Obama takes fire for Crusades comparison (CNN.com)
Reaction to ISIS mirrors the run up to Iraq war (All In with Chris Hayes)
Scott Walker loses his mind: What’s behind his delusional ISIS-unions comparison (Salon.com)
A few weeks ago I came down with a horrible, horrible stomach flu, making me as sick as I can recall being in at least seven years. I passed one night in utter and complete pain, lying on my bed and trying not to move for fear of making things worse, even as I felt like I might throw up at any minute. It’s only now, that I’m really feeling like myself again and getting back to my normal eating habits (which aren’t that great to begin with, I grant you). I can’t remember if I’d ever had stomach flu before in my life, but if I have, I’ve certainly never had it as bad as I did earlier this month.
It was right at the start of that stomach flu that I passed a mostly sleepless night, in too much pain and too feverish to do much of anything. In the hope of distracting myself, I turned my television on at a low volume, to give my mind something to focus on besides the pain I was feeling while I tried to catch at least a little sleep. I happened to be on MSNBC at the time, and I wound up waking up in the middle of Morning Joe. I’m a night owl, so even if I had any interest in catching that wretched show (Mika Brzezinski still owes the furry community an apology for laughing in the face of the chlorine attack at Midwest FurFest last December), it’s not exactly something that’s easy to fit in my schedule.
This was right after the annual National Prayer Breakfast, which is still generating headlines because of President Obama’s speech in which he spoke of the Crusades and other past atrocities that have been carried out in the name of Christianity, pointing out that those actions are no more representative of Christianity than the recent atrocities committed by al-Qaeda and the Islamic State are representative of Islam. Conservative media has been hammering on this comparison for weeks now, regurgitating it through their outrage machine to use as “proof” that Obama “hates America” or “hates Christianity” or isn’t taking the threat posed by the Islamic State seriously. That morning, as I was half-asleep and still feverish, I heard Joe Scarborough and his sycophants trot out one of the common lines of arguments conservatives have been using, that it’s absurd to compare the centuries-old Crusades to the modern acts of al-Qaeda and the Islamic State. Even in my barely-conscious state, though, I was able to remember Obama pointing out how Christianity had been used to justify more recent atrocities in America like slavery and Jim Crow laws. I probably would have been upset if I weren’t so desperately trying not to do anything that might make me throw up.
If the examples Obama gave still aren’t recent enough, how about 2009? That was the year Kansas doctor George Tiller was assassinated for performing abortions by Scott Roeder, who claimed he was obeying “God’s law” when he killed Tiller, following a barrage of right-wing media attacks on the doctor they repeatedly called “Tiller the baby killer.” (Let’s not forget the religiously-fueled physical attacks on abortion providers in America throughout the 1990s.) That’s also the same year that just an hour north of my house, at Henry Ford Community College, student Anthony Powell shot and killed fellow student Asia McGowan, before turning the gun on himself, evidently because he believed himself to be a “true Christian” and he felt he needed to cleanse the world of atheists and other people who weren’t up to his religious standards. If that’s still not recent enough, how about last October? It completely failed to make national news, but Isaiah Marin murdered and nearly decapitated an acquaintance he believed was practicing witchcraft. (Maybe it would have made news if he’d filmed the decapitation and posted the video online.)
In none of these cases were there national rallies against “radicalized Christianity” or politicians tripping over themselves to scare us silly about the dangers posed to America by “fundamentalist Christian zealots,” and there’s a very good reason for this: No reasonable person would ever consider any of those horrors to be representative of Christians or Christianity. Somehow, though, when the fraction of a percent of the 1.6 billion Muslims on this planet start killing people and doing other horrible things, we’re expected to believe that they are emblematic of all Muslims, and that “extreme Islam” is the greatest threat to the world since Hitler or Stalin or Janet Jackson’s nipple.
The use of fear in right-wing media is hardly new, and they’ve made no bones about running it on constant overdrive since 2001. What doesn’t get talked about nearly as much as it should is that creating fear — especially when production is maintained at a fever pitch for years, against deliberately broad and often nebulous targets — is that the fear too often spills over into violent reactions. It’s not like we don’t have immediate and current evidence of this, given the rash of violence against Muslims and mosques in France after the Charlie Hebdo attack. Even though Muslim leaders vehemently condemned the attacks immediately after they occurred, they and their followers still became targets of the fear-fueled mobs that always spring up when these attacks happen.
Hardly any news networks (at least in the United States) bothered to even mention the anti-Muslim violence that spread across France after the Charlie Hebdo attack, though, and too often attacks both small and large are just ignored by the media (unless right-wing media decides to celebrate them). The chlorine attack at a furry convention I mentioned earlier just fell out of the news the days after it happened, except to use as a punch line. If someone tried a similar attack at this weekend’s conservative CPAC conference, it would be in the news for weeks easily, maybe months, and right-wing media would be breathless trying to connect any and all kind of liberalism with terrorism. (Given Wisconsin governor Scott Walker recently said his experience fighting unions makes him qualified to fight the Islamic State, we may already be there.)
When attacks against GLBT people happen in this country — remember, another transwoman here in Toledo was just brutally attacked a couple of months ago, and then earlier this month a transwoman in Akron was murdered by her father who claimed she was “in a cult” — no one says anything about the violent rhetoric of homophobes and transphobes who try to claim that anyone who deviates from heterosexuality and cisgenderism is not just morally repugnant but also a threat to society as a whole. Hardly anyone calls this “terrorist rhetoric,” even as it claims more and more victims. If the goal of terrorism is to make people you don’t like fearful, you know what? I, and a lot of other GLBT people, and liberals, and non-Christians, are afraid.
The reality is, for me and for millions of other Americans, that we are far more likely to be persecuted, or assaulted, or murdered, because of the words of right-wing ideologues than we are by anything the Islamic State will do any time soon. The Islamic State poses a genuine security risk to America and the rest of the world, and it should be taken with the utmost seriousness, but for too many of us we’re more likely to be attacked by someone acting in what they believe is the name of Christ than by someone acting in what they believe is the name of Mohammed. We may be safer in Middle America than we’d be in Mosul, but we are still in very serious danger, a danger that gets worse as right-wing media continues to stoke life-or-death fears in its audience of anyone who isn’t Christian enough, or conservative enough, or white enough, or straight enough.
The problem is not someone believing in “the wrong God” or anything like that; the problem is extremism, and extremism knows no boundaries of religion, or politics, or race, or gender, or sexuality, or gender identity. As long as we continue to soothe ourselves with the lie that extremism is just a problem of “the other people,” as long as we remain willingly blind to the reprehensible violence committed by people who, even if only in their own delusions, claim any kind of kinship with us, then extremism will just keep fueling more extremism. If you cannot condemn attacks against GLBT people as readily and vociferously as you condemn attacks against Christians, then you are only adding to the ignorance and hate that underlies all these attacks. All of them.