Bernie Sanders won Arab Americans in Michigan. The media is wrong about why.

[Fawke Em]

All of it is deeply reductive thinking. In its own way it is as damaging to the perception of American Muslims as the overt prejudice espoused by the loudmouth, firecracker-flinging charlatan who currently and jaw-droppingly remains the prohibitive favorite to win the Republican Party's nomination.

The modern paranoid mode regarding Muslims in America, any Muslim in America, is that without warning one of them could activate as an agent of mayhem, or at the very least seek to poison the principles of the nation by pouring Islamic law into the constitutional reservoir. This mode is so stitched into our daily lives that some Americans can't even look at a starving, traumatized Syrian child without being fearful that this child will murder them.

The result of such a paradigm is that even in this data point about a single state's primary victory, Muslims continue to be defined as a group by what they are assumed to hate: women, Jews, the Western world in general.

It seems to take an extraordinary force of will on the part of media analysts to instead consider these Muslim voters as individuals with nuanced sets of political beliefs. Sanders is indeed a secular Jew, but he is also a firebrand preacher against economic inequality and racist systems still festering within the American social structure. Clinton is not Jewish, but she also has in her long political career voted to support the 2003 invasion of Iraq and had a heavy hand in a government drone program that has killed numerous innocent civilians in its pursuit of confirmed terrorist operatives — a program, it should be noted, that Sanders has said he would continue.

The Muslims have also, in the past, supported Christian after Christian, despite being told in no uncertain terms that certain Christians don't want any Muslims living here; despite long-past historical instances of Christian persecution of Muslims during the Crusades or the Spanish Inquisition. Muslim Americans support candidates of non-Muslim faiths in their bids for elected office because they are invested in the quality of life and of leadership in America. And they do this because very rarely are they given the option to vote for another Muslim American for any elected office at all.

http://www.vox.com/2016/3/11/11193030/bernie-sanders-muslims

[Ichingcarpenter]

1. Clinton’s globocop approach is more easily associated today with Republicans,

Clinton’s globocop approach is more easily associated  today with Republicans, since George H.W. Bush co-opted it from the Democrats in his "New World Order" speech before the first Iraq war. On September 11, 1991, speaking before the U.S. Congress, Bush said, “The cost of closing our eyes to aggression is beyond mankind's power to imagine. This we do know: Our cause is just; our cause is moral; our cause is right.”


 Speaking at the end of last year before the Council on Foreign Relations, Clinton declared “that America must lead a worldwide fight” to defeat ISIS and “radical jihadism,” which “will require a sustained commitment in every pillar of American power.” Indeed, her language familiarly echoes that employed by Bush Jr. in his speech to Congress after 9/11 when he promised to “direct every resource at our command — every means of diplomacy, every tool of intelligence, every instrument of law enforcement, every financial influence, and every necessary weapon of war — to the destruction and to the defeat of the Al-Qaida global terror network.”



Of the five major candidates left in the race, only Clinton clings to the decades-old foreign policy dynamic that has pervaded Washington since WWII — classic liberal interventionism. Clinton’s worldview, bolstered by hundreds of foreign policy advisors, asserts that the United States must “lead” the world to maintain liberal values internationally.


 
On Israel, Clinton’s positions are similar to that of a typical, let’s say pre-Trump era, Republican. As a U.S. Senator, Clinton supported the separation barrier between Israel and some Palestinian areas, “This is not against the Palestinian people. This is against the terrorists. The Palestinian people have to help to prevent terrorism. They have to change the attitudes about terrorism." Clinton, since leaving the State Department, has said in retrospect the Obama administration’s 2009 settlement freeze (imposed on Netanyahu with some strong-arm tactics) was a tactical mistake, saying peace negotiations cannot have preconditions. She often cites her strong advocacy for the two-state solution, but carefully frames the endgame of Palestinian statehood “in the long-term best interests of Israel, as well as the region.”





read more: http://www.haaretz.com/opinion/.premium-1.707919



I see her as dangerous as do others that have witnessed her macho gunboat diplomacy in not just the middle east but for the whole planet.....

[revbones]

2. "Globocop" perfectly sums it up. Nice. n/t

[Hiraeth]

5. new word, Globocop? I like it. Yes. Nice. eom

[Fawke Em]

3. If the name corporate-owned war hawk fits...

[Ichingcarpenter]

4. I can't find anything on her stance on the defense budget

except bla, bla bla...............even from her own site.
I have no doubt her Kissinger tendencies for the empire's so called pax americana

[PyaarRevolution]

6. I would like to see where Bernie supports drone strikes.

[Ichingcarpenter]

7. I think the sun's going down on the sacred cow

when innocents die.

[Mufaddal]

8. He has said in the past that he would continue to support use of drone strikes

IIRC most recently at a town hall. It's disappointing, but I can't imagine he'd be nearly as prolific in that regard as Obama.

In fact, I believe the question he was asked is, can you see yourself ordering drone strikes, and he responded that he could.

Unless you meant "where" as in what region (and not what source), in which case, who knows.

[Ichingcarpenter]

9. I know Bernie would be better on that side of things but.

I do believe that ''the military industrial complex'' is 100 times stronger than when Eisenhower warned us.

I think Obama fears the CIA and the NSA as he should because their really is a government within our government called the deep state.

We know the battle going on since Snowden pointed it out.

The Deep State is well documented,as beginning with Bill Moyer's award winning documentary and even Carlin also commented on the thing many see in his stand up.

Drone strikes are just on the surface of what is terribly wrong. Its a video game for some, that do it and for americans that view it.
I don't even Sanders can fight this beast. But I'm willing and able to make it happen for my children's children. It is an honorable life's battle.