Sharleen Mondal’s blog has a worthwhile debate between Sharleen and “Mike” over Mr. Bowles, 9-11 Field Organizer for the ACLU. Sharleen argues, contra what I have written, that Bowles did nothing improper in leading a “silent” protest of a Daniel Pipes speech, nor has he supported Palestinian terrorism. Mike gives further details supporting the view that the protest was disruptive and not-so-silent, and thus clearly contrary to ACLU values, and agrees with my reading of Bowles’ “no justice no peace” article as endorsing Palestinian terrorism, a rather awkward position for a fellow working on 9-11 issues.
UPDATE: And here is Bowles writing in Cairo’s Al-Ahram Weekly about terrorism:
The politically vacuous “terrorist” label is a prominent fragment of highly racialised hate rhetoric used to demonise Third World people of colour in general and Arab and Muslim people in particular. Ironically, since “terrorism” is the central discourse currently justifying the US conquest of the Middle East, Arab- American “leaders” who wish to build ties to the White House do so at the expense of confronting such labels or developing a politically useful critique of US imperialism. (via Classical Values)So there you have it, it’s not simply that one’s man terrorist is another man’s freedom fighter, the term terrorist itself is simply hate speech against Arabs [edit: btw, since when, other for political convenience, are Arabs “people of color”?] The ACLU is supposed to be a serious organization, and we certainly need a serious organization to be a civil liberties watchdog during the War on Terror. But for the ACLU to be taken seriously, the public needs to be convinced that its fighting for civil liberties, not for terrorists.
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