Jack Ross at Right Web has a fine piece on the extent to which the widespread hatred of Islam has been fed by an ideology of “Americanism,” which draws on the “paranoid style” in American politics, and the complicity of the media, and has a cousin in the Ku Klux Klan’s sacred-ground beliefs:
There is no denying that Breivik’s manifesto and beliefs are rooted in a distinctly post-9/11 ideology of anti-Islamism. This relatively new ideology of anti-Islamism reveals much about the deeper pathologies in current U.S. politics…
The episode that revealed the new anti-Islamism in all its ugliness was last year’s chorus of opposition to the construction of a Muslim community center two blocks from the World Trade Center site. Notorious right-winger Pamela Geller’s crusade against the center was a clarion call for anti-Islamism—indeed, Geller pervasively influenced Anders Breivik’s screeds. Opponents of the proposed Muslim center claimed the site is “sacred ground,” revealing again the paranoid style of anti-Islamism. This is a direct analogy to the Klan’s priestly vestments—“Ground Zero” is the holiest site in [David] Gelernter’s [Americanism] “fourth great western religion,” which non-believers are not fit to desecrate by their presence.
More broadly, this belief in “Americanism”—or, as it is most often called by the right today, “American exceptionalism”—is the militant worldview composed of pathologies its adherents have projected on to their Muslim “enemies” for the last decade. [Richard] Hofstadter would have recognized all too clearly the paranoid style animating the belief that the better part of the Islamic world does not hold legitimate grievances against the United States over its foreign policies, but rather that “they hate us for our freedom.” Thus the basis of the utterly preposterous belief that there is a threat of the imposition of “sharia law” on Western societies or that the non-violent activism of groups like the Muslim Brotherhood poses a more dangerous threat than al-Qaeda. Indeed, Hofstadter wrote:
“Since the enemy is thought of as being totally evil and totally unappeasable, he must be totally eliminated—if not from the world, at least from the theater of operations to which the paranoid directs his attention. This demand for total triumph leads to the formulation of hopelessly unrealistic goals, and since these goals are not even remotely attainable, failure constantly heightens the paranoid’s sense of frustration.”
For media liberals and others to smugly ascribe this paranoid style as the province of the nationalist right is therefore dubious at best, and arguably a deliberate avoidance of the more disturbing questions it raises. The U.S. media is complicit in the belief that “the world” is “at war” with some kind of global Islamist conspiracy against all that is right and true. Coverage of the Norway attacks proved the media’s inherent bias—witness the conflation of the word “terrorism” with an Islamic conspiracy.
Probably no author has more elaborately theorized a great cosmic struggle straight out of Hofstadter’s Paranoid Style between the enlightened West and “Islamofascism” than the self-styled “democrat of the left” Paul Berman. Berman, most recently in the news because of his obsession with the Oxford-based Muslim philosopher Tariq Ramadan, expressed his thesis in The Flight of the Intellectuals, a rambling treatise…
