This third part of the series will conclude by tying up the loose ends of Part 1 and Part 2.
Racial Complexity:
In the picture that graces today’s essay, there is implied the racial complexity behind our theme, for the honorary Brown in the photo, Cat Stevens aka Yusuf Islam, is himself of Greek extraction, and Greeks tend to occupy a kind of taxonomic limbo between White and Brown, even if that limbo becomes somewhat artificially and officially resolved by deeming them Whites.
Put another way, a Carrot Top or a Conan O’Brien or a Brad Pitt would not be able to pull off the physiognomic transformation managed by Cat Stevens, no matter how long and bushy their beard and how correct their kufi.
Nevertheless, according to my theme, this does not matter: for the transformation of the white Westerner into an “honorary Brown” is not merely a matter of skin color, but of ideology complicated by biology. The phenomenon reaches absurd points when, for example, the white Muslims of the Balkans, whose presence in the region is due directly to the centuried menace of Ottoman Muslims against Europe, have been favored by the white West over and above the white Europeans of that region; and, as a kind of mirror-image of this, the plight of black Christians abused by black Muslims in Africa (e.g., in Nigeria) is ignored while a disproportionate hand-wringing is bestowed upon black Muslims in Africa—effectively making those black Christians “honorary Whites” insofar as their plight is ignored (with their Christian identity likely rendering them suspect in the eyes of PC MC).
At best, this perverse favoritism for Muslims will be sometimes, here and there, attenuated by a framework of generalized equivalency superimposed upon such conflicts as are rife throughout Africa between Muslim and non-Muslim Africans—the framework, that is, we have come to know too well from the Israeli-“Palestinian” conflict, of “the cycle of violence” whereby both sides are approximately equally to blame. More often, though, the onus of blame for that conflict tends to be skewed in favor of the “Palestinians” who, in the eyes of PC MC, have acquired the semi-Romantic aura of the noble freedom-fighter guerilla fighting for “the people” against their “oppressors”. In this context, the Israelis are seen as Western—since to a great extent modern Israel owes its sociopolitical substance to the West through the European Jews who founded it—and therefore also as “whiter” than the Arabs surrounding them, notwithstanding an often simultaneous acknowledgement of the Semitism they share. As Western and white, therefore, Israelis, in the eyes of PC MC, become automatically “oppressors”, while the Muslims of the region, as the Poster Children of Third World and Brown, become, in the eyes of PC MC, simply “desperately defending themselves and their land against oppression”—no matter what outrageous atrocities they perpetrate against the Israelis.
In sum, all non-whites of the world who are non-Muslims have, in effect, become “Honorary Whites”—a class of people, needless to say, that has become acutely disadvantaged in the context of the PC MC deference for Muslims.
Ideological Racism: Islamic “Super-Racism”
The ideological super-racism of Islam does the following:
a) it elevates the Muslims to the status of a Master Race over all Mankind,
b) it develops the supremacism of that “super-racism” ideally through all means possible—psychological, spiritual, theological, philosophical, sociological, cultural, political, legal, military and paramilitary,
and
c) it contextualizes that “super-racism” in terms of an anti-Western focus of its broader anti-Infidel antagonism.
With (c), we see the unwitting collusion of PC MC (as well as its older more virulent brother, Leftism) with the super-racist supremacist agenda of Islam (and along with (c), of course, are enabled (a) and (b) as unavoidable concatenations).
As we pointed out in Part 2: as the West is inextricably linked to whiteness, so too does any anti-Westernism partake of anti-white intentions and consequences.
Anti-White Redemption of the White:
Conversion to Islam attracts the type of white Westerner who, among other pathologies, psychologically needs some form of redemption from his “sin” of being white—and in that redemption, hopefully, a transformation into a new being cleansed of its white sinfulness. Ironically, and crucially, a great part of that putative “sinfulness” is supposed to be the racism of the white West.
Perhaps among those white Westerners who are attracted to Islam—whether just enough to bother to defend it from criticism or more strongly to actually convert—there will be a certain number whose pathology is not so deep and twisted that, with enough intelligent persuasion, they can have the scales fall from their eyes and see that, in fact, it is Islam that has had, and continues to have, the far worse record of racism, with no internal impetus for reform as the West has had—not only against black Africans whom Muslims enslaved, sold and slaughtered by the millions for centuries before, during and after the West got involved in slavery; but also against fellow Browns of the Third World who are not Arabs; and lastly, against three quarters of the rest of the Human Race for the crime of not being Believers in Islam.
Other essays:
Other previous essays on this blog relevant to this issue:
Islamoleftism
Muslims: Poster Children of Third World Peoples
Reverse Racism and Islam
The Crypto-Racism of PC Multiculturalism
Racism
Branco, Preto, Mulato
Muslim Profiling in a Peanut Shell
Racial Profiling and the Problem of Islam
6 comments:
First of all, Cat Stevens is 1/2 Swedish and 1/2 Cypriot, not Greek. Cyprus is geographically part of western Asia, and my overall impression is that its people are noticeably darker than European Greeks.
Secondly, your White/Brown racial dichotomy has no taxonomical validity and finds no support in the scientific literature. Europeans, West Asians and North Africans all belong to the same race (Caucasian) regardless of their relative differences in pigmentation, which are more a product of environmental adaptation than divergent biology.
Moreover, the examples you've chosen as representative Whites are outliers. Red hair and freckles are not common features among Caucasians, even in northern Europe. That's why Carrot Top and Conan O'Brien couldn't pass as Near Eastern. But take pretty much any European with dark hair and eyes, and the ability to tan, and he/she could easily be transformed into a "Brown" Muslim.
Here are just a few examples:
John Walker Lindh (the American Taliban)
http://www.crimelife.com/terrorists/mugshots/john_walker_lindh.jpg
http://www.terrorismcentral.com/Library/Biographies/Bios/WalkerLindh/LindhFamily.jpg
Jill Carroll (journalist held hostage in Iraq)
http://www.khqa.com/uploadedImages/Shared/News/National_Stories/Jill_Carroll.jpg
http://www.cynical-c.com/archives/bloggraphics/jill_carroll.jpg
http://www.signonsandiego.com/news/world/iraq/images/060330carroll.jpg
John Rhys-Davies (Sallah in 'Raiders of the Lost Ark')
http://cache.kotaku.com/assets/resources/2008/01/sallah.jpg
David Meads (musician Scroobius Pip)
http://www.platformsmagazine.com/13/contents/scroobiuspip.jpg
George Bush Photoshop
http://www.ahajokes.com/funpages/taliban02.jpg
Sean Connery (right) Photoshop
http://www.aref-adib.com/archives/khomeini_connery2.jpg
mr. x,
On Cat Stevens, the following website denotes his paternal ancestry as "Greek". The name of his father, "Stavros Georgiou" further bears that out. Furthermore, for you to draw a hard and fast distinction between "Cypriot" and "Greek" is rather disingenuous, since there are many Greeks who have lived in Cyprus for centuries (it would be like denying that anybody who was born in, and/or has grown up in, Switzerland could possibly be Italian).
http://www.nndb.com/people/717/000024645/
On your second point -- "your White/Brown racial dichotomy has no taxonomical validity and finds no support in the scientific literature" -- I may not have made clear in my essay that I am not speaking of "race" primarily in scientific terms qua the object, but rather I am dealing with "race" as a mythological construct, so to speak, that has real effects in the real world to the extent that people more or less believe in them in varying ways. As such, it could be "scientific" in the realms of disciplines such as Sociology and Psychology. The "Che-Guevarization" of the Muslim "freedom fighters" figures into this mythology of reverse racism, whereby non-whites of the Third World are more or less romanticized in their "struggles" against "oppression" -- "oppression" which usually is boiled down, in the terms of this mythology, to white Western interference of one sort or another. While this romanticization may rarely be warranted by the facts with respect to a handful of local non-Islamic problems here and there in the Third World, it becomes grotesquely inaccurate with regard to the supremacist, anti-liberal and often frankly racist militancy of various Muslim guerilla and vigilante movements around the world.
On your next point, I have articulated in other essays here which you might not have read that there is a "granularization" problem with profiling for people who "look Muslim" -- i.e., there will inevitably be non-Middle Easterners who will be mistaken for Middle Easterners (not only Hispanics and southern Mediterranean Europeans, but also some otherwise white Caucasians who simply look dark and whose appearance thus would be amplified with a beard, etc. (However, the photo you provide of John Walker Lindh does not look sufficiently "brown" to me. He looks pretty white to me. He looks like a white guy dressing up as a Muslim for Halloween, frankly. Nevertheless, I grant that there are whites who do, or can, look "brown".)
No profiling system can be perfect. The point is to prioritize in the interest maximum protection of our safety. Since the vast majority of terrorists are not only Muslims but also brown Muslims, it only makes sense to make that profile our top priority. Making that profile our top priority does not mean we completely eliminate other profiles. It just means they get relegated to 2nd place, 3rd place, etc., on a rational scale of priorities. So a rational anti-terrorist profiling methodology would not utterly neglect the possibility of whites being recruited by Muslims -- but it wouldn't give that possibility equal place with the far more likely scenario based upon past and current realities. Again, a rational profiling methodology will likely be unable to avoid the concrete effect of targeting many innocents in its dragnet. If we refused to institute a profiling methodology because it is likely to inconvenience or possibly even harm an indeterminate number of innocents, we would either never be able to have a profiling program of any kind (since all will do that), or we will force ourselves to settle for one that will likely have results that will jeopardize our safety far more. And given the various unique features of the nature of the threat of Islamic terrorism -- including not only the nature of the perpetrators but also their intended types of attack -- we should err on self-defense rather than avoiding possible innocent collateral damage (even if that "damage" is only personal indignities and extraordinary inconveniences).
I'm not arguing against profiling, so you don't have to sell me on that. But it's a big mistake to feed people's ignorance about race by treating it as a "mythological construct" and trading in simplistic stereotypes. You can advocate profiling Muslims in the West without pretending that Carrot Top is a typical-looking Westerner and inventing a "Brown race" based on a trait as labile and overlapping as skin color. You talk about the "real world," but none of that has any foundation in reality.
Also, it all plays right into the hands of the PC MCs who interpret any criticism of Islam as "racism." You would do better to use scientific fact to dispel the myth of a "Muslim race" and inform their clueless ilk that the people most associated with Islam (Middle Easterners) in fact belong to the same race as Europeans. Then you could dispatch their silly red herring and force focus back on the issue they're trying to distract from: religion. But right now you're just perpetuating their nonsense.
P.S. Greeks and Cypriots have similarities but are not the same, and you can't draw conclusions about one based on the other. They're two different populations.
mr. x,
"...it's a big mistake to feed people's ignorance about race by treating it as a "mythological construct" and trading in simplistic stereotypes."
The problem with your way of formulating your complaint about my approach is that you would push the alternative toward a color-blind/ethnicity-blind methodology -- when it is simply a matter of fact that the vast majority of those who have executed and planned terrorist attacks -- as well as the vast majority of Muslims we see in hateful demonstrations, in riots, and as perpetrators of various pathologies such as honor killings, etc. -- fit in a certain physiognomy that even though it might have internal variety to some extent, also excludes vast swaths of other people.
"You can advocate profiling Muslims in the West without pretending that Carrot Top is a typical-looking Westerner"
I never said Carrot Top is a typical-looking Westerner. I use him just as a convenient polar extreme to nudge the reader toward the general end of the spectrum I am talking about.
"and inventing a "Brown race" based on a trait as labile and overlapping as skin color."
I never invented a brown race. I speak of brown people. And I acknowledge overlap. But again, the vast majority of terrorists are "brown" in the sense one intends that loosely. There's no way around that fact. To deny it with such fastidious repugnance as you evince betrays a degree of PC brainwashing, which tends to have the effect on individuals of their denial of what is plain as the nose on their face in the name of ideologically based abtractions.
"You talk about the "real world," but none of that has any foundation in reality."
Au contraire, the reality you are holding up is one where complexity trumps observable patterns because of an axiom based upon the historical imperative to throw out the bathwater of specious racism that indeed has been a real problem in our history -- and along with that the baby of real differences and groupings among humans that have observable effects. The vast majority of Muslims are non-white. The reason for that is simple: historically, they arose among non-whites and then for subsequent centuries conquered non-white peoples and expanded their empire among them. And so, on what basis are we going to conclude that Muslims are neither non-white nor white, or both -- but never, Heaven forbid, non-white?
Again, overlap exists with the trans-national ethnic complexion of Islam, but it is the exception to the rule, not the rule itself.
"Also, it all plays right into the hands of the PC MCs who interpret any criticism of Islam as "racism." "
That myth will likely not go away, no matter how carefully and anxiously we try to please the PC People in this regard, for two reasons:
1) PC MCs do not think rationally about this, but hold on to irrational axioms
2) the fact that the vast majority of Muslims are both a) non-white and b) non-Western means that, in the vast majority of times, even when a color-blind profiling system ends up profiling (and/or apprehending) a terrorist, it will not be able to escape the appearance of being racist, because the terrorist will look obviously non-white and non-Western. (The non-Western aspect adds even more ammunition to the PC MCs, insofar as the romanticization of Third World cultures is a distinct -- albeit intimately related -- adjunct to the dogma of Reverse Racism.)
The same goes for any critiques of Islam and of Muslims: they will be unable to avoid the appearance of racism, for the same reasons.
While this appearance should not be a factor for people who think rationally about problems, PC MCs, as I said, don't think rationally.
"...the people most associated with Islam (Middle Easterners) in fact belong to the same race as Europeans."
Belonging to the same race by virtue of some theoretical taxonomy based in large part on invisible genetics is one thing, and the actual physiognomy of the vast majority of terrorist and terrorist planners, as well as their larger pool of enablers, is another. The visible physiognomic aspect must be part of a profiling methodology.
Repeat: such a methodology will not be perfect. Such a methodology should try to incorporate granularization and possibilities of overlap -- but not to the detriment of the #1 priority: self-defense & prevention of attacks.
"Then you could dispatch their silly red herring and force focus back on the issue they're trying to distract from: religion."
Of course, the ideal profiling methodology would zero in on a person's Islam or lack of it and make that the main point. I favor any methodology that can try to maximize that, and the more we can effectively do that, the less we will have to rely on physiognomic & visibly cultural factors. In the meantime, it would be irrational to set up an abstract template that ignores or unduly minimizes the actual concrete ethnic complexions of the vast majority of Muslims, and of the vast majority of Muslim terrorists.
"P.S. Greeks and Cypriots have similarities but are not the same, and you can't draw conclusions about one based on the other. They're two different populations."
That doesn't mean that a certain number of Greeks don't live in Cyprus, and that another certain number haven't lived there for generations if not centuries. So someone being "Cyprian" doesn't mean he is necessarily not Greek.
Plus there's the ongoing phenomenon of intermarriage (I mean, if a supposed Cypriot like Cat Stevens' father can marry a Swede, then other Cypriots could marry Greeks now and then.)
BTW, for a person as aware & knowledgeable of such fine physiognomic differences as those between Cypriots and Greeks, you seem otherwise oddly resistant to incorporating that kind of awareness & knowledge into a profiling methodology. I mean, if you are so good you can spot the difference between a Cypriot and a Greek at an airport, then surely you can tell the difference between, to pluck one example out of a fez, a Jordanian and an Austrian at an airport.
There are far more effective ways to go about profiling than using "brown skin" as a main criterion. For instance, looking at surnames, countries of birth, clothing, grooming, facial expressions, body language, etc. is likely to yield much better results. Certainly, physiognomy should be part of the equation -- and skin color is one aspect of physiognomy -- but the central position you've given it is, quite frankly, ridiculous and makes it difficult to take you seriously. That approach might work if all Westerners did in fact look like Carrot Top and all Muslims were sub-Saharan Africans. But both groups have skin tones that run the gamut from European white to African black, and they belong to all three of the major races of mankind: Caucasian, Negro and Mongol. In this context (reality) "Brown" has very little usefulness.
The bottom line is that if you're criticizing PC MCs for racializing a conflict that has nothing to do with race, then you shouldn't turn around and do the same thing. The way you carry on about "Whites" and "Browns" and call Middle Easterners "non-white" not only doesn't help to remove the "appearance of racism" but actually fans the flames by needlessly bringing race to the forefront, not to mention supporting the PC MCs view of it as a "mythological construct" and making a complete mockery of its anthropological and genetic underpinnings (which, by the way, are neither "theoretical" nor "invisible" -- that's PC MC talk).
------------
Of course Greeks have lived in Cyprus for a long time -- over 3000 years in fact. And that's the whole point. The island was already inhabited when the Greeks arrived, and it was subsequently settled by other peoples. For three millennia, Greek Cypriots have been isolated from European Greeks and likely absorbed non-European elements. This makes the two populations different -- not different races, but different nonetheless. And for that reason, you shouldn't call a Cypriot a Greek any more than you should call an Austrian a German or a Cuban a Spaniard.
mr. x,
You are persisting in arguing against a straw man. Example:
"There are far more effective ways to go about profiling than using "brown skin" as a main criterion."
I never said it would be a "main criterion".
In my essay "Racial Profiling and the Problem of Islam" which I linked in the present essay above, I wrote:
"because, to repeat ourselves, the vast majority of the world’s Muslims are non-white and the vast majority of the world’s whites are non-Muslims, the elimination or proscription of the vast amount of racial data that is one pertinent (but not perfect) factor among others in identifying Muslims would impair any attempts at profiling Muslims."
And:
"it would be irrational to exclude racial data from any profiling methodology that might in the future be constructed by which to deal with the problem of Islamic terrorism."
And:
"it would irrationally impair our law enforcement techniques instrumental for our general self-defense should we refuse to implement some degree of racial profiling in screening for the Muslim terrorist."
Of course, your adjectival qualifier "main" is not scientific, and if I am calling for some degree of racial profiling, I am not at the same time calling for that degree to be so minor as to be effectively negligible. For the PC MC mentality, any degree of racial physiognomy incorporated into profiling is intolerable.
And of course, this general principle should not be conceived in rigid abstraction: there will doubtless be occasions, contexts, times and places where that degree becomes, indeed, "main", insofar as its importance may on any one of those unanticipated occasions, contexts, times and places exert itself as of primary importance. To prejudicially or axiomatically exclude such a possibility in the drafting and implementation of a profiling methodology would be irrational and dangerous.
"For instance, looking at surnames, countries of birth, clothing, grooming, facial expressions, body language, etc. is likely to yield much better results."
Better results in some occasions, contexts, times and places, but not necessarily in all occasions, contexts, times and places. In a situation, for example, where the context is an extraordinarily complex public place with thousands of people coming and going, and where security personnel have been alerted of a possible bomb in transit amid the flux of people and things -- a bomb of unknown deadliness possibly far worse than ordinary explosives -- and where those personnel have little time or opportunity to avail themselves of the criteria you list, and also given other complex variables of the moment, it would be potentially disastrous for personnel not to try to single out people who look Muslim. Such a maneuver would doubtlessly yield a majority of incidences of mistaken identity. But when the stakes are that high, it is better to implement a policy that seems "racist" and that will inconvenience and hurt the feelings of many people, than to risk the deaths of hundreds or even thousands.
The above policy need not exclude other types of people who may seem suspicious -- say, a blonde kid acting fidgety and paranoid and carrying a heavy backpack, etc.
The fact that I have to laboriously explain these things just goes to show the degree of PC MC you evidently harbor.
"Certainly, physiognomy should be part of the equation -- and skin color is one aspect of physiognomy..."
I gather that your apparent concession here actually refers to cases where other information is already known about the suspect. This may pertain in relatively uncomplicated criminal cases, but not in the case of protecting ourselves against innumerable Muslims who have a trans-national system of recruitment, operations and mobility, and who are increasingly infiltrating our Western societies, often under cover in broad daylight in terms of exploiting our PC MC ideas of what constitutes "moderate Muslims" and respect & deference for Muslims and Islam in general (coupled with vilification of those who wish to sound the alarm about Muslims in general). This, combined with the complexity of various kinds of targets in the US, and combined with our great degree of ignorance with regard to pertinent specifics of all of the above, necessitates that our profiling methodology be far more willing to err.
"but the central position you've given it is, quite frankly, ridiculous and makes it difficult to take you seriously. That approach might work if all Westerners did in fact look like Carrot Top and all Muslims were sub-Saharan Africans."
Again, a straw man and a red herring. You are ignoring or glossing over the fact that degrees between these extremes can be useful. Will a methodology attuned to degrees between be imperfect, and difficult to implement? Of course. That doesn't mean such a methodology is not rational for our self-defense.
"The bottom line is that if you're criticizing PC MCs for racializing a conflict that has nothing to do with race, then you shouldn't turn around and do the same thing."
The conflict has nothing to do with race insofar as the skin color of Muslims is not causing them to be dangerous; but it does have to do with race insofar as most Muslims are non-white, a fact we can and must use as one factor in our profiling to protect ourselves. PC MC people can't deal with this distinction because they are holding on with tenacious irrationality to an irrational doctrine of anti-"racism" that is mushed together in their addled brains with the truly ethical cause of being anti-racist without the quote marks.
I don't believe in coddling PC MC people and walking on eggshells about racial factors, where those racial factors may be rationally pertinent to our protection.
"Of course Greeks have lived in Cyprus for a long time -- over 3000 years in fact."
Every Cypriot Greek has roots that go back on Cyprus for 3000 years? There are no Cypriot Greeks on Cyprus whose roots are only 2000 years, 1000 years, 500 years, 250 years, 100 years, 50 years... etc?
Secondly, there are no Greek Greeks who live on Cyprus? Or whose families go back only one or two generations?
"three millennia, Greek Cypriots have been isolated from European Greeks and likely absorbed non-European elements"
Yes, a bland way of talking about the Muslim Turks who raped Cyprus, literally and figuratively.
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