"Sometimes you have to play a long time to be able to play like yourself." ~~~ Miles Davis

As a general rule, musicians, artists, and writers, as well as those possessed of an ardor for self-awareness and a commitment to political activism have been advised to avoid a habitual retreat to comfort zones...to take note of the criteria that causes one's pulse to quicken, brings flop sweat to the brow, causes sphincters to seize up, and delivers mortification to the mind. In order to quicken imagination and avoid banality, it is imperative to explore the fears that cause one to awaken in the darkest of night to stare bug-eyed at the ceiling until dawn; to embrace discomfort; to shun crackpot complacency; to wander through the teeming polis of the psyche, and, in so doing, to not only stray and mingle among the outcasts, demimonde and mad, but proceed to the locked-down wards of the region's lunatic asylum, and make an exhausting inquest into the nature of the hopeless cases that have been hidden from public view.

As of late, my darkest thoughts and angst-engendered imaginings have involved the following: The ecological debasement of the earth, the ongoing degradation of daily life within U.S. society, and the attenuated destiny of the individual under the yoke of late stage, global capitalism. My ruminations have been, in large measure, engendered and inflamed by the following: On Tuesday, Feb. 26, of this year, a son was born to my wife, Angela and myself.

August Franklin Rockstroh came into this world at a time when the planet he will inhabit is warmer than it has been in 11,000 years, a condition caused by the industrial production of man-made greenhouse gasses.

He arrives into an age wherein it is imperative that we as a species re-imagine nearly all we know. Thus far, from the halls of power to the floors of minimarts, our avidity for avoidance of the realities at hand does not augur well for humankind's chances.

Two weeks before the Deepwater Horizon, Macondo Well "spill" (what a dishonest word for that noxious, bleeding gash) into the waters of the Gulf of Mexico, I dreamed of a badly injured fish who had had half his face torn off by some brutal method employed by the practitioners of industrial scale fishing operations to exploit the world's oceans ... The fish had worked himself upon a rock on a craggy shoreline. Holding an eternity of suffering in his remaining eye, the fish turned to face me ... Ever since, this dream image has lived within me. I carry the fish's suffering and I bear his dark rage regarding what our species has done to his/our home -- this complex, mysterious, beguiling, dangerous, sublime, monstrous, and magnificent world we were cast into ... My sense of sorrow, at times, seems unbearable; my rage ... bottomless ... Who will speak for the voiceless -- who will make amends for their suffering?

This much is clear: The means that sustain the present economic order not only defies moral justification (i.e., a culture dependent on the enforced misery of the multitudes and the wanton exploitation of nature) but the order has proven anathema to the balance of the earth's life-enabling forces -- a balance of forces mandatory to the continuance of the human species on the planet. The fate of the earth is inexorably linked to our personal destiny.

Deep down we know this to be true, but the atomizing nature of late capitalism inflicts learned helplessness. Social and political change seems impossible. Personal transformation is relegated to the realm of New Age snake oil. Human longing is deracinated. The Tree of Knowledge rendered a Chia Pet. The unruly call of destiny is bowdlerized into sterile careerism.

Yet, my newly arrived son, as we all do, will long to embrace his own authentic destiny.

The alienation at the mechanized heart of the corporate/consumer state's structure will present a daunting challenge to him, for it is difficult to live a life imbued with depth and resonance without meaningful human engagement. Abiding bonds that bring the depth of oneself deep into life must be formed. A social milieu must be in place that allows for love and friendship, for coming upon mentors, for grappling with antagonists, whereby one is destroyed by catastrophic victories and enlarged by propitious failures.

Although every individual arrives at a fate uniquely his/her own, soul-making is a collaborative effort. Destiny only appears to be a solo act.

My character, like yours, is a composite of all the events, happenstance, and circumstances that transpired before, and after, I arrived in this world. It is resultant from the accumulation of my choices -- and the choices of those in positions of power and authority, over which, I am, all too often, powerless.

But if you discern what I yearn for, you will know who I am.

One's destiny awaits just over the crest of the horizon. It is glimpsed in sublime snatches like a beautiful stranger who catches your gaze from a passing train. Yes, it sleeps within, but must be roused into being by interaction with the outer world. It awaits you in the vastness of life. The truth of your being is honeycombed into life's intricacies. As a general rule (Emily Dickinson accepted) one's destiny does not make house calls.

If character is destiny, the soul of the world is the catalyzing agent that conjures manifestation. While, to some degree, all who live are imprisoned by the past, it is best to be aware of what criteria brought about your incarceration to habit and circumstance.

It is essential to become aware of the contours of your cage...to be in possession of a blue print of the prison. In this way, your odds of escape are greatly enhanced.

Are you weighted down by feelings of powerlessness...nettled by feelings of helpless rage? Good. Your feelings are appropriate to the tone and tenor of the times.

Use the feeling of being weighted down to your advantage: Descend deep into the deepest recesses of your being and listen to the garrulous silence therein.

Appropriate your blessed rage as well: What admonitions cry out from the heart of light ensconced within your darker places.

What is it that is essential about your deepest nature that needs to find its way into Animus Mundi -- the soul of the world...must seek out collaboration with even the most mundane moments of the breath of day.

This is how the creative spirit flourishes, how every moment is made holy.

And remember: Your life is a question that you live your way into. Any attempt to coerce an answer amounts to vivisection, not art.

Conversely, and anathema to the process, the guiding principle of the neoliberal economic order reduces the things of the world to mere economic entities. At this point, this much is, or, at least, should be grimly obvious: Existence within a system that defines all things by their ability to enrich the fortunes of a predatory class of elites starves the soul and blights the landscape; it has come to exist...as a thief, defiler, and squanderer. Exploited and demeaned, the populace grows callow and empty. Desperate to sate the hollowing emptiness within, the citizens of the corporate/consumer state have internalized the noxious mythos of endless growth, peddled by their exploiters, and have been driven to devour their seed crop.

In doing so, all concerned will condemn their society to the landfill of history. Yet, even in this age of corporate despotism, political duopoly, communal atomization, ecocide and the attendant alienation and ennui, life can be lived with passion and grace, and, as individuals, we can take measures to promote a transformation of the prevailing order.

There are simply too many hidden variables involved to predict and control the future. Consequently, this is what we can do: resist the present, corrupt order; organize to bring it down; and strive to create more viable alternatives.

All of which exist within the spectrum of the doable.

At the end of the day, it is a far better choice to err on the side of your inner calling, than to languish as a simulacrum of yourself...evincing a counterfeit consciousness that demands you spend your days compliant to the demeaning dictates of a ruthless few. As a general rule, one stands powerless before the sweep of history and the caprice of the ruling elite. Regardless, you must choose to slouch in the direction of your destiny, or else your life will consist of a litany of thwarted longings -- an agonizing death within life that is absent death's release and resists the warmth and proffered consolation borne of the living.

All the world may be a stage, but don't allow yourself to be miscast as an expendable, one dimensional character, conceived by miserable hacks.

Deep down, your life's calling is encoded within you. Throughout your lifetime, it will arise as inchoate yearnings, reveal itself as implausible daydreams, or as dream-borne symbols that seem, in regard to your daytime exigencies, abstruse or useless. You may know it as a hollow ache in your chest. Or a nettling voice, in the recesses of your awareness, that asks, "how did it come to this?"

Ignore destiny's entreaties at your own risk. Although, your soul will stay at you; it will implore you to pay attention...even if it must pummel you with nightmares or conjure a state of depression that brings on a darkness at noon.

"We are all subject to the fates. But we must act as if we are not, or die of despair." ~~~ Philip Pullman

To paraphrase Rilke, if you ignore the beckoning call of your own uniqueness, your soul will serenely distain to annihilate the false notions that propel you through the harried hours of meaning-denuded day. When shunted aside or blocked by barriers of calcified habit, the soul's inexorable agency will be experienced as a kindly cataclysm. At times, becoming ensnared in the dark night of the soul will allow a lodestar to reveal itself.

Withal, on a cultural basis, the nature-decimating, soul-shredding agendas of the neoliberal enterprise are propelling us collectively towards economic and ecological cataclysm.

When questioned by the youth of future generations, those born into the world created by our myopic choices, about how you responded when the earth was burning, will you reply that you went to the mall, sat in public places staring at a glowing electronic box, engaged in cretinous palaver about the private lives of sub-cretinous celebrities and the dim machinations of reality show jerk-rockets?

At this critical juncture, one's individual calling will be interwoven with the fate of the earth and the collective destiny of all of humankind. The age of elitist narcissists is drawing to a close. The time for dreamers, visionaries and activist has arrived, and their time of arrival is long past due.

"The world is full of magic things, patiently waiting for our senses to grow sharper." ~~~ W.B. Yeats
(c) 2013 Phil Rockstroh, is a poet, lyricist and philosopher bard living in New York City. Visit Phil's website, and at FaceBook.

DEAR CITIZENS of Israel,

I feel the need to speak to you directly, and especially to the young Jewish people amongst you, in order to reach out to your minds and to touch your hearts.

To do so, I gave up the great honor of speaking in your Knesset, as my predecessors have spoken before me. The Knesset, like all parliaments, is composed of politicians, but this time I want to speak directly to you.

I COME as a true friend. A true friend is bound to tell you the truth as he sees it. A true friend does not flatter you. He does not twist the truth to make you feel good.

I know, foreign statesmen and women come to visit your country and feel obliged to tell you how wonderful you are, how brilliant your leaders, how great your achievements. I don't think that a true friend needs to do this.

When you are drunk, a true friend does not encourage you to take the wheel. A true friend asks you for the keys of the car.

If you are drunk with power and success, a true friend does not egg you on to behave irresponsibly. A true friend asks you to calm down, to reflect, to weigh your next steps carefully.

That is my aim today.

I CAN honestly tell you that I have always admired the State of Israel, which was born just 13 years before I was.

You have created a vibrant state out of nothing. Just a few years after the terrible Holocaust, one of the greatest crimes in the annals of mankind, this ancient people has arisen from the ashes and established itself as a powerful presence among the nations. You have established a flourishing democracy. Your science, agriculture, high-tech industry and all the other accomplishments in many fields have aroused the envy of many. Your military prowess is acknowledged by all.

No one with eyes to see can deny the profound similarities between the history of our two nations. From a small group of pioneers, driven by religious persecution, we have developed into mighty nations. Against huge odds, we have built new civilizations. Each of us has built a shining city on the hill. Both of us have achieved liberty and independence in the middle of a terrible war, which threatened our very existence. Both of us had to fight many more wars, earlier and more recent. Both of us can look back on our past with pride and satisfaction.

But both of us know that this history also harbors dark shadows. We have dealt harshly with the people who lived in our countries before us. We have much to apologize for. We should not suppress the bad while celebrating the good.

THOUGH MENACED by enemies, like all of us, Israel can look forward to a bright future. However, dark clouds threaten these prospects. Some of them, I am sorry to say, are of your own making.

It is of these that I want to speak to you.

For the last four years I have followed events in your country with growing apprehension. Indeed - with great fears for your future.

No nation, great or small, can prosper for long without peace. War is the curse of mankind. It coarsens our spirit, consumes our resources, spreads death and destruction. In our time, with the development of ever more deadly means of mass destruction, war threatens our very existence.

Yet there seems to be among you a curious aversion to peace. Peacemakers are denounced as traitors or enemies. Even I have been termed a "Destroyer of Israel" because of my efforts at the beginning of my first term, to bring about peace between you and your neighbors.

I am told that in your recent election campaign, all parties studiously avoided the word "peace". That sounds incredible to me. You need peace, perhaps more than any other people on earth.

I am also told that most Israelis, while longing for peace, strongly believe that "Peace is Impossible". Peace is never impossible, if good men and women earnestly strive for it.

History is full of implacable enemies who made peace after generations of conflict. Look at the peace my country made with Germany and Japan after the deadly struggle not so long ago. Look at the peace between France and Germany after many generations of war. Indeed, Israel herself has made peace and now lives in friendship with Germany, so soon after the Shoah.

Granted that the conflict between you and the Palestinian people is more complex than most, I tell you: peace between you is not only necessary. It is also possible.

PEACE STARTS with seeing your enemy as a human being. With looking him in the eye.

That should be easy for Jews. Do not the Holy Scriptures, our common heritage, tell us that God created all human beings in his image? Did not your great spiritual teacher, Hillel, tell you that the basis of all moral behavior is not to do unto the Other that which is hateful to you?

I am told that lately, there has become evident a rising tide of racism among you, that there have even been incidents of lynching, that many young boys and girls are proud to announce that they are racists.

I find this incredible. Jews? Racists? After centuries as the victims of racist persecution? Barely more than half a century after the Holocaust?

I am a dark-skinned person. Luckily, my forebears never experienced the ultimate evil of slavery. Unlike millions of Africans, my father's family was not kidnapped from their ancestral village in Kenya. But the evils of slavery are deeply imprinted on my mind. The awful sight of the lynchings is still vivid before my eyes.

So are the freedom marches, in which determined black people braved racist mobs, guns and attack dogs. We shall ever be grateful to the white young men and women who joined these marches, so many of whom were Jews. I just cannot understand: how can any Jew in Israel be a racist, and be proud of it? What on earth do you learn in your schools?

I DID not come here to try and impose a peace plan on you.

Peace should not be imposed. It must flow from the heart. It must be approved by the mind.

Let me share with you, however, a few things that seem to me self-evident:

Peace must be based on what is commonly called the "two-state solution". Two states for two peoples, for the Israelis and for the Palestinians.

It is not only the best solution - it is the only solution.

Those who bandy about other "solutions" are deluding themselves. There is no other solution.

There must be a Palestinian state, side by side with Israel. Your fathers and mothers were content with nothing less than a state of their own, and the Palestinians will not settle for anything less either. Freedom and independence under their own flag is the right of all human beings. You should be the first to understand that.

The State of Palestine must include all the Palestinian territories occupied in 1967. Any changes to the borders must be agreed between the two sides, and be of equal extent.

Jerusalem, this wonderful old city where we are meeting now, and which fills me with excitement, must be shared by the two peoples. What is Arab should be the capital of Palestine, what is Jewish should be the capital of Israel, recognized at long last by all.

The security of Israel must be safeguarded and guaranteed by the world, especially by the United States of America. And so should the security of Palestine.

Obviously, the millions of Palestinian refugees cannot return to Israel. Justice cannot be restored by imposing a new injustice on the present inhabitants. But we must make a great international effort to compensate the refugees generously, and at least a symbolic number should be allowed to exercise their Right of Return. These peace terms have been lying on the table for a long time. The time has come - indeed, the time is long overdue - to turn them into a permanent peace treaty. The other Arab nations, whose commendable peace plan has also been lying on the table for many years, should be welcomed as partners in this effort.

My administration will do its duty by signing a solemn guarantee for the security of both Israel and Palestine. A WORD about the settlements.

The United States has always regarded them as illegal under international law. This is as true now as ever.

Those Israelis who remain on Palestinian territory after the mutually agreed exchange of territories must be repatriated to Israel. As gently as possible. With as much compassion as possible. With as generous compensation as possible. But they cannot stay without the permission of the government of Palestine.

Many of them have settled in the occupied territories for the express purpose of making peace impossible. They must not be allowed to achieve their aim.

I STAND here today, so soon after the swearing-in of your new ministers, before your new government has yet settled down for business, because I feel a great urgency.

Time is passing, settlements are expanding, the chances of peace are diminishing. Therefore we must act now.

If you continue on your present course, disaster will surely overtake you. You are already a minority in the land between the Mediterranean Sea and the Jordan River, and your proportion is bound to diminish. Very soon you will be faced by the choice between glorious Israel becoming an odious Apartheid state, a pariah among the nations, or becoming a state governed by the Arab majority. Either way, it will be the end of the Zionist dream.

Don't tell me, don't tell yourselves, that there is nothing you can do.

You are the people of the future. The future is your lives. It is up to you to assure yourselves a life in peace.

Yes, you can!!!

The meteoric rise of the BRICS nations - Brazil, Russia, India, China and South Africa - now concluding their fifth annual summit meeting in Durban, became inevitable once the imperial powers began moving the world's industrial production to the Global South, decades ago. From that point on, the options available to the "West" began to shrink, leading inexorably to the current historical juncture, in which U.S.-led imperialism relies almost entirely on its overwhelming military superiority to maintain itself.

"By 2020," according to United Nations Development Program, "the combined economic output of three leading developing countries alone - Brazil, China and India - will surpass the aggregate production of Canada, France, Germany, Italy, the U.K. and the United States." The Organization of Economic Cooperation and Development, comprised of the world's richest countries, predicts that China will surpass the United States as the world's biggest economy by the end of 2016. By some measures, China actually overtook the U.S. back in 2010.

Brazil's economic development bank is bigger than the World Bank. Last year, BRICS nations sent $75 billion to the IMF to help bail out European financial institutions - so, these countries can well afford to capitalize a BRICS development bank, as they agreed to do, in principle, this week in Durban. It is a question of political will.

U.S. and western European economic decline is an irreversible fact. The essential question facing the Global South, with the BRICS in the lead, is to what extent, and how long, will they shore up the crumbling old Euro-American edifices - in which they also have huge investments and which are backed by a war machine that strives for full spectrum dominance of the planet.

We are living at a crossroads of history. The productive center of the world is shifting back to where it was before western Europe began its 500-year war against the rest of humankind: to China and India, the economic powerhouses of the pre-colonial planet. Europe used force to organize the world to its own, absolute advantage, depopulating a whole hemisphere and much of Africa in the process. Prior to the Industrial Revolution, which was fueled by colonization and slavery, most of the world's people enjoyed similar living standards. The great global imbalance in the human condition, largely along lines of color, is the product of half a millennium of predation.

The gory enterprise could not, however, forever contain the human impulse toward self-determination, or escape the laws of political economy. Unable to export the contradictions of dwindling rates of profit in a decolonizing world, western financial capitalists exported their industrial capacity, instead. Power must shift, as well. This is the central quandary of the BRICS, and of U.S. imperialism.

The United States, firmly in the grip of hyperactive finance capital, has acquiesced to its diminishing role in world trade. It doesn't seriously attempt to directly compete with the core BRICS countries in Africa and Latin America. Washington is betting its global hegemony on military coercion, pure and simple. The U.S. is now the "indispensable nation" only in the sense that it refuses to tolerate a world in which it is not treated as such. Under Presidents Clinton, Bush and, especially, Obama, the U.S. has waged an escalating war against international legal order, largely under the pernicious doctrine of "humanitarian" military intervention. National sovereignty is treated as a dead letter, and trade sanctions are quickly followed by armed, barely covert assaults on unoffending governments. The U.S. publicly announces possession of new systems of warfare that can annihilate targets with a conventional weapon anywhere on the globe in half an hour. The message is clear, repetitive and meant to be terrifying: No nation, or combination of nations, will be allowed to challenge U.S. dominance in the world, as defined by Washington.

The superpower in decline is not only willing to throw the world into chaos to preserve its artificial position at the top, it is actively doing so in Syria, following up its decapitation of Libya. It swarms over Africa, to secure political obedience despite its economic eclipse on the continent. Objectively, the United States has positioned itself as the great and implacable impediment to global development.

Therefore, when the BRICS say that their summit is motivated by "a shared desire for peace, security, development, cooperation, respect for international law and sovereignty," as was announced at the 5th BRICS Academic Forum, earlier this month, they are placing themselves in opposition to the U.S. juggernaut. It is not a place that these nation's governments want to be. But, if they are to continue on the road to self-determination and achievement of their own national goals - including their capitalistic aspirations - they have no choice but to resist Washington's policies of coercion and the threat of strangulation.

A new Gallup poll released Monday morning has a surprising finding: a majority of Americans - while supporting air strikes in foreign countries against foreign nationals suspected of Terrorism - oppose such air strikes when used to target US citizens who are suspected Terrorists, whether at home or on foreign soil:

The reason this is surprising is that when the US actually killed a US citizen on foreign soil on the grounds that he was a suspected Terrorist - Anwar al-Awlaki - large majorities approved. One poll at the time reported that "a large proportion of Americans believe the US Government made the correct decision in killing a US born Islamist militant in a drone strike last month" - specifically, that "69 per cent of respondents think the action taken by the US Government to kill Anwar al-Awlaki was justified" (that included 77% Republicans and 73% Democrats approving). Another poll at the time reported that Obama's approval ratings on national security increased eight points in the wake of the Awlaki killing. Meanwhile, Obama aides ran to Politico to boast that Awlaki's corpse would be a significant asset in Obama's re-election bid, leading to this Politico headline:

What can explain this obvious discrepancy? How can it be that a policy which a majority of Americans oppose (killing Americans on foreign soil on the grounds of suspected Terrorism) was so popular and politically beneficial for Obama when it was actually done to Awlaki? I'm not speaking here about those who support the US Government's right to kill US citizens on foreign soil without a trial: people who believe that and support the Awlaki execution are at least being consistent. I'm focusing here on how it can be that a majority of Americans say they oppose having Americans so targeted on foreign soil yet still support the Awlaki killing.

There are several possible factors explaining this discrepancy. It is probably easier to oppose such killings when considered in the abstract than it is when asked specifically about a person like Awlaki who had been subjected to such an intense government and media demonization campaign. It's also possible that intervening events between these polls - particularly the Rand Paul filibuster - created unprecedented media debate about the dangers of Obama's claimed assassination powers and caused people to re-think their wisdom (that was the ground cited by the ACLU's Laura Murphy when she praised Paul's protest:

"As a result of Sen. Paul's historic filibuster, civil liberties got two wins: . . . Americans learned about the breathtakingly broad claims of executive authority undergirding the Obama administration's vast killing program").

But it seems clear there is a much more odious factor driving some of this. Many Americans can (a) say that they oppose the targeted killings of Americans on foreign soil while simultaneously (b) supporting the killing of Anwar al-Awlaki in Yemen because, for them, the term "Americans" doesn't include people like Anwar al-Awlaki. "Americans" means their aunts and uncles, their nice neighbors down the street, and anyone else who looks like them, who looks and seems "American". They don't think those people - Americans - should be killed without charges by the US government if they travel on vacation to Paris or go to study for a semester in London. But the concept of "Americans" most definitely does not include people with foreign and Muslim-ish names like "Anwar al-Awlaki" who wear the white robes of a Muslim imam and spend time in a place like Yemen.

Legally - which is the only way that matters for this question - the New-Mexico-born Awlaki was every bit as much of an American citizen as the nice couple down the street. His citizenship was never legally revoked. He never formally renounced it. He was never charged with, let alone convicted of, any crime that could lead to the revocation of citizenship. No court ever considered revoking his citizenship, let alone did so. From a legal and constitutional perspective, there was not a single person "more American" than he. That's because those gradations of citizenship do not exist. One is either an American citizen or one is not. There is no such thing as "more American" or "less American", nor can one's citizenship be revoked by presidential decree. This does not exist.

But the effort to depict Muslims as something other than "real Americans" has long been a centerpiece of the US political climate in the era of the War on Terror. When it was first revealed in 2005 that the Bush administration was spying on the communications of Americans without the warrants required by the criminal law, a Bush White House spokesman sought to assure everyone that this wasn't targeting Real Americans, but only those Bad Ones that should be surveilled (meaning Muslims the Bush administration decided, without due process, were guilty):

"This is a limited program. This is not about monitoring phone calls designed to arrange Little League practice or what to bring to a potluck dinner. These are designed to monitor calls from very bad people to very bad people who have a history of blowing up commuter trains, weddings and churches."

Identically, when the Israelis attacked the Mavi Marmara flotilla in 2010 and killed 9 people including the US-born teenager Furkan Dogan, some conservatives insisted that he was not a Real American because his parents were Turkish and he grew up in Turkey ("it is silly to call him an 'American of Turkish descent'. He, like the other members of his family, was a Turk"). The stark contrast in reactions between the sustained fury of the Turkish government over the killing of their citizens by the Israelis versus the support for those killings given by the US government was accounted for in part by the blind US support for whatever Israel does (including killing Americans), but also by the belief that Dogan wasn't really an American, not the Real Kind you get upset about when a foreign army kills them.

This decade-long Othering of Muslims - a process necessary to sustain public support for their continuous killing, imprisonment, and various forms of rights abridgments - has taken its toll. I'm most certainly not suggesting that anyone who supports Awlaki's killing is driven by racism or anti-Muslim bigotry. I am suggesting that the belief that Muslims are somehow less American, or even less human, is widespread, and is a substantial factor in explaining the discrepancy I began by identifying.

Does anyone doubt that if Obama's bombs were killing nice white British teeangers or smiling blond Swiss infants - rather than unnamed Yemenis, Pakistanis, Afghans and Somalis - that the reaction to this sustained killing would be drastically different? Does anyone doubt that if his overhead buzzing drones were terrorizing Western European nations rather than predominantly Muslim ones, the horror of them would be much easier to grasp?

Does it really take any debate to know that if the 16-year-old American suspiciously killed by the US government two weeks after killing his father had been Jimmy Martin in Sweden rather than Abdulrahman al-Awlaki in Yemen, the media interest and public outcry would be far more substantial, and Robert Gibbs would have been widely scorned if he had offered this vile blame-the-victim justification for killing Jimmy rather than Abdulrahman? It is indisputably true that - just as conservatives argued that Furkan Dogan was not a Real American - large numbers of Americans believe the same about the Denver-born teenager named Abdulrahman. This ugly mindset is not the only factor that leads the US public to support more than a decade of US killing and rights abridgments aimed primarily at Muslims, including their fellow citizens, but it is certainly a significant one.

Amazingly, some Democratic partisans, in order to belittle these injustices, like to claim that only those who enjoy the luxury of racial and socioeconomic privilege would care so much about these issues. That claim is supremely ironic. It reverses reality. That type of privilege is not what leads one to care about and work against these injustices. To the contrary, it's exactly that privilege that causes one to dismiss concerns over these injustices and mock and scorn those who work against them. The people who insist that these abuses are insignificant and get too much attention are not the ones affected by them, because they're not Muslim, and thus do not care.

The perception that the state violence, rights abridgments and expansions of government power ushered in by the War on Terror affect only Muslims long ago stopped being true. But ensuring that people continue to believe that is the key reason why it has been permitted to continue for so long.

Domestic surveillance aimed at Muslims

The New Jersey Star Ledger this morning has an excellent interview with CUNY Professor Diala Shamas, who just co-authored a new report on the devastating impact of the NYPD's shockingly invasive and indiscriminate surveillance program aimed at Muslim communities in New York and New Jersey. She documents in particular how this type of surveillance, aimed at innocent Muslims, creates an intense climate of fear and chills political speech. Would anyone tolerate having such sweeping surveillance programs infiltrating Jewish or Christian communities in the US? I once asked this question of leading New York Mayoral candidate Christine Quinn, who supports the NYPD program, and she refused to answer). But the answer is obvious: of course not. That is the point.

UPDATE

The ACLU's Jameel Jaffer perfectly summarizes the point I am making from those polls: