Spencer,
You are doing everything to protect Islam from the shootings at Fort Hood.  The reason so many centrist/independants like myself are starting to lean towards Foxnews, etc….is because you guys refuse to be fair.  The hypocrasy is openly blatant now.  You know if this was a story of a christian psychiatrist killing opening fire on a group of homosexuals, the judgement would be swift.  But that doesn’t happen.  Fact is, every christian majority nation has freedom of religion and freedom of speech.  NO islamic majority nation has freedom of religion and freedom of speech.  If you would just be honest, more would listen.  Independant americans are not fanatics, it’s just the media has moved so far left, we look that way.

Some of those Islamic majority nations respecting freedom of speech and freedom of religion include Turkey and, to a much lesser extent, Indonesia. India isn’t Muslim-majority, but it’s a democracy with, if I’m not mistaken, the world’s greatest number of Muslims.

And actually, I don’t “know” that if a Christian psychiatrist opened fire on “a group of homosexuals” — what a charming analogy from this asshole — “the judgment would be swift.” Instead, what I do know is that if someone decided to say there was something inherently bigoted about Christianity from the fact of such a disgusting occurrence, I would say that the utterance reflected more on the person issuing it than anything else. It is not my job to “protect Islam.” It is my job to adjudicate between what is valid and what is base; and between what is intelligent and what is extremely motherfucking stupid, venal and, yes, bigoted.

These fucking debater’s points, I tell you. I put up a plea earlier today for people to stop their euphemism. At least have the courage to say why you think Islam is so noxious. Instead, we get what we always get: anti-anti-racism. Somehow it all goes back to how comfortable the privileged wish to continue being. I don’t typically let hate mail bother me, but — God, this day. This is what people take away from a tragedy like Ft. Hood.

Taking a break, I saw Ta-Nehisi Coats posted this great DJ Honda/Mos Def song from forever ago, so I relaxed with the beer my office is letting me drink at work and heard Mr. Definitely say:

This thing called rhyming no different from coal mining/ we both on assignment to unearth a diamond.

It sounds beautiful, and he delivers it with such expertise that your head naturally nods, but think about that for one second. I’m neither a coal miner nor a rapper, but it’s impossible to believe that any coal miner sees himself in Mos’ craft. And I’m pretty sure that the purpose of coal mining isn’t actually to extract diamonds. Though I guess Mos Def is using the slang “black diamonds” to denote coal, so I suppose I must rule that part in bounds.

“Do you think it’s time for the military to have special debriefings of Muslim Army officers — anybody enlisted?”

And possible GOP House candidate Allen West:

“….the horrible tragedy at Fort Hood is proof the enemy is infiltrating our military.”

I would urge people to read David Kilcullen’s book The Accidental Guerrilla and think very, very hard about where collective guilt can lead.

After Game 6, a reporter mentioned the team’s unabashed spending to Cashman and said, “There are fans of other teams who go, ‘Well, they’re the only team that can do that,of course they won.’ How do you respond to that?”

The question was tough but fair, and Cashman gave a perfectly pinstriped response. “You can call us anything you want,” he said. “You also have to call us world champions.”

How I wish I could have been at the parade today. Or, better yet, how I wish Tawmmy from Quinzee coulda ben theyuh. Also Judah Grunstein, who seems to be laboring under the misimpression that a team with a $122 million payroll is an insurgent while a team with a $208 million payroll is an empire.

Also, I haven’t seen the rest of the segment, but it seems like she’s making a point in favor of Hasan and PTSD, and while I’m not sure, since I criticized that point earlier, I feel compelled on pains of intellectual dishonesty to acknowledge that. If it’s the case!

In the aftermath of this terrible tragedy, it is more important than ever that we not make the same scapegoating and broad stroke mistakes that were evident in the aftermath of previous tragedies. The Association of Patriotic Arab Americans in Military urges the media, government officials and all of our fellow Americans to recognize that the actions of Hasan are those of a deranged gunman, and are in no way representative of the wider Arab American or American Muslim community.

A-fucking-men. While we’re at it, it disgusts me as well that the cable nets have jumped all over the “explanation” that Hasan, who has never been to war, was somehow driven to pick up those guns by combat stress. This has gotten as baroque as the theory of retrograde motion. I heard for hours on cable last night that even though Hasan isn’t a combat veteran, he had heard all about combat from his mental-health-counseling patients. That would make me about as much of a PTSD sufferer as Hasan.

PTSD is no fucking joke. It should not — should never — carry a stigma. Friends and family members of mine have experienced it, and they deserve our support. To have what they’ve gone through associated, through ignorance, with an armed madman, is an obscenity. In comments from the last post, Mikey bravely stated, “[A]s a PTSD sufferer, I’d like to point out that in forty years neither I nor anyone I know from group has shot up any goddam army bases. People do shit for their own reasons. To try to make their actions fit your narrative is not only stupid, it’s fucking transparent…”

The same reasoning applies to the inevitable and already-germinating slanders against the Arab- and Muslim-American communities. How many shootings across this country were committed by white men? What did they tell us about white men? I love how elements of the right who hector us about spreading freedom to those unwashed Arabs and Muslims as a pretext for invasion and occupation turn around and spread innuendo about Muslim rampages, as if Hasan’s religion can unlock some secret about his motivation or herald an emerging onslaught of “Muslim” attackers.

I repeat what Mikey said, because I can’t say it better: To try to make their actions fit your narrative is not only stupid, it’s fucking transparent.

The Austin American-Statesman has set up a useful Twitter feed for information on these awful developments.

The Israelis have been difficult, as always: whenever Mitchell raises East Jerusalem in talks with the Israeli Foreign Minister, the Israeli stands up and walks out of the room.

Can you believe that shit! Here’s the fucking U.S. special envoy, an emissary of Barack Obama and Hillary Clinton, discussing what everyone knows will have to be a subject of a final-status negotiation — for more on that, substantively, see this Angel Duss post –  and the Israeli foreign minister, like a toddler, gets cranky and huffs out! Routinely! And Mitchell, like a bitch, takes it!

The first thing my mind turns to is Young Jeezy’s recent Complex interview.

Does your situation with DJ Drama—
Young Jeezy: Man, I would never talk about that in my Complex Magazine interview, are you crazy? [Laughs.] No more light. Fight is over.
No more light.
Young Jeezy: Grown, baby, we moving on. I ain’t really no nigga to search for attention or do shit to get attention. I never mentioned niggas’ names, or said anything about anything throughout my career to get no cool points—I just mind my business. But at the same time, I’m a man first. If I feel offended, I’ma speak on it. Like you, you’re not gonna be walking along and a motherfucker just say something crazy to you in the middle of Manhattan and you gonna just keep it moving? You’re gonna say your piece or what? [Laughs.]

Someone needs to print out and slip this interview into Mitchell’s briefing package the next time he shuttles to Tel Aviv. Avigdor Lieberman is not going to respect Mitchell if Mitchell allows himself to be disrespected, and the Israelis are not going to respect the Obama administration if it can disrespect it without consequence.

“Why are you encouraging this insolent sex party?” lawmaker Hamdi Hassan from the opposition Muslim Brotherhood wrote in a letter to the government. “You are accused of disturbing social peace and stability, encouraging vice and debauchery.”

Another Islamic lawmaker, Ali Laban, called for banning the “nudity concert.” A Facebook campaign against Beyonce’s concert collected nearly 10,000 supporters.

But Beyonce had one of the best insolent sex parties of all time!

(Joke stolen from Matthew Yglesias)