alias Bruce.

Noam Chomsky on Osama Bin Laden's death.

My favorite nickname for Chomsky – from a 2003 New Yorker article – is "The Devil's Accountant." He dares to ruthlessly and dispassionately catalog the lies of accepted conventional knowledge. Read his May 6 accounting of the Bin Laden killing here.

We have taken out Osama Bin Laden. But hold

the champagne. This excerpt from a post by Actor212 (at Simply Left Behind and The Agonist) is worth some thought:

"Bin Laden dies knowing he accomplished what he set out to do: destroy America. For fifteen years, he carefully dissected the weaknesses of our "democracy" and our capitalist economy. He demonstrated the fear will trump (pun intended) principles every time. He managed to reveal that America can torture with the best of tyrannies, that America can oppress its people economically, that America can take a thriving economy and turn it into a bankruptcy, and that America will elect the weakest possible leaders if given half a chance and a [SIC] immoral faction whose lust for power overwhelms their patriotism. Allah could not have handed him a better adversary than George W. Bush, a man so morally corrupt and politically inept that he managed to take a moment that could have united the entire world, including the Arabic street, behind him and make that same world ridicule him and hate us."

Yes, we have killed Osama Bin Laden -- after 10 years during which Al Qaeda, led by a man in ill health, has disseminated the preeminent global model for decentralized terrorism. We have killed Osama Bin Laden, and crowds have gathered in New York and Washington, including officers with fists in the air, to chant with satisfaction at having answered murder with murder, at having had the latest heaping helping in a by-now-regular diet of fear and rage. Remember the weakened, angry Germany in the years prior to Hitler's rise? Take a close look. This is what a declining nation looks like.

If you believe that the upcoming congressional hearings on "the radicalization of American Muslims" are

about national security, then, for your sake, I hope you won't answer the phone when a scammer calls  and offers you sure-fire wealth in exchange for your credit card number.

The hearings are another installment of Fear Theater, this time brought to you by House Homeland Security Committee Chairman Peter King (R-NY). They will offer nothing that the nation needs for greater security – no innovations for improved international police work, no smartened relations with majority-Muslim nations and communities, no push for more competitive fairness in the international economy – but they will bring us wagonloads of politely coded alarm about the Turbaned Brown Menace and the need for those in "the Muslim community" to "do their part" in assisting anti-terrorist authorities. As if law-abiding Muslim citizens are not already doing their part by simply being law-abiding.

This photo-op congressional farce is as excruciatingly obvious as it is disgusting, which is why the hearings are being met with street protests even before they begin. In New York, protesters stood in the rain on Sunday and decried Rep. King's exercise in stereotype and blame by association.

King, for his part, offered a comically lame defense. According to CNN:

King defended the hearings on CNN's "State of the Union" program. "We're talking about al Qaeda," he said. "We're talking about the affiliates of al Qaeda, who have been radicalizing, and there's been self-radicalization going on within the Muslim community, within a very small minority, but it's there." King compared the goal of the hearings to investigating the Mafia within the Italian community or going after the Russian mob.

Right. Which is why I am utterly confident that Rep. King's Mafia hearings would be titled "The Radicalization of American Italians."

The name of the Muslim hearings, in fact, says everything. The title is a dead giveaway that the hearings serve only as another stunt to toss scraps of red-meat race-bait to scared, angry voters who, without such continual distractions, might start asking intelligent questions about the kinds of policies that would actually make us all safer. There is no widespread terrorist-friendly "radicalization" of Muslim Americans any more than there is a rampant mob-friendly radicalization of Italian-Americans. In fact, there is a better case for holding hearings on "the radicalization of malcontent American whites," e.g., the Tea Party (complete with publicly-wielded guns and violent anti-government dogma), than there is for an inquiry into American Muslims.

If King's hearings were serious, they would be titled "Combatting al Qaeda's influence in America." And they would, like any smart threat analysis, look at all potentially dangerous players, including the Jihad Janes and munitions sellers. But these Muslim hearings are about neither seriousness nor safety. They are about playing the simplistic fear card in yet another attempt to convince 300 million Americans that a smattering of presumed Muslim potential suicide bombers poses a greater threat to their health than, say, a broadly toxic food industry and a completely broken health care industry.

After all, why actually address the terrorism problem when you can instead scapegoat Muslims and leave things as they are?

An open letter to Imam Feisal Abdul Rauf

Dear Imam Rauf:

I know that you and your partner in the building of the Islamic Center and mosque near Ground Zero, Manhattan real estate developer Sharif el-Gamal, are in a state of shock over what has ensued in the country in response to the project. And I know that you now question whether it has been worth it: you were quoted in the September 10 Washington Post as saying that had you known the Center would meet such responses, "we would certainly never have done this."

I beg of you, Imam Rauf: please, please do not agree to move the Center. Do not move it a single inch.

What you are seeing in public opposition to the mosque -- epitomized at the extreme by a crank Florida pastor with a 10-person congregation, who likely covets attention as much as he allegedly loves the Lord -- is a grotesque illustration of what can happen when anyone with a Tweet and an outrageous idea can command world attention through omnipresent media that thrive on circuses above all else. I know you understand that this obscure and demented pastor, who perhaps managed to gain a New York meeting with you purely on the basis of his stunt, represents a lunatic fringe that tells us more about the power of media than about the state of the nation.

But I also know that polls show that a majority of Americans oppose the creation of a mosque at this location, two blocks from Ground Zero, on the grounds that it violates the necessary reverence for the victims of 9/11. I do not need to elaborate here on the absurd hypocrisy and racist generalization behind such sentiments. You, Imam, are fully aware of this.

I do feel the need, though, to beseech you to not bend to such feelings.

Do not bend to them, Imam Rauf -- because if you do so, you will reward the basest tendency in American ethnic and religious exceptionalism: "We won't let people generalize about us and our religions, but we are entitled to generalize about them and theirs."

Do not bend to them -- until the day that Americans are willing to stop building new churches and synagogues and Mormon temples in locations where people might feel painfully reminded of the horrific acts, both today and in the past, carried out in the names of these faiths.

Do not bend to them -- because as you also said in the Post, "If we move from that location, the story will be that the radicals have taken over the discourse. The headlines in the Muslim world will be that Islam is under attack." Do not send that message, Imam. It is the last thing that this nation, and the world, need.

Do not bend to them -- because those who are racist enough to believe they can successfully blame an entire worldwide religion for the actions of a few of its self-stated believers need to be taught that they cannot. Those who want to believe that this is "their" country, in which they are entitled to deny their own cherished rights to others if they feel like it, need to learn that the United States belongs to others as well. Those who scream at Washington rallies about allegedly "restoring honor" but who are really screaming for a restoration of their own sense of privilege, a restoration of their own endangered sense of being the cultural boss, need to feel the pain of loss of privilege as this nation grows. They need to feel what it means for a nation to expand and deepen to include others -- especially since, as so many forget, the so-called "founding" immigrants to this nation were illegal, repeatedly dishonest, and ruthlessly ravenous for land and power as they violently carved out what became the United States, unlike the millions of contemporary Muslims and others who simply desire the things to which all Americans are entitled.

America needs to learn to read from its own script. It needs to learn to follow the very lessons it purports to teach the world. It needs to learn, however painfully for some, that what the Constitution grants for Christians and Jews and Mormons and Buddhists and atheists it also grants for Muslims. It needs to learn that the ignorant and whining throngs who clamor for a return to "their" America can never have it back -- because "their" America of wicked bias and tilted privilege and chortling selfishness is a place that the United States needs to continue to move away from, not toward. The brutish and the bigoted will be unhappy about this progress. They always are. Tough. At some point, they will have to begin to accept the idea of democracy.

I beg, you Imam Rauf: help Americans to grow into better citizens of a better country. Do not give them what they claim, in the polls, that they want.

Sincerely,

Bruce A. Jacobs