Anti-Socialist Ideologues Could Use a Lesson In Real History

By Ibrahim Abdil-Muid Ramey

It's no surprise that the free market fundamentalists on the Right side of the ideological spectrum have rolled out all of their big guns-and a few of their small caliber weapons as well-in the onslaught against the Obama health care reform proposal. Their arsenal includes not only well-placed and prominent conservative voices, but a small platoon of people of color who serve as a buffer that would hope to protect the (mostly) white and affluent voices of the Republican Party from the counter-charge of racism.

Perhaps they calculate that, if a few Black people join in their collective attack on the Obama health care "public option", African-Americans and other people of color won't see the issue as one with a social class or racial subtext. One such Obama critic-Star Parker, who writes a column for the stridently anti-Obama Washington Examiner, has even labeled the Obama proposal as "Socialism" and a demonstration of what she calls "fatal conceit", and even "hubris".

It's interesting to note that "Socialism" is the common epithet hurled from the Right as they attempt to whip up Americans into an anti-collectivist frenzy over the issue of universal health care and a proposed public insurance option. To their way of thinking, public health care is just a shade away from a Bolshevik-style takeover of the national government. They predict, quite openly, the erosion of personal freedom in the arena of health care choices, and creeping government control over the medical profession.

The came charge of "Socialism" was leveled at President Franklin Delano Roosevelt when the massive social reforms of the 1930's included the creation of something called Social Security. That term may be used in a pejorative way, but it has never been a deterrent to pursuing, and achieving, the kinds of social change that benefit the masses of people in this society. Southern racial bigots called Dr, King a "communist", but that did not derail his movement.

The phony "death panel" charges from the Right were also exposed as bogus. And a majority of Americans now believe that sweeping health care and health insurance reform is certainly a change whose time has come.

I agree that it is legitimate to debate, and disagree, about the size, scope, and cost of this proposal, and there is clearly no unanimity of thinking in either major national party about the precise content of any proposed reform of our health care and health insurance systems. And whatever the final political choices may be, this will me a gargantuan undertaking that is likely to progress more slowly that many people would like.

But to characterize the public health care option as "fatal conceit" or political hubris is either profound ignorance, or an example of extreme political malice. We don't speak of "socialist" education, or "socialist" food and drug inspection, or "socialist" air traffic control, but the federal government is, most assuredly, responsible for those protections, too.

I would remind Ms. Parker, ( and her friends at the Washington Examiner), that what she scornfully calls "socialized medicine" is alive and well in virtually every industrial democracy in the world, with the exception of the United States. Perhaps that fact contributes to the fact that the overall quality of life in America is only 11th or 12th in global ranking, behind the Nordic nations of Europe and Japan. These nations do not view public health care as harmful to their own plural democratic systems.

No medical insurance and delivery system is perfect, and the U.S. system, whatever it might become, will not be an exception to this rule. But the fundamental need for health affordable and proper health care, as a human right of citizens, can only be advanced if and when the insurance monopolies cease to be the arbiters of who can, and cannot, receive treatment for injury or illness. The growing legion of poor people, the unemployed, and the dispossessed in America have not been well served by the for-profit nature of the status quo. They deserve-and demand-change.

The possible challenge to the unchecked profits of the health insurance monopolies will certainly be far short of a cure-all for the ills of this society. The fight for health care reform and universal coverage is only one skirmish in the continuous struggle for inclusive social justice in this great nation.

But make no mistake about it: the rich and the comfortable will still have their property, their constitutional freedoms, and their human rights when the dust settles and a final legislative compromise is worked out. What they will not have, though, is a system that caters to their health needs while excluding access to millions more who of their compatriots who cannot afford to be sick, or who die in squalid hospital emergency rooms because they can't afford anything else.

No, the red banner of socialism won't fly over the White House. But if health care reform is realized, a banner of greater economic justice just might flutter over it-at least for the next three, if not seven, years.

And even if Star Parker sees it differently, it is a flag that most poor people, working people, and people who believe in dignity and human rights will not only celebrate, but salute.

Dave Gaubatz and the Insidious Gang of Four: Yet Another Display of Public Racism and Ignorance

By Ibrahim Abdil-Mu'id Ramey

It never ceases to amaze me how tiny minds can claim so much intellectual territory.

In this instance, it's not the ravings of the (un-elected) lunatic "Right", but the specious claims of four elected members of the U.S. House of Representatives, joined by one Dave Gaubatz, formerly of the Mapping Sharia Project, a lunatic that even respectable Republicans dismiss as 'off the hook'.

Their allegation? Simply that Muslim interns from the Council on American-Islamic Relations (CAIR), have attempted to "infiltrate" the U.S. House of Representatives, presumably to supplant the venerable Constitution with Sharia, thus effecting the demise of the Republic and the triumph of "radical Islam" in the land.

The four House members – all conservative Republicans (surprise, surprise) are John Shaedegg (AZ), Paul Broun (GA), Trent Franks (AZ), and Sue Myrick (NC) who, with Gaubatz, announced this week the publication of a new book called The Muslim Mafia.

Their intent is to not only bash a respected national Muslim organization, but to paint all Muslims as un-American, subversives and terrorists who seek to infiltrate the political establishment as Fifth Column agents of some nefarious global Islamist conspiracy.

As evidence of our hostile intentions, they unveiled their star witness: a young man who misrepresented himself for the purpose of securing a summer internship with CAIR, only to reveal his true patriotic allegiance in this great undercover "tell-all" against Muslims.

But does Gaubatz offer any credible proof that CAIR, or any other national Muslim organization, is operating in a way that is a threat to democratic principles, or in violation of our laws? No.

Give me a break. If brains were dynamite, this crowd couldn't even blow their noses.

Had the aforementioned members of our Congress done their homework, they would clearly have concluded that any association with this nut would be a horrific embarrassment to their constituents, their offices, and their colleagues in our national legislature.

Gaubatz has, for the record:

• Claimed the existence of vast depots of Weapons of Mass Destruction (WMD's) in Iraq (a false claim that even the CIA now denies).
• Called President Obama the front-man for a "Communist" takeover of America.
• Made publicly defaming and racist slurs against African-Americans.
• All while openly excoriating and insulting 1.5 billion Muslims by slandering Prophet Muhammad (pbuh) and the religion of Islam.

Not only does this unprincipled and false attack on CAIR goes beyond an expression of political dissent and free speech, it is utterly vile, repugnant, and drenched with the radical hatred that even political conservatives are loathe to publicly embrace.

I have often said, and I continue to state, that people should be free to criticize and even condemn actions that jeopardize the security and integrity of society. When individual Muslims are guilty of these things, then the charges are more than justified. But the hatchet-job directed against CAIR is painfully similar to the "Communist" smear directed against Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. during the Civil Rights Movement.

Like J. Edgar Hoover back then, this group apparently believes now that if you tell a lie enough times, and express it loudly enough, people will believe that it is true.

It's no surprise that all of this is happening at a time when the public profile of Muslims is rising, and when our national community is coming into its own in terms of political sophistication and electoral clout.

This "Gang of Four" is quite aware of the demographics related to the 2006 Senate election in Virginia, when a mobilized Muslim vote provided the margin of victory for a Democratic party candidate and, in the process, changed the partisan balance of power in the Senate.

And, for the record, the last time I checked, it's legal for CAIR, or any other non-profit organization, to offer internships for young people interested in government policy.

How can someone "infiltrate" Congress – an institution that they already own as a right of their American citizenship?

Neither CAIR nor the larger American Muslim community has anything to apologize for, or to hide.

We proudly exercise our right to free political association and free religious expression.

We are not criminals, and we are not carrying out the agenda of any criminal organizations.

We will continue to mobilize not only Muslims, but millions of other decent people in this society who reject the politic of slander and division.

And in conclusion, I remind these "patriotic" members of Congress that their association with open racists and religious bigots like Dave Gaubatz is as un-American as it gets.

No, White People, it IS About Race!

Hatin' On the President is Driven by More than the Health Care Debate

By MAS Freedom Civil and Human Rights Director, Ibrahim Abdil-Mu'id Ramey

First it was the arrest of Henry Louis Gates, in his own home, at the hands of an irate white Cambridge Massachusetts police officer. Our nation's first Black President jumped into the fray and took more than a little heat from white journalists and politicos alike, when he characterized the actions of the arresting cop as "stupid" and did an about-face damage control maneuver by inviting the officer and the professor to join him over a few beers in the White House garden.

Now, and arguably more seriously, politicians, prevaricators, and pundits alike, and even a former American President, are stirring the cauldron of race in the aftermath of the boorishly vulgar remark of "liar" that spat from the lips of one Joe Wilson – an otherwise undistinguished Republican congressman from South Carolina – where, apparently, some of the good citizens have yet to realize which side did, indeed, lose the Civil War.

All of this has led to some visible shifting of the tectonic plates of American racial discourse. Black folks (and apparently, most Democrats as well), were mortified to hear the President of the United States shouted at as a "liar" in the middle of an important speech to a joint session of the United States Congress. And Conservatives, nearly all of them white (with a few colored folks thrown in the mix for their amusement), are rallying around the good South Carolina Congressman as if he were he were some modern incarnation of Patrick Henry.

Give me liberty, or give me thinly-disguised racial animosity fronting as "free speech".

But this incident is more than an apparent breech of political etiquette in Washington, D.C., a town for dainty dialogue between the contending parties.

Neither is it some random verbal outburst that can be forgotten after the apology that President Obama got from the offender.

It is, in my view, symptomatic of not only a deep racial division, but a malignant racial animus that still simmers in the melting pot of U.S. culture.

As Black folks have known all along, former President Jimmy Carter, himself a Southerner, was right on point when he mentioned the deep resentment that Obama stirs up in the hearts of many European- Americans.

Consider the constant vilification of Obama as a "Nazi", or a "Communist", or someone with a deep-seeded hatred of white people (the last accusation, from Right-wing media talkster Glen Beck being totally baffling in light of the racial identity of the President's late mother).

Add to that the "Birthers" who assert that Obama is not really an American citizen at all, and the weapons that frequently appear in public when the President appears before not-so-friendly public gatherings, and you get the impression that all of this goes beyond legitimate political disagreement over health care issues.

This is, straight up, about hatred, and a particularly toxic strain of that old American virus that evidenced in the political and social corpus of the nation.

It even has an effect of the "responsible public opinion leaders" who claim-falsely, in my opinion, that their anti-Obama positions are not motivated by racism.

Just a few weeks ago, the hate-spewing Washington Examiner ran a cartoon that depicted a gigantic eared caricature of the President, dressed in a while lab coat, calling one of his opponents a "Nazi" in full view of a medical diploma earned from "Karl Marx University".

Of course, Black folks know that even the most egregiously obvious white racists would never refer to themselves at that. In fact, it's much more strategically suitable for many whites to pretend that they have no fear or dislike of a Black President (or in the immortal words of Public Enemy, fear of a Black planet). Their frequent claim is simply that Obama, as a "liberal", is simply too far to the political Left for their liking.

The freedom of political association, and the right of dissent, should be sacrosanct privileges in this, and any, democratic form of government.

Not all disagreements with current administration policies are rooted in racism, of course, and Congressman Wilson has every right to disagree with President Obama's policies, even if his positions seem to be influenced by notions of racial (and class) privilege.(Wilson, for the record, supported the movement to keep the Confederate battle flag on the South Carolina state flag.).

But the Joe Wilson incident should be a wake-up call to white people and people of color alike.

It speaks volumes to the sad reality that racially fueled animosity in public life is very much with us. It is fed by both unchanged notions of white superiority and the concomitant fear of real black authority and political power.

President Obama would, I believe, wish that this weren't true, because he has an abiding, optimistic belief, in the inherent goodness of America. But it is also worth noting that Congressman Wilson has received, as a reward for his boorish and imprudent public remark, more than a million dollars (and counting) in new campaign donations and pledges, presumably from the folk who share his sentiment about President Obama

We may wish that this situation were otherwise, and that political disagreements – even heated ones – are driven by things other than color privilege, hatred, and prejudice. But Mr. Wilson represents haters, not political dissidents. And we should all be wise enough, and vigilant enough, to understand the dangerous reality of race in America.

Racism has not been swept away because some white people are in denial of it. It is all too real, and it is being galvanized by the election of a Black man to the office of the Presidency of the country. And anyone who grew up in the segregated South, as I did, clearly understands that some white people don't have to resort to using the "N" word in public to demonstrate that they regard you that way.

Racist Attacks Against President Obama

Dear Friend,

As racist attacks increase and protestors continue to bring guns to presidential events, it is strikingly clear that President Obama is vulnerable to harm. Are the Secret Service and the FBI doing enough to protect him? Are they confronting those who threaten our president?

Ronald Kessler, a veteran investigative journalist and conservative who recently authored a book about the Secret Service, notes that funding cutbacks have already left the first African-American president in U.S. history particularly vulnerable. The book, which alleges that the cash-strapped Secret Service is endangering the president by cutting corners, has sent shockwaves through Washington.

We cannot allow funding problems to weaken the organizations charged with protecting the life of our nation's president. It is time for Americans of every stripe to insist that the Secret Service and the FBI operate at the highest levels of effectiveness.

I just signed a petition to ask Janet Napolitano, Secretary of the Department of Homeland Security, to ensure that efforts of the Secret Service and FBI to protect President Obama from escalating threats are expanded and fully funded. I hope you will, too.

Please have a look (HERE) and take action.

Ibrahim Ramey Addresses Concerns on Homegrown Terrorism on PBS Online NewsHour

VIEW VIDEO HERE