Almost a decade after 11 September 2001 Islam and American Muslims are on trial in America, implicated through guilt-by-association with Al-Qaeda for being seen as of the same faith. In addition to driving military adventurism (the invasion of Iraq and the recent escalation in Afghanistan-Pakistan), a mushrooming national debt, and the militarization of domestic affairs, the politics of terrorism and the terrorism narrative (the notion that the West remains under constant and imminent threat of attack) have also exposed deep cultural, legal and philosophical fault lines within Western societies. Illiberal tendencies and draconian legislation aimed against Muslims have swept across Western countries and threaten the very fabric of the West.
Islamophobia’s ugly head
Islamophobia, sometimes called “the new anti-Semitism,” has reared its ugly head under a new guise and different pretext, and it has finally reached America’s shore. The “global war on terror” has allowed the far right, including the religious right, to demonize Muslims and portray them as aliens, a fifth column within Western societies. Though driven by powerful far-right grassroots groups, the sentiment has gone mainstream.
In Europe, the alarm over the Islamicization of the continent, masquerading as the demographic crisis in which Muslims outbreed their Christian counterparts, has become commonplace, reflected in the literature, ranging from more sophisticated treatments like Christopher Caldwell’s Reflections on the Revolution in Europe to cruder polemics like Mark Steyn’s America Alone and Bat Ye’or’s Eurabia.
Recent surveys and public opinion polls suggest an increasing number of Western citizens accept the fringe’s image of Muslims. Many say they are not keen to allow Muslims the same religious and legal freedoms and rights enjoyed by others. According to a nationwide poll conducted by Cornell University, nearly half of all Americans (44 percent) say that the government should restrict the civil liberties of American Muslims.
There is a growing cottage industry of Western commentators and politicians who feed off of bashing Islam. The war on terror has provided a substantial level of cover for their views. While initially terror “experts” such as Daniel Pipes, Steven Emerson and Robert Spencer led the anti-Islam charge, it has spread widely. For a glimpse of this venomous rhetoric, read a blog post by Martin Peretz, the New Republic’s editor in chief, which stated, “Frankly, Muslim life is cheap, most notably to Muslims.” Peretz—a strident supporter of Israel—added: “I wonder whether the need to honor these people and pretend that they are worthy of the privileges of the First Amendment, which I have in my gut the sense they will abuse.”
Although Perez apologized, twice, he nevertheless defended his assertion that Muslim life is cheap. “This is a statement of fact, not value,” he said. Writing in Forward, Matthew Duss of the Center for American Progress notes that hatred of Arabs/Muslims has had a permanent home not only in the New Republic, one of America’s oldest and most respected liberal magazines, but also in many pro-Israeli forums that stoke fear of Islam for political profit.
Fox News, the home of course of Glen Beck and Sean Hannity, and several nationally syndicated talk radio show hosts, including Rush Limbaugh and Michael Savage, frequently promote Islamophobia on the national stage. Moreover, prominent politicians such as Newt Gingrich, Peter King and Senator Saxby Chamblis legitimize the demonization of Muslims with dark and misleading language. Critical segments of the Evangelical Christian Movement and prominent religious leaders such as Pat Robertson, John Hagee and Franklin Graham, to name just a few, have contributed to the intensification and escalation of this phenomenon throughout the US.
Similarly, a debate is raging across Europe, the bastion of liberalism and multiculturalism. A plurality of Swiss voted against the construction of mosques, even though the Muslim community in Switzerland numbers only 400,000, most of whom are not Arabs or Africans but Europeans from Bosnia, Albania and Kosovo. Belgium and France are debating whether to pass a legislation to make it illegal to wear the niqab and other Islamic face coverings. In October 2010, the ban passed in both houses of the French legislature by overwhelming margins, and is scheduled to come into effect in spring 2011.
Anti-Muslim sentiment in European countries, which possess sizable Muslim minorities, coupled with anti-immigrant fervor due to difficult economic conditions and high unemployment, has raised serious questions about the future of multi-cultural and multi-religious Western societies. Exploiting the bitter debate, Osama bin Laden and Ayman Al-Zawahiri released several audiotapes condemning discrimination against Muslims, and vowing to attack those European countries that insult Islam and its Prophet. The irony is that Islam-bashers provide bin Laden and his associates with more cannon for their murderous fodder.
Similarly, the cultural reverberations of the war on terror have put America’s values of religious tolerance and individual freedom to the test. Out of a population of 300 million, there are between 2.5 to 7 million Muslims in the United States, a third of whom are African American. Confrontations have broken out over proposed mosques in Tennessee, California, Georgia, Kentucky, Wisconsin, Illinois, as well as Brooklyn, Staten Island, Midland Beach and Sheepshead Bay in New York. Particularly alarming and revealing is the high-profile battle over a mosque and community center to be built about two blocks from Ground Zero in Lower Manhattan, or what its critics and detractors call the Ground Zero Mosque.
Islamophobes, such Pamela Geller and Robert Spencer, have seized on the proposed mosque and Islamic center to stir up anti-Muslim sentiment. Presidential hopeful Newt Gingrich spearheaded opposition to building such a mosque so long as Saudi Arabia bars construction of churches and synagogues. To do so “a few blocks from the site where Islamist extremists killed more than 3,000 Americans,” Gingrich opined, is a “political act” of “triumphalism.” “Congress can declare the area a national battlefield area and control what’s built there.”
Gingrich justified his opposition by drawing an analogy with the Holocaust: “Nazis don't have the right to put up a sign next to the Holocaust museum in Washington,” he said. Meanwhile, conservative commentator Charles Krauthammer has made a similar argument in several Washington Post editorials. Right-wing politicians have jumped on the bandwagon of bashing Islam and Muslims to score cheap political shots. Campaigning for the governorship of New York State, Rick Lazio claimed that the plan to build the mosque undermined the right of New Yorkers to “feel safe and be safe.”
A number of politicians and citizens have backed the mosque project based on the principle of freedom of religion, including New York’s Mayor Michael Bloomberg and, eventually, President Obama, who came out in its support after the decision by the New York City Landmarks Commission to approve construction. However, the virulent debate showed clearly that the politics of terrorism and the terrorism narrative threaten enshrined American values. Even Obama raised the issue of the “wisdom” of building the Islamic center at the location in question.
Anti-Muslim sentiment has widely spread in many quarters in America. Pastor Bill Rench of Temecula’s Calvary Baptist Church in California perhaps best expressed the feelings of those opposed to mosque construction in Temecula. “The Islamic foothold is not strong here, and we really don’t want to see their influence spread,” Rench told the Los Angeles Times. “There is a concern with all the rumors you hear about sleeper cells and all that. Are we supposed to be complacent just because these people say it’s a religion of peace? Many others said the same thing.”
A decade of heightened anti-Muslim sentiment has taken its toll
In 2010, Gallup’s Muslim West Facts Project published the results of a major poll about American prejudices toward Islam. They showed a causal link between rising anti-Islam and the politics of terrorism. The most significant finding is also the most unsurprising: A slight majority of Americans—53 percent—say their opinion of the faith is either “not too favorable”—22 percent—or “not favorable at all”—31 percent. Americans are more than twice as likely to express negative feelings towards Muslims than they are toward Buddhists, Christians or Jews. A majority of Americans disagree with the statement that most Muslims are accepting of other religions—66 percent; that Christians and Muslims’ religious beliefs are basically the same—68 percent. Unsurprisingly, a majority of Americans admit that they know either very little—40 percent—about Islam or nothing at all—23 percent.
Putting the best face on the Gallup’s finding, Boston Globe columnist James Carroll said that Muslims are wildly misperceived and wrongly judged, but that Americans are “at war, and afraid,” and therefore, that “exaggerated fears fuel themselves, and the dynamic of prejudice can be a riptide.” He compares the blanket stereotyping of Muslims to an unseen current that has run below the surface of Western culture for a millennium. Philadelphia Inquirer columnist Stephan Salisbury warns that this anti-Muslim current now embraced by major political candidates may pave the ground for the emergence of a demagogue leader who can synthesize the demonizing and scapegoating of Muslims, fears augmented by economic anxiety, the maturing of far-right-wing activism, and a widespread growing contempt for official Washington. Muslim Americans are the new threat from within and anti-Muslim sentiment “is now spreading like a toxic plume, uncapped and uncontrollable.”
The M-word has become a pejorative term in America, suggested USA Today in an article covering why a growing number of Americans believe President Obama is a Muslim. Some 18 percent said the president was a Muslim, up from 11 percent in March 2009, according to a Pew Research survey on Religion and Public Life released in August 2010. Nearly one in five Americans believes Obama is a Muslim, up from around one in 10 who said he was Muslim last year. A Newsweek poll finds that 52 percent of Republicans believe that it is either “definitely true” or “probably true” that “Barack Obama sympathizes with the goals of Islamic fundamentalists who want to impose Islamic law around the world.”
Despite the efforts by the president’s men to downplay the astonishing findings, USA Today zeroed in on the M-word as mockery, or worse, to call someone a Muslim only when you dislike, fear or disagree with the person; the way to put someone down in polite company: “Is the M-word becoming the political slur that gets through the social filters?”
The terrorism narrative and the rise of Islamophobia in the West, particularly America, undermines American and Western values worldwide, allowing bin Laden and his lieutenants to portray themselves as legitimate warriors or freedom fighters who resist the sole remaining superpower. Since the late 1990s Al-Qaeda’s fundamental goal has been to trigger a clash of cultures between the world of Islam and the Christian West. Although bin Laden and his men lost the struggle for Muslim hearts and minds, Islamophobia fuels Al-Qaeda’s narrative and provides it with the oxygen that prolongs its existence.
Fawaz A. Gerges – Professor of Middle Eastern Politics and International Relations at the London School of Economics and Political Science, London University. Among his books are “The Far Enemy: Why Jihad Went Global,” and the forthcoming book, “The Rise and Fall of al-Qa`ida: What American and Western Politicians and Terrorism Experts Do not Tell You” scheduled to be published by Oxford University Press, 2011.
