Yet, I would be very remiss to just see it as typical of the right-wing paranoid style of American politics, with its long and shameful history. No, it is unquestionably more serious than that, and underscores some frightening themes of their entire---for lack of a better phrase----mode of "thinking." Themes that are insidious; themes that are pernicious; themes that are extremely dangerous; themes that are not too subtly racist even. And though I hate the use of this predicate: Themes that are truly un-American.
Firstly, forget about the disinformation coming from all the usual suspects, those promulgators of a post-truth society with all their propagandist proclivities for assertion, innuendo, half-truths, AND STRAIGHT UP LIES instead of cold, hard, dispassionate and objective facts. No, it's not a mosque that's being proposed, though that shouldn't matter in the least anyway. No, it's not on or even very close to "Ground Zero," though that too shouldn't be of concern either. And no, the man behind the community center, Imam Feisal Abdul Rauf, is no "radical" terrorist sympathizer, no Nazi-loving "Islamo-fascist," nor a (fill in whatever empty right-wing verbiage you like here):__________.
In fact, he was appointed by Bush The Younger to head interfaith outreach to educate on just how strongly American Muslims believe in religious pluralism and political liberalism, while bridging faiths together (also the State Department and FBI have drawn on his expertise). And if his long and distinguished religious resume is not enough the antithesis of a fundamentalist, "radical terrorist" for you, then there's this irony of the man's beliefs in action: Currently, as we speak, Imam Rauf is touring through the Middle East trying to persuade Arab Muslims that American pluralism and religious liberty is the way to go. No shit: America respects religious diversity. Why can't you 12th Century-minded totalitarians be more like us Americans? Meanwhile, practically one and a half of the two dominant political parties in America are in practical agreement on the "debate" over whether a mosque can and/or should be built near the World Trade Center. Of course, they are quick to point out that New Yorkers are strongly against it:
Opposition remains strong against building the mosque, 63-27 percent, however, by a margin of 64-28 percent voters say that the developers of the Cordoba House have a Constitutional right to build it. Nearly one-quarter of voters say the position of the gubernatorial candidates on this issue will have a major effect on which candidate they support.
Likewise, and according to script, 25% say the candidate they support will depend on this particular issue: it's life or death, folks, isn't it? The G.O.P. has really done its homework ever since Nixon first instituted the Southern Strategy. Only today, just add Muslims to the wedge issue formula of god, guns, gays, and mix in a little hate, fear, and racism. However, quite revealingly, a 46-36 plurality of Manhattanites favor the site. Doesn't that seem to be the case: the further away you are from the site the more you insist it's yours and Muslims must stay away. Moreover, it's usually rural know-nothings that clamor on and on about 911 and the Islamic scourge. Nate Silver suggests that Manhattanites are simply more familiar with the geography of the site so it's less contentious for them.
It is embarrassing having to again and again tell the world we hold certain truths, principles, liberties inalienable, and then our actions and words demonstrate the exact opposite. According to the cynical and naive, we're even willing to go to war for the greater part of a decade in two Muslim countries purportedly to spread, to teach, and to share these liberal democratic values in a part of the world where the main religion, Islam, is equated with terrorism by the majority in our public "debate," whether they intend it or not.*
The list of our hypocrisies with regards to not living up to our own principles of law is growing more and more conspicuous. And our imperially-motivated, transparently self-serving sententiousness is coupled with the soft bigotry that our two intellectually, historically, and morally-deficient political parties temper with their postured, constitutional prevarications----their consensus view: that "Of course They have the right to build a mosque, but really to do so would just be sooooo insensitive, "a real affront to the people who lost their lives" on 911. Therefore, they really shouldn't.
Or, take our increasingly cynical president of and ex-advocate for "Change": "I was not commenting on and will not comment on the wisdom of making a decision to put a mosque there. I was commenting very specifically on the right that people have that dates back to our founding." To be fair, if I were a Christian, and the president of a country growing increasingly Islamophobic,** one in which one in five believe, contrary to all evidence and rationality, that I was Muslim, I might say exactly the same thing.
But here's the main idea I want to propose, the connection I see that is so frightfully insidious, pernicious, and dangerous. The idea that American Muslims are "insensitive" to build----I don't care, let's call it a "mosque" for argument's sake, though it's a misnomer----a "mosque" "at" (though we know that too isn't true) "Ground Zero" is implicitly very insulting in the least, and at worst----racist. By demanding that American Muslims admit it's "insensitive," which is what they'd be doing by not building the center, they're asking Muslim Americans to tacitly acknowledge the premise that Islam is synonymous with terrorism; that it's religious tenets are essentially responsible for Islamic terrorism; or, that they should accept them being conflated as such in the Public Mind.
Somehow, in this rhetorical framing, a radical minority is representative of an entire group of people, an entire religion. How is this?
Well, it's a common fallacy, mainly a conservative intellectual attribute, to derive from the part, the whole (Ironically, the microcosm of the Great Chain of Being, a literary device deriving the whole from a part, is what Enlightenment poets and thinkers, distinguished Tories like Alexander Pope and Samuel Johnson employed to great effect for the opposite purpose: for the edification of, about, and for all mankind).
We don't see these faux freedom-loving, purveyors of strict-constructionism and strong localism condemning other entire religions like Catholicism, for example, for propagating terrorism because in the past the IRA resisted, interestingly, what they saw as an illegitimate occupation of Northern Ireland by Protestant Englishmen and women. The irony is amazing seeing that even the Muslims in countries we are occupying against their will are seen as "terrorists" for resisting us, the invaders. Terrorists if they fight back, terrorists if they don't. No ambiguity there, yet the IRA hasn't tarred the whole Catholic religion? Moreover, nobody's calling for the Catholic church to stop building churches because of the current, very real, very endemic sexual-abuse problems and lack of accountability for their crimes or redress for their victims. The list could go on: What about the church of that psychopath who shot an abortion doctor as he was walking out of church? Is his entire congregation a "cult" of radical murderers too because one of their terrorist congregants is devoted to that particular religion (Though I wouldn't be surprised if they did espouse a violent liberation theology regarding baby fetuses)? I don't want to see a single, new Baptist-whatever church he belonged to go up ever again! Right? Get your pitchforks, you idiots!
And though I see racism as highly complicated, and I'm personally not quick to use the word to automatically deduce motivation, this clearly has the racist underpinnings of fearing The Other. Who'd be surprised to see the correlation between those against the mosque, and those susceptible to the nativist fervor over illegal immigration? Those advocating the repeal of the Fourteenth Amendment for children born in the U.S. to "illegals" probably harbor much of the same latent, inchoate, though sometimes rabid, racism for not just Arab Muslims, but American Muslims too. And voila!
Seventy percent of independents oppose the plan to build the Islamic center and mosque near ground zero, according to a recent CNN/Opinion Research Corp. poll. By contrast, 54 percent of Democrats and 82 percent of Republicans opposed the plan. The same poll also found a clear partisan divide on changing the Reconstruction-era 14th Amendment, which guarantees equal protection of law and defines who is a U.S. citizen. Fifty-eight percent of Republicans support a change while 39 percent of Democrats do so. Independents are split 50-50.
So there's our enlightened citizenry! And to think judges have the temerity to rule against the will of the people when protecting fundamental constitutional rights. Notice that the 14th applies to gay marriage too, equal protection under the law. Maybe these jackasses should try and change the constitution so that it doesn't apply to "illegals'" children and to gays, killing two birds with one racist/sexist stone?
But back to the argument: It's a rhetorical conflation of an entire religion----"a cult" according to some politicians, the Nazis and the KKK to others----with the actions of a select few. It's a form of rhetorical collective punishment for the deeds of some renegade terrorists.
However, this conflation is much more serious than it first appears because it is directly related to the mindset of the invasion and occupation of entire Muslim countries, like Iraq and Afghanistan, where collective punishment and "collateral damage," the killing of innocents, is cavalierly---even sanctimoniously---- accepted as the cost of bringing those barbaric brown people of the Middle East the gifts of pluralistic, tolerant, liberal democracy. After all, what are the deaths of a million, and the displacement of two in Iraq to an Empire of Freedom and Democracy, but the collateral damage, the collective and often fatal punishment of entire countries. What to make of the Empire's support for the illegal, collective punishment of Palestinians, and let's not forget the Lebanese, with the disproportionate use of force against civilians? Well, we did kill a few "terrorists" for every ten-plus civilians so it's worth it, right?
To say race or ethnicity doesn't play into the shallow disregard for the deaths of the innocents, often women and children, would be tragically inaccurate. Furthermore, not recognizing this mode of "thinking" and exposing it makes us involuntarily complicit in the continued, "collateral" deaths over which our Empire suffers zero compunction: They are The Other; it's ok to kill them over there, just as it's ok to conflate American Muslims with terrorists here. When you see statistics for just how assimilated American Muslims are into U.S. culture this conflation appears even more absurd:
The survey results also show that American Muslims are integrated in American society—89 percent said they vote regularly; 86 percent said they celebrate the Fourth of July; 64 percent said they fly the U.S. flag; 42 percent said they volunteer for institutions serving the public (compared to 29 percent nationwide in 2005). On social and political issues the views of American Muslims are as follows: 84 percent said Muslims should strongly emphasize shared values with Christians and Jews, 82 percent said terrorist attacks harm American Muslims; 77 percent said Muslims worship the same God as Christians and Jews do; 69 percent believe a just resolution to the Palestinian cause would improve America’s standing in the Muslim world; 66 percent support working toward normalization of relations with Iran; 55 percent are afraid that the War on Terror has become a war on Islam; only 12 percent believe the war in Iraq was a worthwhile effort; and just 10 percent support the use of the military to spread democracy in other countries.
[iv]
Moreover, isn't it at least ironic that right-wing Christians, actual fundamentalists here in America----as opposed to Imam Rauf's pluralistic, tolerant, modern beliefs---want to breach the First Amendment's establishment clause at every turn and impose Christian religiosity on secular government, in the least by publicly acknowledging the Judaeo-Christian foundations of our secular law by posting the Ten Commandments on courthouses, and more seriously by denying rights to homosexuals and autonomy to women's bodies while creating a de facto religious litmus test for public service?
Is it not ironic that some of the more outspoken of them claim that all Muslims, including American Muslims, want to impose sharia law on our government when in fact it is they who want to disregard that inconvenient establishment clause of the First Amendment that is so antithetical to their purpose, their mission: "Congress shall make no law respecting an establishment of religion." So they fear the establishment of the Islamic religion in our culture and upon our government, all the while seeking the same for themselves. Meanwhile, they insist on denying the second clause "prohibiting the free exercise thereof" to Muslims while using the very same freedom of religion provision as a martyrdom rallying cry every time they are thwarted in their attempts to establish a Christianized government. Of course, they, like all petulant, hypocritical, self-unaware persons like to project their own desires for power and the subjugation of others onto all those they see as their enemies, whether it's Muslims, "secular humanists," "atheists," or the anti-Christmas conspirators.
They often claim that freedom of religion means that it's expression must not only be very public, and very much on public property, but it must take place at government institutions themselves. They forget how and why their own history of religious liberty began---- because of feelings that American Muslims are experiencing right now, something Muslims have in common with the Danbury Baptists of the early 19th Century.
Lest these contemporary Christian fundamentalists forget: What they----the Baptists, Anabaptists, Presbyterians, et al.---wanted from the Jeffersonians was protection of religion from the government, a separation whereby each could practice one's conscience however one saw fit without intrusion or interference. They advocated for "a wall of separation" because they were the minority then and they understood and feared the history of majoritarian tyranny with regards to the Church of England's power (especially to tax non-Anglicans), or even worse, the long and disgraceful absolutism of the Roman Catholic Church and Holy Roman Empire. Oh, how nice it is to be the majority now so that the minority faith of all those barbaric darker people can be targeted for persecution, harassment, and coercion. Indeed, American Muslims have assimilated to the actual, historical tradition, the law of religious liberty and protection from government and majoritarian tyranny, that very American set of core principles and beliefs. It's the proponents of the "don't build"-for-whatever-irrational-reasons that are un-American, not American Muslims. Maybe if these hysterical fearmongers would educate themselves, like their Muslim counterparts do***, entire peoples wouldn't become the playthings of irrational, even hateful, American domestic politics.
Update: Glenn Greenwald has linked to some other anti-Muslim activities around the country, other cases where the issue for these dangerous, useful idiots isn't the building of a mosque on Ground Zero per se, but Islam itself and the building of mosques in general:
The intense animosity toward Muslims driving this campaign extends far beyond Ground Zero, and manifests in all sorts of significant and dangerous ways. In June, The New York Times reported on a vicious opposition campaign against a proposed mosque in Staten Island. Earlier this month, Associated Press documented that "Muslims trying to build houses of worship in the nation's heartland, far from the heated fight in New York over plans for a mosque near ground zero, are running into opponents even more hostile and aggressive." And today, The Washington Post examines anti-mosque campaigns from communities around the nation and concludes that "the intense feelings driving that debate have surfaced in communities from California to Florida in recent months, raising questions about whether public attitudes toward Muslims have shifted.
* In March 2006, when the United States was clamoring about its declining standing among publics in the Arab and Islamic region, a Washington Post-ABC poll revealed that the image of Islam among Americans had similarly declined. Nearly half (46%) of Americans surveyed had an unfavorable opinion of Islam. While half (54%) thought Islam was a peaceful religion, 33% thought that mainstream Islam encouraged violence against non-Muslims, and 58% felt that there were more violent extremists within Islam than other religions. Another Washington Post-ABC poll in March 2009 detected few changes in public opinion. Negative American sentiment and images of Islam and Arabs are what prominent Middle East scholar and commentator Juan Cole said in his recent book, Engaging the Muslim World, are undermining America's relations.
**Four months after 9/11, 14 percent believed mainstream Islam encourages violence; today [2004] it’s 34 percent.
*** In 2006 the Council on American-Islamic Relations (CAIR) conducted a survey of American Muslim voters. Results show that American Muslim voters are young, highly educated, (62 percent have obtained a bachelor degree or higher. This is double the comparable national figure for registered voters), more than half the community is made up of professionals, 43 percent have a household income of $50,000 or higher, seventy eight are married and the community is religiously diverse (31 percent attend a mosque on a weekly basis; 16 percent attend once or twice a month; 27 percent said they seldom or never attend). The largest segment of the respondents said they consider themselves “just Muslims,” avoiding distinctions like Sunni or Shia. Another 36 percent said they are Sunni and 12 percent said they are Shia. Less than half of 1 percent said they are Salafi, while 2 percent said they are Sufi.[iii]
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