Revolution #71, December 3, 2006
An Ominous Question from CNN's Glenn Beck
On November 14 Glenn Beck interviewed newly elected Congressman Keith Ellison (D-MN) on CNN's Headline News. Beck opened the interview by asking Ellison for "five minutes here where we're just politically incorrect and I play the cards face up on the table." Unafraid, Ellison smiled and said "go there." Beck proceeded to ask Ellison, "Sir, prove to me that you are not working with our enemies… I'm not accusing you of being an enemy, but that's the way I feel, and I think a lot of Americans will feel that way."
A native of Detroit, Michigan, Ellison is the first Muslim to be elected in the House of Representatives. He represents the 5th Congressional District in Minnesota that includes Minneapolis, a city that is home to over 40,000 Somalian immigrants. On his website Ellison states that he is the only candidate calling for the immediate withdrawal of troops from Iraq and he cites the "shooting of civilians at Haditha, the rape and murder of a fourteen year old girl in Mahmoudiya, and the hideousness of Abu Ghraib" as having a "devastating effect…on our humanity."
Beck took Ellison's views on an immediate U.S. withdrawal from Iraq and the fact that he is Muslim and then demanded Ellison prove he is not a terrorist on national TV days after the election. Beck's words are loaded with the practices of detention and brutality against Muslims perpetrated by the U.S. government in the last five years, where thousands of Muslim men have been detained, deported, and assumed guilty because of their religion or nationality. All of this occurring as the U.S. led a crusade-like war for empire in Afghanistan and then Iraq.
Media Matters for America reports that Beck has previously stated that Muslims and Arabs who don't cooperate with the U.S. war on terror "will be looking through a razor wire fence at the West" and he has consistently called Muslims to "shoot bad Muslims in the head." Beck's views are not just his own. He is forecasting plans that seem like a right-wing fringe idea now, but could very well be made into law in the near future. Muslims in prisons in Iraq and Guantanamo are already looking through razor wire fence.
[Editor's Note from Revolution: The fact that Glenn Beck is aired nightly on CNN – the supposed “mainstream” alternative to FOX News – makes what our reader writes all the more ominous.]
If you like this article, subscribe, donate to and sustain Revolution newspaper.
