Is the anti-war movement racist?


Don't get me wrong, I love the peace movement. I especially like the upcoming End US Wars rally in Washington, DC December 12th: http://www.enduswars.org/ .

But a lot of the white, middle-class people in the peace movement have a great big blind spot.

Ralph Ellison's Invisible Man describes a black man who is socially invisible in the white world. Splitting-the-Sky, the native American peace-and-justice warrior who is putting George Bush on trial in an act of civil resistance, seems to be equally invisible to much of the white, middle-class peace movement.

This guy should be getting the kind of publicity Cindy Sheehan got when she dogged Bush for murdering her son. But maybe because he's Native American, Splitting-the-Sky gets disinvited from mainstream peace rallies, even though he's just about the fieriest rabble-rousing speaker since Malcolm X.

Maybe Splitting-the Sky is too much of a revolutionary (he's been in armed conflict with the authorities more than once). Maybe he's too frank, too fearless, too in-your-face honest. Maybe he's just too real. Reality scares a lot of white middle-class people...especially the reality of 9/11, which Splitting-the-Sky exposes so eloquently and mercilessly.

Many unconscious racists on the liberal/left side of the political spectrum politely avert their eyes when informed by a non-white that 9/11 was an inside job. (Interesting how most African-Americans were suspicious from the get-go, while most whites fell for the official myth.)

Three-quarters of the world's Muslims, and 97% of the people in Pakistan (where al-Qaeda is supposedly hiding) say flat-out that al-Qaeda didn't do 9/11. When I point this out to white middle-class people, they just shrug, scoff, brush it off, or belittle the point. Their attitude is obvious: "Who cares what Muslims think?" The corollary: "They're just brown-skinned people, inferior beings, whose thoughts are of no consequence."

Wait a minute! This escalating war is supposedly targeting al-Qaeda, the alleged perpetrators of 9/11, who are supposedly in Pakistan. Those brown-skinned "inferior beings" in Pakistan are able to build their own nuclear weapons, so they can't be all THAT dumb. And yet the fact that 97% of them say al-Qaeda--a group they know much better than we do--didn't do 9/11, somehow doesn't matter?

If Western whites viewed the world's Muslims as equals, rather than brown-skinned inferiors, they would respond to that vast Muslim majority that says al-Qaeda didn't do 9/11 by demanding an immediate, comprehensive, exhaustive, fully funded investigation of 9/11 focusing on the possibility of official complicity.

Instead, Western whites have covered their ears and eyes, sung "la-la-la," and murdered more than a million Muslims.

It doesn't get any more racist than that.