Wednesday was a difficult day for The American Independent News Network, which is the larger entity that operates The Iowa Independent. Our chief executive and founder announced two of our sister sites would close and their content would be moved to The American Independent.
A recently introduced bill could have far-reaching impact on the U.S. sugar industry, including American Crystal Sugar, a farmer-owned cooperative that locked out 1,300 Midwest workers on Aug. 1.
The chairman for Herman Cain’s Iowa effort says the campaign “relied more on the word of farmers than Washington regulators” in deciding to run an ad containing claims the Environmental Protection Agency says are false.
The Iowa Senate will remain under the control of a slim 26-25 Democratic majority when it reconvenes in January 2012.
I spent some time today checking up on the Web sites of Iowa political groups to see whether anything has changed, and I came upon something I hadn’t noticed before.
On the site of Iowa Family Policy Center ACTION, the socially conservative political group known for offering significant support to Republican campaigns across the state, I found a YouTube video that scarily warns viewers of growing Muslim populations and dwindling Christian populations. It’s embedded in the sidebar of most of the site’s pages (here’s an example).
The video, which is set to gloomy music that sounds vaguely Middle-Eastern, begins with a solemn on-screen warning: “THE WORLD IS CHANGING.”
It then launches into a detailed discussion of fertility rates in majority-Christian countries in Europe and North America. The announcer talks in terms of cultural survival, pitting the a growing Muslim population against Christians in a battle to control the future of the world.
“In a matter of years, Europe as we know it will cease to exist,” the video warns. “Yet the population is not declining. Why? Immigration. Islamic immigration.”
“It’s time to wake up,” says the announcer.
In the United States, the video claims that there is an Islamic conspiracy to “evangelize America through journalism, politics, education, and more.”
Though the video never explicitly says “Christians need to reproduce more” or “Muslims should be discouraged from reproducing so much,” its implication is clear: If the world doesn’t have more Christian babies in it, Muslims will take over. If that doesn’t happen, “The world that we live in is not the world in which our children and grandchildren will live.”
This sentiment may not mirror the particularly nasty eugenicist ideology of someone like Adolf Hitler, but it echoes the softer-edged eugenics movement that was actually pretty popular in the United States and much of the developed world through the middle of the 20th Century.
Dictionary.com defines eugenics as “the study of or belief in the possibility of improving the qualities of the human species or a human population, esp. by such means as discouraging reproduction by persons having genetic defects or presumed to have inheritable undesirable traits (negative eugenics) or encouraging reproduction by persons presumed to have inheritable desirable traits (positive eugenics).”
At the very least, the video, which I have posted below, seems to encourage something akin to “positive eugenics,” based more on religion than actual genes.
I couldn’t determine the actual source of the video, because it was published March 30 using a YouTube account that owns no other videos. (It is unlikely, though, that the Iowa Family Policy Center created the video itself, since they already have their own YouTube channel, and it’s not like they are trying to hide their support of this message.) The username associated with the account is, ironically, “muslimfriend.”
This may not be breaking news (in fact, the video could have been up on the IFPC site for months without me noticing), but I thought it deserved some attention anyway, given the socially conservative group’s significant influence in Iowa politics.
What do you think?
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