Islamophobia is the new anti-Communism

Islamophobia is the new anti-Communism

It’s suddenly fashionable on the left to praise George W. Bush.

Granted, the praise being offered is narrow in scope, limited only to Bush’s non-inflammatory public comments on Islam in the wake of 9/11, and backhanded in nature, with his example supposedly demonstrating the failure of today’s Republicans -- with their Muslim-baiting response to the "ground zero mosque" -- to meet even a modest standard of responsibility in their own rhetoric.

But the idea behind the praise is big in scope: that, as Matthew Yglesias put it in Sunday’s Washington Post, the post-Bush GOP is engaged in an "abrupt slide toward xenophobia" that the party’s Bush era leadership rejected:

[T]he mosque controversy is not a continuation of the dynamics that started on Sept. 11, 2001, but a sharp reversal of course nine years on, one that's antithetical to the approach during the administration of President George W. Bush. Then, leading conservatives were careful to portray the U.S. response to the terrorist attacks as a targeted campaign against a minority group of murderous fanatics, not a broad cultural conflict with Islam. They appreciated that the latter approach would amount to a strategic and moral disaster.

On the surface, there’s plenty of validity to this. Bush’s insistence after 9/11 that Islam is "a religion of peace" and that those who attacked America represented the faith’s fanatical fringes does indeed have the ring of admirable maturity compared to Newt Gingrich’s cynical conflation of the 9/11 terrorists and the Islamic faith.


But let’s be honest: The difference between Bush’s GOP and Newt’s is one of window dressing only. The Republican Party of the Bush years had the same magnetic allure to Islamophobes as today’s does, even if it didn’t use quite the same inflammatory rhetoric.

It was Bush, after all, who filled his inner circle with committed neoconservatives who believed that Islam itself imperiled Western values and the long-term survival of the United States – and who embraced the neocons’ vision of a "global war on terror." Daniel Pipes, for instance, used a speech one month after 9/11 to warn of the threat posed by "the presence, and increased stature, and affluence, and enfranchisement of American Muslims." Bush appointed Pipes to the board of the U.S. Institute of Peace.

The "war on terror," in turn, cemented for Bush and the GOP the loyalties of America’s most virulent Islamophobes – many of them right-wing Christians who had long yearned for just such a confrontation between the West and Islam. Even as Bush was insisting on his "religion of peace" construction, Pat Robertson was branding Islam “an erroneous religion” and suggesting its adherents were "worse than Hitler," and Jerry Falwell was labeling the prophet Mohammed “a terrorist.”

A cynic would call this a version of good cop/bad cop, with Bush using soothing platitudes to placate moderate swing voters while his right-wing allies energized their flock by articulating the effect of his policies in blunt terms. If that was the idea, it clearly worked, given the importance of conservative Christians to Bush’s narrow 2004 reelection.

Islamophobia is the GOP's last hope. While they're trying to run on the economy, it is Republicans that crashed the economy. tax taxes for the wealthy and we'll all live happily ever after. That BS is not selling well among the adults with a good short term memory. Conservatives could try to run on "small government" platitudes, but this would be after eight years of Republicans bloating government to bigger than ever. They can't run on their national security platform because they lied and our troops died for those lies. So they're running on base instinct mixed with fear of the ominous other who is out to get us.