Crescent Moon

[robinturner]

Back in the 1970s, Tom Robinson sang "When left is right and right is wrong, you'd better decide which side you're on." Ah, how simple things seemed in those days. Now it's hard to say what the sides are. Take, for example, the current furore about Elizabeth Moon's invitation to speak at Wiscon because she was critical of plans to build an Islamic centre near Ground Zero. Now I have no plans to attend Wiscon (wrong continent) and I'm not very familiar with Elizabeth Moon, so would have ignored the whole shebang were it not that I'd recently read her novel Surrender None. To the extent that a writer's politics can be deduced from her novels, then it's pretty clear that Moon ought to be one of the good guys, and certainly not someone you would expect to be guilty of racism, religious prejudice or whatever, just as you wouldn't read Atlas Shrugged and expect the author to be a social democrat.

Turning to what Moon's post, I found most of it to be eminently sensible. Certainly no upright person would argue with this paragraph:

When a rich man, like Ken Lay of Enron, can claim that he has suffered more than the low-level employees of the company because he's lost more money (his wealth going down from hundreds of millions to only 20-something millions)--when he can spend his pre-sentencing time at his luxurious home in Aspen with his family, while a poor man will spend his pre-sentencing time in jail--the system is obviously creating bad citizens. When a President's wife (Laura Bush) publicly announces that she and her husband have suffered more from the war than anyone else--a statement I'm sure most brain-injured and amputee vets and their families would take issue with--and then retire to a cushy Dallas home and a cushy central Texas ranch--with a big estate in Patagonia waiting should they wish--we have an excellent example of citizenship failure right at the top.

Even when she gets on to the main issue of Islam, immigration and the controversial mosque, she still makes some good points. It doesn't sound very nice to suggest that Muslims in America should go out of their way to forestall Islamophobia—blaming the victim and all that—but it is sensible advice. After all, if the US were to bomb a city in a foreign country (which it does quite often) then it would be sensible for Americans living there to distance themselves from the actions of their government, and to avoid actions which could provoke hostility, like, for example, July 4th celebrations a couple of blocks from where the bombs fell. Speaking as an immigrant, I know how tiring it can be always to be seen as a representative of your country, race, religion or whatever, but that's the way the cookie crumbles.

On the other hand, Moon does fall into some classic traps, notably the "some of my best friends are ..." trap. I remember being dumbstruck when my aunt said "I've nothing against Black people—some of them are quite clean," but is this so different from "many Muslims have all the virtues of civilized persons"? As tithenai points out, if you said something like that about Black people, Jews or women, it wouldn't go down well. You probably couldn't even say it at the John Birch Society these days. Many Americans don't seem to get the idea that saying "Muslims are X" is like saying "Christians are X." There are almost as many Muslims in the world as there are Christians, so as soon as you start saying things about them en masse, you're likely to put your foot in your mouth. Worse, Moon says that the 9/11 attacks were greeted with "indecent glee" by "the Islamic world in general." Wrong. They were greeted with indecent glee in Palestine and maybe a few other places. In most of the Islamic world they were greeted with horror. They held a minute's silence in Tehran, of all places. The attacks were immediately condemned in Islamic media worldwide. However, the American far right has worked very hard to perpetuate the myth that all Muslims were dancing in the streets on 9/11, and it's a shame that a writer of Moon's calibre fell for it.

So all in all, Moon made some factual errors, and voiced some wrong opinions. Don't we all?

Comments

[alsoname.livejournal.com]

On the news they were running these clips of people in the Middle East dancing in the streets after 9/11. Over and over. It was sickening, because any half-wit should have been able to assume the footage wasn't representative of the reaction in general. Hell, it could have been old footage of Middle Easterners dancing in the streets for some other reason!

[trochee.livejournal.com]

But Moon's comments are spoken in the context of "those people need to get with the program and assimilate", which is just full of unexamined privilege. the whole piece -- at least, in its first iteration; who knows if the text has changed -- read as "Muslims are foreigners, and must learn to assimilate to American ideals if they want to live here".

This is a broad brush to paint with, and she, unsurprisingly, got some on her:

• "American" doesn't mean "Christian" (or "white"), and
• "Muslim" doesn't mean "foreigner"

and those are just two of the attribution errors that are built in.

Additionally, Moon's privilege as a WASP is showing -- it's very easy for her, or you, to say that "that's the way the cookie crumbles", but it just never happens to crumble on white people, or the Christian churches.

Never mind that Timothy McVeigh (Oklahoma bomber) was an active member of his Christian church, or that there are still serial gynecologist-murdering terrorists being shuttled among hiding places in fanatic Christian households in the North Carolina mountains.

Moon's patronizing "advice" to "Muslims" (whom she sees as a foreign, uncivilized mass!) is hypocritical and ugly.

it's made worse by her way of dealing with it. An early move to say "hey, I seem to have really hurt some people with this, and I need to think about it and have some conversations here" might have been a helpful place to go, but she went straight to hostility (and eventually adopted the nuclear option of deleting all comments to that post).

from my POV, that's a sign that she is so uncomfortable with the notion that she might have (however unconsciously) perpetuated some nasty racist memes about those people that she would rather assume that hundreds of her fans are pissed off "just to be mean" than take responsibility.

I liked some of her books, too, and I'm disappointed by this whole kerfuffle, but she has to own it -- she said stupid, racist shit, and it's not okay to just write it off as "people make mistakes" -- especially when she's not actually acknowledging the mistakes.

Sorry to rant at you, but I feel strongly that "we all just fuck up sometimes" isn't an okay attitude when the fucker-up is not willing to acknowledge any problems with their behavior.

[solri.livejournal.com]

Firstly, I should say that I didn't read the comments because she'd already deleted them.

Additionally, Moon's privilege as a WASP is showing -- it's very easy for her, or you, to say that "that's the way the cookie crumbles", but it just never happens to crumble on white people, or the Christian churches.

Actually, as Moon pointed out, it's crumbled that way for almost every group to arrive in the USA at one time or other. When the nativist movement started, their main target was Irish and Italian immigrants (though they moved on to the Chinese pretty quickly). The same goes for almost every immigrant group in almost every country, though the extent to which it happens varies enormously—Turkey, for example, is practically xenophilic, but even there you have to watch your step. It is also true that, as Moon says, the quicker immigrant groups integrate with the host culture, the sooner they will be accepted. This is a simple fact, and privilege has nothing to do with it. And at the risk of stating the obvious, it doesn't matter whether something is easy to say, only whether it's true.

Never mind that Timothy McVeigh (Oklahoma bomber) was an active member of his Christian church, or that there are still serial gynecologist-murdering terrorists being shuttled among hiding places in fanatic Christian households in the North Carolina mountains.

Moon is talking about Muslims in this article, but she also says "(And the same is true for many others, of course. Libertarians, survivalists, Tea-Partyers, fundamentalist Christians, anyone else whose goals benefit only their own group. There's been a huge decline in the understanding of good citizenship overall.)" I wish she'd emphasised it rather than putting in parantheses, but it is clear she is not singling out Muslims and exempting Christians. Her real mistake, and it is a serious one, is simply saying "Muslims" in places where she should have said "fundamentalist Muslims".

Again, not having seen the comments, I'm not sure why people got off on the racism issue or what Moon's response was, but it is clear that the article had no racist intent, and could probably only be construed as such in a race-obsessed country like America. Maybe she's said some racist things elsewhere, but Islam is a religion, not a race, and to conflate the two is almost racist itself. I know I repeated the example of saying the same thing about Jews or Blacks, but that was to show that she was making a dodgy generalisation, not to claim that she was racist. If I said "Many Americans have all the virtues of civilized persons," I could be accused of, say, European chauvinism, but it would be absurd to accuse me of sexism because I could have said "many women have all the virtues of civilized persons" (but didn't).

[sjcarpediem.livejournal.com]

About the aftermath to 9/11 thing... I was a young and impressionable college student at the time... my long-term boyfriend was living in NYC and obviously getting ahold of him was basically impossible. That was stressful. But it wasn't just NYC we couldn't reach. Communications across the whole country were paralyzed, even landlines. Friends of friends were suddenly... not. Everyone knew someone, you see. My classmates showed up to class shellshocked because they'd just heard their father's or mother's or whoever's voice for the last time ever, they knew it, and didn't know what else to do but show up to class. My school was "the Harvard of the South" and we had a lot of people from New England, also a large Jewish contingent, also lots of foreign students (especially from the oil-wealth demographic of OPEC member countries) ; the entire campus was on lock-down/black-out, complete with a deployment of the university police force in riot gear--of course nobody outside heard about it, like nobody outside heard about the meningitis epidemic/plague. I was living in New Orleans at the time. Like most port cities, there always had been large groups of immigrants or foreigners. There was a whole section of town (part of a street, really), that we called Little Lebanon. They were dancing in the streets giving out candy to balady-balady blaring from their shotgun- and camelback- style rented homes. So anyway, it's difficult to remember something so distant in complete detail. Intellectually, I knew more than the average American about Islam and the middle east yet all I could reference emotionally was my own experience and all I could really process was that too many people were shouting for too much blood. Utter madness.

Since then, I've learned and experienced a lot more. I can't say whether voicing an opinion against building a mosque so close to the manifestation of something so raw is a wrong opinion or not. I can understand it. I can understand why any variety of people might have a problem with it either way. I can also understand that this is part of what dialogue is, a very basic part, and it's rough but this is how people learn what's ridiculous and what isn't. I haven't read Moon's article, I don't know who s/he is. I don't care to. From what I understand, this Moon is a relatively intelligent person willing to have a conversation. I think it's a terrible thing to tell such people to shut their mouths and go away. We need to encourage that, not suppress it. Besides, I thought hir talk was supposed to be unrelated to that issue..?

[fjm.livejournal.com]

The comments were really polite. People were going out of their way to be courteous to someone who they basically respected.

[fjm.livejournal.com]

It isn't a Mosque. It's a community centre. I believe there is a strip club rather closer to the site.

Moon was not willing to have a conversation, that's the problem. All the comments were courteous and she took them off her blog and has said nothing since.

[solri.livejournal.com]

Doesn't the proposed centre include a mosque, or at least a prayer room? There again, there was a Muslim prayer room in the WTC itself.

I don't agree wıth all of Moon's points on the mosque/centre issue; I just don't think her argument was racist. After all, I was strongly opposed to the Istanbul City Council's plans to build a mosque in Taksim Square some years back, but I don't think that makes me a racist. Similalry, I can imagine that there would be some opposition if there were plans to build an Orthodox church in Srebrenica.

[sjcarpediem.livejournal.com]

How is "muslim community center" different from "mosque" according to you, because my university degree in international relations specializing in North Africa and the Middle East (for starters) says they're the same thing..? As far as I know, no strippers have committed heinous acts of terrorism and are therefore irrelevant to the conversation--I appreciate the effort with the straw man, but that really belongs at BurningMan, not in an intelligent argument.

That's the problem? Hmm... context is important in most cases, so I'm going to go out on a limb and assume it's important here as well. You say courteous but that means nothing, really. I did skim the link in the op, and at the end she explicitly states that she's responded to all the comments she's received and feels that everyone's points have been satisfied. I think the bottom line here is that she said and did these things on a private blog (please correct me if I'm wrong)--which I hold is different from a publicly-owned forum or community.

In the end, I'm not sure exactly what your point is or what your support for it is. I'm kindof stupid, but I'd appreciate it if you could explain it to me a little more clearly.... I look forward to it, and thanks in advance!

[solri.livejournal.com]

Whether there is a difference between "mosque" and "community centre" is tricky. I'm only familiar with Turkish usage, which reserves cami (translated as "mosque") for a largish structure with a permanent imam, and calls smaller places of prayer mescid. OTOH, I'm not sure if this distinction applies in Arabic—as far as I can see, masjid gets used for any Muslim religious structure. Anyway, there is a prayer room, so it is a Muslim place of worship, which is what counts. There again, it is also being billed as an "interfaith community centre." IMHO, the best solution would be to build something like the mosque they recently completed at my university (http://www.businessstone.com/2010/08/01/architecture-modern-mosque/), which also has places of worship for Christians and Jews.

[sjcarpediem.livejournal.com]

I'm not so good with modern Turkey (working on that...), but in the places I know better there's basically no difference, whether there is an official or professional imam present or not. In the Arabic I am familiar with (which is horrifyingly limited), a "mosque" is literally a "community center".

I have to ask simply for the sake of raising the point, if it's "interfaith" why is it "muslim"...

(Perhaps I should note that I wouldn't be thrilled about a new presbyterian church in the same area, or exclusively any other proselytizing faith's house of operations--too much like shooting fish in a barrel as far as encouraging hate and division....)

That looks like a wonderful space you have on your campus! Indeed, something like that would be the best solution, I think.

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