Pamela Geller’s racist, right-wing Zionist ads have been denounced across the board, including by the Jewish Council for Public Affairs, the Council on American Islamic Relations and Jewish Voice for Peace. But one place where Geller’s message of civilizational clash and conflict with Islam has a home in is the base of the Republican Party.
A new poll shows that the views Geller and the rest of the Islamophobia network in the U.S. push have currency among 64% of Republicans. The Guardian gets a sneak peek at a YouGov poll showing that “an overwhelming majority of Republican voters in the United States regard the west and Islam as being embroiled in ‘a fundamental conflict which only one side can win.’”
Geller’s ads are of this nature, promoting a view that the West (with Israel as the front line) and Islam are thoroughly incompatible and at war with one another. It’s a common trope on the Islamophobic right, as well as a common trope on the radical Islamist side of the equation. It’s not true of course; Muslims make vital contributions to and are part and parcel of many Western societies. But the truth does not matter to these folks.
Geller’s ads seek to cast the Israel/Palestine conflict in these civilizational terms, instead of acknowledging that fundamental political problems–the dispossession of Palestinians being the core one–are at the heart of why Israelis and Palestinians aren’t living in peace.
This message that is now widespread among Republican voters is a recipe for never-ending conflict.
More from The Guardian:
American opinion is beset by a sharp partisan divide. By a near three-to-one margin, of 64% to 23%, Republicans perceive a fundamental conflict [between the West and Islam]. The overall picture of American tolerance emerges only because Democratic identifiers incline even more emphatically towards the hope of peaceful co-existence, by a 68%-18% margin. The partisan gap in support for the “conflict” view is therefore 46 percentage points. Among independents, the split is right down the middle – with 45% believing peace should be possible, and 44% ruling it out.
No wonder that Mitt Romney and Paul Ryan, desperate to get their base to turn out in November, have had no qualms about courting the anti-Muslim vote. Ryan, for instance, recently appeared at the Values Voter Summit in Washington, D.C., a main event for the evangelical Christian right. Romney made an appearance by video.
But as Zaid Jilani reported for AlterNet, anti-Muslim sentiment coursed through the conference. One speaker was Jerry Boykin, an inflammatory former general who has said that there should be “no mosques in America” and that Islam “should not be protected under the First Amendment.” Boykin called for a military strike on Iran at the conference. And Romney met with Boykin in August.
Another speaker at the conference that Ryan appeared at was Nonie Darwish, an “ex-Muslim” and Islamophobic activist. Jilani reported that Darwish told the summit that “Islam’s number one enemy is the truth, that’s the truth! America’s number one virtue is the truth…”Islam is rotten to the core.”
Reporter: What do you think of western civilization?
Mahatma Gandhi: I think it would be a good idea.
The Republican party is in disarray. Islamophobia is symptomatic of this. There is zero discipline. Gingrich savaged Romney in the primaries. Same thing.
Their core constituency – older white males – are fading out in terms of share of the population.
Norm Ornstein has been chronicling the process of the slow decline of the Republican party in the book “It’s Even Worse Than It Looks”.
http://www.newyorker.com/online/blogs/hendrikhertzberg/2012/05/mann-and-ornstein.html#ixzz27gF6QQ4A
We have been studying Washington politics and Congress for more than 40 years, and never have we seen them this dysfunctional. In our past writings, we have criticized both parties when we believed it was warranted. Today, however, we have no choice but to acknowledge that the core of the problem lies with the Republican Party.
The GOP has become an insurgent outlier in American politics. It is ideologically extreme; scornful of compromise; unmoved by conventional understanding of facts, evidence and science; and dismissive of the legitimacy of its political opposition. When one party moves this far from the mainstream, it makes it nearly impossible for the political system to deal constructively with the country’s challenges.
“Both sides do it” or “There is plenty of blame to go around” are the traditional refuges for an American news media intent on proving its lack of bias, while political scientists prefer generality and neutrality when discussing partisan polarization. Many self-styled bipartisan groups, in their search for common ground, propose solutions that move both sides to the center, a strategy that is simply untenable when one side is so far out of reach.
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I remember when the video of fight at Darwish’s speech broke out here on MW.
We had a few Zio-trolls try to turn the tables and blame the abused protestors. We even had some new trolls like Izik pass themselves off as honest bystanders only to later have a Zio-meltdown (think Wizard of Oz and ‘melting’).
It just goes to show you that our instincts were right. Darwish’s is a loony and anyone saying the collective ‘we’ should hear her out lest they be accused of censorship is a agent provacateur. A shitty and transparent one at that considering that these same trolls were wringing their hands at the protestors who got pummeled.
She should not throw stones at glass houses.
after November’s election the Republican Party is going to struggle mightily to even survive as a viable national entity – the Whigs are already motioning for them to come sit on the warm spot on the bench of History’s Forgotten Political Movments right next to them (Sit here, tired elephant, sit here and rest) … after Obama’s landslide victory (which I’ve been predicting for about a year), it will become ALL ABOUT LATINOS in U.S. politics. Hillary will court them vigorously the next year or two, as will the Democratic Party and the shreds of the Big Tent wing of Republicans will do the same – you will see Jeb Bush and Marc Rubio rebranding the Republicans as much as they possibly can with Latino outreach … which leaves hate-mongers like Pamela Geller and the zio-fascist nutballs swingin’ in the breeze