What started for the Tea Party (TP) movement as a home grown product may be moving into the export market. The product is one of the TP's long list of "anti-whatever-agenda" items, in this case an anti-Muslim point of view.
As noted in a previous post on October 11, and a previous post on October 4, the central thrust of the Tea Party when it began in early 2009 was opposition to President Obama and his agenda for large stimulus spending to create and save jobs, health care reform, and the cap and trade proposal, among other things. But the TP's anti-Obama attacks also included his personal background such as where he was born and his religious roots. These personal issues manifested themselves in TP activists highlighting that his middle name was Hussein, which was used against him earlier in the 2008 presidential campaign. Translated, this was intended to convey that there were questions about where he was born and his constitutional eligibility to be President and that he was a Muslim, not a Christian.
Thus, early on the Tea Party and other dissident groups that attached themselves to the movement propagated an anti-Muslim, anti-Islam message. Given that the 2001 destruction of the World Trade Center (WTC), carried out by Muslim members of the al Qaeda terrorist organization, the general environment was fertile ground for TP efforts to wrap Obama in pro-Muslim, un-American toxic rhetoric.
This anti-Muslim message gained a new focus last spring when plans were disclosed to build an Islamic cultural/social center, including a mosque, about five blocks from where the WTC once stood. The concern about such a center was usually expressed in terms of "sensitivity". That is, if those planning the center had any feelings for the families and friends of victims of the WTC disaster and the role that terrorists who were Muslim played in the disaster, they wouldn't build an Islamic center so close to ground zero of the 9/11 attack. The result was loud street demonstrations against the building of the center. The basic counter argument was that our constitutionally guaranteed freedom of religion makes it a fundamental right that the center including the mosque should be allowed to proceed. But the emergence of the proposed plan for the center and the public reaction to it also raised concerns that the issue had awakened a latent anti-Muslim sentiment, stemming from the 9/11 attack, among a larger segment of the population outside the Tea Party.
Inevitably, plans for the center also became a part of campaign politics for the midterm elections next month. Opponents of the center, including TP-backed candidates, primarily based their position on the sensitivity issue; the political opposition, appearing to be backed into a defensive corner on the issue, tended to take the safe position of agreeing that the center should be relocated to a different site farther away from ground zero. But some, like Sharron Angle, seeking the Senate seat of incumbent Harry Reid in Nevada, carried an anti-Muslim sentiment farther. In another of her "what wall did that come off of" comments at a Tea Party rally she said, "there is something fundamentally wrong with allowing a foreign system of law," (meaning Islamic-based law) to take hold in any community in the country. This anti-Muslim, anti-Islamic sentiment also manifested itself in other forms such as the burning of construction equipment at a building site for a mosque in Murfreesboro, Tennessee, and an unsuccessful effort in Sidney, New York, to shut down a small Muslim cemetery there. In Temecula, California, a Tea Party group is trying to prevent the building of a mosque by the local Islamic Center.
Now this domestic brand of anti-Muslim sentiment and protest is being packaged for import into Britain, the home of many Muslims who migrated there from former British colonies. It was very recently reported in a liberal British newspaper, The Observer*, that the English Defense League (EDL), described as a "far right grouping" fighting "Islamification" of English cities is seeking to create ties with the American Tea Party movement. A first step is the invitation of a U.S. rabbi to come to Britain to discuss Islamic Sharia law, best known as the legal underpinnings of the Taliban in Afghanistan during their brutal rule of that country prior to the U.S. invasion in 2001. Also, according to the Observer, the EDL is seeking ties with Pamela Geller, who according to Wikipedia is the cofounder of the "Stop Islamification of America" organization and one of the leaders of those opposing the Islamic center in New York. Geller is also connected with the Tea Party and spoke before a statewide TP convention in Tennessee last May.
In sum, the U.S. Tea Party movement which, unfortunately, has already shown its considerable ability to mobilize a high decibel, far right voice for unhappy voters in this country, is now seen as an instrument for advancing the anti-Islam activities of a protest group in Britain. For a large part of our citizenry the TP has been a harmful product for domestic consumption; it should likewise be tagged as "dangerous to your civic health" on the export label.
*guardian.co.uk/uk/2010/oct/10/english-defence-league-tea-party
The blind bigotry you describe smacks of the Salem witch hunts and the McCarthy era. Islamophobia has been thriving in the UK long before 9/11 and 7/7, however, so it's not at all clear in which direction anti-Muslim "sentiment," to put it mildly, is being imported or exported. It is clear that the EDL and the likes of Angle and Geller couldn't be better foot soldiers for al Qaeda if they strapped on suicide bomb belts. As Professor Gerges, and expert on Middle Eastern politics and international relations with the London School of Economics points out, al Qaeda's strategy is to trigger a clash of civilisations. By fomenting hatred against innocent citizens of the US and UK, Angle, Geller and the ELP are seeking to do just that.
ReplyDeleteYour're right about the possibility of our entering a new McCarthy era. Instead of the anti-communist theme, it will be "soft on Islam".In fact, we have already entered that era. I was a bit curious as to why the EDL would turn to the Tea Party as an "import" product since, as you say, anti-Islamification has a long history in Britan that predates both our 9/11 and the London subway bombing. (It even touches on why so many of the workers on British Rail are Indian/Pakistani as the mainline/Anglo unions shunned such jobs in the 50s and 60s.) The only thing I could figure was that the Tea Party has made such a splash in the U.S. that the EDL would seek its "aura" as an export product to get some renewed attention in Britain. Apparently it had some success as shown by The Observer article. Was particularly struck by your "clash of civilizations" reference which was the exit book of political scientist Samuel Huntington (my generation). What always fascinated me about Huntington is that he sought a tectonic explanation of world events, your context, rather than focus on the clash and clang of current events.
ReplyDeleteNot having read Huntington, I'm not sure what you mean by "tectonic explanation." That world events evolve very slowly? Or that there is an underlying human nature or social/political tendency that surfaces again and again in different contexts, clashes and clangs?
ReplyDeleteIf it's the second, then a dear friend and I just had a conversation about this. He was describing a North Carolina candidate for congressional office who made a chief part of her platform a campaign against the Islamic cultural center proposed in NYC a few blocks from ground zero. In an interview with Anderson Cooper, she faulted her opponent for not addressing this issue. The ignorance, narrow-mindedness and bigotry of her views became so apparent in the interview that her political rival later declared that he wouldn't want anyone who agreed with those views to vote for him. So it seems that ignorance, narrow-mindedness and bigotry repeat themselves over and over in history, with different parties taking the "us" and "them" roles. Whether it's Christians or witches, whites or people of color, Americans or Communists, Nazis or Jews, Westerners or Muslims, the tectonic plates cover the same ground and grind us all down again and again.
The "tectonic explanation" was not related to anything Huntington himself said, only that his "clash of civilizations" thesis had that kind of unstoppable force underlying it. The shift of the plates causes headline events such as earthquakes and sometimes resultant tsunamis. The cultural clash between the Muslim and non-Muslim worlds produces its own headline events such as the terrorist attacks of 9/11 and the London subway bombings and mass killings like Bali and Mumbai. We cannot stop the collision of the plates and we seem to be in the same position with the "clash" thesis-- its time has come, it is occuring, and the best we seem able to do is to deal with its consequences.
ReplyDeleteThe really scarey part of your North Carolina example is that the "antis" may win so many seats in Congress that there are some very dark days ahead for our own "clash of values".