The Islamophobia hysteria on TV, expressed both in news commentary & in series, is crescendoing to a fever pitch. Its so bad & deranged it approaches comedy except that they are deadly serious about convincing people its sane. We havent seen anything like this since the McCarthy era when commies & pinkos were the designated enemies of US democracy. In the McCarthy era, it was used to justify repression of the Bill of Rights. A lot of people lost their jobs. Where I worked at General Electric, radical workers in the 1950s were met in the parking lot by armed guards & told they didnt work there any more. That political environment didnt go away for years. When I worked there (from the late 1970s through 2000) the union organized a goon squad to beat up a communist group that sold their paper at the gate. In a provocation, the union steward asked me to organize women to join the goon squad. In a pigs eye! was my response. I was also more than once threatened with violence by right-wing co-workers. Thats just a tiny glimpse of what prevailed throughout the McCarthy witch hunt. This Islamophobia crap has the same intent: to bring back repression of the Bill of Rights. And we need to start thinking long & hard about how to stand up against it. The most important way is to stand against the wars, immigration policies, & denial of democratic rights that this hysteria is really all about.
Posted on: Fri, 03 Oct 2014 21:13:25 +0000
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