|
|
|
|
NEWS & LETTERS, September-October 2010
World in View
Mosque battles: history's underworld
by Gerry Emmett
Not since the large Ku Klux Klan demonstrations of the 1920s has Washington seen as reactionary an outpouring as the estimated 85,000-100,000 who came out for television talking head and John Birch Society promoter Glenn Beck's Aug. 28 Tea Party rally. The overwhelmingly white crowd was attempting to bury the memory of the Civil Rights Movement by choosing the anniversary of Dr. King's 1963 "I Have a Dream" speech.
The filthy essence of this movement revealed itself in New York on Aug. 22, where a white mob surrounded and threatened a Black construction worker they believed to be a Muslim (he happened not to be one) as part of their campaign against the so-called "Ground Zero Mosque."
In fact, the proposed mosque would be only one part of a Muslim community center located a few blocks from the former site of the World Trade Center. There is already an actual mosque in the area, as well as a strip club, numerous fast food outlets, and sidewalk hawkers of souvenirs. Nobody objected to the proposal for the new community center months ago when it was made, except for a few ultra-reactionary bloggers.
The "controversy" has been pushed center stage since by Fox News and racist Tea Party types. The campaign has enlisted Republican Party voices as prominent as Newt Gingrich and Sarah Palin. It is another sign of how thoroughly today's Republican Party has been taken over by the most reactionary forces, from open racists to the conspiracy theorists of the John Birch Society. It represents the most serious eruption of the "underworld of history" into American politics, what Marx characterized in The Eighteenth Brumaire of Louis Bonaparte as a polity choosing superstition over enlightenment, prejudice over judgment, and the past over the future.
The perfect symbol of this trend is Rep. Louis Gohmert of Texas ranting on television about "terror babies," which even the FBI denies exist. In classic fascist manner, his language is deliberately outrageous, meant only to bludgeon and provoke his listeners. It is also directed at repealing the 14th Amendment, which guarantees citizenship to people born in the U.S.
With few exceptions, notably President Obama's belated defense of the constitutional right of religious freedom, Democratic Party leaders from Howard Dean to Senator Harry Reid have caved in to the right-wing frenzy. That has inflamed attacks on mosques around the country, from New York to Murfreesboro, Tennessee, to Temecula, California. "From California to the New York island," a shameful tide of hate.
What the hype-driven furor in fact represents is a coming together of the European neo-fascist Right with the U.S. nativist Right. It is something that has long been developing, as prominent racists like Patrick Buchanan and David Duke cultivated ties with counterparts in the French National Front, the British National Party, Belgian Vlaams Belang and others.
Pamela Geller and Robert Spencer, the right-wing bloggers who have driven the attacks on Muslims, are open in their expressions of support for Slobodan Milosevic's "ethnic cleansing" campaigns in Bosnia and Kosova. They are attempting to use the 3,000 dead in New York to justify the 7,000 innocent dead of Srebrenica, and the hundreds of thousands of other dead in Milosevic's Balkan genocide. In truth, for them the only good Muslim is a non-Muslim, and barring conversion, a dead one. Geller also openly supports the thugs of the English Defense League in their intimidation of British Muslims, and revanchist Afrikaaners.
This extreme, hateful rhetoric followed by violence, was used by Milosevic, Karadzic and other Serb war criminals to tear apart the social fabric of Bosnia. It is just as clearly directed at tearing apart the social fabric of this country. The attacks on Muslims have coalesced with the racist Tea Party attacks on President Obama, the racist and unconstitutional immigration laws of Arizona, and all the other roiling right-wing nativism that caused Buchanan to hail a "new white nationalism."
This is a struggle that goes to the heart of what kind of society we wish to live in. The mass of reactionaries who descended on Washington Aug. 28 have all but spelled out their declaration of civil war. It is up to us now to answer this challenge.
|
Subscription for one year
$5
|
