I would hope it will be featured in the Abbreviated Pundit Round-up, but in case it is not, it is titled Anti-Muslim Is Anti-American.
It begins like this:
There seems to be no bottom to the cesspool of Islamophobic rhetoric coming from Republican candidates.
The tone of anti-Muslim musings post-Paris attack has become so poisonous that it cannot portend anything positive.
Blow offers some of the offensive rhetoric from various Republican candidates for President, then remarks
Indeed, this is the problem with reckless, racist rhetoric: Each utterance tosses one more log onto the bonfire that can burn out a space for the unimaginable.
Please keep reading.
He offers a quote from Dr. Martin Luther King Jr:
The Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. warned in his 1967 “The Other America” speech: “Racism is evil because its ultimate logic is genocide.” As King put it:
“If one says that I am not good enough to live next door to him; if one says that I am not good enough to eat at a lunch counter, or to have a good, decent job, or to go to school with him merely because of my race, he is saying consciously or unconsciously that I do not deserve to exist.”
Stop and consider the words King offered. Consider the rhetoric we have heard from the likes of Trump, Carson (on “rabid dog”). Then consider that we have already seen mosques attacked. Remember that we have a history of demonizing those seen as “other” and it is not just ancient history.
Blow cites data on people being called in for interviews, that in Republican states there is a severe disparity in the percentage of Muslims versus Christians called in, while in Democratic states there is no such disparity, then ask yourself why.
Here I do want to offer several comments. First an observation. We have had people of Arab background elected to high office in a number of states — S Dakota, Illinois, Maine, Michigan, West Virginia, etc. But most do not necessarily have obviously Arab last names and they were all Christian.
Name can be an issue. Trust me, I know. My last name Bernstein is obviously of Jewish origin, and I have had more than a few interesting job exploration experiences based on that name.
Carrying it a step further, when my mother arrived at Cornell as a 15 year old sophomore with the last name of Livingston, she was immediately invited to pledge all the prestigious sororities — which were all “exclusive” (no Jews allosed). When they discovered she was NOT from the famous family among the founders of the nation but in fact had an immigrant Jewish mother and the family name of her father had originally been Levitsky, the invitations were withdrawn. She got even — she got the rules changed so that no new student could live in a fraternity or sorority until they had been on campus for a semester.
I consider the experiences of my family and of others I have known, and the idea of dividing into us versus them on any external basis — religion, national origin, skin color, sexual orientation — scares me.
I do not think one has to be of a minority category — as is Blow and as am I by background — to find such an approach alien to the principles of this country, although far too often it has been part of the practice.
Sometimes it is unthinking. My father would not let me try out for the elementary school baseball team because its name was Crusaders, and he gave me a lesson on what the First Crusade did to Jews in Europe. Odd to have such a name in a school that was at least ¼ Jewish, with several families that had survived the Holocaust (although in the 1950s it was rarely discussed openly).
Returning to Blow’s terrific column, he spends some time exploring some of the legislative actions that single out Muslims, then writes
This demonizing a single religious faith is a slippery slope. It feeds something that is at odds with the most noble ambition of this country’s better angels: equality.
He cites data from a 2011 Pew Poll (and the figures would be worse now) that demonstrates the high percentage of Muslim Americans who have experienced discrimination, then concludes his column with these words:
We must put a lid on this corrosive language. Simply put, being specifically anti-Muslim is, in a way, anti-American.
Yes it is, and shame on any politician whose actions, rhetoric or votes does not confront this.