Prince Sings Against Anti-Muslim Bigotry

The video ( http://music.channel.aol.com/artist/main.adp?tab=av&artistid=5182 ) for the song "Cinnamon Girl" shows the girl, played by Oscar nominee Keisha Castle-Hughes of the movie "Whale Rider," helpless and tearful after being discriminated against and accosted by her schoolmates.

"Cinnamon Girl of mixed heritage, never knew the meaning of color lines," sings Prince, who only appears in the video intermittently playing guitar.

"9/11 turned that all around/when she got accused of this crime."

One day the girl returned home to find its walls sprayed by "terrorist scum" graffiti and her hijab-donned mother trying to cover Arabic-language signs with English ones.

She appears praying to God with tears running down her cheeks as she grew impatient with the racial profiling wherever she went.

"Cinnamon Girl…Don't cry, don't shed no tears/One night won't make us feel cause we know how this movie's ending," Prince continues.

Desperate as she was, "Cinnamon Girl" decided to blow herself up in an airport but backtracked when she saw children hugging their father.

US F-16s, FBI agents, mosque minarets are all shown in the background of the four-minute clip.

Policies of President George Bush’s administration in the wake of the9 /11 attacks have antagonized a large section of the estimated six million Muslim Americans.

Iraq Illusion

Towering columns of smoke rising from war-battered area could be also seen, in a reference to the US-led war on Iraq.

"As war drums beat in Babylon/Cinnamon girl starts to pray/Eye've never heard a prayer like this one/Never b 4that day," Prince signs.

"So began the mass illusion, war on terror alibi/What's the use when the god of confusion keeps on telling the same lie?" goes the song, in a veiled reference to Bush who is accused of misleading his people into the Iraq war under the false premise of seeking weapons of mass destruction.

"Prince intended for it to spark some dialogue," the video's director, Phil Harder, of Minneapolis-based Harder-Fuller Films, told the Associated Press.

More than 650 American foreign-policy specialists said in an open letter to Bush that his Iraq invasion is the most misguided war since Vietnam, benefits terrorists and is justified by false claims.

Eighteen months after the invasion, UN Secretary General Kofi Annan called the US-led onslaught “illegal” and said it contravened the UN charter.

Top US weapons inspector in Iraq Charles Duelfer concluded earlier in the month that Iraq had possessed no weapons of mass destruction before the invasion.

Criticism

The clip, however, drew immediate criticism from right-wing writers and politicians in the United States.

Michelle Malkin, the author of "In Defense of Internment: The Case for Racial Profiling in World War II and the War on Terror," described the song as "the latest martyrdom video."

She claimed that "it's not just the Palestinian Authority that is in the business of indoctrinating young people through vile martyrdom videos."

In a commentary posted on her website, Malkin accused Prince of jumping "into the murder-promoting, terror-sympathizing act."

She also charged him with "crass exploitation of post-9/11 race-card-playing by Arab-American apologists for terror."

A May 2004 report released by the US Senate Office Of Research concluded that the Arab Americans and the Muslim community in the United States have taken the brunt of the Patriot Act and other federal powers applied in the aftermath of the9 / 11attacks.

More than1 , 200Muslims and Arab-Americans have been taken into custody after the 9 / 11attacks on New York and Washington.

Amnesty International repeatedly said that racial profiling by US law enforcement agencies had grown over the past three years to cover one in nine Americans, mostly targeting Muslims.

http://www.islam-online.net/English/News/2004-10/16/article05.shtml

video at
http://music.channel.aol.com/artist/main.adp?tab=av&artistid=5182