Islamaphobia, sexism and American demagoguery in the 21st century

[Betsy Taylor]

Mainstream media are flooding us with sensationalized images of Americans who fear and hate Islam. Ugly as these images are, there is a deeper brutality. The worst ugliness is in what they are not showing.
There are dangerous blind spots in the media coverage of American
Islam. For instance, there has been a brute blindness to women and to
women's concerns in news coverage of the proposed Islamic Center in New
York City.

At the center of the media firestorm is an interesting woman, Daisy Khan, co-visionary of the proposed center. But, her vision and life work have been nearly invisible in recent media
accounts. She has been categorized almost exclusively as “the Imam's wife” and
quoted because he's out of the country. But, if one pushes aside the
media's smothering memes, one can easily find out more about Daisy Khan
beyond her role as wife. Why has the mainstream media ignored so much
about her life and achievements? It turns out she's an interesting
American woman struggling to build new institutions for women to reclaim
voice and power.

[for more, go to complete article

http://mondoweiss.net/2010/09/islamaphobia-sexism-and-american-dema... ]

[Alice C. Linsley]

Betsy,

Some think that the Hungarians moved north from the Upper Nile/Sudan along the Ural Mountains. This would explain the linguistic similarity between Afro-Asiatic names and some common among the Turkish, Pashtun and Mongolian peoples. Those names include Jochi, Beri, Malik and Khan. Khan was originally a title meaning king. Today it is a common surname in Turkey, Afghanistan, Pakistan, India and Mongolia. It is equivalent to the Afro-Asiatic Kain or Kayan. Some of the Pashtun tribes adopted Malik as the ruler's title instead of Khan. Malik is equivalent to the Afro-Asiatic Melek, meaning king or ruler.

Genghis Khan married a woman of the Olkut’Hun, or Ogur Hun meaning the Hun clan/community. The word ogur means clan/community and appears to be equivalent to the Pashto, orkut, meaning community. So, the words ogur, orkut and olkut seem to be linguistically related. I believe they are related to the Kandahar dialect, which has Tir-hari as a principal dialect. Tir is a form of the name Tiras, mentioned in Genesis 10 and hari is a form of the word for Horite. So Genghis Khan married into a community which has connections to Abraham's Horite people, probably through the ruler Nimrod.

In the Hungarian origin stories, Nimrod had two sons: Magor and Hunor. Magor is the equivalent of the Afro-Asiatic name Magog and the Hungarian word Magyar. Magyar is the name for the Hungarian people. Some Magyar still live in the Upper Nile area where they are called the Magyar-ab, the Magyar tribe.

[Keith Hart]

This is not just an American phenomenon, even though the US leads the world in defining Islam as a military threat. It is worth recalling that the 90s saw a kind of liberal revolution with the dismantling of the Soviet Empire, an apparent end to the threat of nuclear holocaust, the rise of the internet and an explosion of cheap transport. Throughout the Cold War governments could lock up any dissidents in the name of communism, capitalism or whatever. Now people were much less afraid, so how to justify the enormous share of the economy devoured by the repressive apparatuses built up as a corollary to neoliberal economic policies? September 11th provided the answer. Governments everywhere were glad to follow the US in cracking down on the newly liberated masses, at airports for example. And European politicians have encouraged xenophobia which is rife there and in many other places too (like South Africa). This was truly a counter-revolution against the liberal revolution of the 90s and it was joined by states everywhere, many of them being happy to blame for the US for it all.

There is another dimension to this. After centuries of living off unearned income grabbed from the rest, the West now faces a restructuring of the world economy which threatens to cut off the flow just when European societies in particular are ageing fast. This feeds xenophobia too. Although no-one will admit it, the game is up for the Old Regime.

[Michael Findlay]

Betsy, the information this blog post reminds me of the fear campaign that the west promoted back in the days of the USSR. Ronald Reagan especially comes to mid with his now infamous "We have just outlawed Russia, the bombing starts in 5 minutes" statement. In the latter years of his presidency he kept blaming Gorbachev for everything while he ignored the work of Raisa Gorbachev, the wife of the President of the USSR. People, especially the western democracies IMO, need an "other" to blame for everything. Instead of looking for the good (such as Daisy Khan) in different things people look for and promote the "bad". If they are different to us, in any way at all, then they must be "bad". We don't look for kind hearts in "others", we don't promote equality with "others", we don't treats "others" how we would like to be treated. Instead we ignore the kind hearts, we ignore the inequalities, and we ignore the fact that we impose our value system on everything until we have someone to blame.

The media, and I would love to know what Rupert Murdoch has had to say about all this, has a lot to answer for.

Thanks for your blog post, I appreciated it.

[Betsy Taylor]

Alice--I like the spirit of your "Flower Power" comment. And, imagine that Daisy Khan also would! I was aware of the Mongolian roots of Khan -- carried first west under Genghis Khan & then east into India where it was continued in titles given under the Mughul leaders (I have no idea how it became so common -- must have been handed out quite democratically)...but didn't know of African linkages...I wonder if that was from Indian Ocean trade to east Africa? But, the spirit of the meanings certainly ring true with the spirit of WISE, I think...

[Alice C. Linsley]

The name Khan is related to the African words Kain and Kandace and means ruler. A ruler is either someone who inherits a position or one who takes the lead. Daisy Khan fits the latter, so I guess we could say Daisy Khan means Flower Power!

[Alice C. Linsley]

Daisy Khan said, “If you look at the landscape of the Muslim world there are more than 500 million Muslim women around the world and there was not a single institution that spoke for us. So, if we are not at the table, who is going to speak for us?”

Certainly not the mainstream media.

[Keith Hart]

Thanks so much for cross-posting this piece, Betsy. It is one of the best written, most informative and thought-provoking blog posts I have read at the OAC. My first impulse is to bring it to the attention of our members, since it epitomizes what we aspire to here. I hope that we can then develop a discussion that others would want to join. Maybe on another occasion you could telkl us more about the work of ASPECT.