Not All That Innocent

Via Ed Brayton, this piece from Daniel Larison on Mosquegate. I found this particularly interesting:

As I said earlier this year:

The greatest danger all along has been that we would destroy or corrupt our institutions and our values out of an irrational exaggeration of the threat posed by jihadists, and that we would make this even worse through a widely shared blindness to the consequences of our national security and foreign policies. One reason anti-jihadist commentary has seemed less and less persuasive to me over the last decade is that anti-jihadists have done nothing to avoid these dangers and have done all that they could to make them worse.

Anti-jihadists keep making the same errors over and over. Instead of exploiting differences between jihadists and non-jihadists, among different kinds of Islamists, and between different groups of jihadists, anti-jihadists have been perfectly content to roll all of them into a single “Islamofascist” menace. That artificially inflates the strength of actual jihadist enemies by lending credibility to their propaganda, and as a result it makes jihadist causes more appealing.

Two points here:

1) The corruption and/or destruction of our institutions and values is a desired result of this campaign and those behind it. It's been a desired result of the new right since its inception, from the Christianists and their "Christian nation/Biblical principles" mantra to the everlasting "War on Terrah" to legalized torture and detention without recourse on the president's say-so to the corporatist decision in Citizens United.

2) It's almost a cliche at this point that the jihadists are the new right's favorite wet dream. This "lumping" that Larison notes is not an error, it's a tactic. It's not about making jihadists more appealing to disaffected Muslims, it's about making them more frightening to otherwise complacent Middle Americans.

Conor Friedersdorf also makes a good point:

Even worse, opponents of the project are opportunistically invoking the Sept. 11 terrorist attacks, even going so far as to appropriate their imagery. "Join the fight to kill The Ground Zero Mosque," intones a video advertisement released by a group called National Republican Trust PAC. "A mosque at Ground Zero must not stand. The political class says nothing. The politicians are doing nothing to stop it. But we Americans will be heard. "

As an American in good standing, I'd like to be heard--and to make sure that James Madison, a colleague of mine in citizenship, is heard too. The fourth president of the U.S. once wrote, "Congress shall make no law respecting an establishment of religion or prohibiting the free exercise thereof." It's a line that National Republican Trust neglects to remember. Perhaps "the political class" isn't doing anything to stop the construction of an Islamic community center because the Constitution forbids it.

Has anyone noticed how inconvenient the Constitution is these days?