Yesterday, the Council on American Islamic Relations called on Prager to be removed from this position:

No one who holds such bigoted, intolerant and divisive views should be in a policymaking position at a taxpayer-funded institution that seeks to educate Americans about the destructive impact hatred has had, and continues to have, on every society. As a presidential appointee, Prager's continued presence on the council would send a negative message to Muslims worldwide about America's commitment to religious tolerance.

Likewise, the Anti-Defamation League, a group battling anti-Semitism and other bigotry, issued a statement calling Prager's views "intolerant," "misinformed on the facts," and "downright un-American."

The Times mentioned one of the things Beck has said recently, to newly elected U.S. Rep. Keith Ellison (D-Minn.), a Muslim: "Sir, prove to me that you are not working with our enemies." But as press critic Eric Alterman pointed out (Altercation, 12/4/06), as offensive as that question is, it doesn't begin to suggest the poisonousness of Beck's rhetoric about Muslims.

On his August 10 radio show, distributed by Clear Channel's Premiere Radio Networks, Beck told listeners, "The world is on the brink of World War III," then issued this warning:

All you Muslims who have sat on your frickin' hands the whole time and have not been marching in the streets and have not been saying, 'Hey, you know what? There are good Muslims and bad Muslims. We need to be the first ones in the recruitment office lining up to shoot the bad Muslims in the head.' I'm telling you, with God as my witness... human beings are not strong enough, unfortunately, to restrain themselves from putting up razor wire and putting you on one side of it. When things-when people become hungry, when people see that their way of life is on the edge of being over, they will put razor wire up and just based on the way you look or just based on your religion, they will round you up. Is that wrong? Oh my gosh, it is Nazi, World War II wrong, but society has proved it time and time again: It will happen.

On September 5, Beck took the same message to his CNN Headline News audience, declaring, "In 10 years, Muslims and Arabs will be looking through a razor wire fence at the West." He explained:

Since 9/11, Americans have gotten so fed up with the "yes, but" Muslims. The "yes, but" Muslims are the ones who show up on talkshows and in the media and say, "Yes, terrorism is bad, but"-and then they go through a list of reasons on why we should try and sympathize with people who fly planes into buildings.... If, God forbid, there's another attack, we won't have anymore patience for the "yes, buts." The Muslim community better find a spokesman who isn't a "yes, but" Muslim. They shouldn't even understand the word "but," because if they don't, when things heat up, the profiling will only get worse, and the razor wire will be coming.

Beck went on to say:

You want the profiling to stop? Then, here's an idea. Stop murdering innocent people. Stop excusing the people who do. You do that for a while, and I guarantee you won't have any more problems at the airports. Stop blowing stuff up and the world just might be your oyster. Otherwise, it's going to be like that movie, The Siege. You remember that movie? The Muslims will see the West through razor wire if things don't change.

He concluded:

Look, I'm not saying all Arabs and Muslims are anti-American. Far from it. We should get to know these people and embrace the good Muslims, and eliminate the bad ones. Here's what I don't know. I don't know if the Muslim community will ever step to the plate like the Japanese-American community did during World War II. You know, it was absolutely disgraceful how we rounded innocent people up then and, sadly, history has a way of repeating itself no matter how grotesque that history might be. The Muslim community can prevent this if they act now.

When Beck is talking about "razor wire," he's talking about concentration camps-in the original sense of the word, places where masses of people are imprisoned "just based on the way you look or just based on your religion." Despite his (perfectly accurate) observation that such camps are "Nazi, World War II wrong," comparable to the "absolutely disgraceful" wartime interment of Japanese-Americans, Beck is clearly using the threat of such camps to coerce Muslims into behavior he approves of, like volunteering "to shoot the bad Muslims in the head."

Since the overwhelming majority of U.S. Muslims are neither "murdering innocent people" nor "excusing the people who do," there's really nothing that they can do to avert Beck's threat that "the razor wire will be coming." And Beck is explicit that there's nothing non-Muslims can do to avoid locking Muslims up en masse.

The New York Times, in its profile about Beck, refers to his criticism of the animated film Happy Feet, but fails to mention that he uses his Headline News slot to issue threats that he himself compares to Nazi behavior. For the Times, CNN's decision to give Beck a TV show is a "success," because he "has increased the ratings in his 7 p.m. time period 60 percent among all viewers, and 84 percent among viewers aged 25 to 54."

The Times article quoted CNN executive Kenneth Jautz as saying that the network did not take Beck's politics into account when it hired him. "We did not set out to have anyone from any particular view fronting these shows," he said. In fact, CNN hired Beck knowing that the host's repertoire included hateful attacks--the Hurricane Katrina refugees seen on TV and the father of a terrorism victim were both "scumbags" (Mediamatters.org, 5/17/04, 9/9/05)--as well as a disturbing preoccupation with violence: Beck has told his listeners that he was praying for a gruesome death for Democratic presidential candidate Dennis Kucinich (3/6/03), and that he was fantasizing about strangling filmmaker Michael Moore to death (5/17/05). As FAIR predicted (FAIR Action Alert, 1/18/06), Beck has not changed his repellent tune simply because he's been hired by a major media outlet.

Contrary to Beck's suggestion, there are things that the people of the U.S. can do to avoid repeating the "grotesque" history of Japanese-American internment. One of these things is to take people seriously when they start threatening people with concentration camps-rather than looking the other way because of their ratings "success."

ACTION: Please contact CNN/U.S. president Jonathan Klein and urge him to condemn Glenn Beck's chilling threats against Muslims.

CONTACT: CNN/U.S. President Jonathan KleinPhone: 404-827-1500

There is nothing like being made to feel like a nigger. Just having to verbalize it or commit such a thought to text is gut-wrenching. Janitor or journalist, if you're black in America, that feeling is both unmistakable and more familiar than it ever should be so long after the the visible successes of the civil rights movement. But despite the greater prospects, opportunities and privileges earned for and by many of us over the decades, the default has remained the same: The power dynamics that exist in this country at any given time may render us niggers.

I have often joked that if you ever want to see a modern-day Uncle Tom, look no further than me in the vicinity of a white police officer. The reality is, that is how I have been conditioned to behave around the police for pure self-preservation reasons, having grown up black in Chicago with parents who wanted their boys to live to adulthood. But the other reality is that whatever newfound liberties I have experienced, and all too often have taken for granted, I don't ever want to be made to feel like a nigger -- something far, far worse than its utterance. It is a status whose roots form the tree from which we are lynched. Without the corollary lack of humanity and powerlessness, lynching could not occur, in all of its modern iterations, "contagious shootings" included.

Two recent police shootings involving black victims have a deeper meaning and impact for those of us who are unwarranted, but nevertheless prospective, suspects. In New York, Sean Bell, a 23-year-old unarmed man, died and two of his friends were critically wounded -- caught in a hail of fifty bullets fired by undercover officers -- as the group emerged from a nightclub, where they had been celebrating Bell's bachelor party. In Atlanta, 88-year-old Kathryn Johnston was shot as she sought to defend herself from police who had stormed into her home in search of drugs.

This past Thanksgiving I was stopped by an Alabama state trooper for a minor, unintentional moving violation. It was late, my family and I were tired and we were driving through rural Alabama in a rental car. Almost instinctively I knew what I had to become and how I had to act when pulled over. But as soon as I knew that the trooper had no desire to use his discretion to let me off with a warning, I committed an inviolable act that I will not soon forgive myself for as a husband and father of two small children: I challenged the trooper, albeit politely. It was a stupid and potentially dangerous thing for me to do, as the stealthy punches to my thigh from my wife reminded me.

Nothing is more important to me than the safety of my family, and yet there was this dissonant part of me -- that privileged post-civil-rights-era, Generation X sensibility that was evoked -- asserting that "we've been niggers long enough," as I recounted the generations and diversity of indignities my family has had to withstand with no recourse.

Such indignities still abound in popular culture. Consider comedian Michael Richards, who recently unleashed a racist tirade after being heckled by a few black men in the audience. Worse, he made graphic reference to lynching when he explained what would have befallen them had they "mouthed off" to a white person fifty years ago.

But whether or not we use the word "nigger" or discourage its use by others -- or among black folk -- the discrete events that trigger that visceral feeling in us will remain as long as black lives continue to have less value than white lives. Because they do. To invoke a newer, insidious rhetorical tool of conservatives, it is white "innocent life" that is sacrosanct, not society's moral outrage against violence and brutality, physical or psychological.

More than a decade after the O.J. Simpson verdict, Simpson is still the poster boy for brutality and injustice, whereas former detective Mark Fuhrman is all but legitimated as a bestselling author despite a long history of his admitted brutality as a member of the LAPD.

For many African-Americans, whether or not they believe a guilty man was nearly framed, to cast Simpson as a symbol of brutality gone unpunished is not only bizarrely misplaced and insulting; it is also symptomatic of a society intentionally blind to the daily realities of what it feels like to be seen more as a problem than as a person.

Every day we are made conscious of our own race and status in society by a host of peers and judges in a range of venues. And even if we never have to endure an altercation with the police, we still are acutely aware of how easily we can be made to feel like niggers: our gait, tone, behavior, our proximity to valuables (or more valuable people) is scrutinized. And our choice to accept this reality and conform to earn that eye contact, that begrudging customer service or that success in hailing a cab is related to this issue of brutality, because it is an assault on our citizenship and very humanity.

"Contagious shooting" may very well be a legitimate assessment of the events that culminated in Sean Bell's death hours before his wedding. But it is symptomatic of something larger that undoubtedly correlates to when such contagions most often occur and to what degree. If there is a presumption of guilt or reason to fear or distrust someone irrespective of context, that itself is a crime; it represents the psychological brutality and ubiquity of institutional racism.

But perhaps institutional racism sounds a bit too harsh for the thin-skinned mainstream media, the proxy of our willfully ignorant body politic. Society prefers what is in essence "situational racism" that dissolves with a well-placed, well-timed apology to the right brokers of contrition. "Some of my best friends are black." "I was drunk." "He had a wallet." All socially acceptable mitigators of brutal speech are deftly untethered from their more vile origins, too shameful and heavy for those most complicit to bare. But the weight of its impact never lessens on those of us who do not have a choice as long as we're breathing while black.

Christopher Rabb is a blogger, freelance writer, web entrepreneur and activist. He is the founder of Afro-Netizen, one of the largest Black-oriented weblogs on the Internet, and has also founded the Progressive Civic Fund.