We’ve now had almost fifteen years of continual anti-Muslim propaganda. Certainly murderous extremist Muslim groups have been a trigger for the xenophobic response, but it’s widely recognized that Islam is not the only religion that has produced violent fanatics. It’s also abundantly clear that the vast majority of the world’s 1.6 billion Muslims, nearly a quarter of humanity, do not support and bear no responsibility for the acts of fanatics. In fact, they make up most of their victims. The recent murder of three young Muslim college students in North Carolina is a chilling example of the long-term result of xenophobic propaganda.
It’s ironic that the propensity for violence against muslims seems to be increasing as tolerance in our society as a whole is increasing. This is one more example of the polarization of American society; some fraction of the population, perhaps 25 or 30% , is moving against the grain and becoming less tolerant, less rational, and less modern. These people are driven largely by fear. Although right wingers like to posture and pose as tough guys, they are by and large fear biters.
There is an unwholesome pattern in the history of the United States; events lead to the scapegoating of a group, partly out of the natural xenophobic tendencies of the human race, but also for profit and political gain. Examples: Irish immigrants scapegoated on the east coast, black men and women scapegoated over the unfair draft laws during the civil war, southern Europeans scapegoated in the early twentieth century. In general, the practice includes gangs of thugs, pamphlets (now web sites), low-end newspapers (or low end broadcast ‘news’) and political hate speech. Eventually, unhinged individuals attack and sometimes kill people.
In the extreme case of the persecution of southern blacks for decades, millions of people were terrorized until an end was forced by the civil rights movement, led by MLK and others. I think that responsibility for the violence against all these people, and what we are seeing now against American Muslims, does not rest solely with the lunatics who perpetrate the crimes. It extends to those who have created the atmosphere of hate against people who have done nothing to merit it. People who rant on television against Muslims bear part of the responsibility for these murders, just as the leaders of the Klan bear part of the blame for the murders of people like MLK and Medgar Evers.
People like Hannity, Bolling, Kilmeade et al have been ramping up the drumbeat of anti-muslim propaganda for several years, and they now bear a share of the guilt for these crimes. Right wing politicians like John Bennett and Bobby Jindal are also guilty. It’s not hard to find outrageous examples of this; if you’ve been stuck listening to Fox it seems the Barbie and Ken taking heads can’t get through five minutes without uttering some sort of ethnic or cultural slur. See, for example, http://www.rightwingwatch.org/...
It isn’t necessary to postulate conspiracy to understand why these murders take place. There are plenty of violence prone nutjobs in any human society; we are, it seems, a bunch of damned dirty apes. It doesn’t take much to peel the thin skin off these people and turn them loose. A steady diet of bullshit about how muslims/blacks/commies/pinkos/druggies etc etc are going to cause the end of western civilization, making it impossible to drive your Dodge Ram to Hooters on Friday night, is probably enough to set off all kinds of idiots.
So what, if any, are the consequences if you do yell ‘fire’ in a crowded theater and fifty people are trampled? I don’t see much difference between that and what’s happening in this country right now. If my family had been attacked, I’d be investigating the possibility of suing all these fine folks for wrongful death. At the very least, they should be confronted and publicly shamed for the crimes they’ve inspired. Something has to be done or it will get worse.