Why Republicans Need Obama
to be a Foreign-Born Muslim

President Barack Obama. File photo by Luke Thomas

By Rachel Kiernan

August 20, 2010

The number of Americans who now believe that Obama is a Muslim has reached 24%, according to a Time Magazine poll. It also states that fully one-third of Americans feel that Muslims should be barred from running for president, while 28% feel that they should not be allowed to sit on the Supreme Court.  Only 47% of respondents to this poll feel that Obama is Christian, while an additional 24% declined to answer the question or said that they were unsure.

While so many pundits are playing off the fears of the “Ground Zero mosque”, it would also seem as though the “Obama is a foreign/Muslim/terrorist” crowd has achieved a victory.  The spin-zone has not had a liberal put any effort into un-spinning packaged lies and media-manufactured phobias.  The left, taking its usual no-backbone approach, has decided again that outlandish lies will die down on its own and should not distract from complicated realities.

This has not been the case for some time.

If outlandish lies were answered by bold truths, John Kerry would have won the 2004 election by directly addressing the Swift Boat ads. I seem to remember that it was a Karl Rove tactic to attack an opponent on the very things that opponent thought of as strengths. This tactic clearly works.

Politicians would not tell lies unless there was a public willing to suspend disbelief and accept these lies as absolute truths.

What needs to be addressed is why so many in this country want to believe that Obama is a Muslim, even when they criticized Obama for following a “radical” black Christian leader. This is true in spite of the fact that Obama was raised by his Christian mother and grandparents, having barely known his father.  It speaks of the very essence by those who fear an America which no longer looks like they. This manufactured phobia of all things Muslim and of all things non-white (think “white slavery” and the anti-Hispanic establishment) is a response by those who feel that they have lost control over their own lives and power to those who traditionally have been the most disenfranchised and powerless.

This goes beyond those who wish that Obama was a Muslim and a foreigner. This is a manufactured crisis by those who wish to divide the country into two camps by whipping up hysteria against Muslims, blacks, Hispanics and anyone who does not look and pray as they.

The anti-immigration laws of Arizona were not written 20 years ago. It did not happen when crime was bad, illegal immigration was rampant and anyone named Bush was president. Instead, it happened at a time when crime is at record lows, when illegal immigration, especially from Mexico, is at a fraction of where it once was due to an abysmal American economy and when many Hispanics are returning to Mexico to look for work there. Still, Arizona felt the need to write a law which targeted all Hispanics as potential criminals, arresting them for simply failing to prove their innocence.  These actions are not coincidental.  It was not an accident that Virginia’s “Confederate History Month“, which decided slavery was “irrelevant”, happened one month after Gingrich claimed that Democrats destroyed their party by embracing Civil Rights legislation and one year after a black man with a foreign-sounding name was elected president.   The politics of hate:  Racism; misogyny; homophobia; Islamophobia and anti-Semitism are always on the front page when any of these groups gain something resembling power – or basic human rights.

The conservatives are good at whipping up a frenzy and having others carry out their dirty work. Unfortunately, this will not stop with simple race-bating. Since Obama was elected, right-wing nutcases shot up the Holocaust Museum (the day after Obama made a speech at Buchenwald), murdered a doctor who provided abortions and flew an airplane into an IRS building in Austin. The last time we saw Americans blatantly killing other Americans was during the previous Democratic administration, when McVeigh blew up the federal building in Oklahoma City and when other abortion providers were being killed and having their clinics bombed. There have been four other abortion providers who were murdered, all of which happened while Clinton was president.

Such is the pattern of terrorists and propagandists. Their sayings and actions are always a response to some other perceived threat by some other perceived enemy, at a time when they feel that they have lost power or been otherwise dehumanized or made weak. Terrorists almost always see themselves of agents of divine wrath (such as against those of other religions, or whose actions they feel is an insult to their own religion. Liberal politicians and abortion providers both fit this bill, as do most if not all non-Christians).

This is why the right needs Obama to be a Muslim. This is why they want him to be a Muslim. This is also why, in spite of all of the proof, there is a segment which will always insist that Obama was born in Africa.  If he was just another American Christian who held different views on how to be a better leader, it would not incite such wrath. This pattern will continue until either Obama has lost power or until someone “acting in the name of God” assassinates him.

Unfortunately, this is not far-fetched.

Look at the numbers of those who brought guns to Obama’s speeches.  It is an implied threat to anyone who may who has a different American ideal, who does not enforce the status quo.

The making of a terrorist is not confined to Islamic circles.  It occurred when Andrew Joseph Stack III, deliberately flew his plane into an IRS building in Austin, leaving behind a rant about the government and the IRS, insisting that Americans revolt and that “violence not only is the answer, it is the only answer” (his italics).

The hate-mongering speeches of right-wing pundits play into these desires by feeding off of a certain demography’s fears.  They understand that these actions are responses to phobias manufactured for people who feel that their way of life is being threatened. It is designed to create a manipulated response to most help those who are not in power, even if gaining power involves an atmosphere of violence. These are the five reasons people become terrorists, as listed by Dr. Jessica Stern:

1. Alienation
2. Humiliation
3. Demographics
4. History
5. Territory

We have seen these applied to everything from segregation to religious intolerance to Texas wanting to re-write history books and/or secede.  It is meant to play into a mindset and tap a nerve by those who are already on the fringes, who feel that their lives are not in their control, including their right to hate and discriminate.  The other, “bad” group doesn’t understand or like your values.  They will keep you poor and powerless.  They will take your money, land or power, which means you are “defending yourself” and entirely correct when you take their money, land or power.  They will convert you to their religion, therefore you must convert them or at least not allow them to practice their religion.  If they are not like you, they are a perceived threat.

The adherents to the perversion of fear will always see itself as a victim of some imaginary enemy.  By doing so, they will commit the very acts they most fear being used against themselves.

Democrats need to firmly address the Politics of Hate and not allow these fires to burn out of control. Too much is at risk.

FCJ Editor

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