Updike's Ugly Anti-Muslim Pot Boiler
I have not read Updike's latest fictive effort, Terrorist. Nor will I. I personally think it should be trashed from his own account of it on a recent npr interview. The plot line is simplistic. Young son of an Arab-American father who deserted his Irish-American mother when he was 3 discovers an Imam who introduces him to Islam which persuades him that those navel exhibiting American high school girls are the root of all evil, so he will get them, which he apparently does by blowing a hole in the Lincoln Tunnel -- Updike was not too happy that his reviewer had disclosed his plot climax.
Needless to say, by his own admission, Updike has no first hand knowledge of what produces a terrorist. Let me enlighten him -- would send this to his college roommate, a good friend now sadly deceased to pass it along, but perhaps someone else will.
Mr. Updike, Arab terrorists first got started with U.S. backing (against the Soviet occupation of Afghanistan) with CIA assistance. The hard-line terrorists then were targeting some of our U.S. supported brutally corrupt regimes (e.g. Saudi Arabia from which 15 of the 19 of 9/11 came). Al Qaeda then moved on to U.S. supported economic interests, i.e. the corporations that were exploiting oil in the Middle East (again our CIA, lest we forget, which blew Mossadeq out of his democratic Iranian government in 1953-54 to get at his oil and then replaced him with the very brutal Shah, another of our very own corrupt leaders). The extension to cultural objections to the West is a side issue of the extreme Islamists, a very small segment whom Updike has targeted as his 'terrorists' here -- all those bared navels of our high school girls (Updike's image, not mine).
What I see here in Updike's own account is a bigot from small town Pennsylvania exposing himself as such -- and thereby also endangering those of us who have to traverse the various tunnels in and out of NYC. I check my watch each time I enter the one under the East River as I commute home to Manhattan from Brooklyn.
In sum with all his diddling around in the 'burbs Updike has lost touch with the rest of us living in the blue states. I particularly despise his anti-Muslim propaganda in this book because it hits some of my own Muslim students who were as much shocked by 9/11 as were the rest of us:
http://www.youthcomm.org/NYC%20Features/Nov2001/NYC-2001-11-15.htm
Some have been forced to leave this country, thanks to the threat of incognito incarceration in our American gulags set in motion for them around the country -- in Brooklyn after 9/11 and in various county jails in distant states where a $90.00 per diem allowance tempted rural counties mainly in the deep South to solve their local tax problems.
John Updike, you owe American Muslims an 'umble apology. I thought your patronizing comments to one who called in from Patterson, NJ were nauseating. Run, you damned rabbit, back to the suburbs where you hang out. NYC is not for you. Suggest you do some serious reading out there to learn more about Muslims today than a few cursory verses extracted from the Qu'ran. Here is a starter for you -- Islamic Thought in the Twentieth Century:
http://www.ibtauris.com/ibtauris/display.asp?K=510000000051606&bic=HRDD*&ds=Islam&sort=sort_date/d&m=8&dc=94
It will teach you a bit about the internal struggles within Islam between Islamists and secularists for the support of the traditionalists (people in the street) whose hearts and minds we are not winning with either our brutal killing games over there -- or novels such as your ugly pot boiler.
--
"A war is just if there is no alternative, and the resort to arms is legitimate if they represent your last hope." (Livy cited by Machiavelli)
--
Ed Kent 718-951-5324 (voice mail only) [blind copies]
http://BlogByEdKent.blogspot.com/
http://www.bloggernews.net
Needless to say, by his own admission, Updike has no first hand knowledge of what produces a terrorist. Let me enlighten him -- would send this to his college roommate, a good friend now sadly deceased to pass it along, but perhaps someone else will.
Mr. Updike, Arab terrorists first got started with U.S. backing (against the Soviet occupation of Afghanistan) with CIA assistance. The hard-line terrorists then were targeting some of our U.S. supported brutally corrupt regimes (e.g. Saudi Arabia from which 15 of the 19 of 9/11 came). Al Qaeda then moved on to U.S. supported economic interests, i.e. the corporations that were exploiting oil in the Middle East (again our CIA, lest we forget, which blew Mossadeq out of his democratic Iranian government in 1953-54 to get at his oil and then replaced him with the very brutal Shah, another of our very own corrupt leaders). The extension to cultural objections to the West is a side issue of the extreme Islamists, a very small segment whom Updike has targeted as his 'terrorists' here -- all those bared navels of our high school girls (Updike's image, not mine).
What I see here in Updike's own account is a bigot from small town Pennsylvania exposing himself as such -- and thereby also endangering those of us who have to traverse the various tunnels in and out of NYC. I check my watch each time I enter the one under the East River as I commute home to Manhattan from Brooklyn.
In sum with all his diddling around in the 'burbs Updike has lost touch with the rest of us living in the blue states. I particularly despise his anti-Muslim propaganda in this book because it hits some of my own Muslim students who were as much shocked by 9/11 as were the rest of us:
http://www.youthcomm.org/NYC%20Features/Nov2001/NYC-2001-11-15.htm
Some have been forced to leave this country, thanks to the threat of incognito incarceration in our American gulags set in motion for them around the country -- in Brooklyn after 9/11 and in various county jails in distant states where a $90.00 per diem allowance tempted rural counties mainly in the deep South to solve their local tax problems.
John Updike, you owe American Muslims an 'umble apology. I thought your patronizing comments to one who called in from Patterson, NJ were nauseating. Run, you damned rabbit, back to the suburbs where you hang out. NYC is not for you. Suggest you do some serious reading out there to learn more about Muslims today than a few cursory verses extracted from the Qu'ran. Here is a starter for you -- Islamic Thought in the Twentieth Century:
http://www.ibtauris.com/ibtauris/display.asp?K=510000000051606&bic=HRDD*&ds=Islam&sort=sort_date/d&m=8&dc=94
It will teach you a bit about the internal struggles within Islam between Islamists and secularists for the support of the traditionalists (people in the street) whose hearts and minds we are not winning with either our brutal killing games over there -- or novels such as your ugly pot boiler.
--
"A war is just if there is no alternative, and the resort to arms is legitimate if they represent your last hope." (Livy cited by Machiavelli)
--
Ed Kent 718-951-5324 (voice mail only) [blind copies]
http://BlogByEdKent.blogspot.com/
http://www.bloggernews.net
posted by Ed Kent at 11:35 AM
0 Comments:
Post a Comment
<< Home