Racists and religious bigots endanger our troops and undermine U.S. foreign policy

Posted by AzBlueMeanie:

"The whole world is watching! The whole world is watching!"

Yes it is.

And what the world is watching is an America gone insane. The lunatics have taken over the asylum, and there is no responsible adult supervision in charge.

America's racists and religious bigots on the far-right fringe are being given free rein to spew their venomous hatred in the conservative media, in particular the FAUX News Fraudcasting Network, which is taking the lead on stoking racial and religious hatred and fear as a political strategy to get conservatives elected. The Republican establishment has lost control of its far-right fringe and has decided to go along for the ride in the self-interest of regaining power at any price.

It is a tried and true political strategy of combining anti-communist McCarthyism (now anti-Muslim) and Richard Nixon's "white fright" southern strategy (now anti-immigrant). It is a strategy steeped in defining one's political opposition as "other than American" and "illegitimate."  It's not about the mosque — it's America's war on "the Other". 

This deadly concoction of xenophobic nativism, racism and religious bigotry has not been treated with legitimacy by politicians and the news media in this country in a very long time. It is alien to our founding principles and the long-cherished values of this country. It is un-American, and it must stop, now.

The face of America that these racists and religious bigots are painting in the eyes of the world demonstrates that Americans are not true to their history, founding principles and long-cherished values. Americans do not believe in their own Constitution and Bill of Rights so why should the rest of the world be influenced by such hypocrites?

American troops have been fighting in Muslim countries — Afghanistan and Iraq — on behalf of Muslims and for the benefit of Muslims. These wars ostensibly were to give peace loving Muslims the opportunity to free themselves from a brutal dictatorship and a radical Islamist terrorist organization, and to form a stable government that can peacefully coexist with the United States as an ally.

The actions of these racists and religious bigots here at home sends the message to the Muslim world that the United States is not an honest partner in peace and cannot be trusted. Far-right fringe extremists are stereotyping and demonizing all Muslims as radical Islamist terrorists. These extremists want a culture war with Islam, attacking the faith of 1.8 billion Muslims worldwide.

When these racists and religious bigots behave as they do in the video below, it is the greatest recruiting tool that a radical Islamist terrorist groups like al Qaida could ever hope for. Americans angrily rejecting their own history and long-cherished values of religious freedom and tolerance to deny Muslim American citizens their constitutional religious freedom and demonizing all Muslims, including U.S. citizens, as "terrorists" in their own land. Some far-right fringe extremists have gone so far as to demand legislation to ban the construction of any new mosques in the United States and even to ban the Muslim faith itself in the United States. These far-right fringe extremists are unwitting recruiters for Islamist terrorist organizations.

When American troops are killed by these radical Islamist terrorists in Afghanistan, Iraq, or Pakistan, their blood is on the hands of these American racists and religious bigots who served to recruit these terrorists. These racists and religious bigots are endangering our troops abroad and undermining U.S. foreign policy. They are making America less secure and less safe in the world. They are a threat to our national security, as well as a threat to America losing its very soul.

And these racists and religious bigots are telling our troops that the mission they believed they have been fighting to accomplish for the past nine years is a lie; that fighting on behalf of Muslims and for the benefit of Muslims was all in vain.

From the The Rachel Maddow Blog:

Glenn Greenwald calls this video from Sunday's rally against the planned Islamic community center with a prayer roomin Manhattan — a.k.a. the Ground Zero Mosque — a sign of "some extremely ugly stuff that's been unleashed."

And so it is. An African-American man, identified on YouTube as a union carpenter who works at Ground Zero, walks through the crowd and suddenly becomes the symbol of everything Islam. He protests that he's not Muslim and that the people chanting "No mosque here" don't know anything about him. They won't let up. Eventually we get to "He must have voted for Obama" and "Mohamed's a pig."

The man seems to be a target because the mob needs a target, and anyone who looks different from them will suffice.

Eugene Robinson observed in his column today The right-wing, blinded by its own hysteria:

When did the loudmouths of the American right become such a bunch of fraidy-cats and professional victims? Or is it all just an act?

The hysteria over plans for an innocuous Muslim community center in Lower Manhattan — two blocks from Ground Zero, amid an urban hodgepodge of office buildings, eateries and strip clubs — is wildly out of proportion. It would be laughable if it didn't threaten to do great harm to the global campaign against Islamic terrorism.

* * *

Yet right-wing commentators and politicians have twisted themselves in knots to portray the Park51 project as a grievous assault — and "the American people" as victims. Victims of what? Rauf's sinister plot to despoil the city with a fitness center, a swimming pool and — shudder — a space for the performing arts?

The whole "controversy" is ridiculous. Yet conservatives who should know better are doing their best to exploit widespread ignorance about Islam by transforming it into fear and anger. They imply, but don't come right out and say, that it was Islam itself that attacked the United States on Sept. 11, 2001, rather than an extremist fringe that espouses what the vast majority of the world's Muslims consider a perversion of the faith.

* * *

Message to anyone who will listen: You're a victim. Be very afraid.

In the process, this anti-mosque pitchfork brigade is surely recruiting terrorists left and right. As Ahmad Moussalli, a professor at the American University of Beirut, told the Los Angeles Times: "Rejecting this has become like rejecting Islam itself." All the Islamophobic rhetoric tends to reinforce the jihadists' main argument, which is that the United States and the West seek to destroy the faith held dear by more than 1 billion souls.

The thing is, though, that the manufactured brouhaha over the Park51 project is part of a larger pattern in which the far right embraces victimhood and stokes fear. The faction that likes to portray itself as a bunch of John Waynes and "mama grizzlies," it turns out, spends an awful lot of time cowering in the corner and complaining about how beastly everyone else is being.

Witness the frequent eruptions over instances of reverse racism — real or imagined.

* * *

And look at the hysteria over illegal immigration. Facts don't matter — for example, that the flow of undocumented migrants has decreased, or that border enforcement under President Obama is much tougher than under George W. Bush, or that illegal immigrants are not responsible for any kind of crime wave.

* * *

Is the far right really afraid of its own shadow? Do these people really have so little faith in our nation's strength, resilience and values? I hope this is all just cynical political calculation, because there are genuine threats and challenges out there. We'll be better off meeting them with a spine, not a whine.

E.J. Dionne, Jr. observed in his column yesterday Why won't the GOP say 'no' to extremism?:

The principled case that must be made is that the brand of conservatism seeking power this year is irresponsible, incoherent and untrue to the best of its own traditions. That's clear enough at the most basic level of policy: Conservatives can say that they are deeply worried about deficits, or they can insist that tax cuts matter most. But when they say they can reduce taxes and trim deficits at the same time, they are either deluded or deceptive, and they are playing voters for fools.

But there is something far more troubling at work: the rise of an angry, irrational extremism — the sort that says Obama is a Muslim socialist who wasn't born in the United States — that was not part of Ronald Reagan's buoyant conservative creed. Do Republican politicians believe in the elaborate conspiracy theories being spun by Glenn Beck and parts of the Tea Party? If not, why won't they say so? Liberals who refused to break with the far left in the 1950s and '60s were accused of being blinded by a view that saw "no enemies on the left." Are conservatives who should know better now falling into a "no enemies on the right" trap?

* * *

[H]ave we not crossed into never-never land? Where are the responsible conservatives who should be denouncing such crackpottery?

What the current right has to offer is far worse than anything Bush put forward, which means that this election isn't even about whether we'll go back into the ditch. It's about whether a movement that's gone over a cliff will be rewarded for doing so. A victory for this style of conservatism will be a defeat for the kind of conservatism the country needs. And that's a worthy matter to put to the voters.