The Othello Element

What is the Tea Party? Why, it’s elementary. There is the “radical element,” everyone knows. And there is the “racist element,” which the “radical” element claims is just a “fringe” element, but was nevertheless condemned by a majority of NAACP elements. Lesser known is the “Tea Party” element, which -- get this -- actually believes in the Tea Party. The NAACP’s smears have taught this fringe something of the anguish of Shakespeare’s Othello: When he, too, was told his love was not pure, he replied:

Villain, be sure thou prove my love a whore…
Her name, that was as fresh as Dian’s visage,
Is now begrimed and black as mine own face…
If thou dost slander her and torture me,
Thou hadst been better have been born a dog

Perhaps the NAACP risks less accountability if in error, but let’s have it: does the begrimed Tea Party merit its villains' claims?

Representative John Lewis claimed he was repeatedly called the “N word” on Capitol Hill last March, but he lacked something the ancient courts of Othello’s Venice called “proof.” After extensive googling I found some photos of people holding signs (supposedly at Tea Party rallies) depicting the President as a monkey -- though none with as much success as the Minneapolis Star Tribune’s cartoons of the previous President. And I found one picture of a loser holding an “N word” sign. But dost a few losers maketh thine love a whore? I happen to subscribe to the “Tea Party” element’s propaganda outlets -- my favorite being The Jason Lewis Show -- and I have yet to break any racist code.

And let’s not deny the liberal elements their due. “Barack the Magic Negro,” Barack the “light-skinned” man without a “negro dialect,” and Barack the “clean and articulate” black man were epithets from the Left. New York Times writer Matt Bai says there is a “generational divide” in the Tea Party, between the racist “older” element, and the naïve “younger” element. But it was the Left that profited from its own “generational divide” when it slandered Tea Partiers as “Tea-baggers” -- a term Bill Burton, spokesman for a White House full of twenty-somethings that know better, claimed was not derogatory.

Still, what’s so wrong with telling the Tea Party to “expel the bigots and racists in your ranks,” however few they may be? By all means, expel away. But assuming our guiding principle is contempt of all bigotry in all ranks, there are a few elements in a certain group of 1.3 billion that might complicate the expulsion’s logistics.

And let’s nix right now the idea that 1.3 billion Muslims get immunity from standards of political decency because their’s is a religion. (That’s precisely the problem, as when Othello’s lieutenant rebuts a Senator’s “Thou art a villain” crack: “Thou art -- a Senator”). A 2008 Gallup poll showed that “substantial majorities” of Muslims in Muslim-majority countries favor Sharia legislation. And it’s gross negligence to say they lack the Tea Party’s influence, thus owing less public accountability: It’s not Tea Partiers yelling “allah akbar” and pushing the IED detonator as American soldiers deliver aid in Afghanistan. Most of the American defense budget is a political calculation based on “elements” of Islam. So yes, expel away.

And the expulsion of bigots in Muslim ranks should be easier, because whereas the Tea Partiers at least have a core of noble classical liberalism to rest claims of innocence on, Muslims have the Koran. Anyone that praises the Koran as the best book ever written, as all Muslims do, owes you an explanation. It takes a bold imagination to read the Koran and not conclude it is hateful, fearful, and ugly. Its bigotry is of the misogynistic and xenophobic brand. Let’s just say it’s not a book you would let a child read, as almost every other paragraph has a chilling voice demanding “dread me,” or reminding the reader of the bloody punishment that awaits the unsure. Better that thou hadst been born a dog, indeed, than get your face scalded for eternity.

But don’t judge a book by its contents. Look at what Muslims actually do and think. One word: dhimmi. What's that? Just like the old poker saying, if you don’t know who it is, it’s probably you. Another word: Jews. Ninety percent of Middle Easterners view them “unfavorably.” 78% of Pakistanis and 74% of Indonesians. Gee, what could these people have in common that makes them all so bigoted? And a final word: jihad. Or man-caused disaster, or ADD or whatever we call it nowadays. It happens every day, and its victims are chosen for their beliefs. It’s bigotry by definition.

So where proportion and principle are concerned, the NAACP may be biting off more bigotry than it can chew. It’s easy to tell the Tea Party to expel its bigots, because there aren’t many to begin with. Do we have the patience to ask Islam to expel its inherent bigotry? Do we have the defense budget? These types of questions are mostly frivolous where the “begrimed” Tea Party is concerned, but they are horribly pertinent in Kandahar, Afghanistan and, more unexpectedly, Kampala, Uganda. No doubt Islam has its fair Othello’s too: let this radical element be the first to seek the villain’s proof.