On Mar 30, 9:10 am, Tommy News <tommysn...@gmail.com> wrote:
> The Right Wing's Election-Year Islamophobia Fuels a New Smear Campaign
> Against Obama
> In an election in which racist slogans are off the table, the
> Islamophobic accusation of "acting Muslim" remains a politically
> acceptable chauvinism.
> March 29, 2012 |
>
> Those who fervently believe that Barack Obama is a Muslim generally
> practice their furtive religion in obscure recesses of the Internet.
> Once in a while, they'll surface in public to remind the news media
> that no amount of evidence can undermine their convictions.
>
> In October 2008, at a town hall meeting in Minnesota for Republican
> presidential candidate John McCain, a woman called Obama "an Arab."
> McCain responded, incongruously enough, that Obama was, in fact, "a
> decent family man" and not an Arab at all. In an echo of this, a woman
> recently stood up at a town hall in Florida and began a question for
> Republican presidential hopeful Rick Santorum by asserting that the
> president "is an avowed Muslim." The audience cheered, and Santorum
> didn't bother to correct her.
>
> Though they belong to a largely underground cult, the members of the
> Obama-is-Muslim congregation number as many as one third of all
> Republicans. Arecent poll found that only 14% percent of Republicans
> in Alabama and Mississippi believe that the president is Christian.
>
> These true believers treat their scraps of evidence like holy relics:
> the president's middle name, his grandfather's religion, a widely
> circulated photo of Obama in a turban. They occasionally traffic in
> outright fabrications: that he attended a radical madrasa in Indonesia
> as a child or that he put his hand on the Qur'an to be sworn in as
> president. An even more apocalyptic subset believes Obama to be
> nothing short of the anti-Christ.
>
> By and large, however, this cult doesn't attract mainstream support
> from the larger church of Obama haters. Indeed, these more orthodox
> faithful have carefully shifted the debate from Obama being Muslim to
> Obama actingMuslim. Evangelical pundits, presidential candidates, and
> the right-wing media have all ramped up their attacks on the president
> for, as Baptist preacher Franklin Graham put it recently on MSNBC,
> "giving Islam a pass."
>
> The conservative mainstream still calls the president's religious
> beliefs into question, but they stop just short of accusing him of
> apostasy and concealment. What they consider safe is the assertion
> that Obama is acting as if he were Muslim. In this way, Republican
> mandarins are cleverly channeling a conspiracy theory into a policy
> position.
>
> There is a whiff of desperation in all this. After all, it's not an
> easy time for the GOP. The economy shows modest signs of improvement.
> The Republican presidential candidates are still engaged in a
> fratricidal primary. By expanding counterterrorism operations and
> killing Osama bin Laden, the president has effectively removed
> national security from the list of Republican talking points.
>
> One story, however, still ties together so many narrative threads for
> conservatives. Charges that the president is a socialist or a Nazi or
> an elitist supporter of college education certainly push some buttons.
> But the single surefire way of grabbing the attention of the media and
> the public -- as well as appealing to the instincts of the Republican
> base -- is to assert, however indirectly, that Barack Obama is a
> Manchurian candidate sent from the Islamic world.
>
> Obama and the Muslim World
>
> A succession of Republican candidates have attempted to run to the
> right of party favorite Mitt Romney by asserting that only a true
> conservative can defeat Obama in November. Most of them boasted of the
> same powerful backer. Michele Bachmann, Herman Cain, Rick Perry, and
> Rick Santorum all declared that God asked them to run for higher
> office. Together with Newt Gingrich, they have deployed various
> methods of appealing to their constituencies, but none is more potent
> than religion.
>
> Rick Santorum, a Catholic and the favorite of the evangelical
> community, has been particularly adept at using his soapbox as a
> pulpit. The president subscribes to a "phony theology," Santorum has
> claimed, "not a theology based on the Bible, a different theology."
> Although he occasionally asserts that "Obama's personal faith is none
> of my concern," he nonetheless speaks of the president's attempt to
> "impose values on people of faith"-- implying that the president is
> certainly no member of that community.
>
> In his attacks on the president's spirituality, Santorum is cleverly
> attacking Mitt Romney's Mormonism as well (a theology also based on
> text other than the Bible). At the same time, the suggestion that
> Obama is somehow "other" operates as a code word for "Black" in a race
> in which race goes largely unmentioned.
>
> It's an odd set of charges. Obama, after all, did everything possible
> during his first presidential campaign to foreground his Christianity.
> He was repeatedly seen praying in churches and assiduously avoided
> mosques. He never made a campaign appearance with a prominent Muslim.
> He talked about his "personal relationship" with Jesus Christ.
>
> The day after he clinched the Democratic Party nomination in 2008, he
> gave a speech to the American Israel Public Affairs Committee (AIPAC)
> in which he reaffirmed that he was "a true friend of Israel." Although
> he would occasionally mention his Muslim relatives and the time he
> spent in Indonesia as a child, he generally did whatever he could to
> emphasize only two out of the three major monotheisms.
>
> As president, Obama has certainly "reached out" to the Muslim world.
> In Cairo, in June 2009, he spoke of seeking "a new beginning between
> the United States and Muslims around the world, one based on mutual
> interest and mutual respect, and one based upon the truth that America
> and Islam are not exclusive and need not be in competition."
>
> That new beginning, however, has yet to come. At home, for example,
> the Obama administration provided federal funds that the New York City
> Police Department then used to expand its surveillance of Muslim
> American neighborhoods. (Even the CIA was involved in this "human
> mapping" project.) The FBI has spent the Obama years rounding up
> suspected Muslim terrorists in operations that flirt dangerously with
> entrapment. The administration has expanded the no-fly list, though
> because the list is secret it's difficult to know whether
> Muslim-Americans are specifically profiled. Anecdotal evidence,
> however, suggests that they are.
>
> The administration's record internationally is even more
> disappointing. The conduct of U.S. troops in Afghanistan -- the night
> raids, massacres (including the recent murders of 16 Afghan
> villagers), and the Qur'an burnings -- have enraged local Muslims.
> Obama has expanded the CIA's drone air campaign by a considerable
> margin in the Pakistani borderlands. Civilian casualties,
> overwhelmingly Muslim, continue to occur there and in other "overseas
> contingency operations" as U.S. Special Operations Forces have
> dramatically expanded their activities in the Muslim world.
>
> Despite right-wing charges, Obama has maintained a tight relationship
> with Israel and the Israeli leadership. As former New Republiceditor
> Peter Beinart concludes, "The story of Obama's relationship to [Prime
> Minister] Netanyahu and his American Jewish allies is, fundamentally,
> a story of acquiescence."
>
> It's no surprise, then, that surveys in six Middle East countries
> taken just before and two months after the Cairo speech in 2009, the
> Brookings Institution and Zogby International discoveredthat the
> number of respondents optimistic about the president's approach to the
> region had suffered a dramatic drop: from 51% to 16%. A 2011 Pew poll
> found that U.S. favorability ratings had continued their slide in
> Jordan (to 13%), Pakistan (12%), and Turkey (10%).
>
> And yet, perversely, the hard right in the U.S. maintains that the
> Obama administration has behaved in quite the opposite manner.
> "There's something sick about an administration which is so
> pro-Islamic that it can't even tell the truth about the people who are
> trying to kill us," Republican presidential candidate Newt Gingrich
> typically said while campaigning in Georgia.
>
> Pro-Islamic? That's news to the Islamic world.
>
> But it's nothing new to the world of the U.S. right wing, which
> portrays Obama as anti-Israel and weak in the face of Islamic
> terrorism. At best, the president emerges from these attacks as a
> booster of Islam; at worst, he is the leader of a genuine fifth
> column.
>
> Although the administration's policy on Iran is virtually
> indistinguishable from those of his Republican challengers, they have
> presented him as an appeaser. The president who "surged" in
> Afghanistan somehow becomes, through the magic of election-year
> sloganeering, a pacifist patsy. Although Obama never endorsed the
> location of the "Ground Zero mosque," his opponents have suggested
> that he did. Although he was slow to withdraw support from U.S. allies
> in the Middle East like Hosni Mubarak in Egypt and Ben Ali in Tunisia,
> Republican candidates have accused the president of practically
> campaigning on behalf of the Islamist parties that have grown in
> influence as a result of the Arab Spring.
>
> Barack Obama, the right wing has discovered, does not have to be
> Muslim to convince American voters that he has a suspect, even
> foreign, agenda. They have instead established a much lower
> evidentiary standard: he only has to actMuslim.
>
> For this, they don't need a birth certificate. All they need are
> allegations, however spurious, that the president is in league with
> Iran's Ahmadinejad, Arab Spring jihadists, and anti-Israel forces at
> home. This more subtle but no less ugly Islamophobia has already
> insinuated itself into the 2012 elections in a potentially more
> damaging way than did the overt disparagement of Obama's religious
> bona fides back in 2008.
>
> The Upcoming Elections
>
> The 2010 midterm elections witnessed a sharp uptick in anti-Islamic
> sentiment. In addition to the concocted "Ground Zero mosque"
> controversy, Florida preacher Terry Jones threatened to burn the
> Qur'an in front of the world's cameras; a group called Stop
> Islamization of America bought anti-Islamic ads on buses in major
> cities; and a movement to pass anti-Sharia legislation at a state
> level began in Oklahoma. In response to this brushfire of hatred,
> Timemagazine devoted a cover story to Islamophobia that year. On the
> right at least, Islam seemed on the way to becoming a litmus test in
> the way communism was during the Cold War.
>
> Two years later, the hysteria seems to have subsided. The Islamophobes
> haven't gone into hiding. They tried to organize an advertising
> boycott of the TV show All-American Muslim; they campaigned against
> halal meats. But these efforts didn't get much traction.
>
> Meanwhile, Park51-- the real name of the cultural center inaccurately
> dubbed the "Ground Zero mosque" -- opened in its original Park Street
> location with an exhibition by a Jewish photographer. Terry Jones is
> pursuing a quixotic bid for the presidency far from the media
> spotlight. Time has returned several times to the topic of
> Islamophobia, particularly after Anders Breivik's bombing and shooting
> rampage in Norway in July 2011, but with none of the intensity of the
> summer of 2010. The anti-Sharia campaign has passed legislation in
> several states, and laws are pending in more than a dozen more. But
> the 10th Circuit Court of Appeals ruled the Oklahoma anti-Sharia
> statute unconstitutional, and the anti-Sharia crowd has been unable to
> provide a single piece of evidence that Islamic law poses any
> challenge to the U.S. legal system.
>
> Don't be fooled, though, by the relative quiet. It's still early in
> the election cycle. The Republicans, arrayed in a circular firing
> squad, have been largely focusing their attacks on each other. The
> last man standing will marshal his resources to challenge Obama. In
> the unlikely event that Rick Santorum emerges as the Republican
> candidate, religion will be central to his attack on Obama and the
> Democrats.
>
> Mitt Romney has a more ambivalent relationship to religion as a wedge
> issue, given the level of discomfort that many American have toward
> Mormonism. But there are no Mormon countries to which Romney can be
> accused of owing primary allegiance. It will be safe, in other words,
> to challenge Obama for acting rather than being Muslim, for deferring
> to the Muslim world much as anti-Catholic voters in 1960 imagined John
> F. Kennedy to be taking his orders directly from the Pope.
>
> Romney is already lining up his ducks, welcoming onto his team Islam
> critic Walid Phares and attack ad specialist Larry McCarthy (who did
> an distortion-laden spot on the "Ground Zero mosque" back in 2010).
> After securing the nomination, Romney will simultaneously appeal to
> the center and shore up support among evangelicals. The message that
> Obama is weak, anti-Israel, and appeases Islamic movements and
> countries could catch the attention of both constituencies.
>
> A disconnect between accusation and reality hardly matters in American
> politics these days. Obama the "socialist" somehow manages to work
> hand in hand with Wall Street financiers. Obama the "Nazi" courts
> AIPAC. Obama the "peacenik" has been very much a war president. And
> Obama the "Muslim" gets a big thumbs-down from the Muslim world.
>
> The president makes a lousy Muslim Manchurian candidate, for he has
> disappointed his imagined Muslim handlers at virtually every turn. In
> an election in which racist slogans are off the table, however, the
> Islamophobic accusation of "acting Muslim" remains a politically
> acceptable chauvinism. Given the deep anti-Islamic currents in
> American culture, such accusations might unfortunately prove effective
> as well.
>
> John Feffer is the author of the just-published Crusade 2.0: The
> West's Resurgent War on Islam (City Lights Books). A TomDispatch
> regular, he is the co-director of Foreign Policy In Focus at the
> Institute for Policy Studies and will be starting an Open Society
> fellowship later this year.
>
> More:http://www.alternet.org/news/154758/the_right_wing%27s_election-year_...
> --
> Together, we can change the world, one mind at a time.
> Have a great day,
> Tommy
>
> --
> Together, we can change the world, one mind at a time.
> Have a great day,
> Tommy
--
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