The debate over the prisoner-swap deal spotlights how anti-Muslim sentiment on the right has actually grown in the last decade.
Jonathan Ernst/Reuters
I have some sympathy for critics of President Obama’s
decision to trade five Guantanamo prisoners for Sergeant Bowe Bergdahl.
At the very least, the White House should have informed Congress
beforehand,
as required by law.
And the administration’s effort to justify that failure by citing a
presidential signing statement altering the law’s meaning sounds
positively
Cheneyesque.
Still, it's disheartening to see that some prominent conservatives
are unable to critique the Bergdahl deal without resorting to
anti-Muslim bigotry. Bergdahl’s father, an
outraged Bill O’Reilly said earlier this week, “looks like a Muslim. He is also somewhat sympathetic to Islam.” Actually, Bob Bergdahl’s
untrimmed beard would fit in well in
Amish and
ultra-Orthodox Jewish
circles as well.
But it’s revealing that for O’Reilly, sympathy for
“Islam,”—not “Taliban-style Islam” or “radical Islam” but merely
“Islam”—is a character flaw.
It’s remarkable, when you think about it. In recent decades, the
stigma associated with offensive comments about African Americans has
clearly grown. Donald Sterling is banned for the NBA for life for racist
comments made in a private conversation.
When it comes to homophobia,
the shift has been even more dramatic. The term “faggot”—which was
omnipresent and largely uncontroversial in my youth—is becoming as
unacceptable as the term “kike.” (The actor Jonah Hill
apologized profusely for using “faggot” earlier this week.) Feminists are enjoying success in their
“ban bossy” campaign, an effort that would have been unthinkable a decade or two ago.
Attacking someone for “looking like a Muslim,” on the other
hand, arouses barely any controversy.
Some liberal blogs condemned
O’Reilly’s comments, but it’s unlikely that he will apologize and
unthinkable that he’ll resign.
In conservative circles today, in fact, high-profile expressions of
anti-Muslim bigotry are as routine as anti-black or anti-Jewish slurs
were a half-century ago. In 2011, Republican presidential candidate
Herman Cain
vowed
not to appoint a Muslim to his cabinet. Far from crippling his
candidacy, the comment preceded his meteoric (if short-lived) ascent
into
the lead in national polls. Newt Gingrich traveled the country
warning,
“I believe Shariah is a mortal threat to the survival of freedom in the
United States.”
At its 2012 national convention, the GOP featured a
Catholic priest, a rabbi, an evangelical minister, a Sikh, a Greek
Orthodox archbishop, and two Mormon leaders but, conspicuously
failed to invite an imam.
It’s not just conservative elites. A 2012 poll for the Arab American
Institute found that while 29 percent of Democrats hold an “unfavorable”
view of Muslims, among Republicans it's
57 percent.
In 2013, two researchers at Carnegie Mellon sent out the resumes of a
fictitious Christian and Muslim job applicant with the same credentials.
In the 10 states where Barack Obama recorded his highest vote
percentage, the two applicants received interview requests at the same
rate. In the 10 states where Romney did best, by contrast, the Christian
applicant was
more than eight times more likely to be asked for an interview.
It would be comforting to believe this is merely a holdover from
9/11, and anti-Muslim bigotry will fade as we move further from that
trauma. But according to the Arab American Institute poll, Republicans
are 17 points
more likely to dislike Muslims
than they were in 2003 (although
the numbers were even higher in 2010). Between 2002 and 2013, according
to the Pew Research Center, the percentage of Republicans who said
Islam is more likely than other religions to encourage violence
rose 29 points.
Even as public tolerance for most other forms of bigotry declines,
hostility to Muslims has actually grown, despite the winding down of
America’s wars in Iraq and Afghanistan. In fact, the rise may be
partially due to the end of those wars. After 9/11, George W. Bush told
Americans that although we were fighting “bad Muslims” (al-Qaeda) “good
Muslims”—who constituted the large majority—would embrace our invasions.
It hasn’t worked out that way. My hunch is that faced with the
realization that many Iraqis and Afghans hated America’s occupation of
their countries, Democrats have been more likely to blame the U.S. for
starting those wars in the first place. According to polls, large
majorities of Democrats now see both
Iraq and
Afghanistan as
mistakes. Republicans don’t. For Republicans, I suspect, America’s
problems in Iraq and Afghanistan say less about us than about them. They
prove that Bush was wrong: Most Muslims really are our enemy.
Otherwise, why would they oppose our efforts to make them free?
In 2006, when O’Reilly called for withdrawing U.S. troops from Iraq,
he said
“the essential problem” is that “there are so many nuts in the
country—so many crazies—that we can’t control them.” In other words,
America’s problem in Iraq is Iraqis. And virtually the only thing most
Americans know about Iraqis, and Afghans, is that they’re Muslim.
Perhaps this explains some of the right-wing venom towards the
Bergdahls. Sergeant Bergdahl may have done ill-advised and even
reprehensible things. But it appears that he and his father reacted to
America’s wartime troubles in Afghanistan not by blaming Afghans but
blaming America’s war.
That’s exactly what most conservatives—in their
zeal to defend America’s righteousness—have refused to do. And in Bill
O’Reilly’s eyes, this willingness to side with America’s enemies casts
doubt on the Bergdahl’s character. It makes them almost like Muslims
themselves.
