Republicans love hate the way arsonists love gasoline. Hate unifies their supporters, and confuses and divides the opposition. It injects emotion into empty half-truths. Best of all, perpetuating hate insures endless war. Their recently created controversies in New York and Arizona illustrate their mentality perfectly.
Republicans are using New York’s 9-11 tragedy to stir up hatred against Moslems, by trying to block the construction of a 13-story cultural centre, which includes a prayer space, three blocks from Ground Zero. They are also imposing drastic laws that force police officers to engage in racial profiling and/or to arrest suspects without a warrant.
According to Wikipedia, a hate group is “an organized group or movement that advocates irrational hatred, hostility, or violence towards members of another race, ethnicity or designated group.” Most Republicans fit this description to a T.
Republican “rogue” Sarah Palin has never seen a hate issue that she didn’t embrace.
Her recent twitter post reads: “Ground Zero mosque is UNNECESSARY provocation; it stabs hearts. Pls reject it in the interest of healing.”
She disguises her hate with a veneer of kindness. Like her vapid smile, it is not very convincing unless you are a hardcore Republican. She calls the proposed 13-story center for Islamic studies a “Ground Zero mosque,” which it isn’t. Its actual name is Cordoba House. Besides the domed space for prayers (that takes up less than 15% of the building) Cordoba House will contain a cultural center, culinary school, exhibition space, swimming pool, gym, basketball court, restaurant, library and art studios. Its stated goal is: “to sponsor inter-faith co-operation and to improve relations between the west and the Islamic world.” Provocative? Maybe. Maybe improving relations is provocative when you are preaching hate.
Provocation is her word, her invention, her invidious intention. Her purpose is to perpetuate endless war. Endless war needs boundless hate. Her goal is self-promotion.
Palin’s hate mongering is not limited to Moslems. She tells us that unlike Obama, Arizona’s Republican Governor Jan Brewer “has the cojones that our president does not have” when dealing with illegal immigrants.
Palin’s sexist statement refers to Republican Governor Jan “Brewer’s signing of SB 1070 into law. This law allows police officers to arrest anyone who looks suspicious (Mexican) whenever they feel like it. It does away with pesky due process. To some people, and to most of the civilized world, this looks like a police-state tactic. Nevertheless at least ten states are planning copycat laws, all led by Republicans.
People tend to agree with police-state tactics when the tactics target a group that they hate. “Cojones” Brewer herself is no stranger to hate talk. On a local TV show she said: "Our law enforcement agencies have found bodies in the desert either buried or just lying out there that have been beheaded.” She claimed that border violence “is on the rise and that illegal aliens are responsible for most police killings." She also said that Phoenix is becoming “the world’s number-two kidnapping capital.”
Border police and medical examiners who work on the border have refuted Brewer’s statements completely. She herself refuses to answer any questions about the statements. Doesn’t matter. The hate-lies have fueled her campaign. Up until a short time ago, her reelection campaign had flat-lined, she is now running ahead of her democrat opponent, Terry Goddard.
Republican icon Newt Gingrich takes hatred to another dimension. He tackles a nonexistent legal immigrant “problem.” He would establish the “primacy of English” nationally, forcing legal immigrants to pass English tests, something that was never in the entire history of the United States required for citizenship (My own grandparents, who were immigrants could never have passed an English test). He also would require them to sign loyalty oaths because he sees foreign traitors and infiltrators everywhere.
He doesn’t stop there. The hate goes even beyond Palin when it comes to Islam and war. Gingrich claims that Moslems are conspiring to impose sharia (Islamic canonical law) on America. Gingrich warns that Islam poses a "mortal threat to freedom" in America.
He said that he will push for legislation to prevent states from adopting sharia law even though not a single state, district, town, or village, or even a single politician, has even suggested doing any such thing.
Republicans see Gingrich not as a bigot, but as a patriotic voice of reason.
Another Republican Presidential-hopeful, Mike Huckabee, is determined not to be outdone by either Palin or Gingrich. He wants to do something about illegal immigrants’ babies. Amendment Fourteen is clear enough – “All persons born or naturalized in the United States, and subject to the jurisdiction thereof, are citizens of the United States”. He hates immigrants so much he wants to rewrite the constitution. He promised Minuteman-Project founder, James Gilchrist, (who ran for national office with the help and support of National Alliance, one of the largest neo-Nazi groups in the United States) that he would force a test case to the Supreme Court to challenge birthright citizenship. He said he would push Congress to pass a twenty-eighth Amendment to the Constitution to remove the possibility of illegal immigrants’ babies gaining citizenship because they were born in the US.
Republicans across the country are eagerly jumping on board with this insidious idea. Surprised?
According to an FBI Law Enforcement bulletin, a hate group, if unimpeded, “passes through seven successive stages. In the first four stages, hate groups vocalize their beliefs. The FBI report also points to a transition period that exists between verbal violence and acting that violence out. In the last three stages, hate groups act on their beliefs.
The FBI says that it is only a short step from hate-talk to hate-action. Sharon Angle, who won the Republican primary in Nevada, has already threatened to use force if she is not victorious in 2010. “The public,” she says, “would bring down the Congress with ‘second amendment reminders” i.e. guns, if Democrat Harry Reid is not defeated. Gingrich calls the Tea-Party movement “the militant branch of the Republican Party.” Right-wing militia groups such as the Minutemen ("I will not promote violence in resolving this, but I will not stop others who might pursue that,” Jim Gilchrist, Minutemen founder.) have sprung up in nearly every state in the union. Will they (with the encouragement of the Republican party) take the law into their own hands?
Should we be concerned?
By James and Jean Anton
www.endendlesswars.org
