Juan Cole: White Terrorism at Oak Creek: The Paranoid Style in American Violence
He (Wade Michael Page) likely thought he was targeting American Muslims. He operated in an atmosphere of virulent hate speech against American Muslims. A discourse of Islamophobia has plagued the United States in the past decade, pushed by unscrupulous bigots in public life and by entire media organizations such as Fox Cable News and other media properties of billionaire yellow press lord Rupert Murdoch. Among them is also Rush Limbaugh, who, incredibly, is still broadcast to US soldiers abroad.
Among the hatemongers are Frank Gaffney, and his acolyte Rep. Michele Bachmann (R-Minn), Rep. Peter King (R-NY) Daniel Pipes, James Woolsey, Robert Spencer, Steve Emerson, John Bolton, and sometimes Rudi Giuliani, Mike Huckabee and others, most associated with the Republican Party. The push for hate speech against American Muslims is funded by a small group of billionaires through their foundations. Some of the Muslim-haters are connected to the US arms industry and are hoping for profits from further wars in the Middle East. Others are Israel-firster fanatics. Others are looking for a bogey man to scare Americans with, so as to convince them to vote against their interests, as they used Communism during the Cold War to convince ordinary Americans to give up their constitutional rights.
It is legitimate to criticize Muslim organizations and parties, and to work against violent groups like al-Qaeda. But al-Qaeda is a tiny fringe religious-nationalist movement; far fewer Muslims have been involved in it than white southerners have been involved in the Ku Klux Klan. Nevertheless, American politicians at least implicitly attempted to tar all Muslims with its brush. Like anti-Semitism, racist anti-Muslim discourse has illegitimate properties. It shouldn’t be acceptable to attribute to Muslims a vast general conspiracy. It shouldn’t be acceptable to assert that they are all dishonest and lying about their real beliefs. It shouldn’t be acceptable to lie and allege that they believe in casually murdering non-Muslims. Their religious law, or sharia, shouldn’t be demonized more than the Talmud or Roman Catholic canon law. It shouldn’t be acceptable to accuse them all of waging jihad or holy war.
As in Norway, where the Muslim-hating network (fostered also by hateful web sites like “Gates of Vienna,” “Elders of Ziyon,” and a host of others) deeply influenced mass murderer Anders Breivik, so in the United States the purveying of a negative image of Muslims predictably has resulted in violence. In Norway, Breivik targeted what he called liberals soft on the alleged Muslim menace. In the US, Wade targeted people he thought looked like Muslims, the Sikhs.
http://www.juancole.com/2012/08/white-terrorism-at-oak-creek-the-paranoid-style-in-american-violence.html
Somehow I doubt that Gaffney, Bachmann, King, et al will be inclined to admit any responsibility or change their tactics. It's who they are and what they see as their source of power.
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