Why do so many Americans fear Muslims? Decades of denial about America's role in the world.

["Dave Farber" <farber () gmail com>]

Begin forwarded message:

> From: Dewayne Hendricks <dewayne () warpspeed com>
> Date: February 18, 2017 at 11:57:35 AM EST
> To: Multiple recipients of Dewayne-Net <dewayne-net () warpspeed com>
> Subject: [Dewayne-Net] Why do so many Americans fear Muslims? Decades of denial about America's role in the world.
> Reply-To: dewayne-net () warpspeed com
>
> [Note:  This item comes from friend David Rosenthal.  DLH]
>
> Why do so many Americans fear Muslims? Decades of denial about America's role in the world.
> By Jon Schwarz
> Feb 18 2017
> <https://theintercept.com/2017/02/18/why-do-so-many-americans-fear-muslims-decades-of-denial-about-americas-role-in-the-world/>
>
> There’s been lots of attention-grabbing opposition to Trump’s “Muslim ban” executive order, from demonstrations to 
> court orders. But polls make it clear public opinion is much more mixed. Standard phone polls show small majorities 
> opposed, while web and automated polls find small majorities continue to support it.
>
> What surprises me about the poll results isn’t that lots of Americans like the ban — but that so many Americans 
> don’t. Regular people have lives to lead and can’t investigate complicated issues in detail. Instead they usually 
> take their cues from leaders they trust. And given what politicians across the U.S. political spectrum say about 
> terrorism, Trump’s executive order makes perfect sense. There are literally no national-level American politicians 
> telling a story that would help ordinary people understand why Trump’s goals are both horrendously counterproductive 
> and morally vile.
>
> Think of it this way:
>
> On February 13, 1991 during the first Gulf War, the U.S. dropped two laser-guided bombs on the Amiriyah public air 
> raid shelter in Baghdad. More than 400 Iraqi civilians were incinerated or boiled alive. For years afterward visitors 
> to a memorial there would meet a woman with eight children who had died during the bombing; she was living in the 
> ruined shelter because she could not bear to be anywhere else.
>
> Now, imagine that immediately after the bombing Saddam Hussein had delivered a speech on Iraqi TV in which he 
> plaintively asked “Why do they hate us?” — without ever mentioning the fact that Iraq was occupying Kuwait. And even 
> Saddam’s political opponents would only mumble that “this is a complicated issue.” And most Iraqis had no idea that 
> their country had invaded Kuwait, and that there were extensive United Nation resolutions and speeches by George H.W. 
> Bush explaining the U.S.-led coalition’s rationale for attacking Iraq in response. And that the few Iraqis who 
> suggested there might be some kind of relationship between Hussein’s invasion of Kuwait and the Amiriyah bombing were 
> shouted down by politicians saying these Iraq-hating radicals obviously believed that America’s slaughter of 400 
> people was justified.
>
> If that had happened, we’d immediately recognize that Iraqi political culture was completely insane, and that it 
> would cause them to behave in dangerously nutty ways. But that’s exactly what U.S. political culture is like.
>
> In an interview last March with Anderson Cooper, Donald Trump tried to puzzle out what’s behind the terrorism 
> directed at the U.S. “I think Islam hates us,” Trump learnedly opined. “There’s a tremendous hatred there, we’ve got 
> to get to the bottom of it.”
>
> “In Islam itself?” asked Cooper. Trump responded, “You’re going to have to figure that out. You’ll get another 
> Pulitzer.”
>
> During Trump’s speech at the CIA right after his inauguration, he expressed the same bewilderment. “Radical Islamic 
> terrorism,” pondered Trump. “This is something nobody can even understand.”
>
> John F. Kelly, now Trump’s head of the Department of Homeland Security, is similarly perplexed, saying in a 2013 
> speech that “I don’t know why they hate us, and I frankly don’t care, but they do hate us and are driven irrationally 
> to our destruction.”
>
> Say what you want about the tenets of this worldview, but at least it’s an internally consistent ethos: We’re 
> surrounded by lunatics who want to murder us for reasons that are totally inscrutable to rational people like us but 
> … obviously have something to do with them being Muslims.
>
> Meanwhile, in private, the non-crazy members of the U.S. foreign policy establishment aren’t confused at all. They 
> understand quite well that Islamist terrorism is almost wholly blowback from the foreign policy they’ve designed.
>
> [snip]
>
> Dewayne-Net RSS Feed: <http://dewaynenet.wordpress.com/feed/>



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