Of course, it's a little harder to explain away letters like the one that recently appeared approvingly in the right-wing blog Horsefeathers, clearly advocating genocide directed toward the whole of "Arab-Muslim culture" -- including those who live in America:
- I've worked hard all my adult life to provide for my family, to be useful, and not go out of my way to injure anyone. Like most Americans, I knew little about arab-muslim culture and believed that the developed nations were partly responsible for the poverty and authoritarian regimes that infest the middle east.
Things changed on 9/11/01 when you ruined the lives of at least 10,000 Americans.
These people instantly became my countrymen and you became my mortal enemy.
Ordinary Americans are arming themselves for war with you. I and many of my friends have closets full of handguns, rifles, shotguns and thousands of cartridges.
If we had enough ammunition and time, we would kill every last one of you.
We completely support our President and our armed forces. We only wish they would destroy you faster, but we are certain that they will.
We no longer listen to the insane words of Kerry, Harkin, Kennedy, Clark, and others whom we now see as ideologues who would sacrifice our country and our lives on the alter of their vanity and desire for power.
We no longer listen to our secular mullahs, our media fools, preaching hatred of America and sapping our will with their lies and deceptions.
We watch your cowardly methods of killing by beheading. We are disgusted. But we are not afraid.
You turn your women and children into walking bombs. We are disgusted. But we are not afraid.
You shoot and rape children. You kill their mothers before their eyes. You burn, hang, and tear apart the bodies of your victims, and then play with body parts. We are disgusted. But we are not afraid.
Why should we fear you? What ARE you to be feared? You are cowards. Your bravado is a clown mask that hides the soul of a ghoul. You are not able even to manufacture the knives you use to butcher your bound victims.
One day soon, our planes and missiles will begin turning your mosques, your madrasses, your hotels, your government offices, your hideouts, and your
neighborhoods into rubble.
And then our soldiers will enter your cities and begin the work of killing you, roaches, as you crawl from the debris.
As cowards, you will have your hands in the air and you will get on your knees begging for mercy. And we will instead give you justice. Your actions and your
words long ago placed you far from any considerations of mercy. You are not men.
And if you come to this country and harm a child, shoot a mother, hijack a bus, or bomb a mall, we will do what we did in 1775. Millions of us will form militias.
We will burn your mosques.
We will invade the offices of pro-arab-muslim organizations, destroy them, and drag their officers outside.
We will tell the chancellors of universities either to muzzle or remove anti American professors, whose hatred for their own country we have tolerated only
because we place a higher value on freedom of speech. But we will no longer tolerate treason. We will muzzle and remove them.
We will transport arab-muslims to our deserts, where they can pray to scorpions under the blazing sun.
No doubt, that last item would be justified by people waving Michelle Malkin's In Defense of Internment.
Not that Michelle herself is "advocating" such steps, mind you. Heavens no.
Pseudo-fascism? How dare we even suggest such a thing?
UPDATE: The author of the letter -- a professor of sociology at the University of North Carolina-Wilmington named Martin Kozloff -- has posted the following in the Horsefeathers comments:
- I am so disheartened, but not surprised, by what is happening.
How long did democracy last in Greece? Not long.
Or Rome? Not long.
Why? They stopped DOING democracy and started doing class/group warfare. They tried to defend their own positions and not work for the good of the whole.
I can barely stand the amount of conflict among our own citizenry over this war. Instead of examining as much evidence as possible and then making reasoned decisions, each side--hawk and dove--merely advances its pre-estabished position and attacks the other side. This, I feel, is tearing our country apart. It also means that sheer power, rather than democratic processes, will decide our nation's future.
I wish to make it clear that...
The letter was NOT my opinion.
I was NOT advocating ANYTHING in that letter.
The letter was sociological in intent. It was a literary device to get readers to examine their own assumptions.
I have NO hatred of Arabs or Muslims in general--only killers, as clearly stated in the letter.
I do not advocate killing anyone or burning anything. I do not consider Arabs or Muslims to be roaches. I do not advocate killing people who beg for mercy. I do not advocate muzzling professors. Anyone who knows me, knows the truth of what I just said.
The letter was expressing the feelings and drives of what I see in more and more Americans.
I did not sign my name to it precisely because it did NOT represent my opinion.
When read dispassionately, it should be clear that when the words "arab muslim" were used , they referred to people designed as "our enemies"--NOT to all Arabs and Muslims merely. The letter also made it quite clear that "arab muslims" and "our enemies" were the people (called "you," again and again in the letter) who are engaged in beheading, raping, mutilating, burning, hanging, and bombing.
Further evidence that the letter was a device designed to get people to face their own assumptions and feelings, was that I SAID EXACTLY THAT on websites where it was originally posted. [I did not first put a link to it on the University website.]
For example, I wrote this in the "Comments" section of the Horsefeathers websiste...
"I was writing what I believe will happen if our enemies attack us again."
Again...
"I (boldface) advocated nothing. I (boldface) said what I thought was happening and was going to happen even more if we were attacked again.
"Perhaps instead of attacking me (which is okay if you need a target) why not discuss the issues? For example,
"At what point or under what conditions will citizens begin to form militias to protect themselves?
"When is it a good/bad thing for them to do so?
"Under what conditions will citizens take the law into their own hands, as they say?
"When is this a good/bad thing to do?
"Under what conditions will citizens violate what had been their own moral code (such as not harming noncombatants) in order to protect themselves.
"Under what conditions do ordinary persons begin to see themselves as soldiers?
"These questions are more important than whether I am (or you are) the bigger %$$wit."
Clearly, these are sociological questions. Had I been the sort of racist war hawk that anodyne web asserts, I would not have raised those sociological questions; I would simply have attacked other commenters.
I posted the faked position on the Horsefeathers webiste because I thought it would enable us to discuss in a more rational way how we as a country may be changing--for the worse.
If anyone continues to believe that I was intended to incite violence or that I am a racist, they have only their own hardened positions to blame.
Sure. And the dog ate his homework.
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