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Obama jabs use words as new-speak weapons

June 16th, 2008

An eloquent piece that highlights the code words that show up in the media -- an insidious "new vocabulary" emerging in the context of the immigration debate.  Couldn't have said it better ourselves...

http://www.dailynews.com

Obama jabs use words as new-speak weapons

Mariel Garza, Editorial Page Writer

06/14/2008
Los Angeles Daily News

THE other day a thoughtful reader forwarded me a satirical piece on Sen. Barack Obama titled "The Jihadist Candidate." In it, the Democratic ticket-topper was hilariously likened to the sleeper agent in the classic thriller film "The Manchurian Candidate," based on damning evidence such as the fact that he no longer likes to be known as "Barry," a good old American name, but Barack, apparently a moniker only a terrorist would use.

And it's only one step from that amusing set-up to the comical plot line: Once he gains the Oval Office, one word from the Evil Muslim Leaders World Council and Obama would suddenly activate and start knocking off Republican members of Congress, bombing malls and replacing apple pie and hamburgers with tasty chickpea dishes in diners across America.

Ha-ha! Chickpeas are funny.

But after careful reading of this e-mailed piece - which I suspect is just one of many nasty Obamagrams being forwarded around in cyberspace like the Y2K rumors of 1998 - I started to realize this was no clever parody. It was in earnest. The flap over a Fox News anchor's recent quip suggesting that a televised fist bump between Obama and his wife during a campaign speech was a "terrorist fist jab" (whatever that is) only cemented it.

Once upon a short time ago, Obama's skin color would have been the basis for the attacks against his candidacy. But simple skin-color prejudice is no longer acceptable in American public discourse. The slurs of yore are as antiquated as rotary dial telephones.

I would say "yay," but we've come up with something worse. I call it the New Racism lexicon, which takes straightforward words and rejiggers them with insidious new meanings that express the same prejudices, just less overtly.

This should be apparent to anyone who has followed the debate on immigration reform, in which the adjective "illegal" has been transformed into a noun and used to insult Latinos of any type or citizenship status, as in "those illegals are destroying our way of life with their big families, ubiquitous taco trucks and mysterious love of cornmeal."

The next most-common anti-Latino slur is "gang member," which is employed for any Latino who has had a brush with the law, no matter how minor, or dares to disagree with any law enforcement policy. I have had the pleasure of having both of these code words used against me, in additional to the more traditional ones.

Thanks to the Obama e-mail, I was able to identify two additional New Racism lexicon code words that I can add to my list: "terrorist" and "Muslim."

This new vocabulary is quite helpful for those who want to rationalize their fear of Obama, but don't want to admit to ethnic prejudices. For example: "It's not because he's black, see. I don't like Obama because he's a terrorist." Oh. Or at the very least, "he's a Muslim," which in the New Racism lexicon is synonymous with "terrorist." (Recently, one Daily News letter-to-the-editor writer came to his own conclusion on Obama's evident Muslimness by noting that the candidate ate goat cheese.)

Considering that the war on terrorism is the 21st century's version of the Cold War, that's akin to denouncing someone as a communist because they like vodka. And just as damaging. During the height of the Red Scare, many innocent people had their lives wrecked by similar whisper campaigns.

And it's not only a few people whispering about an anti-American Obama. Google "Obama" and "Muslim" and you get 1,120,000 hits; Google "Obama" and "terrorist" and you get 619,000. Given the way Google searches, maybe only half those are sites that make the connection between the two words. But that means about 1million references in cyberspace. That's a lot, and with Obama just recently becoming the apparent Democratic candidate, I expect that number to grow. As this new vocabulary is just emerging, I expect its ranks to grow in number and originality.

Finally, there is another code word of this New Racism worth noting: "patriot," which seems to mean someone who employs the New Racism code words to attack others. And that one is the saddest, most perverted of all the new definitions. I imagine the Founding Fathers are squirming in their graves.