I was watching video clips of evacuees being flown out on a Marine Helicopter. My wife used to wear hijab. Here's how these things are related...
So, in the clip there are some women and men of Lebanese origin sitting in the back of a Marine helicopter. Its the same type of squadron which was my first assignment back in 1996. Thus, I felt a pinge of "being there" since I, too, participated in a evacuation operation in Africa, 1998. Then I noticed a few of them had hijabs and beards. I am going to be brutally honest here, so read this only after the kids are in bed. My first reation was that if I was the crew chief of that bird, there wouldn't be a snowball's chance in hell that any hijabi or beardie would get on board my helicopter! Now, I know this is politically incorrect and simply not nice, even for me. But, I just couldn't help myself not to see the hijabi and beardie as Hezbollah sympathizers.
No, I don't blame the woman or man themselves; I blame the fundis who have made the hijab and beard as symbols of allegience and political orientation. They have made personal adornment into shallow badges of tribal identity, so much so that even another Muslim like myself has become initially suspicious of all who bear those badges as enemy sympathizers. They shoudn't be, but the cat's out of the bag now, so there seems to be no going back so long as they emphasize hijabs and beards as thier symbols.
Why all this angst? Because, the Marines are one of the few bastions left who don't coddle these dangerous bastards. We tell Islamists that we're not going to blow them as do so many leftists who've lost their way and coddle fascism, instead we're just going to blow them away. When Islamists are ready to sit down and compromise on some of the odious things they want to impose on me, then and only then will I lessen my hardline and be willing to concede some things as well. Until that time, opposition and combat are the only things I will offer them.
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Ginan Rauf
are you afraid to kiss the leper?
Honestly, I understand this double feeling. I am utterly against the death penalty, but when someone is executed I despise for harming children or some indefensible, sickening act, I am pleased. I won't ever support it. I know it doesn't work to prevent crime. I am just saying how I feel. Maybe these situations do not seem similar, but to me they are. Your mind, your heart know one thing and your gut level instincts know another. The gut level isn't wrong. Learning when to trust it properly is the hard thing. The beard the scarf. They've been turned into visceral symbols of danger. His wife wears a scarf, but he still feels it. Isn't that what this is about? That double feeling?
Deja Fu is the feeling that you have been kicked in the head this way before. --Terry Pratchett
Ginan Rauf
No doubt. The ambiguity is always there. But what about when
the gut level is given free rein? What if your mind and heart have
been shaped by years of indoctrination and demonization? The scarf
has been turned into a visceral symbol of danger. So we must ask
ourselves by whom and for what purpose and to what ends? Hasn't
the African American male also been turned into a symbol for crime?
Are there perhaps numbers against which we can check the gut level
reaction? One might want to reflect upon the reality of weapons actually raining down on people's heads. For many people in the world those are experienced as visceral symbols of power, with much
fire power to back up the gut level feeling.
Exactly, we all have these experiences through which we can learn to empathize and maybe do the right thing in the right moment. I see where OG is coming from, them too. Personal ethical moments sometimes happen in a helocopter when one guy is supposed to save the lives of some folks and the are there to be saved and they both think the other is going to kill them. My God. I thought he did a beautiful job of describing how that double pull feels, how utterly confusing it is, how not easy it is, how really hard it is to know what the right thing to do is in the moment.
Let's put it this way. You are driving along a lonely highway, by yourself, a person has had a car crash, no cell phone access, he is bleeding and need help now, but the person clearly looks like a skeezy freak of a guy, and you can tell. Biker guy been in prison. And for what? You can tell from your car. Nothing good. Now do you get out and help him? He is bleeding now, you do not have time to get him help or to wait til you get to a phone. Holy God, I'd probably put the guy in my car and drive him to a hospital. But you know the cops would probably find me dead and raped on the side of the highway my car gone after about a week.
Ginan Rauf
Yes, the fear is necessary. For our survival. The pull and ambiguity
understandable. But what if it is a delusion fed in a cultural climate
of constant constant fear and the bogey man is really disguising himself in a suit.
Salaams, Ginan when you say who plants the notion and to what end, I feel you are insinuating that its the media. I would accept this for a non-Muslim, but I don't pay attention to the media too much. I do hear hijabed women talk in my communities where I've lived. Although most are fine people, the ones spouting the hate-the-West rhetoric are/were always the ones who so fastidiously performed the hijab and just about forced it on others. The two seem clearly linked to me, especially when I over pontificate about it after reading anthropology works.
Laury, thanks for the kind comments and understanding it. Even my wife shuddered when she read it, eyes bulging out, "You wrote that in public?" This, coming from a newspaper blogger and sometime columnist...
- A Salafi in worship, a Sufi in society, a Secularist in government.
Ginan Rauf
Of course you have the right to fear nut cases like Bin Laden
but the blurring of the lines between every hijabi and the terrorist
has something to do with the constant demonization in the media.
Why should Muslims be immune to that. It is asinine and a war
crime for Nasr Allah, should he do it, to threaten to bomb petrol
places in Israel. That merely stokes the fear of a people traumatized
by the holocaust. But my question to you is why aren't you all
afraid of the war hungry neocons? Shouldn't you as Americans be
worried for heaven's sake about possible retaliation by Shiite sympathizers to our troops in Iraq, to the possibility of seeing a massive hostage crisis on the ground? Are you seriously underestimating the threat of a widening regional conflict?
You've got to ask yourself why certains things are feared more than
others and what the constant demonization may have to do with it.