My cousin Ron e-mailed me some racist anti-Obama propaganda, using out-of-context quotes from his two books to try to make him out as someone who hates whites and hates Christians. I was appalled not just by the depths to which McCain supporters would sink but that my cousing was so amazingly stupid that he'd send something so blatantly racist to someone who is married to a black woman and whose son is half-black (like Obama is half-black).
I replied...
I thought maybe you'd encountered enough prejudice as a Jew not to buy into this, but I guess you've lost that connection to your roots. I guess you've forgotten all the lies the right has spread about our people over the years. Every time you hear a Republican say "Barack Hussein Obama" ask why they don't use Johnny Mac's middle name. It's because they're trying to emphasize Obama's otherness, how he's not like us, and if you don't think that's racist, I don't know what is.Bad economic times are the greatest recruiting tool Nazi groups have. And you better pray that your racist friends don't turn on you next... jewboy.
Now, calling him "jewboy" was supposed to be ironic, showing him how the "friends" who would send him this kind of racist propaganda could turn on him.
This was his response...
Its a known fact obama has ties to 9 11 as well and he is muslim most muslims hate jews thats a fact ask any jew or israeli
OMFG. He's not just a dumb-ass, but a moron. I have to assume that comes from his dad's side of the family. Known fact that Obama's a Muslim? What? His dad was. But that no more makes him a Muslim than my dad's time in the high school marching band makes me a tuba player.
Then we have the woman on Friday who told John McCain that Obama is an Arab. McCain's actually having to defend Obama because "Republican activists" are spreading fear through a campaign of poisonous lies. And it's even worse than the swift-boating of John Kerry, because they have to do with Obama's ethnicity, his racial identity, and his faith. These are the three things that most are NOT supposed to matter in America. These are things we've tried to protect from this kind of discrimination in the most fundamental foundations of our democracy. And these are the things that the average Republican is showing he/she has no respect for.
It's hillarious how they can use this racist propaganda as a basis for the claim that Obama is unamerican without realizing that doing so is one of the most unamerican things they could do. This is the America of George Wallace and Bull Connor. This is the kind lying and fearmongering more associated with the KKK and the Neo-Nazis... and I'm hearing it from a Jewish real estate broker.
If you want to vote against Obama, vote against him because you don't like his economic policy, because you don't like his energy policy, because you don't like his health care plan. Those are very valid reasons. But if you're uneasy because someone told you he's secretly Muslim, secretly hates whites, secretly Arab, then that says a lot more about your racism (and that of the person who told you) than Obama. And if you're out there spreading these lies, shame on you. You're the one betraying America.
Tags: election, mccain, Obama, racism
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Here's the Snopes.com article that fact checks the claims and puts the quotes in context. I merely thought the quotes were taken out of context, but one isn't even from Obama. It's from a book reviewer and reworded to the first person to sound like Obama said it instead of it being said about him.
What's really sad is that the people who forward this seem to want to believe it's true. The books have been out there for years. If stuff this damning was in them, it would have come up on the stump. If they'll go after Michelle Obama for what she said, they wouldn't have left this alone. Bill O'Reilly would have it tattooed on his forehead. Yet despite the fact it would take all of two minutes to look it up at Snopes, they pass it on without checking it out for themselves. Someone sent it to them in e-mail, so it must be true, right?