Michele Bachmann: "Not All Cultures Are Equal" (EXCLUSIVE VIDEO)
Rep. Michele Bachmann caught the national spotlight recently when she told MSNBC's Chris Mathews that Barack Obama "may have anti-American views."
Although Bachmann's statement may have come as a surprise to people outside her home district in central Minnesota, she has a history of making statements that are inflammatory, controversial, questionably informed and that require further explanation. Until now, the most famous of those was her assertion that there was a plan already in place to partition Iraq and give half of it to Iran. She later said her comments had been "misconstrued" but did not elaborate.
One comment she has never explained came during a debate she had while running for Congress the first time in November 2005. Prompted by a question on the rioting in France and Europe at the time, Bachmann said "not all cultures are equal, not all values are equal," letting it be known that she thought that people of the Muslim faith had an inferior culture to that of the United States and the West.
She held forth on the European unrest, referring to a generation of unassimilated Muslim French youth addicted to cable television, led in her imagination by al Jazeera to wreak havoc. Yet it was Bachmann who seemed entranced by cable news. Her knowledge of what was actually happening in France seems to have come entirely from a FOX news-style script. In fact, the unrest was no jihad, had nothing to do with religious faith or Muslim culture or al Jazeeera. It was more akin to the riots in the U.S. for expanded civil rights in the 1960s or those that followed from the Rodney King police beating in Los Angeles in 1991. The European riots came after two suburban youth were killed in a police chase. The unrest centered on decades of discrimination that had manifested itself, for example, in school acceptances and hiring practices and police force racial profiling.
Bachmann's statements on the matter have not been seen outside of that debate room until now.
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