(Flickr/Dan Nguyen)
My Plum Line post today is about what looks like a growing sentiment on the right that we should indeed be in a clash of civilizations, between the Christian West and Islam. When Bill O'Reilly is literally calling for a "holy war," practically every Republican is complaining that President Obama doesn't call terrorism "Islamic" often enough, and people like Senator Lindsey Graham are saying things like, "When I hear the president of the United States and his chief spokesperson failing to admit that we're in a religious war, it really bothers me," then there's something significant going on.
We're now entering the time when the party's most prominent politicians will be going out and meeting the voters, which will almost inevitably result in some instances where somebody says something horribly bigoted and the candidate has to decide how to react. Here's some of what I had to say about it:
The real test of how mainstream this kind of anti-Islamic sentiment has grown within the GOP isn't so much what those like Huckabee and Jindal say-they've obviously decided that advocating for religious war is the path to becoming the favored candidate of Christian conservatives (though they seem to have forgotten that the candidate who wins that mantle almost never gets the GOP nomination). The test is whether we see candidates like Jeb Bush, Scott Walker, and Marco Rubio, who are looking to appeal to a wider group of voters, dipping their toes in those rancid waters.
One Republican candidate has done the right thing in response to this question. In 2011, Chris Christie appointed Sohail Mohammed to a state judgeship, a decision for which he was attacked by some conservatives in the most blatantly bigoted ways you can imagine. The critics called Mohammed, an accomplished attorney, a terrorist sympathizer and someone who would attempt to impose sharia law on the citizens of New Jersey. Christie treated the criticisms with the contempt they deserved. "This sharia law business is crap," he said. "It's just crazy and I'm tired of dealing with the crazies."
But that was then. We'll see what the candidates do when someone at an Iowa town meeting stands up and says something grossly anti-Muslim, because that absolutely will happen. Will they agree? Will they just try to change the subject? Or will they say, "Now hold on there"? That'll show us what they're really made of.
And while we're on the subject, anyone who says that all this "We can't defeat terrorism if Obama won't say 'Islamic terrorism!'" fury isn't in large part about the conservative belief that Barack Obama isn't a "real" American is just full of it. For instance, read this quote, which I'm sure many Republicans would agree is an "apology" for Islam, and evidence of how Barack Obama coddles our enemies: "Islam is a vibrant faith. Millions of our fellow citizens are Muslim. We respect the faith. We honor its traditions. Our enemy does not. Our enemy doesn't follow the great traditions of Islam. They've hijacked a great religion." Or this one: "All Americans must recognize that the face of terror is not the true faith-face of Islam. Islam is a faith that brings comfort to a billion people around the world. It's a faith that has made brothers and sisters of every race. It's a faith based upon love, not hate." Or this one: "The face of terror is not the true faith of Islam. That's not what Islam is all about. Islam is peace. These terrorists don't represent peace. They represent evil and war."
How can a president who would bend over backward like that to praise Islam possibly fight Islamic terrorism, conservatives might ask? But those words, and many others like them, weren't spoken by Barack Obama. They were spoken by George W. Bush. I was not exactly a fan of Bush's when he was president, but in the immediate aftermath of September 11 and for years afterward, he took pains to emphasize that America was not at war with a religion. And I don't recall too many Republicans complaining at the time.
