It's easy to demonize the other, especially if you don't know people in the other group. When left to our lesser natures, we will make fun of and belittle those others.
The current other of choice at present are Muslims. I'm working on focusing my thoughts on the subject after getting reacquainted with Kathy Shaidle's blog after having her drop off of my radar for a few years; Bene was venting at her "sewer of bigotry" last week.
Hyperbole? Your mileage may vary. If there is something in need of waste-treatment, it's excessive anger and aggression; she's not woofing when she calls her blog Five Feet of Fury.
When one of my two-year-old charges was troubled this morning, he started beating his tummy and toss-rolling miniature cars around the room at warp speed; when Kathy's troubled, she sets the aggression knob to 11 and lets 'er rip.
My enemies are belligerent Muslims -- from now on I'm calling them "brown supremicists" [sic] -- and the radical left. Both are
unfortunately being enabled by our liberal elite Establishment.
It should go without saying, therefore, that I refuse to allow my enemies to control the way I speak.
Because if they control the way I speak, they will win. And I plan to win. Competitiveness and success being foreign
concepts to many liberals, I don't expect them to comprehend that.
OK, she's got her game face on, but let's play smart and not just furious.
One of our enemies is belligerent Islam, a rather nasty meme that spreads well in folks that are frustrated with the world. It is the idea that is our foe; if we can wean people off of the idea, they're no longer our enemy.
A note, therefore, to my enemies:
You believe in the existence of a strange creature called "group rights." I do not accept the existence of said
animal.
It follows that you also accept the notion of "group libel." Obviously, I reject that notion also.
I refuse to accept the faddish notion that only certain groups are allowed to use certain "offensive" words when
describing themselves.
I refuse to adopt the fad of writing "not all Muslims" whenever I speak about Islam.
There are some offensive words that are best left retired. For instance, gays have often adopted "queer" as a badge of honor as self-applied, and blacks can use the n-word as a complement, as in "that's one bad n-----." However, the later word is so toxic, you can't even use it in print without getting in trouble; you can use the Lord's name in vain and f-bomb to your heart's content, but don't start a limerick that's first line ends in "Tigger."
I don't know too many anti-Muslim cuss words, nor do I use them. We just got done doing a section on stereotypes in my MGT 499 class; let me pull a except from it.
There are truckloads of bad stereotypes that don’t reflect well on groups. Please note that I’m not endorsing any of these.
Blacks are crime-prone and undereducated, Jews are all great businessmen, American Asians are all great at school and in science, Italian-Americans all are mobbed up, Arabs are all terrorists, Baptist-style fundamentalists are all dumb and undereducated, and folks from West Virginia are even dumber than that and always marry their cousin.
Such stereotypes keep us from dealing with people as individuals, assigning a stock character to a person based on their demographic group.
For instance, African-Americans have frequently pulled over for “Driving While Black;” police officers can fall into stereotyping and get unduly suspicious about a black male driver.
Post 9/11, Arabs and folks of South Asian descent will be viewed as dangerous as well, even if they’re not Islamic, since you can’t see their theology at a distance in most cases. Airline security has seen a few “Flying While Muslim” cases in recent years.
How do we counter that? First, we can note that there’s really one race that matters, and that’s the human race.
Secondly, we can remember the “golden rule” of treating others like we want to be treated. Assuming the worst of others isn’t what we’d want done to us.
Thirdly, people aren’t bound by their ethnic group’s stereotype. A group may tend to have a characteristic, but that doesn’t mean that each and every person shares that trait.
While it's a bit PC to insist on saying "Not all Muslims are [fill in issue at hand]" not doing so both trots out stereotypes and can trot out what amounts to a group libel, charging the whole of a group with the excesses of a few.
I have to deal with Muslims on a daily basis. For instance, the undergraduate econ prof at Sullivan is an Indonesian Muslim; he was my fellow soft-drink-only drinking buddy back in 2007 when we had our faculty retreat at the Buffalo Trace Distillery. He's not packing any C-4 under his shirt, as my Iraqi-American MGT 499 student likes to joke about himself.
The reason he can joke about it is that I have treated him and the other Muslim students I have (two in that class and more than that in FIN 510) with respect. Not with deference or pulling punches (maybe once, where I had to refrain from making fun of a student named Yassir's name) but with respect. That respect will go a long way to keeping them from getting the jihadi bug.
One interesting thing to note is that there is quite a bit of common ground between Muslims and conservative Christians on social policy. Last week in MGT499, the subject tangented into dry counties in Kentucky; per Wikipedia-
Of the 120 counties in Kentucky,
53 are completely dry, 37 are considered partially dry or "moist", 29
are entirely wet, and one is classified as wet but is actually closer
to "moist".
That's a novel concept to a Michigander, where the closest thing to dryness is not selling booze on Sunday mornings. My Iraqi-American student (born here but spent most of his childhood in Iraq) was agree with the dry laws, putting Muslims and Baptists in the same corner.
Last I checked, Muslims are people, too. If you treat them with respect, they're less likely to pick up the jihadi bug. Heck, they might even see Christ in you and come to see Jesus as something more than a prophet, but as God incarnate. You're not likely to do that stereotyping them as brown-supremacist terrorists.
We might even get some allies in the culture war in the process.
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