Middle-Eastern American Glad Trump Won

F*** You, White Liberal: a Middle-Eastern American Glad Trump Won

By Christopher Ketcham

I received the following note in the wake of an op-ed I recently published at the Daily Beast called “Anarchist for Trump: Time For Liberals To See America As It Really Is.”

“As a Middle-Eastern American,” it began, “I just wanted to thank you for your [article.] I first became politically aware while I was in the army during 9/11 and our country’s response to it.  I felt like a living contradiction, being one of the ‘heroes’ as a soldier and a villain as a Middle Eastern person.” The writer was an Iranian-American dual citizen named Bijan Sharifi, who was an infantryman in the U.S. Army and who now teaches art in a youth prison in Ohio. He remarked how disgusted he was “at our country’s behavior internationally” and how he had voted for Obama in 2008, partly “because I knew Clinton would continue the policies of Bush.” But a funny thing happened in the wake of the election. First, there was his own “complete disillusionment” with the new president, as Sharifi puts it: “Obama continued the same policies in the Middle East and spying at home.” Then came a greater disappointment, one which turned out to be a common enough experience during the Obama years. “My white liberal friends were with me when it was against Bush,” said Sharifi, “but their rhetoric quickly changed with Obama. Even my black friends weren’t trying to hear any criticism of Obama’s imperialism. Now all my white liberal friends want to ‘stand in solidarity’ with me?”

“I resent the hell out of them and their protests,” continued Sharifi. “They’re partisans trying to disguise themselves as social justice warriors. Obama detained and deported Latinos in record numbers in for-profit detention centers. Spied on Muslim-Americans here and bombed innocent Muslims over there. We shame Donald Trump for saying he wants to kill terrorist’s families, but give Obama a pass when he drone strikes an entire extended family at a wedding party out of existence? Fuck that. Fuck Obama, fuck Clinton.” And, in a final parting blow before signing off: “Fuck white liberals and their meaningless protests.”

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As my friend Travis Kelly tells me, “Two million Muslims/Arabs killed in the ‘War on Terror’ – two million BROWN people, not to mention all the maimed, widowed, orphaned, homeless and impoverished. These horrors don’t even register on the radar of the prissily politically correct, so obsessed with their own WESTERN WHITE privilege that transgender bathroom privileges trump [emphasis his!] 2000 children blown to bits in Gaza.”

This is a link to the original article.