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Home Front: WoT
The Arab street has come to America
2021-04-14
[American Thinker] - Beginning last June with the George Floyd riots across America, and resuming now, with the Daunte Wright riots, I’ve had a continuing feeling of déjà vu. It seems to me that I’ve seen all this before. Then, it suddenly hit me what is happening in America: The Arab street has come to town.

It’s important to note that riots happen constantly. If you type the word "riot" into YouTube, you get videos from every corner of the world. Many of the riots in the Arab world were part of the Muslim spring, when liberty seekers and Muslim Brotherhood despots alike took to the streets, anxious to unseat the governments then in charge. In the West, riots tended to be focused on a specific political goal, complete with signs and the usual leftist street theater.

However, the notion of the "Arab street" connotes a very specific type of riot, one in which imams and other activists stir up a mob to take to the streets in a blind rage. We started hearing about these riots after the Iraq War started. The media turned their cameras to the Middle East, and we started hearing routine stories about "the Arab street." This almost invariably meant a sudden, spontaneous riot by people driven to a maddened frenzy, usually by their imams.

If you check out the phrase Arab spring at Wikipedia, you get a scholarly statement saying it refers "to the spectrum of public opinion in the Arab world, often as opposed [to] or contrasted [with] the opinions of Arab governments." In other words, it’s just the marketplace of ideas where people gather to meet and talk.

Read further down, though, and you discover the definition to which I’m referring and the one that was supported by the images flooding television screens for the first two decades of the 21st century (emphasis added; footnote omitted):
    While sometimes the American media used "Arab street" as to be interchangeable with "Arab public opinion," suggesting rationality and calm, [Terry] Regier and [Muhammad Ali] Khalidi found that most uses carried the connotations of incipient unrest. "We propose that a central association of the Arab street is indeed that of a volatile potential mob, dangerous to the established order of Arab states, and thus to any agreements Western powers may have with those states." While users may not always have intended it that way, in many cases they did.
IMO. While African-American clergy been inciting violent riots for ages, it was localized.
...The initial George Floyd protests, while they were built on a lie, had the indicia of a traditional protest: People focused on an issue gathered together with signs and slogans to impress politicians with their numbers and, often, marched down the streets.

However, once those protests devolved into riots and looting, they took on the patina of the Arab street. And when the people skipped the formal protest part entirely, as they did in Kenosha and are now doing in Brooklyn Center (and will certainly do in Minneapolis after the Chauvin verdict), we are witnessing pure Arab street theater: Demagogues are whipping volatile crowds into frenzies that do not result in formal protest but simply lead to anarchic street violence.

As a reminder, in Brooklyn Center, the mob hit the streets before the facts were known about Daunte’s death. They continued to hit the streets (and loot the stores) when bodycam video showed that Daunte violently fought back against arrest and that the police officer, for whatever reason, actually thought she was tasering him, not shooting him. (Tasers should be fluorescent colors so this can’t happen again.) The facts didn’t stop the mob:
Posted by:g(r)omgoru

#2  M. Murcek will get interesting, but the damage is done. We've all but encouraged the worst anti-civilization behavior for years now. I'm not sure how you put the genie back in the bottle short of a war that causes everyone to unite against a common enemy and even that might just divide us further.
Posted by: ruprecht   2021-04-14 09:06  

#1  The cost of being a white person going left is going up. When it starts pricing itself out as a way to talk and think things will get interesting.
Posted by: M. Murcek   2021-04-14 05:58  

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