“The Response” Promises Toxic Mix of Racism and BigotryBy Gale Courey ToensingA mix of racism and bigotry against American Indians, Palestinians, Muslims, Jews, gay people and others is the backdrop to a mass rally billed as “A National Day of Prayer” that will take place in Texas the first weekend in August.
Texas governor and Republican presidential hopeful Rick Perry initiated the event, which is named “The Response: A Call to Pray” on its website. The event, featuring some of the most prominent figures of the Christian Right, will take place all day on August 6 at Reliant Stadium in Houston, Texas, which seats 71,500 people.Other than violating the Constitutional separation of church and state, what's wrong with this? Well, the event's sponsor is none other than
Bryan Fischer of the American Family Association (AFA):
“The Response” has generated a squall of controversy, much of it centered around Fischer, the AFA’s Director of Analysis for Government and Public Policy. Fischer is perhaps best known for warning the people of America that President Obama “wants to give the entire land mass of the United States of America back to the Indians. He wants Indian tribes to be our new overlords.” But it was Fischer’s article “Native Americans Morally Disqualified Themselves from the Land” published last winter that has generated the harshest criticism for its blatant racism against the Indigenous Peoples of Turtle Island.
The article was removed from the AFA website but is archived as Text of Fischer’s Racist Screed on Newspaper Rock. In it, Fischer claims that “the superstition, savagery and sexual immorality of native (sic) Americans” made them “morally disqualified from sovereign control of American soil.” He draws an analogy between the Indigenous Peoples of this country and the “Amorites, or Canaanite peoples”--the ancestors of today’s Palestinians--who “practiced one moral abomination after another, whether it was incest, adultery, sexually immorality, homosexuality, bestiality or child sacrifice, and God finally said ‘Enough’”--and gave the land to the ancient Israelites.Nor is Fischer the only Christian bigot participating in "The Response":
Other participants at The Response include C. Peter Wagner, a Colorado evangelist, who advocates placing the government and media under Christian control, as well as burning the statues of Catholic saints; John Hagee, who has called the Roman Catholic Church the “Whore of Babylon,” and said that God used Hitler to have the Jews resettle Israel; and Mike Bickle of the International House of Prayer in Kansas City, Missouri, who described Oprah Winfrey as a “pastor” of the “Harlot Babylon” that will be a precursor to the coming of the Antichrist.
Right Wing Watch reported on July 25 that Perry has tried to distance himself from the many extreme activists he is working with to put on The Response. “But Perry is open about his ties to advocates of Seven Mountains Dominionism, an ideology which demands that fundamentalist Christians take total control over all aspects of society,’ the report says. Dominionism advocate Jim Garlow is directing National Church Mobilization for The Response and other Dominionist endorsers include Cindy Jacobs and David Barton. Even the American Family Association now promotes Seven Mountains Dominionism.Comment: Fischer rails against the "superstition, savagery and sexual immorality" of anyone who isn't like him: a white male conservative Christian. Other white male conservative Christian take up the attacks against the poor and minorities and you get the Republican Tea Party trying to bankrupt the nation. In its most extreme form, you get the
Ku Klux Klan, neo-Nazis, right-wing militias,
Tim McVeigh,
Jared Loughner, and
Anders Breivik killing the "bad people" and those who support them.
For more on the subject, see
Mocking the Hatemongers' Denial,
Conservative Hatemongers Deny Responsibility, and
A History of Conservative Hate Speech.
Heretofore, Native Americans per se is rarely the topic of discussion when it comes to Rick Perry. His anti-Muslim sentiments are more frequent and bold in both public and online forums, compared to that of his views on the Indigenous, at which I'm surprised to say--is arcane, remote and less known.
ReplyDeleteIn fact, most White are angry with his "Day of Prayer" event, because it violates the Separation of Church and State.
They are vying for him not to shove his religious views down their throats.
Actually, most people outside the fundie circles assume Palestinians are related to Jews, due to DNA. Many are simply Jews that converted to Islam.
ReplyDeleteFischer's also conflating different Biblical villains. It was the Babylonians who supposedly offered children to Moloch, the Sodomites who supposedly sexually assaulted any man who came by (thus naming a trope), and...well, the main cases of incest are all in Genesis. Abraham married his half-sister, and Lot's daughters got him drunk and sexually assaulted him. Potiphar's wife is the main case of adultery in the Bible, and there's also the fact that her husband literally owned the man she was trying to get with.
But of course, premillennial dispensationalists haven't decided who Palestinians are, just that Christians have always been really friendly to Jews but Muslims have always been the enemies of Jews. Welcome to Oceania.
While Rick Perry is an ardent anti-Muslim crusader. I forget to add tha Fischer's rabid sentiments seem to be focused primarily on the Gay and LGTG communities. His anti-Gay rhetoric is far more evident than anything else. Rick Perry's views on Natives is not certain. But his guilt by association with Fischer doesn't mean he share those same views on the Indigenous. However, I could be wrong.
ReplyDelete"Palestinians are related to Jews, due to DNA."
ReplyDeleteTwo points:
1) Jewishness is not defined according to DNA, even though there's genetic evidence for the single-line descent of the Kohanim (priests). The definition of "Jew" is: Someone either born to a Jewish mother or having undergone halachic (meaning Orthodox) conversion. The second criterion decouples the Jewish ethnos from being defined by genetics.
2) The Arab settler-colonists in Palestine are not the indigenous Palestinian nation, or a nation at all for that matter—they're part of the Arab nation. The indigenous Palestinian nation is the Jewish nation, seeing as only the Jewish nation has real historical and cultural connection to Palestine, and not a happenstance presence. Arabs are no more Palestinians than Greek soldiers settling down in Afghanistan after Alexander's expeditions were Bactrians.
While I have missused this term in the past, it needs to be pointed out that the Arab people are for all intents and purposes indigenous to the area of Israel and Palestine. They've had a presence there for more than 1300 years. That's pretty ancient.
ReplyDelete"The Arab settler-colonists in Palestine are not the indigenous Palestinian nation"
Zion, your sentence is poorly worded and/or has no regard to any meanings at all. A settler or colonist is a settler a colonist. Individuals who are native to a land don't count as either.
So the only Arabs settlers and colonists you will find in the area of Israel and Palestine are a very few people, a small subset of the mostly native Arab population.
"Arabs are no more Palestinians"
That's incorrect. The Palestinian nationality exists whether any of us likes it or not. It is the hieght of arrogance for outsiders to declare that a nation does not exist.
"Greek soldiers settling down in Afghanistan after Alexander's expeditions were Bactrians."
I'm not sure the relevance of your point. Any children of these soldiers were surely Bactrians. As they were natives, not settlers.
I have major disagreement with the Palestinian government, especially with its main foreign policy goal being the estermination of Israeli Jews. But unlike you I don't let my dislike of a government extend to racist hatred of an entire nation.
As I've noted before, under Ziontruth's definition of "indigenous," Anglo- and Latin Americans would be indigenous to Europe and Native Americans would be indigenous to Asia. This is a stupid misunderstanding of the word that no dictionary supports. In short, Ziontruth's definition is simply wrong.
ReplyDeleteFor more on the subject of Perry's Christian bigotry, see:
ReplyDeletehttp://www.npr.org/2011/08/24/139781021/the-evangelicals-engaged-in-spiritual-warfare&sc=nl&cc=ph-20110828
The Evangelicals Engaged In Spiritual Warfare
Tabachnick says the movement currently works with a variety of politicians and has a presence in all 50 states. It also has very strong opinions about the direction it wants the country to take. For the past several years, she says, the NAR has run a campaign to reclaim what it calls the "seven mountains of culture" from demonic influence. The "mountains" are arts and entertainment; business; family; government; media; religion; and education.
"They teach quite literally that these 'mountains' have fallen under the control of demonic influences in society," says Tabachnick. "And therefore, they must reclaim them for God in order to bring about the kingdom of God on Earth. ... The apostles teach what's called 'strategic level spiritual warfare' [because they believe that the] reason why there is sin and corruption and poverty on the Earth is because the Earth is controlled by a hierarchy of demons under the authority of Satan. So they teach not just evangelizing souls one by one, as we're accustomed to hearing about. They teach that they will go into a geographic region or a people group and conduct spiritual-warfare activities in order to remove the demons from the entire population. This is what they're doing that's quite fundamentally different than other evangelical groups."