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A too-convenient scapegoat
Why an anti-Muslim backlash now?
Robert Zaller
The growing anti-Muslim backlash in the U.S. raises a question: Why now? No such backlash arose after 9/11 itself, when it might most have been expected; nor after the shoe bomber; nor the Christmas bomber; nor the attempted Times Square bombing; nor the Fort Hood shooting. Any of these incidents might easily have triggered such a reaction, yet none did.
The current reaction is clearly related to the proposed Islamic community center near Ground Zero and the Reverend Terry Jones's now-suspended threat to hold a Kuran-burning party in Gainesville. But it's not apparent why the Park51 project in New York should have been the precipitating agent.
Its first announcement, many months ago, aroused little interest. On the face of it, too, it's far from obvious why building a house of study and prayer, even in a sensitive location, should provoke a greater reaction than than, say, an effort to blow up a crowded part of Manhattan or bring down an airliner.
There's no simple answer to the question, but I can suggest a place to start: Barack Hussein Obama.
Polls indicate that about a fifth of our population believes that President Obama himself is a Muslim. This belief overlaps with the persisting myth— recently fanned by the ever-mischievous Newt Gingrich— that Obama isn't an American citizen.
Nativist canards
"Foreign" and "unchristian": These traditionally nativist canards reinforce one another, and suggest to those susceptible to them that the very center of government has been seized by conspirators seeking to destroy American liberty and deliver the country into the hands of "evil-doers," as George W. Bush famously described America's alleged enemies.
It probably doesn't help that some of Obama's most prominent advisors— David Axelrod, Rahm Emanuel, the recently departed Larry Summers— are Jewish. That an inner circle of Jews should be fomenting a Muslim takeover of the U.S. does not, granted, make much sense; but internal coherence isn't the strong suit of nativist ideology.
To be sure, the most rabid version of this theory may be confined to "only" a fifth of the population. But a further segment— say, another fifth or so— remains convinced that, under Obama, the government is stealthily intruding into people's lives and trying to take away their freedom.
This is the basis of the Tea Party movement. Its poster child is the federal health care bill, which actually guarantees private monopoly over a medical system that has brought the U.S. into a dead heat with Slovenia for 37th place in world health outcomes.
The left concurs
It's true that the Republicans have fanned the myth that Obamacare is a government takeover, but the susceptibility of a large segment of the public to such nonsense is the core suspicion of virtually anything Obama does. The only thing he gets credit for with this crowd is fighting the senseless war in Afghanistan, which manifestly involves killing Muslims. For some, of course, even this is only a cover story to help conceal the sinister conspiracy that has seized the White House.
Strangely enough, much left-of-center opinion appears to concur that Obama has been an excessively activist president. It's almost an article of faith in these circles that he has tried to do too much while failing to do the most necessary thing: relieving the distressed U.S. economy.
It's true, certainly, that current unemployment numbers are killing Obama, but quite false that he has taken on structural reform. In fact, the reverse is the case: The only thing Obama has done in office is to prop up the two most despised sectors of the U.S. economy: banking and health care. Wall Street and Kaiser Permanente could hardly have asked for a better friend.
A cautious temperament
From whichever end of the political spectrum one approaches him, then, the question nags: Who is Barack Obama?
I suspect this is a problem for Obama personally; it's certainly one he has wrestled with in his autobiographical musings. More to the point, though, it is one that boxes him in politically. By temperament and experience a very cautious man— as we now know— he seemed hemmed in rather than liberated by his mandate at the polls in 2008.
Many on the center and left of American politics exulted in the election of an African-American president. Obama himself seems to have anticipated, with dread, the backlash to follow. He understood, as only a black man could, how deep the roots of racism were in the country, and how shallow and fleeting the mandate of an African-American president would be.
He was, in short, defeated in advance. Obama's instinct was to curry favor with the elites that had groomed him for power, and that no doubt saw in him the accommodating straw man he has proved to be.
If one reads the subtext of American political discourse, then, "Muslim" is a code word for "black," as of course the figure of the "black Muslim" was, not long ago, our ultimate bogeyman. The belief that Obama is a Muslim is, in short, rooted in the fact that he is actually a black man.
Witches' brew
For a significant minority, the idea of a black president was and is unacceptable. For another segment, the witches' brew of a personally suspect chief executive, the specter of a Muslim terrorist threat endlessly manipulated by our new security establishment, and the brutally demoralizing fact of persisting unemployment fuels a Tea Party movement that, while not yet overtly racist and anti-Muslim in its rhetoric, contains all the seeds of the Know-Nothing nativism Americans have witnessed often enough in the past.
Such tinder made ready kindling for a spark such as the so-called "Ground Zero mosque." Americans are angry and bewildered about their lives, and with good reason. They no longer belong to the richest country in the world, but only to the one whose riches are the most asymmetrically distributed. Bob Herbert of The New York Times has likened the impact of our misnomered Great Recession (it is actually a good-sized depression) to the tornadoes that recently ripped through wide swaths of New York City, overturning cars, uprooting trees, and wreaking general havoc on ground-level neighborhoods.
Herbert rather pathetically concluded with an appeal to the elites in their high-rises, far above the economic storm they themselves created, to spare a dime or two for the masses below. Maybe the masses should be grabbing their pitchforks instead, and turning them on their real tormentors instead of symbolic minority targets like illegal immigrants and, now, peaceable Muslims.
That is the real Ground Zero most Americans deal with: not the one created on 9/11, but the one that blew up on them in the crash of 2008, and which devastates them without relief.♦
To read a response by Dan Rottenberg, click here.
The current reaction is clearly related to the proposed Islamic community center near Ground Zero and the Reverend Terry Jones's now-suspended threat to hold a Kuran-burning party in Gainesville. But it's not apparent why the Park51 project in New York should have been the precipitating agent.
Its first announcement, many months ago, aroused little interest. On the face of it, too, it's far from obvious why building a house of study and prayer, even in a sensitive location, should provoke a greater reaction than than, say, an effort to blow up a crowded part of Manhattan or bring down an airliner.
There's no simple answer to the question, but I can suggest a place to start: Barack Hussein Obama.
Polls indicate that about a fifth of our population believes that President Obama himself is a Muslim. This belief overlaps with the persisting myth— recently fanned by the ever-mischievous Newt Gingrich— that Obama isn't an American citizen.
Nativist canards
"Foreign" and "unchristian": These traditionally nativist canards reinforce one another, and suggest to those susceptible to them that the very center of government has been seized by conspirators seeking to destroy American liberty and deliver the country into the hands of "evil-doers," as George W. Bush famously described America's alleged enemies.
It probably doesn't help that some of Obama's most prominent advisors— David Axelrod, Rahm Emanuel, the recently departed Larry Summers— are Jewish. That an inner circle of Jews should be fomenting a Muslim takeover of the U.S. does not, granted, make much sense; but internal coherence isn't the strong suit of nativist ideology.
To be sure, the most rabid version of this theory may be confined to "only" a fifth of the population. But a further segment— say, another fifth or so— remains convinced that, under Obama, the government is stealthily intruding into people's lives and trying to take away their freedom.
This is the basis of the Tea Party movement. Its poster child is the federal health care bill, which actually guarantees private monopoly over a medical system that has brought the U.S. into a dead heat with Slovenia for 37th place in world health outcomes.
The left concurs
It's true that the Republicans have fanned the myth that Obamacare is a government takeover, but the susceptibility of a large segment of the public to such nonsense is the core suspicion of virtually anything Obama does. The only thing he gets credit for with this crowd is fighting the senseless war in Afghanistan, which manifestly involves killing Muslims. For some, of course, even this is only a cover story to help conceal the sinister conspiracy that has seized the White House.
Strangely enough, much left-of-center opinion appears to concur that Obama has been an excessively activist president. It's almost an article of faith in these circles that he has tried to do too much while failing to do the most necessary thing: relieving the distressed U.S. economy.
It's true, certainly, that current unemployment numbers are killing Obama, but quite false that he has taken on structural reform. In fact, the reverse is the case: The only thing Obama has done in office is to prop up the two most despised sectors of the U.S. economy: banking and health care. Wall Street and Kaiser Permanente could hardly have asked for a better friend.
A cautious temperament
From whichever end of the political spectrum one approaches him, then, the question nags: Who is Barack Obama?
I suspect this is a problem for Obama personally; it's certainly one he has wrestled with in his autobiographical musings. More to the point, though, it is one that boxes him in politically. By temperament and experience a very cautious man— as we now know— he seemed hemmed in rather than liberated by his mandate at the polls in 2008.
Many on the center and left of American politics exulted in the election of an African-American president. Obama himself seems to have anticipated, with dread, the backlash to follow. He understood, as only a black man could, how deep the roots of racism were in the country, and how shallow and fleeting the mandate of an African-American president would be.
He was, in short, defeated in advance. Obama's instinct was to curry favor with the elites that had groomed him for power, and that no doubt saw in him the accommodating straw man he has proved to be.
If one reads the subtext of American political discourse, then, "Muslim" is a code word for "black," as of course the figure of the "black Muslim" was, not long ago, our ultimate bogeyman. The belief that Obama is a Muslim is, in short, rooted in the fact that he is actually a black man.
Witches' brew
For a significant minority, the idea of a black president was and is unacceptable. For another segment, the witches' brew of a personally suspect chief executive, the specter of a Muslim terrorist threat endlessly manipulated by our new security establishment, and the brutally demoralizing fact of persisting unemployment fuels a Tea Party movement that, while not yet overtly racist and anti-Muslim in its rhetoric, contains all the seeds of the Know-Nothing nativism Americans have witnessed often enough in the past.
Such tinder made ready kindling for a spark such as the so-called "Ground Zero mosque." Americans are angry and bewildered about their lives, and with good reason. They no longer belong to the richest country in the world, but only to the one whose riches are the most asymmetrically distributed. Bob Herbert of The New York Times has likened the impact of our misnomered Great Recession (it is actually a good-sized depression) to the tornadoes that recently ripped through wide swaths of New York City, overturning cars, uprooting trees, and wreaking general havoc on ground-level neighborhoods.
Herbert rather pathetically concluded with an appeal to the elites in their high-rises, far above the economic storm they themselves created, to spare a dime or two for the masses below. Maybe the masses should be grabbing their pitchforks instead, and turning them on their real tormentors instead of symbolic minority targets like illegal immigrants and, now, peaceable Muslims.
That is the real Ground Zero most Americans deal with: not the one created on 9/11, but the one that blew up on them in the crash of 2008, and which devastates them without relief.♦
To read a response by Dan Rottenberg, click here.
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