My (earnest, irate) thoughts

I hate politics. I particularly hate voting on a weekday, scattered primaries and the electoral college. Everything is designed to ensure that a) no one votes; and b) that those who do vote will be old, white and bigoted.

Lately I’ve been reading about the candidates. This is unbelievable self-discipline on my part, because I don’t hate anything as much as the verbal diarrhea that is shat around election time. I’m a registered Democrat. This is because Florida hates independent thought and bars non-affiliated voters from the primaries. I should have changed my party affiliation to Republican, so I could put my vote toward weeding out John ‘Islamofascist’ McCain and Rudy ‘9/11′ Giuliani.

I went to the CAIR (Council on American-Islamic Relations) website to see if there was a candidate who didn’t think America should keep taking a dump on the Middle East. Just for fun, read anti-Muslim rhetoric from the candidates.

This is *the* topic of late: To have any chance at the presidency, you must have said at least one disparaging thing about Islam or Muslims, and you must have emphasized your own rock-solid, preferably evangelical, Christian faith. Otherwise, you’re soft on terrorism. I’m serious. Here, William Fisher writes about candidates competing to be more ‘Christian’.

If you’re like me, in that you find it hard to listen to jingoistic types who, with broad brushstrokes, paint entire civilizations as backward or evil, you’ll understand why my heart stopped when I read these chilling comments from a Giuliani supporter: “[Giuliani]’s got I believe the knowledge and the judgment to attack one of the most difficult problems in current history and that is the rise of the Muslims, and make no mistake about it, this hasn’t happened for a thousand years. These people are very dedicated and they’re also very, very smart in their own way. We need to keep the feet to the fire and keep pressing these people until we defeat or chase them back to their caves or in other words get rid of them.’ When asked if he was referring to all Muslims, he told the [Monitor], ‘I don’t subscribe to the principle that there are good Muslims and bad Muslims.’”

The man who said those things, John Deady, co-chair of the New Hampshire Veterans for Rudy group, had to resign.

This is why I hate George W. Bush & Co. His war in Iraq is a war on Islam for many people of many backgrounds. His thirst for oil and wealth, and his use of born-again Christianity as a political tool, have made the huddled masses think the current situation in the Middle East is a holy war, a war to rid ‘Jesus’ country’, Israel, of all the black-chador-clad ‘Moslem’ heathens. These huddled masses don’t know the difference between an Muslim and a Sikh, forget about the differences between a Sunni and a Shi’a, or an Arab and a Persian. If they don’t care about these distinctions, how can they support wars with a religious group, whose ethnicities, customs and yes, beliefs and practices, are as diverse and multifaceted as their own?

But like the other Crusades of the Middle Ages, we know the current Crusade isn’t really about religion: religion is just how you get poor folks to fight for you. It’s really about money, land and its natural resources, and power.

There is a great article in the Boston Globe, Islamofascism’s ill political wind. Linguistically, this word is a disaster and an affront to the English language. And the people who use it are belligerent, right-wing nationalists; that’s ironic but not surprising. Every major politician in America and Europe hails from the authoritarian right, the fascist part of the political compass. It makes sense they would take the focus off their own mistaken ideas by disparaging ‘Izlam’.

As a Muslim, I do wonder who to vote for — who would bother me the least? Who would be least likely to tap my phone or read my e-mail? Who would be least likely to further profile my co-religionists? Who would be the least likely to attack yet another Muslim-majority country?

It goes without saying that John McCain, Rudy Giuliani and Mike Huckabee, with their ongoing talk about ‘radical Islamic militants’, are hoping to sail into the White House on the ‘fear’ factor. I doubt any of them have any idea what Islam actually is.

Former basketball player Kareem Abdul-Jabbar endorses Barack Obama, but I’m annoyed by Obama’s positions on the Armenian ‘genocide’ and a possible invasion of Pakistan. It seems like he’s trying to vehemently disprove those Internet rumors about his being Muslim by annoying the Muslim countries that dislike America the least. Or something.

Science teacher Hussein Ali calls on all American Muslims to vote for Ron Paul. From what I read so far, Ron Paul seems to be kind of libertarian and isolationist, and I mean that in a good way. In Dr. Paul’s favor he a) voted against going to war with the nations of Afghanistan or Iraq; b) voted against the Patriot Act; c) opposes going to war with Iran; d) favors withdrawing military and financial aid to all nations in the Middle East.

Dr. Paul also supports abolishing several government agencies, from the Department of Education to FEMA to the IRS, because they’re ‘unnecessary bureaucracies’, which sounds cool. But I have to wonder what would happen to the U.S. unemployment rate?