The Christian minister and activist Bryan “No More Mosques, Period” Fischer isn’t new to whipping up xenophobic, anti-Islam hysteria.
The Supreme Court has declined to block the $20,000 court-imposed fine against Orly Taitz for filing frivolous birther lawsuits.
The federal investigation of Tom Delay’s ties to Jack Abramoff, one of several aspects of Delay’s iron-fisted rule over the era of excess on Capitol Hill that were under scrutiny, has ended with no charges against the former House majority leader.
Mark Halperin has a highly unusual and painfully quaint column today imploring the GOP not to demagogue the Mosque issue for votes in the mid-term election. The reason simply being that it’s not right. This is “your moment”, he writes and commends Republicans for having “restricted yourself as much as possible to an economic message, eschewing social issues and foreign policy as you try to establish contrasts for the electorate between your brand and the Obama-Pelosi-Reid record.”
What stands out most is not only Halperin’s general aping of Republican language but his seemingly genuine belief that there’s anyone there to appeal to. As Eric Cantor might say, C’mon. The institutional Republican party has fully (though with some notable and honorable exceptions) hoisted its sail to xenophobia and religious hatred. And as Halperin notes, at least for motivating their own voters, it’s simply good politics. This is not something anybody happened into.
I’ve given a lot of thought to how we’re going to cover this now that we’ve got our full complement of reporters back from vacation. And we have various ideas on particular questions that we’re going to dig into. But some of what’s required is simply to provide witness.
For most of us who are anything but quite young, we grew up in America where Islam, as a domestic social or cultural reality, was close to invisible. That doesn’t mean there weren’t any Muslims in the US. The fact that some of our most searing and for many of us some of our first experiences with Islam came in the form of a catastrophic terrorist attack by Islamic radicals creates a situation ripe for exploitation. And here we have it. We’re in a midst of a spasm of nativist panic and raw and raucous appeals to race and religious hatred. What effects this will have on the November election strikes me as not particularly relevant. What’s important is compiling some record of what’s afoot, some catalog for understanding in the future who was responsible and who was so willing to disgrace their country and their principles for cheap advantage.
(Ed.Note: Reading this post over again, while I believe Halperin’s take is naive and ignoring how much Republican elected officials have already made the decision to juice up and fan this fire, still the most important distinction today is between people who will stand up and say this is wrong and those who stand silent.)
Over the weekend, in the numerous articles written in response to President Obama’s comments on the mosque furor, you’ll notice that a frequent refrain is to the purported opposition to the Cordoba House project (aka the ‘Ground Zero Mosque’) from families of 9/11 victims. And as evidence of this opposition you’ll frequently see quotes from a woman named Debra Burlingame, whose brother was the pilot aboard the plane flown into the Pentagon on 9/11.
Always in such cases it’s important to recognize that unlike most of us who experienced 9/11 as a national or communal tragedy, she suffered it as a personal one. That’s real. I respect that grief. And I believe in giving people stricken by overwhelming loss a wide berth in assessing the lessons they draw from the tragedies that affected them.
That is not the same, however, as turning a blind eye when lazy journalists present her as representing or even being representative of the families of victims of the 9/11 attacks. The most cursory googling shows that she’s been advocating a string of right-wing positions going back over the last decade. Indeed, she’s the cofounder with Liz Cheney of Keeping America Safe.
Also very worth noting is that none of the 9/11 Families groups who actually seem to be membership organizations made up of families of the victims seem to have taken positions on the mosque issue at all. I looked at the websites of several such organizations. And they each contain ‘about’ pages with some information about the organization, its membership and in most cases boards of directors. The website of Burlingame’s group, 9/11 Families for a Safe & Strong America, contains no such information. But it’s statement of purpose does give some sense of viewpoint: “The war against sharia is a struggle to preserve our Republic, our religion, and our civilization, and to set free a suffering humanity.”
Since almost three thousand people died as a result of the attacks, many thousands count as family members of the dead. And given that the public at large is at best divided over mosque question and likely on balance against it, it stands to figure that there’s a similar spectrum of opinion among these families. Yet I have not seen any clear evidence that as a group these people are against the Cordoba House project.
A few weeks back I asked whether we weren’t seeing a perceptible rise in Islamophobia, paradoxically many years after the 9/11 attacks. And if we are, why? There are many potential and probable reasons. But of all the emails I received, the couple that struck me most were the ones that pointed to George W. Bush. Yes, him, George W. Bush. Whatever his other errors and shortcomings, with the exception of a few very poorly chosen words at the outset (calling the War Against Terror a “crusade“), Bush was quite consistent in arguing that America was not in a war against Islam. And that put a real brake on the forces of xenophobia, extremist religion and religious hatred, almost all of which were in his own party.
For those of us who believe his policies in the Middle East were close to catastrophic, this fact may seem of somewhat trivial importance. But in the US I think it was actually a pretty big deal. Conservatives’ ability to play on xenophobic fears about President Obama’s race and Islamic ancestry has clearly played into the politics. But as TPM Reader CB wrote last month …
His being President and the nominal head of the GOP basically kept a lid on many of the fanatical Islamophobes and the few who did rear their ugly heads (Tancredo, Bachmann and others) were essentially kept away from the Party and to some degree the media (by being told to keep their mouths basically shut on the issue or just being ignored by the media because they were viewed as merely the fringe).
Which brings me to a very interesting piece in Politico today. In this piece by Ben Smith and Maggie Haberman argue that the GOP’s harsh turn against Islam represents an effort to repudiate the former president’s legacy on this front and embrace the ‘Clash of Civilizations’ worldview or what might more properly be termed a Holy War between America and Islam.
Maybe we need to repeal the 1st Amendment too?
Times do change.
This is quite something. Politico just sent out a breaking news alert claiming that President Obama is now ‘backing off’ his support for building an Islamic Center near Ground Zero.
With criticism mounting of his support for the construction of an Islamic center two blocks from Ground Zero in Manhattan, President Barack Obama on Saturday defended his decision to wade into the controversy the night before, but backed off from his previous stance. “In this country we treat everybody equally and in accordance with the law, regardless of race, regardless of religion,” Obama said when asked about his remarks at a White House dinner Friday marking the start of Ramadan. He did, however, emphasize that he was not endorsing the project, just the organizers’ right to build it.
And yet what did the president say just last night? Word for word …
But let me be clear: as a citizen, and as President, I believe that Muslims have the same right to practice their religion as anyone else in this country. That includes the right to build a place of worship and a community center on private property in lower Manhattan, in accordance with local laws and ordinances.
Perhaps anticipating a response to this effort to create a false controversy, they write in their current front page feature …
But his comments Friday night were widely interpreted as an endorsement of plans to build a mosque a few blocks away from where nearly 3,000 Americans perished at the hands of Islamic terrorists on 9/11 – an interpretation the White House hadn’t disputed, up until Obama’s comments in Florida.
This was in response to the president himself clearly making this distinction. He’s not getting into the identity of the builders or whether he agrees on the exact placement. They have the right to build on private property. We’re Americans. We’d don’t discriminate on the basis of religion. Even the AP, more accurately, refers to the president “expanding” on his statement, though perhaps better to say ‘countering willful distortion.’ The CBS version of the AP story says he “expounded” on the issue. (ABC was a bit in Politico’s direction, though nearly as egregious.) Even with the aim of selling copy and appealing to its core readership’s biases, this stands out as a troubling example of organized lying on the part of Politico’s editors. It will be interesting to see who else follows their line.
Late Update: Notably, whereas Politico writes that the White House had made no effort to suggest that the president’s original statement referred to a equal right to build rather than support for this particular effort, the Times says that had indeed done just that. What stands out here is that there is nothing surprising about Obama’s stance since I believe this is the stance of most people who take a 1st Amendment stance on this. Who the people behind the project are is beside the point. Getting drawn into the design of the building is irrelevant. We don’t discriminate on the basis of religion. Call it the American values position.
We now have official Washington’s response and take on the President’s speech last night stating that Muslim-Americans have every right to build an Islamic center on private property near Ground Zero. It comes in the form of Politico’s ubiquitous and closely followed “Playbook” email. As the author puts it, the statement poses a basic choice: is it “Obama delivering on his status as a breakthrough figure on American history”, by which we mean a feel-good affirmative action president with a foreign-sounding name or “elitist arrogance.”
It continues with various responses — mainly from chortling but unnamed Republican operatives marveling at the president’s being out of touch or courting a backlash from regular Americans but also one from Michael Bloomberg and a circumspect response from a White House aide.
The stand out for me was the response from what the author labels a “middle American” …
“This is too much. It’s not insensitivity that’s leading these guys to build this mosque. It’s a monument to their conquer of the site — just like the Al-Aqsa Mosque in Jerusalem or the conversion of the Hagia Sophia (former primary church of the Byzantine empire in Istanbul) into a mosque”
There’s also what’s titled a “flashback” to what is apparently the most apt comparison, President Bush’s impromptu speech at Ground Zero two days after the attack: “”I can hear you! I can hear you! The rest of the world hears you! And the people — and the people who knocked these buildings down will hear all of us soon!”
It’s a quite a moment. We’re still hung up on the Turks turning the Hagia Sophia into a Mosque in 1453? Soon after 9/11 we marveled at how the bin Ladenites could still be so aggrieved over the abolition of the Caliphate in 1923 and the loss of Muslim Spain in 1492. But I guess times change.
No doubt the president’s advisors would much have preferred not to address this at all, wish it had never come up. But it’s difficult to imagine any president doing otherwise. We learn again that saying you’re for “democratic values” and freedom actually means being for “democratic values” and freedom. Are we in the tradition of the opening and plural societies of Amsterdam and London and America? Or the closed and authoritarian ones of Madrid and Moscow? The infrastructure of the Republican party has chosen to hoist its sail to religious bigotry. There’s no other way to put it. The president has done the only thing he could possibly do which is to state clearly that we’re Americans and we don’t discriminate on the basis of religious belief.
As the president said …
The Citizens of the United States of America have a right to applaud themselves for having given to mankind examples of an enlarged and liberal policy: a policy worthy of imitation. All possess alike liberty of conscience and immunities of citizenship. It is now no more that toleration is spoken of, as if it was by the indulgence of one class of people, that another enjoyed the exercise of their inherent national gifts. For happily the Government of the United States, which gives to bigotry no sanction, to persecution no assistance requires only that they who live under its protection should demean themselves as good citizens, in giving it on all occasions their effectual support.