Max Blumenthal: A nation against Islam ... America's new crusade
[Max Blumenthal is a journalist whose work is published in the New York Times, the Daily Beast, the Nation, the Huffington Post, Salon, and other publications. He is author of Republican Gomorrah: Inside the Movement that Shattered the Party (Basic/Nation Books, 2009).]
As the tenth anniversary of 9/11 approaches, hysteria about Muslims in American life has gripped the country. With it has come an outburst of arson attacks on mosques, campaigns to stop their construction, and the branding of the overwhelmingly moderate Muslim-American community as a hotbed of potential terrorist recruits. The frenzy has raged from rural Tennessee to New York City, while in Oklahoma, voters even overwhelmingly approved a ballot measure banning the implementation of sharia law in American courts (not that such a prospect existed).
This campaign of Islamophobia has wounded President Obama politically, as a fifth of Americans have bought into a sustained chorus of false rumours about his secret Muslim faith. And it may have tainted views of Muslims in general; a Pew Research Center poll of August 2010 revealed that, among Americans, the favourability rating of Muslims had dropped by eleven points since 2005.
This spasm of anti-Muslim bigotry, erupting so many years after the 11 September 2001 trauma, might seem oddly timed and unexpectedly spontaneous. But think again: it’s the fruit of an organised, long-term campaign by a tight confederation of rightwing activists and operatives who first focused on Islamophobia soon after the 9/11 attacks, but only attained critical mass during the Obama era. It was then that embittered conservative forces, voted out of power in 2008, sought with remarkable success to leverage cultural resentment into political and partisan gain.
This network is obsessively fixated on the supposed spread of Muslim influence in America. Its apparatus spans continents, extending from Tea Party activists to the European far right. It brings together in common cause rightwing ultra-Zionists, Christian evangelicals, and racist British soccer hooligans. It reflects an aggressively pro-Israel sensibility, with its key figures venerating the Jewish state as a middle-eastern Fort Apache on the front lines of the global war on terror, and urging the US and various European powers to emulate its heavy-handed methods...
Read entire article at openDemocracy (UK)
As the tenth anniversary of 9/11 approaches, hysteria about Muslims in American life has gripped the country. With it has come an outburst of arson attacks on mosques, campaigns to stop their construction, and the branding of the overwhelmingly moderate Muslim-American community as a hotbed of potential terrorist recruits. The frenzy has raged from rural Tennessee to New York City, while in Oklahoma, voters even overwhelmingly approved a ballot measure banning the implementation of sharia law in American courts (not that such a prospect existed).
This campaign of Islamophobia has wounded President Obama politically, as a fifth of Americans have bought into a sustained chorus of false rumours about his secret Muslim faith. And it may have tainted views of Muslims in general; a Pew Research Center poll of August 2010 revealed that, among Americans, the favourability rating of Muslims had dropped by eleven points since 2005.
This spasm of anti-Muslim bigotry, erupting so many years after the 11 September 2001 trauma, might seem oddly timed and unexpectedly spontaneous. But think again: it’s the fruit of an organised, long-term campaign by a tight confederation of rightwing activists and operatives who first focused on Islamophobia soon after the 9/11 attacks, but only attained critical mass during the Obama era. It was then that embittered conservative forces, voted out of power in 2008, sought with remarkable success to leverage cultural resentment into political and partisan gain.
This network is obsessively fixated on the supposed spread of Muslim influence in America. Its apparatus spans continents, extending from Tea Party activists to the European far right. It brings together in common cause rightwing ultra-Zionists, Christian evangelicals, and racist British soccer hooligans. It reflects an aggressively pro-Israel sensibility, with its key figures venerating the Jewish state as a middle-eastern Fort Apache on the front lines of the global war on terror, and urging the US and various European powers to emulate its heavy-handed methods...