New York Mayor Michael
Bloomberg is pictured in the Brooklyn borough of New York City on
February 14, 2013. Bloomberg said Sunday he will invest $12 million in a
nationwide ad campaign to counter the powerful US gun lobby and rally
support for background
June 5, 2013
|
In late May, a
threatening letter laced with the deadly chemical ricin was sent from
Shreveport, Louisiana, to New York City Mayor Michael Bloomberg as a response to the mayor’s outspoken support for stricter gun control laws. Two
identical letters,
also containing the lethal substance, were addressed to both President
Barack Obama and the head of the Washington D.C. lobbying group, Mayors
Against Illegal Guns, which is managed and funded by Bloomberg himself.
The contents of the letters are clearly the work of a right-wing gun nut and
readas
follows: “You will have to kill me and my family before you get my
guns. Anyone wants to come to my house will get shot in the face. The
right to bear arms is my constitutional, god-given right and I will
exercise that right till the day I die. What’s in this letter is nothing
compared to what I’ve got planned for you.”
Despite
lethally targeting civilians and non-military officials far from any
active battlefield, no one is referring to these acts as terrorism. Not
the press, not political pundits, not the intended victims. No one.
In fact, Bloomberg himself was nonplussed by the whole ordeal,
tellingreporters
on May 30, “I’m not angry. There are people who I would argue do things
that may be irrational, do things that are wrong, but it’s a very
complex world out there and we just have to deal with that.”
Yes, Mike, it is a very complex world. This world is so complex, in fact, that an easily
identifiable act of terrorism isn’t
considered terrorism for one simple reason: it probably wasn’t
committed by a Muslim, but rather by some white guy in the South.
Clearly,
while white guys who send murderous mail are merely acting irrationally
and doing something wrong, potential violence by members of the Muslim
faith present a singular threat to our civilized society. So much so, in
fact, that Michael Bloomberg himself believes our own laws and the
bedrock of that very society are not good enough to defend against such a
scourge to humanity.
In April, following the horrific Boston
Marathon bombing, Bloomberg declared that the American obsession with
privacy, civil rights and basic freedoms were antiquated and trite when
compared to the dire threat posed by hypothetical barbarian hordes of
“Islamists.”
At a press conference at the Lower Manhattan Security Initiative, Bloomberg
said,
“The people who are worried about privacy have a legitimate worry. But
we live in a complex world where you’re going to have to have a level of
security greater than you did back in the olden days, if you will. And
our laws and our interpretation of the Constitution, I think, have to
change.”
Yes, how complex it is. So complex that, although a 2010
study by Duke University and the University of North Carolina found that Islamic terrorism accounted for
only six percent of all terrorist attacks in the United States between 1980 and 2005 while a 2012
analysis by the Center for American Progress reported that a
whopping“[f]ifty-six
percent of domestic terrorist attacks and plots in the U.S. since 1995
have been perpetrated by right-wing extremists,” Michael Bloomberg has
made it his duty to illegally spy on and harass Muslim communities in
the New York Metro area.
Bloomberg has presided over a
massive, illegal covert domestic surveillance and
ethno-religious profiling program that have targeted, alienated and
traumatized Muslims throughout the Northeast, despite the fact that, following the September 11, 2001 attacks, more Americans have been
killed in right-wing
terrorist plots than by
Islamic terrorists.
“NYPD surveillance has impacted every facet of American Muslim life,”
explains Nermeen
Arastu, a volunteer attorney with the Asian American Legal Defense and
Education Fund (AALDEF), which co-authored a March 2013
report entitled, “Mapping Muslims: NYPD Spying and Its Impact on American Muslims.”
“The
program has stifled speech, communal life and religious practice and
criminalized a broad segment of American Muslims,” Arastu added, “The
isolationism that comes with being a ‘spied on’ community means that
American Muslims are getting a fundamentally inferior opportunity to
exercise their constitutional rights.”
But, for Mayor Mike, just
because a white guy tries to kill you by post doesn’t mean white people
in general deserve to be spied on, rounded up, marginalized, and
profiled. Keep calm and carry on, he says. These things happen.
Last week, on Chris Jansing’s MSNBC show, USA Today Washington Bureau Chief Susan Page
said it
was “probably not fair to taint the entire gun rights movement with the
actions of this disturbing letter because there is a serious debate and
two sides to it when it comes to the issue of guns.” Jansing agreed.
“Yeah, and it’s unfortunate that, for a few, it comes to this,” she
said.
Not fair, she said. Unfortunate, she said.
Just last year, Bloomberg
defended his Muslim surveillance program,
claiming,
“Everything the NYPD has done is legal, it is appropriate, it is
constitutional,” and, unsurprisingly, by invoking that sacred strawman:
9/11. “We have not forgotten the lesson of that terrible day on 9/11,”
he insisted, sanctimoniously
adding, “We have to keep this country safe. … Remind yourself when you turn out the light tonight.”
Bloomberg’s
insistence that, “We don’t target individuals based on race or
religion. We follow leads,” is fascinating because, just six months
after he said this, an Associated Press
report on court
testimony by
the NYPD stated, “In more than six years of spying on Muslim
neighborhoods, eavesdropping on conversations and cataloguing mosques,
the New York Police Department’s secret Demographics Unit never
generated a lead or triggered a terrorism investigation.”
But
Bloomberg’s targeting of Muslims isn’t his only method of rooting out
the evil that lurks in the hearts of brown and black men. A month ago,
the
billionaire mayor defended his
racistStop-and-Frisk policy by invoking – what else? – the ever-looming conversation-ender: the constant scourge and fear of terrorism.
“Look at what’s happened in Boston,” he
said.
“Remember what happened here on 9/11. Remember all of those who’ve been
killed by gun violence and the families they left behind.”
Again
he even claimed that our own laws and efforts not to discriminate
against certain communities are making us less safe. “God forbid
terrorists succeed in striking our city because of a politically driven
law that undermines the N.Y.P.D.’s intelligence-gathering efforts,” he
said.
Even the editors of the New York Times were unmoved by
Bloomberg’s fear-mongering defense of racial profiling. “Mayor Michael
Bloomberg trotted out shopworn, discredited
arguments this week,” they
wrote,
“while defending the constitutionally suspect police program under
which hundreds of thousands of innocent New Yorkers have been detained
and questioned on the streets every year.”
They note, “[G]uns were
seized in only 0.15 percent of all stops. In addition, only 5.4 percent
of all stops resulted in an arrest, and about 6 percent led to a
summons. This means that in nearly 90 percent of cases, the citizens who
were stopped were doing nothing illegal. In some cases, prosecutors
declined to automatically prosecute arrests made in connection with the
program because they knew that the stops were illegal.”
In 2011,
84 percent of all those stopped under
the NYPD’s Stop-and-Frisk rampage were black and Hispanic, despite
respectively representing 23 and 29 percent of New York City’s total
population.
Under Michael Bloomberg’s reign, minority communities
have been collectively punished for the criminal actions of a few. In
his complex world, blacks and Latinos are all potential gun-toting
killers, while all Muslims are jihadists-in-training. Yet, an actual
gun-toting lunatic who actually tries to murder Bloomberg is an anomaly,
an aberration, nothing to be concerned with. Simply something “we just
have to deal with.”
But call it terrorism? No, never. Not if the perpetrator is white and not Muslim.
Glenn Greenwald, a former constitutional lawyer and currently a columnist for The Guardian, has been
addressingthis
double standard for
years.
“Terrorism,” he
writes,
“is simultaneously the single most meaningless and most manipulated
word in the American political lexicon. The term now has virtually
nothing to do with the act itself and everything to do with the identity
of the actor, especially his or her religious identity. It has really
come to mean: ‘a Muslim who fights against or even expresses hostility
towards the United States, Israel and their allies.’”
So while the NYPD continues to
terrorize minority communities and the FBI continues to foil
phony Muslim terror plots that it itself
devises,
plans and
funds,
rest assured that all the well-armed and well-represented white folks
in our noble nation will continue to live free from suspicion, scrutiny
and surveillance no matter how much
postal poison some of them send and how many
mass shootings some of them carry out.
Maybe it’s not complex after all, maybe it’s just complexion. Remember that when you turn off the light tonight.
Nima Shirazi is co-editor of the Iran, Iraq and Turkey pages for the online magazine
Muftah. His political analysis can be found on his blog,
Wide Asleep in America. He tweets
@WideAsleepNima.
Nima Shirazi is a
political commentator from New York City. His analysis of United States
foreign policy and Middle East issues is published on his website,
WideAsleepInAmerica.com
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