Veteran Takes On Hate Speech Against Muslims

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BY JUSTIN SALHANI

Jim Driscoll is the quintessential all-American. He has a PhD from Cornell, was a star football player at Harvard, was awarded a Bronze Star for fighting in Vietnam, and was on staff as a teacher at MIT before quitting in 1982 to devote his time to working for social justice. Now, at 70 years old, Driscoll is working with Veterans for Peace, an organization of military veterans and allies who are working to help veterans, dismantle the war economy, and eventually end all wars, to fighting the United States’ rising Islamophobia — something he says “violates every value of the United States Constitution.”

Driscoll recently spoke to ThinkProgress by phone about what led him to take up the fight and how the public has received his actions.

ThinkProgress: How did you decide to take up fighting Islamophobia as an issue?

Jim Driscoll: Last year, in December, Michael McPherson, the Executive Director of Veterans for Peace, spoke about what everybody was talking about in the United States at that time, which was the incredible outbreak of hate speech that was all over the TV every time you turned it on. [It was] about Muslims and how Muslims needed to not be hire vetsallowed in the country or a census taken of where they are. Even the possibility of internment camps was hinted at, so he talked about that and how as an African heritage U.S. citizen, it affected him directly, since a large number of Muslims in the U.S. are of African heritage. So, there’s a clear overlap of Islamophobia and other forms of racism, and I heard that and was impressed and moved and so we launched this campaign.

“Read the Full Article at thinkprogress.org >>>>”

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