You might be a racist/bigot if ...

You forward someone an e-mail like the following one which my father received:

This guy is great. He should be Prime Minister of England. Watch the video below. Click on the link below or load it into your browser. This is the message we will be singing in the US very soon if the US does not do something to stop the advancement of Islam in this country. Be politically correct and be enslaved. Not a very good choice but I don’t see any leadership from Washington or on the local front to change the proposed plan of Islam taking over the US.

The Muslims have taken over Europe and they are headed this way. I guess we are all too tired and too old to do anything. Well just sit by and watch a once great country go into further demise. I wonder what God is thinking. Maybe its time for us all to go home. What a place we are leaving for our grandkids.

The potential now is very great that we will have a Hussein for President. I guess “change” will make us all very happy and warm. We didn’t call him a muslim or use his name, Hussein, because that might offend someone. Sen. Barack Hussein Obama (D- ILL) What a bunch of wimps. Where is [insert late 19th century celebrities and a war hero] Are there any real American heroes left?

Nice. I can imagine someone sending out a letter like this in the 30s:

This guy is great. He should be Prime Minister of England ... This is the message we will be singing in the US very soon if the US does not do something to stop the advancement of Judaism in this country. Be politically correct and be enslaved. Not a very good choice but I don’t see any leadership from Washington or on the local front to change the proposed plan of Judaism taking over the US.

The Jews have taken over Europe and they are headed this way. I guess we are all too tired and too old to do anything. Well just sit by and watch a once great country go into further demise. I wonder what God is thinking. Maybe its time for us all to go home. What a place we are leaving for our grandkids.

The potential now is very great that we will have a Goldstein for President. I guess “change” will make us all very happy and warm. We didn’t call him a Jew or use his name, "Goldstein", because that might offend someone. Sen. David Goldstein Thomson (D- ILL). What a bunch of wimps. Where is [insert late 19th century figures of choice]? Are there any real American heroes left?

Not only is the person from whom this e-mail originated a bigot, but this individual is also a racist. We don't say Barack Obama's middle name for the same reason that we don't usually say other people's middle names. The only sort of people who say Obama's middle name - like the vile hate-monger Ann Coulter for instance - are bigots who want to play on people's prejudices to insinuate that Barack Obama (who is in fact a Christian) is an evil dirty Islamofascist Muslim terrorist because he has "Hussein" for a middle name. This smear tactic is particularly insidious because what these racists are doing is to instinctively capitalize on the fact that by linking Obama to a word that already has a negative connotation they can to a certain extent provoke a negative response to Obama at a subconscious level that is independent of rational thought.

I honestly marvel that there are mature adults alive today who aren't in some sort of white supremacist organization who don't see what's wrong with that "logic" and behavior.

That type of xenophobic fearmongering and stereotyped demonization of an entire class of people is not in and of itself fascist, but as the scholar Walter Laquer has observed, it is that sort of sentiment that helps lay the groundwork for fascism to take root.

And it might be worth remembering that the rabid anti-Semite/Nazi sympathist Henry Ford had a habit of accusing politicians he disliked of being Jews even though they were not Jewish.

Update: Over at Dispatches from the Culture Wars, Ed Brayton linked to Dave Newiert's latest post about John McCain's chief political advisor having organized the ceremony in which the theocrat Rev. Moon who has stated his intention to become the supreme leader of America and then to conquer the world was crowned King of America in the Senate Dirksen building. The point Brayton and Neiwert is making is that while the GOP noise machine is able to generate controversy over the ultimately inconsequential statements of Barack Obama's pastor, comments that are more extreme from people like Moon who are movers and shakers in the conservative movement get a free pass.

Here's the snarky comment I left at Dispatches:

Yeah, but Obama's middle name is "Hussein" which links him to Saddam Hussein and thus al Qaeda and Islamofascism. Why are you trying to divert attention from the Muslim plot to conquer America through their Manchurian candidate?

Update 2: And just to be clear, in the original e-mail pictures of Muslim extremists protesting in London are included. Those individuals should be rightly condemned as agents of violence and intolerance. As I said before, I have no sympathy for Islamic fundamentalism (something of an oxymoron in the Muslim world) but stereotyping all of the world's billions of Muslims as equivalent to those demonstrators while concomitantly suggesting that a minority population is somehow about to magically "conquer" Europe and America is not an appropriate and rational response to the issue. That only creates a Manichean view of the world which mirrors the outlook of those extremists ... then it becomes not a matter of who is right but who is mightiest.

Slight editing since first posting.