Muslims, Blacks and RhetoricSeptember 9, 2013
“They brainwashed kids. They told us, ‘This is Islam and it is our time to rule the world again.’ So you were brought up in an atmosphere that made you go for extremism, for hatred of the other, and to fear people who are conspiring against Muslims—against us.” The speaker is Manal al-Sharif, the thirty-four-year-old Saudi woman who on May 17, 2011 defied a Saudi taboo against women driving by posting a video of herself behind the wheel of a Cadillac SUV on the streets of the Saudi city of Khobar. She became a YouTube sensation.
If her words sound familiar, it’s because they echo the cant that liberals and other champions of racial justice have preached for years to brainwash young Blacks and Hispanics in this county into believing that they are an oppressed minority within a racially hostile majority. Ms. Sharif’s description of her Muslim upbringing crystallizes all that is wrong with liberalism. Liberationists’ flowing robes of compassion and fairness conceal an engine of deceit, envy, divisiveness, and falsehoods fueled by the white heat of emotion. Liberalism enjoys intermittent fashion because it panders to the basest instincts of human nature: selfishness, greed, envy, sloth, and blame-shifting. At the wheel of the enterprise, and aided and abetted by an array of well-intentioned, starry-eyed idealists, is a legion of grifters, opportunists, and demigods who enrich themselves at the expense of the victims of their noxious beneficence. The singular achievement of this toxic brew of hatred and fear of “the other, “the straw man whose alleged reason d’être is to deprive minorities of their rightful place in society, has been to ensure that the disadvantaged remain disadvantaged and thus generationally dependent on the tender mercies of their supposed benefactors. In human terms, the propaganda has kept untold thousands of talented, industrious, gifted minority youths in a state of arrested development. They are unable to venture beyond thedysfunctional environment into which they were born and within which they have been programmed into believing that they are outliers in the hostile world of “the other.” Like victims of the Stockholm syndrome, they have grown accustomed to lives bereft of hope or opportunity. Since time immemorial, men and nations have used and abused people as means to self-serving ends, at times by force, at times by lies and propaganda. Although liberalism sounds good in the speaking, as a doctrine of governance it has failed miserably everywhere it has been tried. Its sole beneficiaries are liberationists themselves, its victims the downtrodden they purport to love. Ms. Sharif describes how she felt when she first sat behind the wheel of the car, “You know how you have a bird and it’s been in a cage all its life? When you open the cage door, it doesn’t want to leave. It was that moment.” Republicans wring their hands about how best to reach minority voters. My unsolicited advice to every Republican candidate from dog catcher to president is to carry this message to every Black and Hispanic parent and child in every school, community group, neighborhood association and congregation willing to listen. That moment….freedom, opportunity, self-determination...… is within your grasp. Like Manal al-Sharif, don’t waver. Do it!
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Gerald McOscar has lived, practiced law, and penned an occasional column in West Chester, Pa for over three decades. His work has appeared in numerous newspapers and periodicals over the years, including the Philadelphia Inquirer and Daily News, Baltimore Sun, Washington Post, Women's Quarterly, and many others. He was politically raised a "blue collar democrat" before acquiring a conservative world view upon entering young adulthood. Jerry believes that the personal responsibility that conservatism espouses is the key to a life worth living.
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