What's Up with Booker Texas: A Tale of Islamophobia in Post 9/11 America

Hey fellow bloggers, readers, or random people who happened on to this expecting pictures of pandas in not such a good mood- IT'S GOOD TO BE BACK! I should have posted about my hiatus, but I was too busy/lazy to do so- but it's all good now, The Angry Panda is back and that's that.
Finding things to blog about can either take a long time or no time at all- today is when a story hit me the second I went online: An Al Jazeera Journalist gets booted from a high school football game in Booker, Texas.
Though I wasn't too surprised by the reaction, I was curious as to why Al Jazeera correspondents would be in the small Texan town of Booker when they always hit me as a newsgroup that covered larger issues such as the Arab Spring or the War in Afghanistan.
But as the story goes, Gabriel Elizondo, a Brazil-based correspondent for Al Jazeera was traveling to random American towns to find out how 9/11 still impacts the American people ten years after the fateful string of attacks devastated a great number of people in 2001. So he goes to the most American thing he can think of: a high school football game with its bleachers, hot dogs, and all-American folk. He makes his way through and approaches the principal of the Fighting Kiowas and introduces himself to her and describes what his project is about. Of course, she is delighted to have media coverage put her school in the spotlight, that is until he shows her his business card with the "frightening" name of AL JAZEERA, which probably elevated her sympathetic nervous system to Terror Alert Level Red. Suddenly her Texan hospitality regressed into cold Islamophobia and she felt the need to contact her higher ups regarding the "situation". Then comes Superintendent Michael Lee on to the scene, who hands back Elizondo's business card back to him (like a psychic slap to the face), rebuffs him with the classic though non sequitur quote of "I think it was damn rotten what they did"- probably followed by something similar to a pirate "arggggh".

Pirates everywhere are offended. Sorry, Cap'n S'prrow.

Though Superintendent Lee didn't specify who "they" was referring to,  it's not too hard to figure who he meant- especially when this man's definition of diversity boils down to his school's annual "Fiesta Night" where they probably serve burritos and other foods that end in "o", which many Americans claim to be Mexican.
Though the reaction was not one he may have been anticipating, Elizondo ultimately did find out how 9/11 has impacted the American people ten years later and it's sadly, "We don't  take kindly to your kind over here."


For more on this story go here.