Thread: Witness to Discrimination: What Would You Do?
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Old 02-29-2008, 07:54 AM   #28 (permalink)
CrazyFlamingos
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Quote:
Originally Posted by Katczinsky View Post
I don't really know how you can quantify something like this. Hate-crimes? Sure. But discrimination? I'm not too sure about that.

I hear overt anti-Islam and anti-Arab slurs everyday, even in the professional setting. When I went to buy my last used car, I heard my rather unabashedly conservative car dealer's conversation on the phone with one of those (as he called them) 'towel-heads', and the moment he heard his accent he was talking trash to him and hung the phone up on him. At first I thought he was frustrated with an employee, but then again I've never heard compassionate conservative 'customer service' before either.

Whilst anti-semitic discrimination is largely covert and reserved to a minority of radicals and racists, anti-Islamic/Arab discrimination is largely overt and evident in the larger population. It just so happens that people like car dealers talk trash and discriminate while gun-toting Nazis in the woods happen to burn crosses and trash temples. You can't always quantify the level of discrimination with the numbers of overt hate-crimes.
Thank you, Katz. You ably and accurately articulate the nature of anti-Islamic/Arab feeling.

But, in addition to that, your personal anecdote puts to bed the lie that anti-Islamic/Arab discrimination by businesses is something that does not exist in America.

I have never personally witnessed such discrimination but I hear the racist talk all the time.

And look how much mileage wacko Republican supporters have gotten out of the fact that Obama spent a couple of years in a Muslim school as a small child. The rational response to hearing that is "So?"

But the actual response to that fact by literally millions of Americans has been, "THE MUSLIMS ARE COMING! THE MUSLIMS ARE COMING!"
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