Juan Cole: Stop Saying ‘If X Fired Rockets at U.S.’: It’s Racist, and Assumes We’re Colonial

[marmar]

By Juan Cole

Is anyone else disgusted by the propaganda trick of trying to get Americans to sympathize with Israel’s massive attack on the civilian habitations of Gaza by saying “if the US was subjected to rocket fire by X [usually Mexicans], what would it do?”

This hope that Americans are racists and that their racism can be incited against the Palestinians is about the lowest rhetorical trick you could imagine.

I’m old enough to remember the race riots in American cities of the late 1960s and early 1970s. I can remember a prominent pro-Israel columnist for the Washington Post, way back then, explicitly comparing Palestinians protesting their occupation by Israel to African-Americans protesting their economic marginalization. The writer’s hope was that white Americans would identify with Israelis and come to see Palestinians as “Black.” Or, let’s face it, as the N-word.

Someone recently sent to my blog such a screed, saying, what if rockets from Quebec were slamming into Maine?

The comparison is not only repulsive because the author hopes that Americans are Anglo-Saxons who don’t like French Canadians (or French anything). Notice no one says “What if the white people of Windsor, Ontario, were sending rockets across the Detroit River onto Detroit?” That would get the race dynamics that the analogy is aiming at all wrong. ..................(more)

The complete piece is at: http://www.juancole.com/2014/07/rockets-assumes-colonial.html