Arab Riots Raise New False Hopes for US Dupes

The Revolution of Hope Is Changing the Way Americans Look at Islam
James Carroll, TomDispatch: "Since 2001, Americans have been living with a nightmare Arab, a Muslim monster threatening us to the core, chilling our souls with the cry, 'God is great!' Yet after two months of world-historic protest and rebellion in streets and squares across the Arab world, we are finally waking up to another reality: that this was our bad dream, significantly a creation of our own fevered imaginations. For years, vestigial colonial contempt for Arabs combined with rank prejudice against the Islamic religion, exacerbated by an obsession with oil, proved a blinding combination. Then 9/11 pulled its shroud across the sun. But like the night yielding to dawn, all of this now appears in a new light. Americans are seeing Arabs and Muslims as if for the first time, and we are, despite ourselves, impressed and moved. In this regard, too, the Arab revolution has been, well, revolutionary."
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Liberal Dupe Trashes Peter King

King's Charlie Sheen-like self assessment is at best inflated and, more often than not, flat out wrong. It's not that King is politically incorrect that is troublesome; it's that he's empirically incorrect. From his wide-ranging positions on the Guantanamo prison camp, torture, civilian trials for terrorists, profiling, Muslim-American involvement with terrorism and support for ever more intrusive security measures, King engages in wild demonizations and irresponsible fear mongering that exaggerates the jihadist threat and alienates Muslim-Americans. By doing so, King, a potent symbol of US Homeland Security policy, conceivably makes recruitment and radicalization easier for the very jihadists who prey on young Muslim-American alienation. His obsession with radical Islam also leaves more American forms of extremism and, therefore, less conspicuous, unexamined. To see why a general sense of uneasiness surrounds this week's fast approaching hearing is as easy as reviewing some of King's controversial and inaccurate statements relating to the war on terrorism and Muslim-Americans.
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