http://musliminsuffer.wordpress.com/
bismi-lLahi-rRahmani-rRahiem
In the Name of Allah, the Compassionate, the Merciful
=== News Update ===
Why We Shouldn't Celebrate Thanksgiving - Remember The Genocide of
Native Americans, Indians
By <http://www.alternet.org/authors/4690/>Robert Jensen,
<http://www.alternet.org>AlterNet. Posted
<http://www.alternet.org/ts/archives/?date%5BF%5D=11&date%5BY%5D=2007&date%5Bd%5D=22&act=Go/>November
22, 2007.
Thanksgiving Day should be turned into a National Day of Atonement to
acknowledge the genocide of America's indigenous peoples.
After years of being constantly annoyed and often angry about the
historical denial built into Thanksgiving Day, I
<http://www.alternet.org/story/28584/>published an essay in November
2005 suggesting we replace the feasting with fasting and create a
National Day of Atonement to acknowledge the genocide of indigenous
people that is central to the creation of the United States.
I expected criticism from right-wing and centrist people, given their
common commitment to this country's distorted self-image that
supports the triumphalist/supremacist notions about the United States
so common in conventional politics, and I got plenty of such
critique. But I was surprised by the resistance from liberals,
including a considerable number of my friends.
The most common argument went something like this: OK, it's true that
the Thanksgiving Day mythology is rooted in a fraudulent story --
about the European invaders coming in peace to the "New World," eager
to cooperate with indigenous people -- which conveniently ignores the
reality of European barbarism in the conquest of the continent. But
we can reject the culture's self-congratulatory attempts to rewrite
history, I have been told, and come together on Thanksgiving to
celebrate the love and connections among family and friends.
The argument that we can ignore the collective cultural definition of
Thanksgiving and create our own meaning in private has always struck
me as odd. This commitment to Thanksgiving puts these left/radical
critics in the position of internalizing one of the central messages
promoted by the ideologues of capitalism -- that individual behavior
in private is more important than collective action in public. The
claim that through private action we can create our own reality is
one of the key tenets of a predatory corporate capitalism that
naturalizes unjust hierarchy, a part of the overall project of
discouraging political struggle and encouraging us to retreat into a
private realm where life is defined by consumption.
So this November, rather than mount another attack on the national
mythology around Thanksgiving -- a mythology that amounts to a kind
of holocaust denial, and which has been critiqued for many years by
many people -- I want to explore why so many who understand and
accept this critique still celebrate Thanksgiving, and why rejecting
such celebrations sparks such controversy.
Once we know, what do we do?
At this point in history, anyone who wants to know this reality of
U.S. history -- that the extermination of indigenous peoples was,
both in a technical, legal sense and in common usage, genocide -- can
easily find the resources to know. If this idea is new, I would
recommend two books, David E. Stannard's American Holocaust: Columbus
and the Conquest of the New World and Ward Churchill's A Little
Matter of Genocide. While the concept of genocide, which is defined
as the deliberate attempt "to destroy, in whole or in part, a
national, ethnical, racial or religious group," came into existence
after World War II, it accurately describes the program that
Europeans and their descendants pursued to acquire the territory that
would become the United States of America.
Once we know that, what do we do? The moral response -- that is, the
response that would be consistent with the moral values around
justice and equality that most of us claim to hold -- would be a
truth-and-reconciliation process that would not only correct the
historical record but also redistribute land and wealth. In the
white-supremacist and patriarchal society in which we live, operating
within the parameters set by a greed-based capitalist system, such a
process is hard to imagine in the short term. So, the question for
left/radical people is: What political activity can we engage in to
keep alive this kind of critique until a time when social conditions
might make a truly progressive politics possible?
In short: Once we know, what do we do in a world that is not yet
ready to know, or knows but will not deal with the consequences of
that knowledge?
The full story in
http://www.alternet.org/story/68170/
===
-muslim voice-
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BECAUSE YOU HAVE THE RIGHT TO KNOW
