WHY DID AMERICA TAKE NOTICE OF THE SLA AFRO-AMERICAN EXTREMISTS AND MILITANTS OF THE SIXTIES?

...THEY ARE THE BLACK PANTHERS, BLACK CIVIL RIGHTS MOVEMENT AND THE TWO BLACK GLOVED BLACK-AMERICAN ATHLETES IN THE MEXICO OLYMPICS WORE, BUT NOT THE CRASHING OF THE TWIN TOWERS ON 11 SEPTEMBER, 2001 FOR AMERICA TO LOOK WITHIN ITS OWN SYSTEM AND ATTITUDES AND THE INHERRENT FLAWS IN THEM AND TO CREATE A NEW SCENARIO IN AMERICA.

By Mansor Puteh

America may be missing the boat. Instead of using the creation of history of recent times, they choose to find faults with Islam and Muslims. They are too many of them. And the sheer number can be difficult for America to contain them.

The best way is to accommodate them.

America and Americans do not understand their Muslims’ call for accommodation and recognition so that freedom of religion in America has become a mere rhetoric. American and other Muslims in America are being persecuted for being and even looking like Muslims or Arabs.

I may not be lucky I do not look Arabic; I look Oriental as my Arab or Islamic name can give away my identity should I choose to return to America in the near future.

It is America and the many other Americans who have to be rehabilitated to accommodate them, if the American Dream is still valid to all and not just to the non-Arab or non-Muslims.

The Muslims in America came to the country or had chosen to revert to Islam and they are to be given special attention to their needs, without which America will be confused, and many Americans will relate them to what they had done to the few Arab and other Muslim countries, and react to their action with more drastic actions which can cause America and many Americans to be more confused.

White America was so afraid of the Blacks that they decided it was time for them to bend backwards to accommodate them.

They then created a scenario which caused America and Americans to be at peace with themselves.

Unfortunately, this attitude did not extend to their own Muslims, the American-Muslims.

It seems that White America is not so afraid of the Arabs and Muslims that they don’t care with what they could do to them to see if they could be equally accommodated.

If Muslim Americans are terrorists and militant suspects, then this should also extend to some of their more illustrious Muslims, including Muhammad Ali and the others, instead of targeting some of them.

The irony is that the Blacks were only their slaves in the early formative years of the development of their country, America where they worked in cotton farms.

But the Arabs and Muslims have been giving America it’s much needed oil, which they could use to develop their country even more, much more than the cotton trading could do to it, for which they could develop their aerospace programs and build their large largesse of nuclear arsenal. 

And what has White America done to the Arabs and Muslims?

Unfortunately, they were able to use their aerospace and nuclear arsenal as a threat to the existence of the Arabs and Muslims so that many of them could not even find employment in any cotton farm anywhere, even if they wanted to.  

And here I would like to remind everybody about the Symbionese Liberation Army (SLA) which I had written about before.

They were a group of Blacks in America who formed a militant group to demand equal rights in America where their ancestors had come to the country at almost the same time as the White Folks.

The only exception is that they did not go there on their own volition but by the White Folks who had earlier immigrated to the country and who now consider themselves to be masters of the land, by ignoring the Native Americans of the First Nation like they did not exist.

Of course, many of the Natives did not exist because they had been killed or slaughtered by the White Folks who did not know of anything better to do, much less to be grateful for being allowed to come to the country and live there.

The members of the SLA were not like their brethren in the Black-American Civil Liberties movement who went to the podiums to shout for equality and be recognized as American citizens at the same par with the others.

The SLA was good at making their demands in the physical manner and later on, dramatic manner, by kidnapping Patricia Hearst, the media mogul in San Francisco.

And not to be outdone were the Black Panthers who also had similar plans to attract the media in America, their way.

This probably made White America feel threatened, with their lives not getting any better since the Blacks in the country were willing to do more to show how patriotic and nationalistic there were.

More Americans would be kidnapped and many incidences would be created so the SLA could attract the attention of the media and everybody in the country.

And not to be outdone, even the brighter and more talented Blacks in America were taken by such fever, but they did it in their own subtle way. One of which was to wear a black glove in one hand while accepting their medals at the Mexico Olympic Games, where two Black athletes had won the gold and silver medals for the 100-meter race.

They both bought a pair of black gloves and used only one of them per person. It saved them a bit of money to buy just one pair of the gloves instead of two pairs.

But then wearing a pair of gloves which is black in color may not look or feel good compared to wearing just one of them in one hand.

In later years, Michael Jackson also thought it was interesting to wear one glove, except that his glove was sewed with sequins and other precious stone studs for attraction.

But they still felt like they were punching something, like Muhammad Ali, the three-time world heavyweight boxing champion who liked to beat up people to pulp wearing gloves, but in the boxing ring. He drove the point that Blacks can create knockouts.

And interestingly, none of the White Folks in America then had dared to charged the Blacks for being militants or terrorists, despite all the things that the SLA had done and their Civil Rights movement leaders particularly, Martin Luther King, Jesse Jackson, Andrew Young and a host of other second echelon leaders were not charged or condemned as being so.

To add to this list are Elijah Muhammad and Louis Fakaruddin, who headed the Nation of Islam religious movement which grew in acceptance as more Blacks in America realized that their ancestors were indeed Muslims; they had all been kidnapped by the White traders and forced to come to America to work as slaves.

They had later been described as Civil Rights leaders and who have national acceptance and recognition.

White America saw what the Blacks in their country could do with just one kidnapping of Patricia Hearst and the pair of black gloves at the Olympic Games, which were able to tame them.

Yet, they were not able to see what the Crashing of the Twin Towers could do to them.

Instead of being tamed, they decided to toughen up, and seek to punish those whom they claimed to have done the deed.

How could the Twin Towers be allowed to come crashing down? And how could White America be allowed to be so cowed, when it has the aerospace program and largesse of nuclear arsenal at their disposal to use.

When in some distant future, a prospect of them being able to use these weapons of mass destructions seemed inconveivable, because they had the Soviet Communists to deal with, now they thought they had been given a chance to use them.

And use them, they did, but only in Afghanistan and Iraq, and even then when the Soviet Communists had already long left Afghanistan and the Middle East and Gulf Region.

If the Soviet Communists were still there, there would be stillness in the whole region. And the Americans wouldn’t have dared to inflict pain on the ordinary Arabs and Farsi the way they had done.