Since your website is about ameliorating ignorance, I’m surprised you are unable to detect the ignorance, not to mention jingoist bigotry, of this statement. I live surrounded by rural white Americans for whom no better kick exists than to fire their guns into the air, usually after consuming large quantities of alcohol.
My guess is that American civilians kill more people with careless use of firearms than any citizenry on earth. Think about it.
Just FYI, the weird search engine in this place searches the threads and the columns separately, which is why I couldn’t find that statement in a thread search as stated in the other thread.
Now for the column.
It’s unfortunately true that American television has a thing - whether a bias or a lack of understanding or a fetish is hard to say - about videos of Middle Eastern men shooting guns into the air. Therefore the action becomes easily noticeable.
The questioner used the videos as an example in which to frame the question. Is that inherently bigoted? I’d say not, just because it would be difficult to frame the question in a different way that used a common cultural referent. Rural white Americans may shoot their guns into the air quite frequently for all I know, but there are few videos of them doing so, and fewer of them doing so en masse. Same with all the other populations in the world and the various reports one sometimes hears about their gun in the air shooting.
What about Cecil’s response? Well, he does start out with a snarky remark that reprises the Middle Eastern reference in the question.
But notice that he never again focuses on them, but goes on to talk about American instances of deaths by falling bullets. And his conclusion was general: “So, Middle Eastern men, gang bangers, etc., listen up!”
We’ve had a number of heated discussions about people finding offense in other people’s statements and the differences between those who are of the offended parties and those who are not. There are no good dividing lines.
So as someone who is not a Middle Easterner, or a gang banger, or a rural white American, my take on the subject may not satisfy you. But for what it’s worth, while I agree that in general images of Middle Easterners are not well served by this country’s media or its inhabitants, you’re reaching pretty far to make this particular question or response an exercise in bigotry.
Thanks for the reply. I agree that I may have been reaching a bit with the bigotry statement, especially since I know nothing of the questioner other than the question itself. So let’s write that off to frustration stemming from the real problem, which is the use of American media to infuse in many Americans an anti-Arab, pro-war mentality which serves the purpose of keeping them fearful and therefore willing to let the power elite “protect them” in any way the elite deem necessary.
There is nothing uniquely American about this strategy, btw; keeping the citizenry fearful of “outsiders” in order to maintain and expand power is a tactic as old as history itself. Recently, we saw it in justification of the illegal invasion, and continuing occupation, of Iraq; and we’re seeing it again in the run-up to an almost certain confrontation with Iran, a country which isn’t even Arab, a fact lost on most Americans thanks in part to the over-simplified “news” reporting of the commercial media, upon which the vast majority of Westerners rely for assistance in determining their world views.