O’Hehir:
From Trump to Fox News to Bill Maher, the
forces of anti-Muslim panic and paranoia are having a glorious year.
There
was a deeply unfortunate, if predictable, period of national debate in the
middle of the 19th century that was summed up in a memorable New York Times
headline from December 1862, just before Abraham Lincoln issued the
Emancipation Proclamation: “What shall we do with the Negro?” Even at the time,
a handful of people on the outer fringes of politics understood that it was a
fallacious question whose true subject was concealed. Frederick Douglass, for
one, repeatedly observed that the central question was less about “the Negro”
than about the United States of America and what sort of country it would turn
out to be. As white abolitionist Leonard Marsh put it, what his fellow citizens
really wanted to know about black people was “How will their freedom affect
us?”
White
Americans have arguably never gotten past those questions; I keep waiting for
somebody on Fox News to revert to the various “colonization” schemes of the
19th century, aka “Send them back to Africa.” (Lincoln himself believed, for
most of his political career, that white racism could never be overcome and
that African-Americans, once freed from slavery, would be better off somewhere
else.) But the question we’re stuck on in 2015 is a different, albeit related
one. All day long, on every news site and every cable TV talk show, we get
endless iterations of “What shall we do with the Muslim?”
Donald
Trump’s campaign was viewed, a few short weeks ago, as having gone into a
terminal nosedive. Now Trump has risen to a glorious new apogee, thanks largely
to the Paris attacks, the Syrian refugee crisis and most recently the theoretical
terrorist links of the San Bernardino shooters. Trump has relentlessly flogged
the Republican Party toward the most extreme version of the “Muslim question,”
and the most extreme answers. Trump has only halfway retracted his bold
suggestions that mosques should be closed down and American Muslims should be
compelled to register in a national database; he has refused to retreat from
his claims that “thousands of Muslims” in America celebrated the fall of the
Twin Towers on 9/11, despite a total absence of evidence. The only reasons he
has not proposed that Muslims should wear identifying emblems on their clothing
are A) in the age of microchip technology and universal surveillance that
really isn’t necessary and B) somebody informed him at some point that that
idea has an unsavory history. But, you know – the trains ran on time!
To be a
viable Republican candidate at all in 2016, you have to go most of the way
toward the Trumpian position of limitless and full-throated paranoia, as Ted
Cruz and Marco Rubio have done. We must seal ourselves off against the hordes
of Muslim invaders purely as a matter of survival, and given the sleeper cells
no doubt embedded in every American village and town, not to mention the
eagerness of Barack Hussein Obama and
the entire Democratic Party to surrender the nation to Sharia rule, unlimited
(if undisclosed) budget increases for the military-intelligence matrix are the
least we can do. But Cruz and Rubio judiciously decline to support 24/7
Muslim-monitoring, or a coast-to-coast re-enactment of Kristallnacht. Because:
Small government! We have reached a truly pathetic state when Jeb Bush, the sad
clown of the 2016 race, and unreconstructed neocon warmonger Lindsey Graham
(the happy clown, I guess) come off like vaguely reasonable human beings.
Justifiable
as it is to blame the white-rage contact high of the Republican presidential
campaign for our national game of “What shall we do with the Muslim?” the
contagion has spread more widely than that. Even before this week’s mass
shooting in San Bernardino had any clear link to Islamic extremism – which is
not to say the nature of that link is clear now – we heard Sean Hannity darkly
murmuring that the suspects did not have “normal-sounding” names. Hannity
spouts bigotry and spreads intolerance for a living, to be sure. But even by
Fox News standards, that offhand remark revealed complicated layers of
assumption and prejudice that I suspect are widely shared by the general
public, at least out in Fox-viewing Whitelandia.
Certain
names are by definition not “normal,” even in an era when the United States has
absorbed all kinds of unpronounceable surnames in Hmong or Kurdish or Bengali,
and when there are at least 3 million Muslim citizens. Furthermore, the
specific nature of the non-normal name altered the essential character of the
crime. If the San Bernardino shootings had been carried out by a white man
named John Smith, he would be considered a lone nut even if he were a
whacked-out evangelical Christian who thought he was doing the Lord’s work. But
if Syed Farook is a crazy Muslim dude who looked at crazy Muslim websites, then
he winds up on the front page of the New York Post as a “MUSLIM KILLER” who
represents the tip of a deadly iceberg of terror, and cannot possibly be a lone
nut.
Fourteen
years after George W. Bush assured us that we were not at war with Islam, it
has become entirely normal for mainstream politicians and media commentators to
suggest that, in effect, we are. Hannity’s Fox colleague Jeanine Pirro, a New
York suburbanite who identifies as a moderate Republican, said on Thursday that
since Farook and his wife “looked like Muslims” and were seen carrying boxes
into their house, the only possible reason the neighbors didn’t call the cops
was a desire to avoid being “politically incorrect.” Pirro has been a judge and
a district attorney; she is supposed to know the law. Her clear implication is
that Muslims, or people who look like
Muslims, are not entitled to the same zone of privacy as the rest of us,
and are inherently more likely to be carrying boxes full of bomb-making
materials than, say, bowling balls or KitchenAid mixers. (I don’t even know
what to say about the fact that Pirro is of Lebanese ancestry, and presumably
knows that Muslims come in all colors and dress in different ways.)
But
honestly, how far is the blatant fear-mongering of Pirro and Hannity and Trump
– the assumption that Muslims are guilty of terrorism or terrorist sympathies
until proven innocent, and the corollary assumption that they cannot really be
innocent, because they are Muslims – from the more sensible-sounding, “liberal”
species of fear-mongering promulgated by Bill Maher and Sam Harris? Before the
blood was dry or the killers had been identified in San Bernardino, Maher was sternly
tweeting that we must not compare mass shooters with terrorists because the
latter were far more dangerous, for reasons he declined to elucidate.
Those
guys are complicated public figures, and their views are not identical, on
Islam or anything else. They would hasten to assure us that they know most
Muslims are not terrorists, and they steer well clear of Trump’s brand of
National Socialism Lite. They don’t want concentration camps, or a national
registry. They are practical-minded, hardheaded citizens who see the need for
prudence and vigilance in defense of democracy. They are saddened by the fact
that their fellow liberals don’t understand the gravity of the danger.
I think
we have to take Islamophobic fellow travelers like Maher and Harris (and the
late Christopher Hitchens) at their word. They don’t agree with the
Muslim-bashing right on most other stuff, and in the old-fashioned American
sense of the word, they absolutely qualify as liberals. To be specific, they
are Cold War liberals without a Cold War to fight; if this were 1965 instead of
2015, they’d be berating the left for its reluctance to take on the Communist
menace in Vietnam instead of facing it in Dubuque and Santa Rosa. They are also
Enlightenment liberals who see religion as the great enemy of reason and who
see Islam, the youngest and most fervent of the world’s major faiths, as the
most dangerous enemy of all.
This
verges on an enormous cultural, historical and theological debate that we
definitely won’t settle here and now (and most likely won’t settle anywhere,
ever). I would say that the New Atheist movement’s understanding of religion in
general is ahistorical and reductive, and that its understanding of Islam is
even more so. But Sam Harris, at least, is a thoughtful and erudite person who
has devoted years of reading and writing to these subjects (which is not a
description you could apply to Bill Maher). I can only conclude that Harris
genuinely believes in the “clash of civilizations” hypothesis: Islamic
radicalism is the Nazism of our time, and since all of Islam has been
contaminated by its most extreme forms, the faith as a whole presents an
existential threat to the most essential rights and liberties of Western
civilization.
I
believe that argument rests upon multiply flawed premises, but at least it
possesses some intellectual rigor and clarity, whereas the incoherent cavalcade
of Republican Muslim-bashers either don’t believe in anything at all (beyond
what the Koch brothers tell them to believe) or believe numerous impossible
things before breakfast, like the White Queen in “Through the Looking-Glass.”
But I’m not sure the outcome is any better. Harris’ passion for Enlightenment
values leads him, gravely and reluctantly, to ponder ditching the ones that
interfere with waging permanent war against Islam, and drive him toward Ben
Carson’s position that a Muslim could only be elected president if he or she
effectively stopped being a Muslim.
As I
wrote two weeks ago, the hotly debated question of whether Islam is compatible
with democracy only becomes answerable if we can figure out what democracy is,
and whether we have ever had it or ever will. But the insidious power of the
“What shall we do with the Muslim?” moment lies in the fact that ISIS is a
specter specifically created to provoke that question, and to scare us into not
noticing that the most urgent threats to Western democracy come from within,
not without.
It does
not help matters, to be sure, when deranged Muslims in France or California
decide, for obscure reasons, to ally themselves with the apocalyptic and
suicidal fantasies of ISIS or other extremist groups. But I am convinced that
those disordered and disaffected people are largely driven by cultural and
economic forces in the West, not by a blatantly incoherent ideology that most
Muslims despise and reject. As with the 19th-century beliefs that fueled “What
shall we do with the Negro?” – people of African descent were seen as depraved
savages, liable to run amok and rape white women at the first opportunity – the
urge to demonize and scapegoat Muslims as the greatest threat our civilization
has ever known has very little to do with the attitudes or behavior of Muslims
themselves.
This is
not a matter of liberal piety, although I fully expect the hyper-patriots on
Twitter to barrage me with semi-literate diatribes about how Democrats and
Muslims and terrorists are all pretty much the same thing and must be wiped
out. I am neither pious nor a liberal, but more to the point I don’t know any
liberals who have said or implied that violent crimes committed by Islamic
extremists are excusable or ignorable or a good thing. I don’t think it’s
remotely controversial to say that Islam is experiencing an internal schism in
which a small group of dangerous fanatics is trying to hijack the entire faith.
There
are two things to say about that, which ought to be obvious even to relatively
clueless Westerners, but evidently are not. First, this is hardly a new
phenomenon in religious history, and parallels can be found in every other
major denomination. Second, as Princeton scholar Bernard Lewis (no
squishy-hearted liberal) observed decades ago, the principal targets and
principal victims of ISIS and other Islamic fundamentalists are the other Muslims they regard as traitors
and apostates.
It
cannot be said often enough that ISIS has murdered many times more Muslims than
Westerners and goes on doing it every day, without bothering to post the
evidence on YouTube. But that’s not the central issue. Beheading Western
captives and murdering Parisian clubgoers are good things in themselves, from
the ISIS point of view, and entitle their martyrs to eternity in an especially
small-minded version of Paradise. (As far as I can tell, the ISIS/al-Qaida
heaven resembles a Nevada brothel with no liquor license, on a hot night in
1986.) But for all the rhetorical ranting about a worldwide caliphate or
whatever, such actions are best understood as means toward an end.
That
end includes convincing as many Muslims as possible to join their moronic jihad
and, perhaps more important, convincing as many Westerners as possible that
most or all Muslims already support
their moronic jihad. Those two goals feed into each other in a hurricane-like
spiral of noxious ideology and also, as I argued after the Paris attacks,
dovetail perfectly with the goals of the Islamophobic right. The more acts of
violence ISIS can inspire in the West, the more Westerners will whip themselves
up into anti-Muslim hysteria. The more Western nations wage indiscriminate war
in the Islamic world and treat their Muslim residents as alien invaders, the
more Muslims in the West become an isolated and disenfranchised group ripe for
the nihilism of ISIS. You get the point. Or maybe you don’t, because Muslim
fever has spread through our national bloodstream and replaced all thought.
