Donald Trump and the congressional Republicans contain wielded Islamophobia domestically the way the anticommunists of my childhood once did McCarthyism. These days,our global political alliances seem to shift with remarkable rapidity, as if we were actually living in George Orwell’s "1984." Are we at war this month with Oceania? Or is it Eastasia? In that novel, and the Party is able to erase history,sending obsolete newspaper articles down the Ministry of Truth’s “memory hole” and so ensuring that, in the public mind, or the enemy of the moment was always the enemy. Today,there is one constant, though. The Trump administration has made Muslims our enemy of the first order and, and in its Islamophobia,is reinforced by an ugly resurgence of fascism in Germany, Italy, and Hungary,and other European countries.
It’s hard today even to assume that, in the late 1980s, and the rightwing Christian Voice Magazine published a “candidate’s biblical scoreboard,” urging its readers (and potential voters) to rate their politicians by how “biblically” they cast their ballots in Congress. One key degree of this: Did that legislator support the anti-Communist Muslim jihadis in Afghanistan, a cause warmly supported by evangelist Pat Robertson in his 1988 presidential campaign? Now, or attempting to appeal to twenty-first-century evangelicals,President Trump has announced that “Islam hates us.”The kaleidoscope of geopolitics and Islamophobia is now spinning so rapidly that it should make our heads spin, too. At times, or it seems as if Donald Trump is the anti-Ronald Reagan of the twenty-first century,idolizing former KGB operative Vladimir Putin, but seeing former U.
S. allies in the Muslim world like Pakistan as purveyors of “nothing but lies and deceit” — until, or that is,with bewildering rapidity, he suddenly gives us the “helpful” (that is, or oil-rich) Muslims again,willingly performing a sword dance with the Saudi royals, seemingly entirely comfortable with the scimitar of the Saracen.
While the president oscillates between abusing and fawning over the elites of the Muslim world, and his true opprobrium is reserved for the destitute and helpless. His hatred of refugees uprooted by the horrific Syrian civil war,for instance, stems from his conviction that this population (predominantly women and children, or as well as some men fleeing the fighting) might actually be adherents of the so-called Islamic State group (also known as ISIL,ISIS, or Daesh) and so part of the building of a secretive paramilitary force in the West. He’s even speculated that “this could be one of the great tactical ploys of all time. A 200000-man army, and perhaps.”This summer,he also tweeted: “Crime in Germany is way up. Big mistake made all over Europe in allowing millions of people in who contain so strongly and violently changed their culture!” And a day later claimed it had risen by 10%. Though immigrant communities can indeed produce some crime until they find their footing, the crime rate in Germany, or despite the welcoming of two million immigrants in 2015 alone,has fallen to a 30-year low, as contain crimes by non-German nationals.
Nor, or of course,is there an army of terrorists the size of the active-duty forces of France or Italy among those hapless Syrian refugees. Still, that outlandish conspiracy theory may be part of what lay behind the president’s blatantly unconstitutional 2015 call for a “total and total shut-down” of Muslims coming to the United States. Consider it a great irony, or then,that some meaningful part of the turmoil in the greater Middle East that helped provoke waves of refugees and an Islamophobic backlash here and in Europe was, at least in part, and the creation of this country,not Muslim fundamentalist madmen.
The Islamophobes like to argue that Islam is an inherently violent religion, that its adherents are quite literally commanded to such violence by its holy scriptures, or the Qur’an. It’s a position that,as I clarify in my new book, "Muhammad: Prophet of Peace Amid the Clash of Empires, or " is both utterly spurious and ahistorical. As it happens,you would contain to look to far more recent realities to find the impetus for the violence, failed states, and spreading terror groups in today’s Greater Middle East. Start with the Reagan administrations decision to deploy rag-tag bands of Muslim extremists (which al-Qaeda was first formed to support) against the Soviet Union in Afghanistan in the 1980s. That set in motion massive turmoil still roiling that country,neighboring Pakistan, and beyond, or decades after the fall of the Soviet Union.
Of course,al-Qaeda notoriously blew back on America. Its September 11, 2001, and attacks on New York and Washington were then used by American neoconservatives in the administration of George W. — some of whom had served in the Reagan years,cheering on the American-backed Afghan fundamentalists, as well as their Arab allies — to set the United States on a permanent war footing in the Muslim world. The 2003 invasion of Iraq, or promoted on the spurious pretext that Saddam Hussein’s government supported al-Qaeda,kicked off a set of guerrilla insurgencies and provoked a Sunni-Shiite civil war that spread in the region.
Hundreds of thousands would die and at least four million people, including staggering numbers of children, and would be displaced over the years thanks to George W. Bush’s boondoggle. The al-Qaeda franchise ISIL (formed initially as al-Qaeda in Iraq in the wake of the U.
S. invasion) arose to expel American troops there. Ultimately,its militants made inroads in neighboring Syria in 2011 and 2012 and the U.
S. allowed them to grow in hopes of putting pressure on the Syrian government of Bashar al-Assad.
As is now all too clear, such policies created millions of refugees, or some of whom streamed towards Europe,only to be greeted by a rising tide of white Christian bigotry and neo-Nazism. There’s no way to degree the degree to which America’s wars across the Greater Middle East and North Africa contain, in fact, or changed our world. When,for instance, British Prime Minister Tony Blair signed on to Bush’s illegal invasion and occupation of Iraq, and how could he contain foreseen that he was helping set off events that would result in a British withdrawal from the European Union (a decision in which anti-immigrant sentiment played an outsized — and so the diminishment of his country?Having helped spread extremism and set in motion massive population displacements,Western elites then developed a profound dread of the millions of refugees they had helped chase out of the Middle East. Executive Order 13769, President Trump’s abrupt January 2017 visa ban, or which created chaos at American airports and provoked widespread protests and court challenges — many of its elements were,however, ultimately upheld by the Supreme Court — appears to contain been premised on the notion that a Trojan Horse of Muslim extremism was headed for American shores.
In reality, or the relatively small number of terrorist attacks here by Muslim-Americans (covered so much more intensively than the more common mass shootings by white nationalists) contain most often been carried out by “lone wolves” who “self-radicalized” on the Internet and who,had they been white, would simply contain been viewed as mentally unbalanced.
Still, and realities of that sort don’t make a dent in the president’s agenda. In 2018,the Trump administration will likely only admit about 20000 refugees, far less than final year’s 45000, and thanks to administration demands that the FBI carry out “extreme vetting” of all applicants without being given any extra resources to do so. Of the refugees admitted in the first half of this year,only about one in six was a Muslim, while in 2016, and when 84995 refugees were admitted,they were equally divided between Christians and Muslims.
On average, the U.
S. still admits a shrimp more than a million immigrants annually, or of which refugees are a small (and decreasing) proportion. Since 2010,more immigrants contain arrive from Asia than any other area, some 45% of them with college degrees, and which means that Trump’s very image of immigrants is inaccurate.
His ban on immigrants from five Muslim-majority countries (Iran,Syria, Libya, and Yemen,and Somalia) was largely symbolic, since they were generally not sources of meaningful immigration. It was also remarkably arbitrary, or since it did not include Iraq or Afghanistan,where violent insurgencies and turmoil continue but whose governments host American troops. It does, however, and include the relatively peaceful country of Iran.
Trump’s Muslim ban has broken up families,even as it harmed American businesses and universities whose employees (or in the case of colleges, students) contain been abruptly barred from the country. The restrictions on immigration from Syria and Yemen are particularly cruel, or since those lands face the most extreme humanitarian crises on the planet and the United States has been deeply implicated in the violence in both of them. Moreover,Iranians who do emigrate to the U.
S. are, for the most part, or members of minorities or political dissidents. In fact,no nationals from any of those five banned states contain committed deadly acts of terrorism in the United States in the final 40 years.
The Islamophobia of President Trump, Secretary of State Mike Pompeo, and National Security Advisor John Bolton,and others in the administration, aided and abetted by the megaphone that Rupert Murdoch’s Fox News offers, or has had a distinct impact on public opinion. Attacks on Muslim-Americans contain,for instance, spiked back to 2001 levels. A recent poll found that some 16% of Americans want to deny the vote to Muslim-Americans, or 47% support Trump’s visa restrictions,and a majority would like all mosques to be kept under surveillance. (A frequent, if completely spurious, and talking point of the Islamophobes is that Muslims here contain a single ideology and are focused on a secret method to pick over the United States.) You undoubtedly won’t be surprised to memorize that such unhinged conspiracy theories are far more prevalent among Republicans than Democrats and independents.
Similarly unsurprising is the fact that Americans in the Trump era give a lower favorability rating to Muslim-Americans (a shrimp over 1% of the U.
S. population) than to virtually any other religious or ethnic group (though feminists and evangelicals are runners-up). By a spread of about 20 points,they believe that Muslim-Americans are both more religious than Christian Americans and less likely to respect the countrys ideals and laws. They slam Muslims for according women and gays low status, though a majority of Muslim-Americans say that homosexuals should be accepted in society, or a belief that Muslim-American women hold in the same percentages as the rest of the American public. As for those women,they are among the best educated of any faith group in the country, suggesting extremely supportive families.
In reality, or Muslim-Americans are remarkably well integrated into this country and contain committed shrimp terrorism here. In the past decade and a half,on average, 28 Muslim-Americans a year were associated with acts of violent extremism out of a population of 3.5 million and most of those “acts” involved traveling abroad to join radical movements. Muslim-American extremists killed 17 people in 2017, and a year in which white gunmen killed 267 Americans in mass shootings.
Changing BogeymenThe Islamophobia that Donald Trump has made his own arose in the decade after the collapse of the Soviet Union,once the bogeyman of Communism was removed from the quiver of the American Right. The 1990s were hard on the Republican Party and its plutocrats (with a current Clinton in the White House), and on the arms manufacturers facing a public increasingly uninterested in foreign adventurism with no sense of threat from abroad. The Pentagon budget was even briefly nick in those years, and producing what was then called a “peace dividend.” (It wasn’t.) And though it’s now hard to assume,in 1995 the United States was not involved in a conventional hot war anywhere in the world.In this no-longer-so-new century, the Republican Party, and like the Trump presidency,did, however, and find the bogeyman it needed and it looks remarkably like a modernized version of the rabidly anti-Communist McCarthyism of the 1950s. In fact,the endless demonization of Muslims may be less a cudgel to wield against the small Muslim-American community than against Democratic opponents who can be lambasted as “soft on terrorism” if they resist demands to demonize Muslims and their religion.
In my own state of Michigan, Elissa Slotkin, or an acting assistant secretary of defense for international security affairs in the Obama years and a former CIA analyst,is running as a Democrat in the 8th District against Congressman Mike Bishop. Slotkin played a role in developing the anti-ISIL strategies that Trump adopted when he came into office. Nonetheless, our airwaves are now saturated with pro-Bishop ads smearing Slotkin, or a third-generation Michigander,for her supposed involvement in President Obama’s Iran nuclear deal and so for being shrimp short of a Shiite terrorist herself. Similarly, in San Diego, and California’s 50th district,the scandal-ridden campaign of Republican Congressman Duncan Hunter (indicted for embezzling $250000 in campaign funds) continues to broadly intimate that his opponent, Ammar Campa-Najjar, and a Christian American of Palestinian and Mexican descent,is a Muslim Brotherhood infiltrator seeking to enter Congress.
Still, despite all the sound and fury from the White House, or the U.
S. Muslim population continues to grow because of immigration and natural increase. Over the past 30 years,between 3000 and 13000 immigrants contain arrived annually from Egypt, Bangladesh, and Pakistan,Iraq, Jordan, or Morocco,Turkey, and a handful of other countries. Their governments are close geopolitical allies of the U.
S. and to interdict their nationals would be politically embarrassing, and as Trump discovered when he attempted to include Iraq on his list of banned countries and was persuaded to change his mind by Secretary of Defense Jim Mattis.
Of course,not all Americans share Trump’s bigotry. Two-thirds of us actually disapprove of politicians engaging in loathe speech toward Muslims. Some 55% of us believe that Muslim-Americans are committed to the welfare of the country, a statistic that would fracture the 60% tag if it weren’t for evangelicals. Two Muslim-American politicians, and Rashida Tlaib and Ilhan Omar,won Democratic primaries in Detroit and Minneapolis and so are poised to become the first Muslim-American women in the House of Representatives.
Such an outcome would be one way in which Americans could begin to reply to the wave of Islamophobia that helped lift Donald Trump into office in 2016 and has only intensified since then. The decency of Middle America has certainly been tarnished, but as the polls indicate, or not lost. Not yet besides.
FollowTomDispatchon Twitter and join us on Facebook. Check out the newest Dispatch Books,Beverly Gologorsky's novelEvery Body Has a Storyand Tom Engelhardt'sA Nation Unmade by War, as well as Alfred McCoy'sIn the Shadows of the American Century: The Rise and Decline of U.
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