The Never-Ending Crusade

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http://inthesetimes.com/article/12862/the_never_ending_crusade


Men praying at the All Dulles Area Muslim Society, in Sterling, Va. on February 24. (Mark Wilson/Getty Images)

No Americans were killed on U.S. soil by Islamic extremists in 2011. Why does Islamophobia persist?

Seconds after lambasting the “intolerance of the Left” and comparing Barack Obama to a Soviet atheist, presidential hopeful Rick Santorum lionized his supporters at a campaign rally in Texas as the real dissenters of American politics: “[D]issent comes from folks who use reason, common sense and divine revelation,” he told an enthusiastic crowd in February.

Democracy, according to Santorum, is underpinned by faith. And he’s not entirely wrong. Mahatma Gandhi’s noncooperation movement against British imperialism was predicated on the principles of Hindu dharma, and Rev. Martin Luther King Jr. organized against political disenfranchisement through a network of Baptist congregations. But to Santorum and his ilk, the roots of democracy are exclusively Christian. And one religion in particular represents the political antithesis: Islam. “[Equality] does not come from Islam,” Santorum said.

John Feffer’s new book, Crusade 2.0 (City Lights Books, March), tackles the West’s resurgent Islamophobia, critiquing the notion that Islam is innately hostile to democratic principles. From the medieval-era Crusades to the Cold War, Feffer argues, the Western imagination sees Islam through the prism of conflict, synthesizing the characteristics of historical enemies and projecting the result onto modern-day Muslims. Part doomsday religious adversary, part geopolitical menace, Islam satisfies a “cultural anxiety” in America that longs for a galvanizing enemy – the inverse of democratic and moral Christians.

Take the word “Islamofascism,” for example, which conflates contemporary Islamic movements with 20th-century fascism. Feffer, co-director of the Foreign Policy In Focus project at the Institute for Policy Studies, notes that the term – a favorite of the Right (and the late Christopher Hitchens) – is a “fusion of the theological and the geopolitical,” embodying a threat to the political structure that protects America’s Christian heritage.

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1. And he’s not entirely wrong? Yes, yes he is entirely wrong.

Fucking theocrats like Santorum would have made the founding fathers vomit.