"Please, Please, Please, Let It Be Somebody Named Akbar."

Judaism and Islam are also religions, but there’s little doubt that most Americans imagine “Jews” and “Muslims” as coherent “racial” categories.

- libfreeordie on August 5, 2012 at 7:48 PM

Speak for yourself.  My father's great-aunt (that would be my great-great aunt) and her children were murdered by the Nazis because they were Jews.  My father is a Jew.  The last time that I saw a census form, there was no box in the race section marked "Jew."

We tend to imagine and talk about these groups using the hereditary language of race, (see Mitt Romney’s claims of cultural differences passed down from generation to generation).

- libfreeordie on August 5, 2012 at 7:48 PM

Cultural differences are not based upon race.  Romney also compares the economies of Chile and Ecuador.  You probably think that he is a racist for his comparison of the FACTS that exist in the Israeli and Palestinian or other Arab economies, but,  interestingly enough, he was merely citing David Landes' book, The Wealth and Poverty of Nations, and a 2002 United Nations report written by Arab intellectuals,
which Obama's own State Department has used.

And, yes, not all cultures are equal no matter how much you push multikulti.  I do not believe that the Shari'ah culture -- where women are subjugated, little girls are subjected to FGM, homosexuals are executed, Christians and other infidels are forced to pay jiyza, stonings are carried out on rape victims, girls are denied an education, boys are taught only the Qur'an and jihad, etc. -- is equal to the Western culture of democracy, freedom, and equality.  You may think so and that's your perogative.  You may also think that I am a bigot.  Fine.  Whatever.  For the two to be equal, however, you must defend honour killings, forced marriages, FGM, the criminalisation of homosexuality, etc.  If you want to defend all of that, then...and only then...can you call me a bigot and guess what?   I will gladly wear that label with pride. 

 
And we also know that physical difference is one of the primary ways racial knowledge is made and codified. 

- libfreeordie on August 5, 2012 at 7:48 PM

And, we also know that physical differences between races are subsiding, not increasing.

So while Sikkhism is a religion, there’s little question that the gunman imagined them as, not only a racial other, but a racial other he perceived as a threat.

  

- libfreeordie on August 5, 2012 at 7:48 PM

Pure speculation.  None of us knows why he acted the way that he did.  None.

And this, of course, totally explodes conservative notions of a “colorblind” society.

- libfreeordie on August 5, 2012 at 7:48 PM

Really?  You see, I've asked many Progs over the years this question:

If scientists came up with a drug that would make us all black, would you approve of it being given to everyone so that racism would no longer be a problem?

Not one has ever said "yes," which leads me to believe, as Booker T Washington said many years ago, that you don't want racism to ever go away.

"There is (a) class of colored people who make a business of keeping the troubles, the wrongs and the hardships of the Negro race before the public. Having learned that they are able to make a living out of their troubles, they have grown into the settled habit of advertising their wrongs -- partly because they want sympathy and partly because it pays. Some of these people do not want the Negro to lose his grievances, because they do not want to lose their jobs. ... There is a certain class of race-problem solvers who don't want the patient to get well, because as long as the disease holds out they have not only an easy means of making a living, but also an easy medium through which to make themselves prominent before the public."

- Booker T Washington, 1911

***************************************************************

The shooter was so overwhelmingly not color-blind, that he relied on nothing more than the fact that Sikhs looked like the vaguely defined, broad composite image we’ve created of “the terrorist” in a post 9/11 world.

 
- libfreeordie on August 5, 2012 at 7:48 PM

More speculation.  We don't even know the man's name, but you have already created an entire psychological profile on him.  Interesting...to say the very least.

How do you even know he was a conservative?

You know what disgusts me about people like you?  You could care less about those that died.  All that you care about is trying to use this tragedy to paint everyone, who disagrees with you politically, with the same brush so that you can score cheap, political points.

It is people like you, who tell us that we can't say that all gays are paedophiles when one gay man is arrested raping a child and possessing child pornography.  You know what?  You're right....which is why I never blame all gays for the act of one disgusting pervert. 

You tell us that we can't blame all environmentalists for the actions of the radicals that burn down homes; yet, somehow, we are responsible when Anders Behring-Breivik shoots 79 people in Norway. 

You will tell us that we cannot blame all Muslims for the actions of 19 Islamic terrorists on 9/11 or Major Hasan at Fort Hood -- and you are right -- but then, you will blame all of us for the actions of one person in Wisconsin...whose motives have yet to be determined.

Just who is the hypocrite with the broad brush, sir?  It is YOU and you are too blinded by your own sanctimony to even know it.

A composite that conservatives have been particularly active in constructing as vaguely Arabic or Middle Eastern. And everyone knows that’s true.
 

- libfreeordie on August 5, 2012 at 7:48 PM

 Everyone knows that you want desperately for this guy to have what Jared Loughner and James Holmes did not:  One tiny strand connecting him to the Tea Party.

You are a hateful person, who is as, if not more, contemptible than those fellow Americans you accuse with your broad brush.

That's what we know, libfreeordie.

Your motives and values are as clear as glass and you have no shame.

PS:  Sikhs are not Muslims nor are the overwhelming majority of them Arab.

"OMG reports of a 40ish white supremacist-a tattooed US Army veteran. Please let this not be true….Please please please let it be somebody named Akbar."

- MaiDee on August 5, 2012 at 11:00 PM

This “Blame The Tea Party, Christians, Conservatives, Libertarians, Right-Wing, etc.” game reminds me of something the IRA once wrote to Margaret Thatcher. Following an unsuccessful terrorist attack, the IRA sent a letter to the Prime Minister that ended with:

“Today we were unlucky, but remember we only have to be lucky once. You will have to be lucky always.”

It is not enough that we protest peacefully and lack the violent record of the Left from assassinations to the WTO riots to the rapes and other violence of OWS, we have to cross our fingers and hope that no one even closely resembling the media’s caricature of us acts violently — even if he or she has NOTHING to do with us. On the other hand, the Left only has to be lucky once and they get to smear us with the “hate brush” even though we have nothing to do with any of this.

And, they get to do it while calling themselves the purveyors of all that is good and holy.

Disgusting.

This will give Obama a chance to spend time in Wisconsin and support the people, shoring up WI electoral votes.

inthemiddleLucky Pierre on August 5, 2012 at 6:59 PM

Hmmm….

Maybe, Rahm and Axelrod should put some of those “Chicago Values” on Greyhound buses to Virginia, North Carolina, Ohio, Florida, New Hampshire, Iowa, and Pennsylvania.  You know, get some more blood flowing and the Crybaby-in-Chief can go to swing states and pretend that he cares…while “shoring up electoral votes.”

You are disgusting piece of shit.  No, really.  You are.