are Muslim only lines at airports next? The thought is offensive, disgusting, and blatantly unconstitutional. But it’s hardly far-fetched. Three years before suspected Nigerian airline terrorist Umar Farouk Abdulmutallab was hauled off a Northwest airlines flight from Amsterdam to Detroit with a powder and liquid explosive device stuffed in his underwear, British Department of Transportation officials openly discussed corralling men of Asian or Middle Eastern appearance at airports for intense questioning, checks and searches. The plan outraged Muslim leaders and British officials backed off the systematic profiling of Muslims. However, single men of Asian and Middle Eastern appearance were still subject to intense checks and searches. Britain was not alone. France and the Netherlands had already imposed de facto profiling of Muslim appearing young men and families at airports since the September, 2001 terror attacks. Polls showed that a substantial majority of Europeans agreed that racial profiling was not repugnant if it made airline travel safer and thwarted a possible terror attack. The clamor for a racial crackdown was first heard in the U.S. following the bombing of the Federal Building in Oklahoma City in 1996,

Then President Clinton and Attorney General Janet Reno had the good sense not rush to judgment and scapegoat Muslims. The swift arrest of Timothy McVeigh squelched the building mob hysteria against them. But it didn't squelch public suspicions that all Muslims were potential terrorists. The federal building bombing propelled Clinton's 1996 Antiterrorism Act through Congress. Civil rights and civil liberties groups had waged a protracted battle against the bill. The law gave the FBI broad power to infiltrate groups, quash fundraising by foreigners, monitor airline travel, and seize motel and hotel records and trash due process by permitting the admission of secret evidence to expel immigrants. The implication was that present and future attacks would likely be launched by those with an Arab name and face rather than by men like McVeigh.

President Bush, as Clinton, took the high ground after the 911 attack. He did not reflexively finger-point Muslims. The Bush administration publicly assured that profiling was reprehensible and violated legal and constitutional principles, and that it would not be done. But the attack stirred tremors among Muslims that they would routinely be targeted, subject to search and surveillance, and profiled at airports.

The profiling alarm bells went off again after a soldier with a Muslim name shot up the military base at Ft. Hood back in November. The Council on American-Islamic Relations wasted no time and issued a loud and vigorous denunciation of the mass killing. The Council didn't know at that moment whether Major Nidal Malik Hasan, the alleged shooter, was a Muslim by birth, a converted Muslim, or even a Muslim at all. The name and the horrific murder spree was enough to drive the group to quickly distance itself from the rampage. Other Muslim organizations instantly followed suit and issued their own equally strong disavowal of Hasan.

This didn’t stop the pack of Fox Network commentators, conservative radio talk show hosts, writers, and some officials from again openly shouting for even tighter scrutiny of Muslim groups. Terror suspect Abdulmutallab has simply raised the decibel level on their call for transportation officials to openly profile Muslims at airports, train stations, and even on the open highways.

Some elected officials have even jumped on the profiling bandwagon. Congressman Peter King, ranking Republican on the Homeland Security Committee, predictably loudly called for the profiling of Muslims. Brooklyn Assemblyman Dov Hikind went further and announced he’d reintroduce the bill he first introduced in 2005 to let police stop and search anyone they deem to be suspicious. Hikind didn’t specifically finger Muslims, but the intent of the bill was unmistakable, namely to target Muslims.

The New York Assembly will reject Hikind’s bill again. But the rejection isn’t likely to be unanimous. Legislators read the papers and the polls. Informal on line polls taken immediately after Abdulmutallab’s failed terror attempt found that a majority of Americans are ready to turn a blind eye to law, the constitution and just plain human decency to target Muslims, any Muslim, for special scrutiny. No matter that a potential terrorist can come in any shape, size, color, gender, and disguise. The Leadership Conference on Civil Rights noted that convicted terrorists John Walker Lindh were white, and Richard Reid was Jamaican and British. Abdulmutallab is Nigerian, but from all appearances he could just as easily be mistaken for a young African-American hip hop artist.

Broad-based ethnic profiling creates in turn panic and the false sense of security that airlines are actually preventing terrorist attacks. It also causes law enforcement resources to be squandered chasing the wrong targets. Worse, it’s a witch-hunt against a group based solely on their religion and ethnicity. This fuels even greater racial division, fear and hysteria. The public whispers and the right wing’s open talk of Muslim only airport lines do the same.

Earl Ofari Hutchinson is an author and political analyst. His forthcoming book, How Obama Governed: The Year of Crisis and Challenge (Middle Passage Press) will be released in January 2010.

New Yorker Depicted Obama Horribly Wrong, but Got It Horribly Right about the Slanders
Earl Ofari Hutchinson

New Yorker Magazine’s under fire cover illustrator Barry Blitt says his infuriating cover was intended only to show that the incessant rumor that Obama is a closet terrorist is preposterous and ridiculous fear mongering. Team Obama’s rage at the inflammatory cover was beyond ballistic and nearly everyone with eyes and an opinion about it, and that included Republican rival John McCain, expressed the same ballistic anger at the New Yorker. But Blitt’s point that the ridiculous rumor mongering, gossip, slurs, and flat out falsities about Obama’s religion, patriotism, birth, and, of course race, are deep and widespread is horribly true. Even more frightening is that those slanders may touch a nerve in an unknown but frighteningly large number of voters. That danger was there from the start and there were packs of website ready to deepen that danger.

Obama had barely finished his announcement on the steps of the State Capitol at Springfield, Illinois in February, 2007 that he was in the hunt for presidency when the site Barack Exposed popped up on every search engine. The website was a put up job by Human Events, a fringe, ultraconservative outfit. It promised to expose the "truth" about Obama, from his alleged role in corruption scandals to doubletalk on the issues, and of course the signature hit item, his patriotism. At the time, it was rightly laughed off as a typical smear and slander by one of the pack of ultra-conservative hit squads.

The laughter didn’t last long. Obama’s breakout win in the Iowa Caucus in January instantly marked him as the potential Democrat's presidential go-to guy. It also set off alarm bells among the blog hit squads. Here’s a check list of the biggest, best known, and most virulent Obama dirt dealer sites that sprouted up after Iowa:
AntiObama.net AgainstObama.com AudacityOfHypocrisy.com BlockBarack.com ChicagoAgainstObama.com DontVoteObama.net DrNObama.comExposeObama.comInvestigateBarackObama.blogspot.com JustSayNoDeal.com MeetBarackObama.com No-bama.blogspot.com NobamaNetwork.comNobamaZone.comNoExperienceNoChange.org NoQuarterUSA.net ObamaBlog08.com Obama-Wire.comObamaism.Blogspot.com ObamaNation.comObamaTruth.org ObamaWho.wordpress.com ObamaWTF.blogspot.com Obamology.blogspot.com SavagePolitics.com SlickBarry.com Stop-Obama.org TheRealBarackObama.wordpress.com

The anti-Obama bile, complete with the scurrilous and phony doctored photos of Obama as a Muslim terrorist is the staple on many of the sites, and is repeated as a sickening mantra by the Obama character maligners. Obama’s White House bid has virtually breathed new life into the unabashedly white supremacist group Stormfront’s site (stormfront.org). The group claims to get about 40,000 hits a day

Google belatedly realized that its engine was rapidly becoming a top conduit for spreading the anti-Obama rumor mongering hate and shut down several of the more blatant anti-Obama sites. It sternly warned that any site that engaged in lathering Obama with vicious personal slurs would be promptly shut down. This drew some mild criticism that Google was stifling free speech, but the right to propagate malicious slander and lies hardly qualifies as a free speech protection, let alone legitimate political criticism.

There were early warning signals of the on-line ugliness that could come. Talk show gasser Rush Limbaugh took the first real swipe when he derisively sneered at Obama as the Magic Negro. Limbaugh kind of sort of backed away from it. But the message was that Obama was not exempt from a racial dig. That was much evident in the short-lived furor over Obama's former Southside Chicago church, and the controversial outbursts of his former pastor Jeremiah Wright.

The inference was that Obama's guilt by membership and friendship with him made him a closet radical and a race baiter. But long before the Wright controversy broke in the national media, more than a few of the above mentioned anti-Obama sites had a field day lambasting him and Wright.


The nitpicking continued on the most trivial things such as his chain smoking, his admitted flirt with drugs, and pokes at his wife, Michelle as outspoken, bossy and domineering, and America hating. This slander against her has been almost as popular on the sites as knocking Obama as unpatriotic and inferring he’s a closet Muslim terrorist.

The great danger is that the lies and maliciousness the Obama slander sites busily fan could or has had some resonance with some voters, especially the much fought over independents. They make up about one quarter of American electorate, and the overwhelming majority of them are white, and centrist to conservative in their views.

The fear that the rumors could hurt prompted Obama and the campaign to take the unprecedented step of putting up an anti-smear website to counter the lies. It also prompted Obama in January to do a teleconference call with Jewish reporters to refute the rumors that he was a Muslim.

New Yorker Magazine’s editors may well as the claim depicted Obama and Michelle as flag hating, unpatriotic, violent terrorists to show the absolute vileness and absurdity of the rampant slanders. But the magazine which is the nation’s staid, bastion of highbrow culture and thinking inadvertently or deliberately imprinted the damaging slanders in the thoughts of an even more unknown number of voters. The same as the legion of dirt dealing Obama blogs have done.

Earl Ofari Hutchinson is an author and political analyst. His new book is The Ethnic Presidency: How Race Decides the Race to the White House (Middle Passage Press, February 2008).