If we can learn anything from the events of the past few weeks in Bloomington, the attack at Sofra Cafe in particular, it’s that not even the ideal liberal college town is immune from the insidious racial hatred that underlies U.S. culture.
Even here, with the slick varnish of modern cosmopolitan education and “fair trade” boutiques, there are still gangs of Neo-Nazis openly demonstrating in the streets — with police protection — and columns of four-wheel-drive trucks brandishing confederate flags. The liberal and the reactionary aspects of Bloomington aren’t so far apart as they might appear. One side openly embraces what the other ignores — the fact that the foundation of U.S. society is the exploitation of the great majority of the world’s population. Both benefit from the wealth extracted from the world’s poorest nations by the imperial military-industrial complex.
For the past 30 or so years the full weight of the American empire has come down on the heads of Muslim majority nations, a reality reflected here in the xenophobic hatred and harassment of Muslim people. U.S. imperialism is the real foundation for both the material wealth of a town like Bloomington and the white-supremacist ideology that accompanies it.
The word “Islamophobia” has been on the tongues of Bloomington residents for the past couple weeks and though it is a real phenomenon, there has been a great amount of confusion as to what it really is.
We disagree with the Indiana Daily Student that it begins with “judgement” or rather misjudgment. The type of racism that drove Triceten Bickford’s attack does not just drop from the sky. Bickford and reactionaries like him adopt their fanaticism from the well-crafted imperialist lies that justify the colonization of Muslim majority countries.
The U.S. government and its corporate media mouthpieces propagate the paranoid fantasy of “Islamic extremists” that might be hiding around any corner or in any mosque. The fear of extremists is expanded to Muslims in general and especially to Muslim women for whom the hijab has become a coded image of otherness.
Despite his expulsion from the University and condemnation from the community, the structure that produced Bickford’s particular brand of white-supremacy remains. The U.S. is still reigning terror across North Africa and the Middle East.
On Oct. 15, President Obama announced his intent to continue the occupation of Afghanistan beyond 2017, reversing his much lauded campaign promise. When will we lose faith in the ability of our government to reform itself? Until we do, until we realize politics in the U.S. is not a game of competing visions for a better society but a contest to determine who will manage the affairs of the empire, then the hate will never disappear.
Can we expect Islamophobia to pass from our streets when John Kerry, a principal architect of U.S. imperialism, is welcomed as a great statesman to our university? Can we expect IU students to transcend nationalism when their professors are funded to perfect drone technology? We don’t think so.
Students Against State Violence
