Mic-checking and the Occupy Movement

An clear summation of the principles behind the Occupy Movement, to my mind, from PJ Rey in Inside Higher Education:

"The current debate surrounding Occupy’s mic-check tactic is in desperate need of an updated notion of free speech that accounts not only for negative freedom (i.e., freedom from constraints) but also for positive freedom (i.e., freedom to be recognized) as well. That is to say, for the right to free (political) speech to have a practical significance, it must also imply a right of equal access to the public sphere. Of course, there are practical limits to equal access. Attention given to one individual or group usually comes at the expense of attention to others. But what the Occupy movement seems to be rejecting is the current (arguably anti-democratic) reality where distribution of access is left to be determined by market forces. Occupiers are struggling for the democratization of political speech. The primary purpose of Occupy’s use of the human microphone at public speaking events is not to disrupt, but to be heard. It is not an assault on free speech but a tactic for obtaining it.

The logic of this debate over access and control extends beyond issues of free speech and the human microphone. Political opponents have made similar criticisms of the Occupy movement's tactic of indefinite encampment on (often privately owned) public spaces. These detractors have argued that by camping in a public space, Occupiers are, simultaneously, denying others the freedom to use that space. Again, this concept of freedom is blind to power. Like speech, space is not evenly distributed. If the mic-check tactic aims at the democratization of speech, encampments aim at the democratization of space."

"Just Gathering Statistics," Alabama's Kristallnacht for the Undocumented

I grabbed this story from Tex(t)Mex blog,which points to a similar logic behind the recent changes to Alabama's racist new citizenship laws. The response by many undocumented families in the region was to flee:

"Hispanic students have started vanishing from Alabama public schools in the wake of a court ruling that upheld the state's tough new law cracking down on illegal immigration.

Education officials say scores of immigrant families have withdrawn their children from classes or kept them home this week, afraid that sending the kids to school would draw attention from authorities."

 While panicked administrators have "distributed to schools sample letters that can be sent to parents of new students informing them of the law's requirements for either citizenship documents or sworn statements by parents.

In an attempt to ease suspicions that the law may lead to arrests, the letter tells parents immigration information will be used only to gather statistics."

Mass deportation is not a new story when it comes to undocumented laborers in the United States. It is a standard means of producing labor control even if the move is garnered by grossly nativist sentiments (see "Operation Wetback" for example). At the same time, their rate is accelerating and expanding, additionally seeding a set of subcontracted companies of incarceration and control that are exorbitantly profitable.

State of Exception Discourse, It's Problems

Michael Hardt discussing how claims about "sovereign power" as based on "a state of exception" (e.g. Abu Ghraib, the new jurdical category of "enemy combatant" that enables torture, etc., preemptive defense) is always governed by a constitutionalist tendency, a desire for the rule of law, rather than any ethos that might be revolutionary, or transform the conditions for such exceptions:

Never Forget...

Of all of the 9/11 memorialization hysteria, Vladimir Lenin would remind us, cui prodest?:

"In politics it is not so important who directly advocates particular views. What is important is who stands to gain from these views, proposals, measures.

For instance, “Europe”, the states that call themselves “civilised”, are now engaged in a mad armaments hurdle-race. In thousands of ways, in thousands of newspapers, from thousands of pulpits, they shout and clamour about patriotism, culture, native land, peace, and progress—and all in order to justify new expenditures of tens and hundreds of millions of rubles for all manner of weapons of destruction—for guns, dreadnoughts, etc."

Let's remember, in the case of Iraq:

"There is no evidence that Saddam Hussein was involved with al-Qaida or with the September 11 attacks.

Wall Street Journal, right after 9/11: “Few U.S. officials believe that any real alliance between Iraq and al-Qaida ever emerged… The two groups share few aims and have very different motivations.”(Sept. 19, 2001)

BBC, Feb. 5, 2003: “There are no current links between the Iraqi regime and the al-Qaida network, according to an official British intelligence report seen by BBC News.”

New York Times (Oct. 11, 2001) reported that intelligence officials from Jordan, Israel, and Saudi Arabia do not believe there is any serious Hussein-bin Laden connection.

On Sept. 11 itself, top government officials decided to use the airliner attacks to justify war with Iraq. “CBS News has learned that barely five hours after American Airlines Flight 77 plowed into the Pentagon, Defense Secretary Donald H. Rumsfeld was telling his aides to come up with plans for striking Iraq–even though there was no evidence linking Saddam Hussein to the attacks.” (Sept. 4, 2002)

In October 2002, the New York Times reported that Rumsfeld created a Pentagon operation “to search for information on Iraq’s hostile intentions or links to terrorists”–despite CIA reports saying there were none.

Shortly afterward, Rumsfeld announced that he had “solid evidence of the presence in Iraq of al-Qaida members” (Seymour Hersh, May 28, 2003). Soon other officials of the U.S. government were presenting what he said as “evidence.”

When examined, these U.S. government claims have no basis in fact. Their “evidence” relies on a bogus McCarthyite method of linkology– If A is linked to B, and B is linked to C, then D must be backing terrorists, and anyone who questions that is probably also linked to terrorists."

And also, there is always the fact that the Taliban seems to be making some gains.

Update: Steven Seagal Sued for Celebrity, Tank "Justice"

From Forbes:
"It turns out, of course, that Seagal was just joining the ranks of reality TV stars, blending the line between reality and television, and the line between entertainment and justice. And now he’s being sued to the tune of $100,000 by Llovera, who is also demanding a written apology from Seagal to his children for killing their puppy"

The Koch Empire and Venezuela

You may remember the Koch brothers from the recent outbreak of popular outrage over the liquidation of public employee bargaining rights by the current governor of Wisconsin, Scott Walker. The Koch brothers spent over $34 million dollars trying to undermine workers rights particularly of public employees seemingly in collusion with Walker. What you might not know about them is that last October they saw the fertilizer plants they owned in Venezuela nationalized by standing President Hugo Chavez.

You might think this would be a story ripe for Fox News or various rightwing pundits to pounce upon. Here's why they kept the nationalization hush hush, from eXiled:

"The Kochs made hundreds of millions on every end of this deal…and even more surprising, bond markets cheered the nationalization. In other words, the free markets championed by the Kochs gave a big thumbs-down to Kochs’ negative influence on the value of the business, while at the same time, the free-market Kochs earned huge windfalls doing business with socialists. No wonder this story hasn’t made the rounds.

Here’s what happened: When Chavez’s nationalization of the plant took Koch Industries out of the picture, bond investors responded by driving up the value of the company’s bond debt by a whopping 33 percent. That means they had a lot more confidence that the debts would be paid back AFTER the free-market Kochs were out of the picture. As every business school flunky knows, price fluctuations of bonds are very much like those of stocks: the more they cost, the higher the confidence in a given company. And that means investors had less faith in the ability of the Kochs to run a tight business operation than they did in a bunch of Venezuelan socialist bureaucrats.

[...]

So for all the enterprising Americans out there wondering “What’s the secret to the Kochs’ success?” The answer isn’t pretty—especially if you’re one of the gullible Tea Party libertarians who believe the Kochs practice the free-market libertarianism that they preach. Their ability to reap billions and billions in profits year after year isn’t about buying low and selling high, but about buying subsidized-by-the-state, and selling subsidized-by-the-state. Using taxpayer money to cover the costs and ensure profits every time—that’s the simple formula to the Kochs’ success."

What's more is now the Koch's appear to be taking Chavez's government to court over the nationalization, before a investment dispute body in the World Bank. Check out this article from the Latin American Herald Tribune for more.

Tepoztlán and Movements for Autonomy in México

A Narconews report on a community's response to "a building project that would’ve turned communal lands into a golf course. When the people of Tepoztlán found out about the plan, they expulsed the mayor and the police and barricaded all entrances to the town. During the eight months that followed, Tepoztlán organized its own community police and elected an autonomous government, free of political parties.

[...]

After eight months of autonomy, in April 1996, the police killed a local campesino, Marcos Olmedo, near the spot where Emiliano Zapata was shot exactly 76 years earlier. The man’s death was followed by the cancellation of the construction plan. The townspeople, exhausted and mourning but also pleased with their victory, gradually allowed the police and political parties to return to Tepoztlán.

Tepoztlán’s struggle is not the only of its kind. The eviction of the golf course marked a renaissance of resistance movements in the state of Morelos. During the almost 17 years that have passed since Tepoztlán first declared itself a free town, autonomous municipalities have popped up in different parts of the state. They have an impressive track record of winning most of their battles, but those victories have often been, like the one in Tepoztlán, tinged with sadness: many of the movements have failed to bridge the gaping class divisions that characterize Mexican society. Many times autonomy has lasted only a fleeting moment."

Mark Krikorian is a Racist, Anti-Immigrant Immigrant

A commentator for the rightwing organization the Center for Immigration Studies (note the fact that it seeks to give the academy access to correct information on immigration as if the academy's own biases make this impossible) and Armenian immigrant, Mark Krikorian makes a fairly telling comparison (on National Public Radio) between how worthwhile immigrants are to the United States and some sort of national doughnut orgy:

Krikorian says we can think of immigration like a good fat-filled doughnut.

"When you're 11 years old, you eat all of the doughnuts that your parent will let you eat, and they're probably good for you at that point," he says. "When you're 50 years old, you can't eat doughnuts like that anymore. There's nothing wrong with the doughnuts. They're the same doughnuts. But your metabolism has changed. And our body politic's metabolism has changed so that we need to start now looking at what's good for our grandchildren, not what was good for our grandparents."

This comment with its veiled allusions to immigrants as sugary foods that not only pollute the bodies of elder members of a society, but also poison generations to come evinces ideas of racial/cultural purity, albiet ones impacted by a crude behaviorism. As much as this comment seems downplay its racism by reverting to a metaphor of unthreatening food, it still reeks of miscegnation panic of previous decades and centuries.

If you needed a little more convincing Krikorian's "post"racism observe his enlightening comments on Haiti following the earthquake:

"My guess is that Haiti’s so screwed up because it wasn’t colonized long enough…But, unlike Jamaicans and Bajans and Guadeloupeans, et al., after experiencing the worst of tropical colonial slavery, the Haitians didn’t stick around long enough to benefit from it. (Haiti became independent in 1804.). And by benefit I mean develop a local culture significantly shaped by the more-advanced civilization of the colonizers."

Commentators from Think Progress follow this comment up nicely with:

"In fact, Haiti’s comparatively short-lived colonial history might be the best thing the island had going for it. Haiti’s revolution inspired the fights for independence across Latin America and ushered in the end of slavery in the New World. Meanwhile, a never-ending sphere of Western influence and self-serving intervention probably offers a better explanation for why Haiti is as “screwed-up” as it is. Unlike the islands of Jamaica, Barbados, and Guadalupe, Haiti has long been the 'poster case for the vicious circle of colonial and foreign intervention, poverty, violence and political instability.'"

Private Prison Corps. Benefitting from Crackdowns

Some more specifics on the Corrections Corporation of America referred to in an NPR exposé of the lobbyists behind Arizona Senate Bill 1070,

From MSNBC:

"[Corrections Corporation of America] says its facilities perform as well as or better than regular ICE facilities or state prisons: "We view ourselves as part of the system, and a complement to what our government partners do. Both our government partners and our industries have evolved over the last 30 years and don't view it through that frame. We are trying to partner with them and be a complement to the existing system." And it vehemently denies that its business harms the public good — indeed, it claims to trim budgets and provide a more flexible alternative to the public prison industry. Still, many of the industry's critics regard its work as repugnant under any circumstance, because of the perverse incentive of CCA and others to increase the volume of people behind bars, with an emphasis on people ill-suited to advocating for their release. CCA's business model is similar to that of the hotel industry, in that profits come from filling beds with paying customers. And just as the Bellagio markets hard to persuade travel agents to bring their customers to Las Vegas, CCA lobbies hard to get state corrections departments to send their clients to Club CCA.

Its lobbying arm spends on average $1 million to $2 million annually — a minuscule amount, CCA says, compared with the lobbying efforts of comparably sized companies and other organizations, such as public employee unions. In fact, the amount is slightly above average for corporations of its size, as judged by publicly available lobbying records maintained by the website OpenSecrets. CCA's opponents, however, say they are more concerned about the effect of the lobbying than the number of dollars spent. They claim the lobbying has resulted in harsher laws, and thus more demand for CCA bed space."

A Note For Those Who Advocate "English-Only" Policies

While putting together an encyclopedia entry on Latino struggle, I came across an observation from Rumbaut & Portes from their Ethnicities: Children of Immigrants in America anthology:

"Forceful assimilationism does not seek to expel newcomers but to integrate them as quickly as possible into the American mainstrean. English immersion and the rapid loss of languages and cultures promoted by assimilationist policies weaken immigrant parents' authority and help drive a wedge between generations [...] The paradox, is that, in seeking to make 'good Americans' out of the second generation, English immersion and similar programs undermine the single resource poor immigrant youths have to succeed: namely, the social capital inherent in their families and co-ethnic communities. In the programmatic scenario promoted by forceful assimilationism, schools and immigrant families work at cross-purposes, with negative consequences for both" (315).

This suggests the fundamentally maliciousness of English only policy that seeks to actually eliminate the possibility of upward mobility for immigrant communities and instead producing what the authors describe as a "rainbow underclass."

Peru, Part 1: Aguantando Los Andes

I've been waiting to revisit my trip to Peru mostly because of pressure to get back into school work and to face the mountain of grading I had piling up on the days I spent not working, but I guess I have a moment tonight to spend some time deliberating on the things I've gleaned from Peru.

The more I look back on the trip the more it seems to culminate a lot of the ongoing processes of life for me in generative and positive ways.

I decided to educate myself more about Peru, it's history, and the struggles between left-guerillas in the countryside and an increasingly authoritarian state all verge on issues I want to explore for the dissertation, although mostly tangentially. Peru had a rather unique group emerge out of the late-70s/early-80s insurrectionary struggles going on throughout Latin America. They were dubbed Sendero Luminoso (The Shining Path), a break off group from other Maoist currents in Peru at the time. It's leader, a former political philosopher, Abimael Guzmán, insisted on the necessity of crossing "the river of blood" into a glorious post-capitalist world for which Peru was its threshold. This meant a strategy of attempting to choke the remnants of colonial social relations, capitalist exploitation, and neo-colonial arrangements from the society and the people through guerilla operations, reeducation, and terrorism. I don't know enough about them to say much beyond that their rhetoric seems born of a kind of mode of prophecy as much as politics, as killing in the name of the future seems to be highly valued for Sendero Luminoso (see Vice Magazine's article on contemporary musical dispatches from the group). Mario Vargas Llosa, the most recent winner of the Nobel Prize for literature, and perhaps one of the more right-wing members (he ran for president of Peru once on a neo-liberal platform, ugh!) of, what America's literary public likes to define as Latin America's New Narrative form, has written a novel on the issue called Lituma en Los Andes or Death in the Andes which I am still reading despite having visited Peru over a month ago. Llosa apparently once got into fisticuffs with Gabriel Garcia Marquez, perhaps over Marquez's wife (this part could be a rumor), in the Museo de Bellas Artes in downtown Mexico City.

The Inca too, offer a unique counterpoint to some of my thinking about the indigenous histories of Latin America (I have read mostly about Meso-American peoples and their traditions) insofar as the history of human sacrifice seems highly contested (between my tour guides of various destinations, but also a short piece I read from a feminist anthropologist). Apparently although their societies enforced strict gender segregation and roles, they tended to be roles with a great deal of gender parity, insofar as women served similar ritual roles as men with gender specific power and knowledge-sharing kinship structures. Women in these powerful roles were then targeted by the Spanish Inquisition post-conquest as witches.

However, despite the militaristic missionary work of much of the Spanish empire the emissaries from Spain encouraged and pursued aesthetic cultural syncretisms with Andean/Inca culture to facilitate conversion. I saw a great deal of this fascinating cultural blending in the facades of churches and cathedrals throughout the country (in one case I was informed that St. James, who was in some cases interpreted as the Moor killer, was repurposed as a ritual figure for the practice of Andean black magic).

The Spanish also had a difficult time destroying what were the foundations on Incan temples, buildings, and city walls so instead they often built on top of them. We saw a number of churches and walls in the Sacred Valley and in Cusco built on the former Incan foundations.

Cusco (or the "navel"), formerly a major city for the Inca, was our first significant stop of the trip before the hitting the Inca trail. It is a beautiful city involving a great deal of Spanish colonial architecture, lush plazas, and an altitude that might inspire illness (I had a headache for the duration of our stay). It is replete with tourists and those catering to tourism (too many pizza shops to count) which is after all one of Peru's largest industries. In addition to tourists and those in the tourism industry (including young women who would not stop offering massages) we encountered those who kept to some element on Andean native traditions: women with braids, wearing fedoras, and traditionally patterned sarapes in which they carried goods for sale or their children, kids carrying baby goats and lambs insisting that you hold them for a photo for a few soles (Peru's currency).

The soundtrack I would have stuck with was this volume of Peruvian cumbias (Afro-Latin rock) from the 1960s titled The Roots of Chicha, which I heard throughout the trip. My iPod broke on the plane ride, which was fine as I was on a hiatus from technology for the whole trip. This was one of the better decisions I made.

Regardless, I did prepare for the trip by imbibing this album in the weeks leading up to the trip. A decent track I would recommend from this album is as follows:



Another noteworthy and fascinating artist from Peru is Yma Sumac who had a five octave voice and I unfortunately discovered her only after the trip had ended. A few examples of her extraordinary and eerie talents below:

One of the drawbacks of the trip that was simultaneously a benefit for me was that we were traveling a group of people, the reason behind the trip affordability, few of which understood Spanish and even fewer who spoke any semblance of the language. Although the trip itinerary had been prepared ahead of time there are of course a numberless set of interactions one has to have in order to figure out where one is headed, confirmations, questions, and difficulties that arise as one travels. I was responsible for translating on almost all of these occasions. This pushed me to practice my Spanish a great deal. Although at times I resented it I think this experience made me feel like a more adequate traveller, someone who can handle and take care of themselves in Latin America with a little research and some occasionally tortured grammatical constructions. The only times I wanted to strangle the other travelers in my group was when they insisted I help them haggle for fractions of the dollar off of stupid shit they were buying, and forgetting that I wasn't being paid to help them in the first place, i.e. making stupid demands for my skills.

After a day in Cusco we awoke early to hit the trailhead of the Inca Trail to Machu Picchu. When we arrived after several stops and starts it was revealed that some of us had the wrong tickets for the type of traveller we were and thus 3 of us could not proceed onto the trail (for those of you thinking you are a graduate student and deserve to pay student prices for admission in Peru you should note that if you are 25 or older you are too old to be considered a student, unlike in the United States and Europe). This fact was devastating for the 3 left behind as the trip was centered around this element of Peru to begin with and for whatever opaquely bureaucratic reason they were not allowed to pay the remainder owed for a different ticket. Nor could they purchase tickets for any of the following days because the government limits the number of hikers on the trail, requiring that travelers prebook tickets.

Despite this setback I have to say the hike was challenging, beautiful, and fascinating. My boyfriend, his friend Becca, and I seemed to take to the altitude pretty well despite my constant headache and so we stayed ahead of the other hikers in our group most of the time, giving us space to talk as we liked and enjoy the sights together. It was the end of the rainy season so clouds were pouring over the mountains like rivers of the air making the hike between and around them all the more dramatic. The Inca believed (or so I was told) that the mountains were holy so the hike was more of a pilgrimage through the mountains and their passes, moving through multiple ecosystems and temperatures along the way on the way to Machu Picchu.

The second day was by far the most physically challenging. The altitude and steepness of the climb (which incidentally the trail is made out of uneven stone stairs carved by the Inca) made the highest points difficult to maintain a steady pace for very long. The lack of oxygen at times made my limbs feel as if they were heavier and more difficult to move. Towards the end of the highest pass we were stopping every 20 feet or so to catch our breaths, but with every break we felt completely rejuvenated and ready to tackle more. At the highest point that day the bf, Becca, and I looked at each other, bundled up against the cold and laughed at the joy of the accomplishment.

A note about the labor that made this trip possible: So even as we were looking at each other happy and satisfied by the hard work it took us and our backpacks up the hill, we had to notice the porters who were resting around us as well. The Peruvian government mandates that everyone who enters the Inca trail has to have a porter that goes along with them. I am not clear on the reasoning for this, perhaps, it just frees up a bunch of seasonally available jobs. If you are part of a tour group which most everyone was, they arranged this for you. The porters for our group carried food, cooking supplies, and tents which they set up before we arrived at the campsites. They usually kicked our asses on the trail, usually with nothing more than a sweater, shorts, and a pair of canvas golas scampering across slippery stairs. This reality made me relatively uncomfortable, several of us got together to put together some decent tips for the porters (because it turns out they don't make a great deal of money for 4 days of labor) and I was enjoined to make a speech to honor their labors (again as the only Spanish speaker) where I got to acknowledge this even as there seemed little I could do beyond this.

The rest of the hike which probably could have been consolidated into fewer days was peppered with smaller Incan ruins along the trail either food depots or guard towers (the tour guides seemed to be at odds about which at certain points), and amazing Incan mountainside terracing that we could see as the clouds slid across the faces of mountains and cliffs. The Inca also carved smooth rectangular tunnels into rock faces to ease the trail through which we easily passed, amidst rainforest limbs dripping with vegetation, moss, and moisture. On the last day we waited at the Sun Gate to see if the clouds would part so we could behold Machu Picchu from a good distance. Seeing the pockets of air open up the clouds and the former Incan city was really pretty amazing at the moment, mostly because we had been immersed in its environment for so long, and that we had worked to get there. I unconsciously approach tourism scenarios, I think most consumers of Western media do this, like I would instances in which I am a spectator--with a half-bored interest. Marching up the trail made seeing the city that much more spectacular.



One interesting element of the city is not only the resilience of it's foundations to the elements (it was discovered at the turn of the 19th-20th century), but also the ways in which debates about restoration seemed very much alive in the tour. Our guide was of the opinion that ruins should remain ruins, there is something unique in how ruins enable more open interpretations that restoration tends to foreclose upon, ignoring the history of the site since its abandonment.

We rounded off the trip with mineral baths in the public hotspring pools in Aguas Calientes (a nearby town) and a really expensive burrito I bought (burritos are not Peruvian food, but I was feeling rushed to catch a train) made out of a crepe and lima beans.

Steven Seagal Barrels into a Suspected Cockfighting Depot with a Tank!

From Colorlines:

Seagal, who has unfettered access to the Maricopa County Sheriff’s Office for his A&E television show, “Steven Seagal Lawman”, showed up in a Phoenix’s West Valley neighborhood to break up a suspected cockfighting operation.

Phoenix’s KPHO reported that SWAT vans and sirens came blazing down the block on March 9, and shocked neighbors with their wild antics.

From KPHO:

Neighbor Debra Ross was so worried she called 911 and went outside where a nearby home had its windows blown out, was crawling with dozens of SWAT members in full gear, armored vehicles and a bomb robot.

“When the tank came in and pushed the wall over and you see what’s in there, and all it is, is a bunch of chickens,” Ross said.

[...]

Maricopa County Sheriff Joe Arpaio, no stranger to publicity stunts, said that day that Seagal is “working with us on law enforcement activity and he’s a member of my posse.”

Arpaio’s since had to defend his use of force, if not Seagal’s presence in town.

“We had good intel that this guy could be armed,” Arpaio told KTVK. “[The heavy equipment] was needed for officer protection.”

Locals are unconvinced. Arizona is facing an unprecedented deficit, and Phoenix has had to lay off actual police officers to deal with its budget shortfall.

Oligarchic Stirrings in the U.S. of A.

It's been my contention with the interpenetration of marketing, money, and politics have moved the United States closer to what some Latin American government situations involve (as in, Honduras) where conservative and liberal elements engage in clientelism and electoral power swapping. Some numbers from the Center for American Progress appear to confirm increasing class war from the right. Also, Republican Maine Governor engaging in the cultural end of said class war by demanding the removal of a labor oriented mural from the state's Department of labor and the renaming of conference rooms, previously commemorating labor leaders and the first female U.S. cabinet secretary. The account from his administration:

We have received feedback that the administration building is not perceived as equally receptive to both businesses and workers -- primarily because of the nature of the mural in the lobby and the names of our conference rooms.

Race-baiting in Congress Somewhat Unsuccessful

Though the fact that it is occurring in the first place is troubling as well as telling. From Colorlines.com:

Last week’s congressional hearings on the Muslim community didn’t go quite the way Rep. Peter King hoped and expected. Their content turned out to be more of a referendum on whether such hearings themselves were a good idea, interrupting the fear mongering political theater that King had set up.

[...]

Minnesota Rep. Keith Ellison, the first Muslim to be elected to Congress, stole the show by crying as he told the story of 23-year-old paramedic Mohammed Salman Hamdani, who became the subject of speculation that he’d collaborated with the hijackers after he disappeared on 9/11. It turned out that he was actually among the first responders who died in the towers. Hamdani’s mother, Talat, went to D.C. several weeks ago with other family members of 9/11 victims for a scheduled meeting with Peter King, but he stood them up.

King argued that Muslims have a greater responsibility to turn each other in than other Americans, as he thinks that every Mosque has a bomber hiding in its basement. King refused to broaden the hearing to include other groups, asserting that there is no equivalent between Muslim extremism and, say, neo-Nazis. But of course there was the case of Byron Williams, who was intercepted by California Highway Patrol on his way to shoot up the ACLU and the Tides Foundation last year. And just last week, police arrested Kevin Marpham (a member of the neo-Nazi National Alliance) for appearing to construct a bomb with which to greet marchers at Spokane’s MLK Day rally. In a recent report, Charles Kurzman notes that in 2010, there were more than 20 terrorist plots by non-Muslims. A certain segment of white men appear to be very, very angry.

[...]

But there is some room for change. While most polls, taken ahead of the hearings, showed just over 50 percent support for King’s effort, that broke down heavily along political lines, with Republicans at about 70 percent and Democrats at around 40 percent. Seven in 10 people polled by the Public Religion Research Institute said King should expand the scope of the hearing to other groups. In a Gallup poll, most people said that Muslims are not too extreme in their religious beliefs or supportive of Al Qaeda. Importantly, a good 10 percent were undecided, and that represents a large number of people.