Who Will Stop Republican Islamophobia?

[Valin]

The New Republic:

Democrats should make a convincing case against it, but change must come from within the GOP

Jeet Heer

December 18, 2015

 

In the wake of the terrorist attacks in Paris and San Bernardino, Islamophobia has become a powerful and divisive issue in American politics. The two main political parties are increasingly defining themselves by sharply different rhetoric and policies on the treatment of Muslims, both in the United States and internationally. These issues dominated the Republican debate, and are likely to be equally important when the Democratic candidates take the stage on Saturday.

 

How did Islamophobia become a litmus test dividing the two parties? The answer long precedes the candidacy of Donald Trump.

 

As recently as the presidency of George W. Bush, Republican elites successfully clamped down on Islamophobia. As Duke University sociologist Christopher Bail points out in his book Terrified: How Anti-Muslim Fringe Organizations Became Mainstream, the 9/11 attacks led to the American public as a whole becoming more positively disposed to Islam. In a poll conducted in 2000, 45 percent of Americans has a favorable view of Islam. This figure rose to 59 percent by November of 2001, in the immediate aftermath of 9/11. This shift in public attitude occurred because President Bush and the elites in his party were vocal in insisting that America was at war not with Islam, but with a jihadi fringe.

 

The bipartisan consensus against Islamophobia that existed in 2001 has collapsed in the current election. Donald Trump has polarized the Republican Party with his call for an indefinite moratorium on Muslims being admitted into the United States. Although this specific policy has been condemned by most of his rivals, they’ve all echoed Trump’s clash of civilization rhetoric in one form or another, ranging from limiting Muslim refugees into the United States to monitoring (and possibly closing down) mosques. Senator Marco Rubio is considered more moderate than Trump, but he made an analogy between Muslims and Nazis. Speaking with George Stephanopoulos on ABC’s This Morning last month, Rubio argued that refusing to say that radical Islam is a threat is “like saying we weren’t at war with Nazis ’cause we were afraid to offend some Germans who may have been members of the Nazi party, but weren’t violent themselves.” By Rubio’s analogy, jihadis are the most violent Nazis while ordinary Muslims are run-of-the-mill Nazi party members.

 

(Snip)

 

________________________________________________________________________________________________

 

It's all 'champagne' Frank Gaffney's fault.