The Great Fear

[mgc1961]

Nine years after 9/11, hysteria about Muslims in American life has gripped the country. With it has gone an outburst of arson attacks on mosques, campaigns to stop their construction, and the branding of the Muslim-American community, overwhelmingly moderate, as a hotbed of potential terrorist recruits. The frenzy has raged from rural Tennessee to New York City, while in Oklahoma, voters even overwhelmingly approved a ballot measure banning the implementation of Sharia law in American courts (not that such a prospect existed). This campaign of Islamophobia wounded President Obama politically, as one out of five Americans have bought into a sustained chorus of false rumors about his secret Muslim faith. And it may have tainted views of Muslims in general; an August 2010 Pew Research Center poll revealed that, among Americans, the favorability rating of Muslims had dropped by 11 points since 2005.

Erupting so many years after the September 11th trauma, this spasm of anti-Muslim bigotry might seem oddly timed and unexpectedly spontaneous. But think again: it’s the fruit of an organized, long-term campaign by a tight confederation of right-wing activists and operatives who first focused on Islamophobia soon after the September 11th attacks, but only attained critical mass during the Obama era. It was then that embittered conservative forces, voted out of power in 2008, sought with remarkable success to leverage cultural resentment into political and partisan gain.

This network is obsessively fixated on the supposed spread of Muslim influence in America. Its apparatus spans continents, extending from Tea Party activists here to the European far right. It brings together in common cause right-wing ultra-Zionists, Christian evangelicals, and racist British soccer hooligans. It reflects an aggressively pro-Israel sensibility, with its key figures venerating the Jewish state as a Middle Eastern Fort Apache on the front lines of the Global War on Terror and urging the U.S. and various European powers to emulate its heavy-handed methods.


Read it all at http://www.tomdispatch.com/post/175334/tomgram:_max_blumenthal,_the_great_fear_/

[ixion]

1. Fear, in general, is being used as a cudgel to destory both the fabric of our society and

the Constitution on which is was founded. Joy. :(

[liberal N proud]

2. The bu$h regime were masters at utilizing and instilling fear

They used 9/11 to get most of their agenda in both the first and second terms. They employed the media in driving that fear deep in the American psyche.

[COLGATE4]

3. Republicans, like all good Facists, know that the key to maintaining

power is generating fear of some others in the general population. They were temporarily grounded after the USSR came apart at the seams, but 9/11 was their early Xmas present. Now they can continue to generate fear and hatred of all things Muslim to keep their low-information knuckledragging followers in line.

[bemildred]

4. Fear makes you stupid, that's the point of it.

It was no accident that FDR made the comment about nothing to fear but fear itself when he was ready to start kicking butt and taking names.

Fear is the mind killer
I must not fear.
Fear is the mind-killer.
Fear is the little death that brings total obliteration.
I will face my fear.
I will permit it to pass over me and through me.
And when it has gone past, I will turn the inner eye to see it's path.
Where the fear has gone there will be nothing.
Only I will remain.

-- The Bene Gesserit Litany of Fear from the novel Dune by Frank Herbert