Posted by counterpanch from ? (64.94.93.158) on Sunday, June 02, 2002 at 1:06PM :
In America there are white Christian Americans refered to as "white trash". Every culture has its trashy people at the lower end of it all. Arabs have them too. Unfortunately you people were only able to deal in the trashy parts of the Muslim world and you formed your opinions of all Muslims accordingly, as any lower class uneducated person would...especially when you think your little religion is better than theirs and you resent what you consider to be the injustice of your status and blame it on the opression meted out to you by others...instead of on your own meagre deserving.
My father was a Christian who was discriminated against, yet he became Head of the Health Department in Kuwait...for which you will call him a traitor...because he wasnīt "faithful" to the faliure you guys carry around like it was some sort of badge of distinction...another "martyrdom" suffered for Christianity and at the hands of the dreaded and dastardly Muslims you blame for everything including your pimples.
Trashy Americans think all Puerto Ricans are as uneducated and low class as the poor and desperate examples of Puerto Ricans they see in New York grubbing at the lowest end of the economic ladder. They never stop to think that Puerto Rico is populated by plenty of educated doctors and lawyers, successful businesspeople, artists, inventors, engineers, intellectuals...people who had absolutely no incentive to move to New York city, live in slums and come across poor examples of white Americans. Same for the Irish, Italians and Assyrians in America. People assume the desperate ones they meet, the ones forced to leave home and family to have a chance at life somewhere else, and who are consequentially the least successful on their home turf, must be representative of the culture as a whole. At least they assuage their own sense of inferiority by thinking that way because it helps explain why, in their own country and knowing the language and customs, they havenīt managed to do better themselves...and strive to make up for their own poor showing in part by assuming an undeserved sense of superiority towards the foreigner.
It may be that you all only managed to associate yourselves with the lowest of the low...they exist everywhere, and to explain to yourselves why you made such a poor showing in those countries, blamed everything you could on the Muslims and Arabs and elves and toads who must have tripped you up and kept you from attaining the status you THINK you deserve...especially as Christians, which to you, as Christians, should have made you automatically superior to ANY Muslim.
I am Assyrian, I am not Christian or Muslim or Jewish. I grew up around Muslims in Iran, Iraq and Kuwait at a time when relations were strained between everybody. I knew Muslims of all walks of life and found them every bit as representative of Human beans as anyone else I ever met in Paris, Lisbon, Los Angeles, New York, San Francisco or Seattle.
Some of the finest people I ever met, or had the privilege of knowing were Muslim and Arab to boot. They, and I...would have gladly stepped over any number of Christians laying in the gutter of life.
Donīt make your own personal limitations the basis by which you decide which of us measures up...according to you.
-- counterpanch
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