By Chris Hedges
TruthDig.com
June 13, 2011.
In Franz Kafka’s short story “Before the Law” a tireless supplicant spends his life praying for admittance into the courts of justice. He sits outside the law court for days, months and years. He makes many attempts to be admitted. He sacrifices everything he owns to sway or bribe the stern doorkeeper. He ages, grows feeble and finally childish. He is told as he nears death that the entrance was constructed solely for him and it will now be closed.
Justice has become as unattainable for Muslim activists in the United States as it was for Kafka’s frustrated petitioner. The draconian legal mechanisms that condemn Muslim Americans who speak out publicly about the outrages we commit in the Middle East have left many, including Syed Fahad Hashmi, wasting away in supermax prisons. These citizens posed no security threat. But they dared to speak a truth about the sordid conduct of our nation that the state found unpalatable. And in the bipartisan war on terror, waged by Republicans and Democrats, this ugly truth in America is branded seditious.
Read the rest at Countercurrents.org
Comment: The US government has misled many, but mostly its citizenry, into believing that it is the "land of the free". You would have to interrogate what it means to be free in the US and to weigh the inherent duplicity.
To start it is necessary to understand the US's sordid genocidal history to appreciate how freedom is conditioned and how whiteness never disappears even when white people are not present (or directly implicated).
A few years ago I was visiting a Navajo reservation in Arizona when I stopped in at a gas station and picked up a local newspaper. There on the front page was a story about the struggle to bring water and sewerage to homes on the reservation!
And there you were thinking the toilet debacles was mostly a victimization reserved for poor folks of color in South Africa.
Think again. Clean running water is not to be taken for granted on the rez (Indian reservation).
Indians in Indian country have a life expectancy around 39. Read that again broer. Add to that the fact that unemployment on the rez is almost at full tilt while Indians have the highest suicide rates in the US.
Are these folks free? Or the ghettoized black and brown skins who are securely imprisoned in the so-called 'underclass' or the prison-industrial-complex that has one out of four black men serving time in one way or the other?
The number of black men in prison dwarfs the number of black men in colleges and universities.
Whose land of freedom then? And what kind of attained freedom can live blindly in these contexts?
So why the hell should anyone be surprised that Muslims (terrorists as they are born to be) cannot be free in the US unless they strip their identities and assume a whiteness or play white (if they can)?
And yeah there are a lot of f*cks like that all over the country. Indians from India too. Folks who can't pronounce the names of the countries where there extended families still live and where some of them are being killed by the very machinery the same b*tches pay taxes to without a second thought.
But I am not losing sleep about colorpean agents and their sorry asses. They are to be found everywhere and perhaps the worst kind of agent is the liberation radical who trades in his/her rifle to join the system of oppression.
On the continent we call these muthaz the government in most cases.
And we are not free here or there.
Onward!
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