A substantial racist uproar is taking place in conservative America, particularly in right-wing radio and television. Reactionary pundits are drawing increased attention to plans to build an Islamic community center in downtown Manhattan, near Ground Zero. Republicans and conservatives have long been known to harbor racist views of Islam, although they\u2019re hardly alone in this. Many on the right frame the entire religion as radical, fundamentalist, and a threat to national security. In light of this pattern, there\u2019s little surprising about the right\u2019s most recent attack on Muslim Americans as a secret, under the radar threat.<\/p>\n
Islam has at times been portrayed on the right as the bedrock threat to American cultural values, and Muslims are depicted as uni-dimensionally set on overthrowing Christianity, enslaving the American public, and imposing \u201cSharia law.\u201d The last warning about \u201cSharia law\u201d \u2013 repeated by pundits like Sean Hannity and Rush Limbaugh \u2013 among many others \u2013 comes off as extremely ignorant, considering that the term \u201cSharia\u201d itself means Islamic law. One should take the warnings of those who use the phrase \u201cSharia law\u201d about as seriously as someone who masquerades as a legal scholar while talking about the importance of \u201cAmerican law law.\u201d<\/p>\n
The American right has also taken to paranoid conspiracy theories charging that Obama is a non-citizen. As the story goes, Obama was really born in Kenya, and his \u201ctake over\u201d of the White House represents a secret victory for radical Islam, since, as we all \u201cknow,\u201d Obama is a closet Muslim terrorist who is allied with Osama bin Laden and other radical Islamists. About half of Republicans believe either that Obama is not a citizen or that they cannot be sure of whether he is really an American citizen or not. These views are shared by nearly 60 percent of self-designated Tea Party supporters.<\/p>\n
Of course, the nuances of the Islamic faith and the mainstream nature of the American Muslim community – the vast majority who oppose terrorism, fundamentalism, or repression of women – have been completely lost in the smug arrogance and incompetence of racists on the right.<\/p>\n
The reactionary right has long been opposed to anything related to Arab culture and the Muslim religion in New York and around the country. One infamous example is New York\u2019s Khalil Gibran Arabic language academy, the first of its kind for the city. Rabid right-wingers railed against it, especially those in the \u201cstop the Madrassa\u201d campaign (many of whom worried about the dangers of \u201cMadrassa schools,\u201d while apparently too ignorant to realize that the word Madrassa itself means school). I argued with one of the leaders of this group on Alan Colmes\u2019 radio show a few years ago. She seemed un-phased by the reality that there was never any concrete evidence that the Khalil Gibran academy was teaching Islamic values. As she announced on the show (despite my scorn for her comments), the very fact that there was no visible evidence of an Islamic curriculum was proof of just how good the schools\u2019 administrators and teachers were of hiding it. Such paranoia demonstrated how far conservative extremism and racism have come in recent years.<\/p>\n
This brings us to the most recent \u201ccontroversy\u201d related to Islam: the Muslim community center planned for Manhattan. Right wingers in radio and at Fox News have gone into overdrive attacking it as a fundamental threat to the American way of life and to American security. Their racist diatribes have been hard for me to listen to, but they remain important to address, if for no other reason than so we can fight the ignorant assumptions behind them head on.<\/p>\n
Here\u2019s a quick review of some of the most outrageous comments made in the American media:<\/p>\n
On Fox News, former Congressman Newt Gingrich attacked the community center for its planned location \u201cright at the edge of a place where, let\u2019s be clear, thousands of Americans were killed in an attack by radical Islamists.\u201d On his website, Gingrich announced that \u201cthere should be no mosque near ground zero in New York so long as there are no churches or synagogues in Saudi Arabia.\u201d Gingrich\u2019s choice to spotlight the radical fundamentalist regime of Saudi Arabia (hypocritically supported by Gingrich himself when he was Speaker of the House in the 1990s) \u2013 while neglecting moderate and secular governments in the Muslim world, speaks volumes about what he considers to be the \u201cessence\u201d of Islam. Gingrich\u2019s language is truly abhorrent; he frames those supporting the community center in Manhattan as part of the same \u201cthey\u201d as the Islamic fundamentalists who perpetrated the 9-11 attacks. As far as Gingrich is concerned, there are no distinctions to be made in the monolithic \u201cthreat\u201d that is the entire U.S. and world Muslim community.<\/p>\n
On Fox, Sarah Palin drew attention to \u201cthose innocent victims, those families of those who were killed in the 9-11 tragedy, it saddens me to think that people don\u2019t understand what building this mosque at such hallowed ground really represents.\u201d Inextricably linked to Palin\u2019s warnings is the assumption that the community center represents a single, overarching fifth column threat from American Muslims. This much was clear when she characterized its construction as \u201can unnecessary provocation\u201d against the people of New York and the American people more generally.<\/p>\n
Fox News host Sean Hannity claimed that the \u201cIman\u201d supporting the building of the community center is a figure who \u201csupports what happened on 9\/11\u201d and \u201cpraises Osama bin Laden.\u201d Hannity, of course, failed to present any evidence linking community center supporters to defending the 9\/11 attacks, but this hardly seemed to matter to him or his guest, Jay Seculow (of the American Center for Law and Justice), who complained that \u201cyou don\u2019t get to build a mosque on a site that\u2019s part of ground zero\u201d because \u201cthat would be like putting at Pearl Harbor a monument of the Kamikaze pilots who tried to destroy U.S. troops, you just don\u2019t do that.\u201d In this case, Muslim Americans who had nothing to do with 9\/11 are apparently the equivalent of Japanese soldiers who killed Americans during World War II.<\/p>\n
Right wing radio icon Rush Limbaugh, not to be outdone, warned that \u201cthe terrorists win\u201d if the community center successfully moves forward. Limbaugh continued, posing a hypothetical comparing Muslim Americans to those who lynched blacks in the post Civil War era: \u201cLet me ask you: What would happen, do you think, if the Ku Klux Klan wanted to establish a memorial at Gettysburg?\u201d Limbaugh also employed a World War II analogy, likening the dangers of the community center to the destruction brought upon Japan by U.S. nuclear weapons: \u201cLet\u2019s go to Hiroshima and Nagasaki and let\u2019s build giant monuments in the shape of nuclear bombs and call it the Manhattan Project. I mean you\u2019d have Americans objecting to that, wouldn\u2019t you?\u201d<\/p><\/blockquote>\n
What is most disturbing about the manufactured controversy involving the community center is the blatant arrogance and stupidity of the right in its warnings of an imminent \u201cthreat.\u201d Anyone who spends thirty seconds researching the Cordoba Group, the organization responsible for promoting the community center, would know that the group\u2019s representative, Feisal Abdul Rauf (targeted in Hannity attacks as pro-bin Laden and pro-9\/11) is actually a public critic of Osama bin Laden and the 9\/11 attacks, and a vocal supporter of improving relations between the U.S. and the Muslim world. None of this is conveyed in any of the right-wing slander above, however, as these pundits are content to showcase their ignorance regarding the basic facts surrounding the community center fiasco they \u201cauthoritatively\u201d \u201creport\u201d on.<\/p>\n
I should note that all of the pundits above premise their attacks on the Manhattan community center with statements that promotion of religious tolerance and cultural diversity are important and necessary. These claims, however, mean nothing when they are followed by fear mongering and attacks on Muslims as part of an all-encompassing threat that derives from some sort of uniform \u201cMuslim culture\u201d \u2013 one that is seen as constituting a danger to U.S. security and the American way of life. These pundits refuse to distinguish between the tiny minority of those throughout the world who support terrorism in the name of Islam and the vast majority of Muslims who reject those beliefs. Their reluctance to take a reasonable, level-headed approach to the study of the Muslim faith is an indicator of their fanaticism, religious bigotry, and racism.<\/p>\n
Rather than asking whether the Manhattan community center represents a threat, we should be asking ourselves what happened to our country when national discourse is hijacked by those who not only have no interest in facts, but see them as an active roadblock to advancing their racist agendas. The blatant racism and incompetence of those attacking the Manhattan community center should be obvious enough to those who pride themselves in promoting multi-culturalism, racial diversity, and respect for religious freedom. That the racist right remains so prominent in national television and radio is a sign, more than anything else, of the steep deterioration of American political discourse.<\/p>\n
Anthony DiMaggio<\/strong> is the editor of media-ocracy (www.media-ocracy.com<\/a>), a daily online magazine devoted to the study of media, public opinion, and current events. He has taught U.S. and Global Politics at Illinois State University and North Central College, and is the author of When Media Goes to War<\/a> (2010) and Mass Media, Mass Propaganda<\/a> (2008). He can be reached at: mediaocracy@gmail.com<\/a><\/p>\n
Source <\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
A substantial racist uproar is taking place in conservative America, particularly in right-wing radio and television. Reactionary pundits are drawing increased attention to plans to build an Islamic community center in downtown Manhattan, near Ground Zero. Republicans and conservatives have long been known to harbor racist views of Islam, although they\u2019re hardly alone in this. Many on the right frame the entire religion as radical, fundamentalist, and a threat to national security. In light of this pattern, there\u2019s little surprising about the right\u2019s most recent attack on Muslim Americans as a secret, under the radar threat. Continue reading