Alright, y'all, welcome back to the show.
It's Anti-War Radio.
I'm Scott Horton.
And when I first read this headline, I was frightened.
Muslim smash!
And I thought, oh no, Muslim smash!
I'm so afraid!
Because, you know, I'm a conservative in America.
And so, I started crying, and my bottom lip started quivering, and I went and hid under my bed, and I wet my pants, because the terrible Muslims are coming to hurt me.
And then while I was hiding under my bed, I looked up the rest of the headline on my 3G phone here.
Oh, Muslim smash!
Right-wing stereotypes.
Well, that doesn't sound quite so scary.
Welcome to the show, Kelly Vlahos.
How are you doing?
Great, thanks for having me on, Scott.
Yeah, I thought, Muslim smash!
It just scared me right out of my wits.
I'm so happy I have you here to straighten things out.
Of course, everybody in the audience knows who Kelly Vlahos is, right, everybody?
She's from FoxNews.com, a contributing editor at the American Conservative Magazine.
She also writes a regular column for AntiWar.com.
That's at AntiWar.com/Vlahos.
And again, this article is called Muslims Smash Right-Wing Stereotypes.
What right-wing stereotypes, and how did some Muslims smash them?
Well, I got onto this story because when I had first heard about the riots in London and the surrounding cities last week in the UK, I, you know, probably like many people in this country had, you know, had been depending on some assumptions.
My first assumption was that these were race riots.
My first assumption was that it was somehow involving the Muslim community.
And I assume that, I think, at a very visceral level because of the, you know, this constant barrage of negative news that we get about the Muslim community in Europe being isolated and angry and often outraged.
I remember the riots in France a couple years ago.
So I was pleasantly surprised to find out that it was not a race-based, it was not race-based rioting or looting.
It wasn't involving the Muslim community.
And in fact, it was the opposite that as the riots continued, the looting continued, it surfaced that the Muslim community was actually standing up and protecting not only their own properties in these cities that were being threatened by looters, but those of their neighbors, non-Muslim neighbors.
In fact, three Muslim men of Pakistani descent had been run over by some looters in the course of protecting their properties.
And it turns out that they were sort of emerging as the heroes in this story.
And I wanted to write something about it because I felt that my initial response, reaction to hearing about riots in Europe was based on this propaganda that we've been hearing over the years.
I mean, there's no doubt that there's been some very high-profile case about Muslims in Europe that are very troubling, whether it be the honor killings that occur in places like England and France, the jihadists or the extremists that have gone after cartoonists based on fatwas because they had dared draw on the depiction of Mohammed.
But overall, you know, there is good news.
And I felt that we, as the media, have often ignored that.
And we listen to right-wing politicians too often who are, what I say, hell-bent on creating this negative image to forward their own political agendas.
And then I broke that down and brought that back to the United States and how we have fostered this negative image about American Muslims.
And it's way off the mark.
In fact, American Muslims are more integrated, happier, and more well-adjusted than European, not only European Muslims, but many Americans as well.
And I feel that's a story that has not been put out there by the mainstream media.
The hate and fear Muslims crowd, they have this thing where they say, well, we don't want you to hate and fear all Muslims.
There are Muslims who are good.
The ones who have joined us in saying that all the rest of them are evil.
And somehow, you know, virtually all Muslim preachers in America have denounced terrorism, have denounced Al-Qaeda and whatever.
And yet, if they're not holding a denounce Al-Qaeda rally this afternoon, then that just shows that really they're out to get us and whatever in the minds of the Robert Spencers and Pamela Gellers of the world, who are the ones pushing this hate and fear all Muslims meme.
After all, George Bush said, we're not at war with Islam.
It's just these few guys.
They're going to kill us all if we don't stop these few guys somehow.
But still, it's not all Muslims that we're fighting.
I really think you put your finger on it.
In this post 9-11 world, Muslims, in order to be accepted by the establishment, by the mainstream, they have to sign a sort of symbolic letter of loyalty by denouncing If you check off these certain boxes, which include invariably denouncing terrorism, denouncing terrorists, putting your support behind Israel, and checking all these boxes, then we will recognize you as an American Muslim in good standing.
And they might all like you said, there are Muslims, high-profile Muslims in this country who have done just that.
But we don't turn around and say, well, now that you are a Muslim in good standing, let's learn more about you.
Let's learn more about your community.
You know, it's all one way.
It's a one-way street.
And I think that we have, and it has fostered a fear and a loathing of Muslims and Islam in general in this country, and I point out in my story that our approval ratings, but those who hold, Americans that hold favorable views of Islam have actually declined in the last five years.
That's not even, you know, the ten years though.
You can't attribute this directly to 9-11.
You can attribute this directly to people like Newt Gingrich and others who are out there constantly talking about loyalty to the country and whether Muslims have loyalty and whether Islam is a violent religion, whether it fosters jihadism and extremism.
And, you know, Newt Gingrich was on stage the other night in Iowa and he was saying that we need to make sure our government workers are, there must be a way to find out how loyal they are to the United States.
So, he believes there needs to be more levels of loyalty checking in this country.
You know, he mentioned that almost in the same breath as talking about English as a first language, official language rather.
You know, sometimes it's subtle, sometimes not so subtle, but it's created this atmosphere here in this country in which we look at Muslims as the other, or as suspect, not real Americans.
Alright, well, I have an idea for how to counter this, because this is almost all on the conservative side.
I mean, most liberals, even if they can't come up with another explanation for September 11th other than Islam made them do it, it still doesn't turn them right into bigots over it or whatever.
But the conservatives need another narrative, because conservatives have no way to explain September 11th other than the evil of their religion made them hate what is so good about us.
That same lie that came from Bush's speech that night.
When the alternative narrative is right in front of us and it's perfectly obvious and simple.
September 11th was Bill Clinton's fault.
Bill Clinton blockaded a million Iraqis to death from Saudi Arabia, and he did it for Israel while he's backing their occupations of Lebanon and Palestine, and that's what got those towers knocked down.
Blame the Democrats.
It's a lot easier than blaming a billion Muslims in the world, and it's a lot more accurate.
Right, but unfortunately, to hop on this train, you know, this anti-Muslim, anti-Islamic, you know, jihad-hunting train, it's the forward one's political career.
You get a lot of traction, you get a lot of mileage out of going around town talking about, you know, the scourge of Muslims threatening a society, a society that's already fearful because, you know, of the economy and unemployment.
That's red meat for the American people who love it.
Alright, it's Kelly Vlahos from the American Conservative and Antiwar.com.
We'll be back right after this.
Alright y'all, welcome back to the show.
It's Antiwar Radio.
I'm Scott Horton.
I'm talking with Kelly B. Vlahos from the American Conservative Magazine and Antiwar.com and we're talking about all this hype and propaganda about Muslims in America and why we're all supposed to hate and fear them and why actually it's a bunch of nonsense.
The poll numbers are in.
It turns out that Muslims are just people just like you and me.
I was wondering, well, before the break, Kelly, you were talking about how to bash Muslims, to scapegoat Muslims is great politics in America.
It's fantastic politics.
I mean, you remember during, you know, the Tea Party wave.
I mean, there were several politicians out there two years ago and there was a climax during last August protest against the Islamic Center in New York City, but there were several Tea Party politicians who were out there grandstanding about Sharia law coming to the U.S. court system and they're gathering large crowds and like you said, it's red meat to a certain segment of the population.
And that's fine.
It's probably a small I would imagine a small segment of the population, but the problem is that's what the media is covering.
And the media is most at fault of this because they're covering these wacky politicians.
They're covering Newt Gingrich.
They're setting the agenda and it's Muslims against everybody else.
They're not doing the stories.
I mean, there's plenty of stories and I'm not going to take away from the New York Times and other papers.
We've done plenty of stories about Muslims who feel that they have been denigrated by the system, that they're being hounded by the FBI, that they're not getting a fair shake.
And I've read all those stories and I think they're fine.
But it hasn't trickled down to this general awareness that there are Muslims.
I mean, okay, less than a percent of adult Americans are Muslim.
But they're here.
They're everywhere.
And like the poll numbers are reflecting that there are just like you and I and in some cases they're doing better than you and I. They're working.
They're well educated.
They're feeling good about their communities.
They're involved in their communities.
They're involved in their mosque.
But they're also involved in their civic organizations.
They didn't come here to start jihad.
They didn't come here to foster isolated little communities where they could be in these cells of pious Muslims who don't go outside and don't let their women drive.
They came here because they love America.
They want to be part of the system.
And we're not recognizing that in our media culture.
And that makes me pretty angry.
Because as a reporter, I have been fed and been part of this media minefield where you're constantly getting this disinformation about Muslims and what they're all about.
And there's been a concerted effort by the right wing to equate Muslims here with the situation in Europe which is a lot more serious.
The Muslims in Europe are significantly poorer.
They're in situations where they are living in ghettos and they are isolated from the rest of their communities, whether it be in Paris or London.
And they're treated like second class citizens.
So there is more of an atmosphere there bordering on festering tensions where you just don't see that here.
But I have this feeling that people like Newt Gingrich and others would love for it to be like that here.
The irony is, of course, that to be an American means to believe in the Declaration of Independence.
To be an individual, to be treated as one, to treat others as individuals.
To even call them the American Muslims or something like that is to collectivize a bunch of people who are a bunch of people.
The whole thing is ridiculous.
If you start treating them all like they're all the Muslims or something like that, they're going to start thinking of themselves that way, when they ought to just be Americans just like everybody else.
If you meet one, then you see that that's exactly what they are.
Just regular people.
Exactly.
And there has been quite an emphasis on whether Islam is a religion of violence, whether Islam fosters violence, whether it's even a legitimate religion.
The fact is, Catholics and Protestants have been fighting each other for years.
Bloody wars in France and England and Spain have been committed in the name of God and of religion.
The Crusades, the Inquisition.
We can go back and say that every religion has fostered violence at one time, but the Muslims that are living here have come here to live.
To live and to raise families and get educated and, like you said, advance themselves as individuals.
There's no evidence that you have Muslims moving here to usurp the system.
You know, to use their religion as a weapon or a tool.
Yes, they're religious, but look at our American Christians.
They're very religious, and I think many of them would call themselves Christians first.
You have soldiers in our military who call themselves Christians before they are soldiers for the Constitution.
And that's a whole other story we could talk about someday.
So, to say that these Muslims are suspect because of their religion is just wrong.
Yeah, well, it's interesting when you talk about these poll numbers and the amount of Muslims who feel like, whatever their situation right now, whatever the economic situation in the country right now, they're more confident about their future than most regular Americans.
They're not too worried, I guess, about all this anti-them scaremongering.
Yeah, which I'm, you know, I'm really, frankly, I'm a little afraid, you know, or just a little anxious that as we get closer to the 9-11 anniversary, the 10th year, that we're going to be revisiting a lot of these, like I say, a lot of these tropes and narratives about Islam and Muslims and Muslims here in the country and whether they're loyal and, you know, so on and so forth.
It is, you know, sort of part of what we can imagine is going to be a whole retrospective on what happened.
And, you know, last summer at this time, like I mentioned, you know, we were fixated on what was going on in New York, whether or not these American Muslims should be able to build an Islamic center near, you know, near the sacred, you know, 9-11 site.
And it seems as though that was nine years after 9-11 that we had come no further as a country and sort of reconciling these differences, these cultural and religious differences, you know, and using a whole like segment of our population as a scapegoat for, like you said, the foreign policies that led to 9-11 in the first place.
And so I just think that we just, we have not gone forward at all, and I think it's just going to get worse as we sort of, like, remember, you know, 9-11.
Well, you know, thank goodness Ron Paul is running.
He's the only, you know, antidote to this propaganda on the national political level, and he's changed the political conversation in America in so many ways.
I sure hope that Rick Perry starts attacking him for being pro-Al Qaeda or whatever any minute now, so that they can have this fight, because, I mean, this is the biggest lie of our whole era, which is that they hate us because we're good, and never mind the fact that the American troops were occupying Saudi Arabia in order to blockade and bomb Iraq, and that this is why the enemy said they were at war against us in the first place.
This is what it was about.
Earthly, human politics that take place in time and space, in real life, in the Middle East, that happened before 9-11 happened.
People act like September 11th was the first day in the history of the world or something, and it just is not the case, and once we get that across, then that's it.
We win, because then the argument's simple.
We don't want to occupy more countries, bomb more countries, and do more regime changes.
We want to do less of that, since that's what got us in this mess.
Yeah, and you bring up the presidential election.
I mean, another thing I've been not looking forward to is the same old rhetoric, which you know is happening.
You know, I mentioned that Newt Gingrich on the stage in Iowa.
I think that's just the beginning.
The first step is talking about English only.
Next step is loyalty test for government workers.
Next thing you know, like you said, they're going to be saying that Obama isn't tough enough on terrorists, and then it's just going to go from there.
And pretty soon, it's going to be a litmus test.
How hard are you on Muslims?
I look back at some of the polls after 9-11, I'm just shocked that Americans were basically saying, oh, we believe in the Constitution, we believe in the right to one's religion, but we also believe that Muslims should have to prove their identification and their background and their papers.
They have to go through extra security checks.
This is America.
So, I don't know.
That's the government schools right there, where there's just no critical thinking or everything can be a non-sequitur in politics.
It doesn't matter.
Some all for peace and nuclear war with Iran, too.
I don't know.
Why not?
Thank you very much for your time, Kelly.
I really appreciate it.
And great peace, by the way, too.
Everybody, that's Kelly Vlahos, antiwar.com/Vlahos.
I'll be right back.
