Sarah Palin, never one to
shy away from political conflict, has come out
against the mosque and community center being
planned near the former site of the World Trade
Center in New York, calling on "peace-seeking
Muslims" to reject plans for the mosque.
Originally, Palin called on Muslims to
"refudiate"
the mosque, inventing a word in the process of
making this request. After deleting that tweet,
here's what she had to say in two subsequent ones.
From her Twitter account,
@SarahPalinUSA:
Peaceful New Yorkers, pls refute the
Ground Zero mosque plan if you believe
catastrophic pain caused @ Twin Towers site
is too raw, too real
And then:
Peace-seeking Muslims, pls understand,
Ground Zero mosque is UNNECESSARY provocation;
it stabs hearts. Pls reject it in interest of
healing
As
Politico
reported, an aide to NYC Mayor
Michael Bloomberg tweeted at Palin to tell the
former governor to "mind your business," then
asking "whose hearts? Racist hearts?" The aide
deleted her tweets shortly after posting them,
explaining why she wrote them and that she
regretted the "curt response."
This response raises the question: was Palin
being racist? Addressing her request to
"peace-seeking Muslims" sounds mildly
unnecessary, as it makes an issue out of
peacefulness when it comes to
Muslims. Technically speaking (and perhaps it's
ridiculous to parse the semantics of a tweet
that includes the term "refudiate"), this would
not be racism, but religious bigotry, if that's
what it is. Maybe it reads as if Palin assumes
Muslims are not peaceful, as a base-line of how
she understands them, and feels the need to call
out the peaceful ones as a minority segment of
the group. That analysis feels like it imputes a
lot, probably too much, about Palin's cultural
assumptions and what goes on in her own head.
Given the heated rhetoric over Islamic
extremism offered up by Palin and countless
other GOP voices on national security over the
past nine years, are those imputations a
stretch? Probably, but it's easy to see why
"peace-seeking Muslims" rings a bit funny in
ears that are already skeptical of what Palin
says, and why non-hawks see national security
conservatives--some of whom honestly and
expliclty see an ideological, religious war
between Islam and the Christian or secular
West--as entertaining some broad-based
assumptions about Islam as a whole.
Aside from the nuances of the "racism"
question, what's notable (if unsurprising) about
Palin's tweets is that, while most politicians
would approach with extreme caution something so
hot-buttoned and charged with religion, anger,
and fear, Palin dives right in without
trepidation, on Twitter no less, not carefully
calibrating her words, but just taking a side
and expressing a stance, controversy be damned.
It's the style on which she prides herself, and
on this matter of controversy in New York, she
gives us no less.
