Speaking Monday at the Take Back the
American Dream conference in Washington D.C., MSNBC host
Melissa Harris-Perry shared
an interesting progressive perspective on our response to the 9/11 attacks: namely,
that they gave the United States the opportunity to once again wreak “horrific
racial violence” against an imaginary enemy.
The three-day Take Back the
American Dream Conference 2012 is a creation of
former New Left radical Robert
Borosage, founder, director, president and/or
board member of various progressive organizations like the Institute
for America’s Future and the Campaign
for America’s Future (CAF), the organizers and hosts of the
conference. CAF describes
itself as “the strategy center for the progressive movement.”
In addition to speakers like Borosage and Melissa Harris-Perry, the conference boasted leftist rock star Van
Jones.
Ms. Harris-Perry, or Harris, or Perry –
let’s just say MHP, as she goes by on her website
–anchors the weekend Melissa Harris-Perry
Show on the leftist mouthpiece MSNBC. A former neighbor
to now-President Obama, MHP is also a Tulane Professor of Political Science,
having previously served on the faculties of the University of Chicago and
Princeton University after studying at Wake Forest, Duke and even seminary.
There must be something in the rarefied
air of such prestigious academic institutions that renders its intellectuals
incapable of acknowledging the reality that lesser mortals easily grasp. One
doesn’t have to have a wall full of academic honors to see that on 9/11,
America was attacked by a very real enemy who had openly declared war on us, had
been waging it for many years before 9/11, and have been ever since. Apart from
rabid conspiracy theorists and the lemmings brainwashed by the fact-challenged hatemongers
at MSNBC, the average American sees this truth clearly. But progressive
professors who aren’t satisfied with the simplicity of Occam’s
Razor feel compelled to abandon inconvenient
facts and shoehorn the sweep of history into their race-obsessed, anti-American
theoretical constructs.
Americans of course responded in very
typically American ways to [terrorism], something that many people in the rest
of the world had already experienced. We
began with a kind of nationalist fervor that was justified as reasonable
patriotism.
I’m not sure how responding militarily
to an act of war is “very typically American.” Perhaps it’s because Americans
don’t take lightly the murder of thousands of our fellows on our own soil, and
we don’t suffer bullies gladly either. These and a “reasonable patriotism” would
seem to be positive national
attributes to anyone except a leftist who views America as the world’s bully.
MHP remarked that this “nationalist
fervor” was similar to “post-traumatic stress disorder.” She paused here for a smirking
aside, which got a big laugh from her smug, starstruck audience:
I’d like to point out that we clearly must have been having post-traumatic
stress disorder, because for about a year
after September 11th, there were African-American men walking around the city of
New York with NYPD hats on. That can only
be explained as a PTSD response.
On the contrary, it’s very easily
explained as a symbol of patriotic solidarity with the courageous NYPD and NYFD
first responders, both black and white, hundreds of whom lost their lives at
the WTC (and many, many more injured). But that doesn’t fit the racist paradigm
of leftists like MHP who are incapable of seeing any blacks as proud Americans
or as individuals who don’t subscribe to the left’s identity politics. For MHP,
all New York black males must be resentful, distrustful victims of police
brutality and racial profiling, and so any deviant behavior on their part, like
expressing support for the police, can “only” be explained as some sort of
mental disorder.
MHP – who, like Obama, is half-white
but rejects that part of the equation – went on to assert that America “typically
needs… a racial enemy”:
Americans in
part identify who we are, and who deserves what, through our notions of
whiteness and of the racial enemies that are the non-whites.
“Our notions of whiteness.” “Non-white
racial enemies.” These are the fantasies of a progressive academic like Zinn
or Chomsky
or MHP who sees everything through the distorting lenses of race and
anti-Americanism. If America goes to war with a “non-white enemy,” it must be because we are racist – not because they are openly supremacist aggressors
who attacked us first, such as the Imperial Japanese or jihadists. (Funny how
progressives neglect to call out our enemies on their blatant racism.)
And in this moment, the new racial enemy
became not so much Reagan‘s “welfare queen,” who was imaginary, but instead
this imagined “other” that is somehow Muslim, or Arab, or Sikh, or something else.
I hardly know where to begin breaking
down this breathtakingly ludicrous statement. How is our enemy “imagined”? Did
we merely imagine 9/11? The Fort Hood massacre? The WTC bombing in ‘93? And “somehow Muslim or Arab, or Sikh, or
something else”? I have news
for MHP: there’s overwhelming evidence that our avowed enemy is not “somehow”
Islamic, but extremely Islamic and hellbent
on making the rest of the world so.
As for America’s need for a non-white
enemy, MHP ignores the inconvenient fact that Islam is not a race, and that white
Americans like Anwar al-Awlaki and Adam Gadahn have been some of our most
prominent Islamic foes. It is just a contemptuous smear on her part, utterly
divorced from reality, to claim that America – and let’s call it like it is:
she’s talking about white America – is only lashing out in some aimless, racist
way at an innocent “other.”
But that doesn’t stop her from labeling
Americans throughout history as murderous racists:
We became willing to stomach a kind of
horrific racial violence in the name of national security. It is something that
we have been willing to stomach as a people over and over again in our history.
Melissa Harris-Perry is an accomplished academic. What that
means is, she has mastered the art of twisting history into the perverse
progressive worldview, to which Obama subscribes, that white America is the
racist, imperialist aggressor against, and exploiter of, the always innocent Third
World “other.” It’s a hateful insult to all Americans – especially the victims
of “imaginary” jihad.
(This article originally appeared here on FrontPage Mag, 6/25/12)
