White fright

The far Right is making a bid to use the average American's economic frustrations in its campaign against the minorities and immigrants.

ON September 11, the Dove World Outreach Centre, a Christian church in the town of Gainesville, Florida, will host an International Burn a Koran Day. Ordinarily, the incident in Florida would not have been of much significance. The town authorities denied the church's application for a permit to conduct a bonfire. Dove World has said it will go ahead with its burning programme though it will attract a fine. Most religious organisations in this town, which houses the University of Florida, have condemned the action.

Dove World's pastor, Terry Jones, a 58-year-old former hotel manager, is undeterred. He makes for good television. The Quran, he says, deserves to be burnt. Outside his modest church premises is a sign, which is incendiary stuff. Protests by local interfaith organisations and the Council on American-Islamic Relations (CAIR) have informed public opinion but had the reverse effect on Jones and his congregation. They are unmoved.

Jones' ideas are not, however, unique. The Gainesville Sun reports that two candidates for Congress in Florida have brought the same sentiment into the established political arena. In the Palm Beach area of Florida, Allen West, a retired lieutenant colonel, is running for the Republican nomination to take on the sitting Democratic Congressman. West, an African American, has framed his campaign around the theme that Islam is infiltrating the United States and needs to be stopped. Islam is not a religion, West has said, but a vicious enemy. Not far from West is Ron McNeil, who ran for office in Florida's second Congressional district. At a candidate's forum in Panama City, before a crowd of high and middle school students, McNeil said that Islam plans to destroy our way of life. It is our place as Christians, he added, to stand up for the word of God and what the Bible says.

Neither McNeil (who lost in the August 24 primary) nor West is a credible candidate. They belong to the political fringe and would normally be ignored by the media and by the public. But this is a peculiar year. Both are in the news, and their views, like those of Pastor Terry Jones, are being sought in the blogosphere and on Fox News. West's extremism would normally have shaken the staid Republican Party of Broward County, but he has the endorsement of the Tea Party, and that has given him cache. An otiose Republican Party has been energised by the galvanic Tea Party, a movement that came from below and was quickly seized and shaped by the politicians of the far Right. Angry at the economic catastrophe in the U.S., ordinary people had begun what might have become a taxpayers' revolt. But before it could orient itself in that direction, the Tea Party sloshed over into the most grotesque corridors of American bitterness. The old standby of racism rushed in where economic anger had once begun to germinate. It was no longer the corporations that were at fault; the real enemy was Islam and social equality.

Hateful crescendo

Barack Obama's election was a blow to white supremacy. No longer could it be said that the highest reaches of American society were out of bounds to non-whites. It rattled the cages of hardened racists. Protests came fast on the heels of the election. Those who refused to believe that a black man could be President of the U.S. sought fantastic reasons to deny reality: that Obama was not born in the U.S. (a criterion for the office) and that Obama was secretly a Muslim (until now not a disqualification for the office). Having inherited an economic and foreign policy mess, Obama did not articulate a plan that generated confidence among the large section of the American middle class that saw its jobs and its wealth disappear (one indication of the lack of trust in the future is the decline in the birth rate since 2007). The unemployment rate continued to rise, and home foreclosures seemed unstoppable. The general drift in the country was fodder for the growth of small protests, whose presence attracted the attention of Washington's far-Right organisations and the money of the sturdy pillars of the far Right. Former Congressman Dick Armey's FreedomWorks gave its activists to the nascent Tea Party, and rising figures in the Republican Party, such as Sarah Palin, offered themselves as its leaders. They were funded by such figures as David and Charles Koch, owners of Koch Industries, the second largest private firm in the U.S. (after the agro-business behemoth Cargill). The grass-roots protests soon became astroturf events.

The Tea Party, by its nature, is a protean phenomenon. At its heart are people like Mark Williams of the Tea Party Express, who has dedicated his energy to thwart the National Association for the Advancement of Coloured People (NAACP), a veteran civil rights organisation that was founded in 1909 by people such as W.E.B. DuBois. The NAACP, Williams told National Public Radio, deserved to be shut down. We are dealing with people who are professional race-baiters, who make a good living off this kind of thing. They make more money off of race than any slave trader, ever. The Tea Party Express threw itself into the anti-immigrant campaign in the American States that border Mexico (such as Arizona). It was easy fodder to blame undocumented immigrants for the woes of the threatened middle class. Both the Republican Party and its Tea Party brethren took the immigrants by the throat to strengthen their patriotic credentials.

The Tea Party Express also backed Nevada senatorial aspirant Sharron Angle, who wants to prevent children born in the U.S. of non-U.S. citizen parents from attaining citizenship automatically (this is provided for by the 14th amendment to the U.S. Constitution). The charge is that immigrants give birth to children in the U.S. in order to gain citizenship (the children are called anchor babies). The Tea Party Express' emotional appeal to the vulnerability of the middle class is made in incendiary language; the political field is now toxic.

Park 51

In July 2009, a real estate firm bought 45-51 Park Place, New York. The old building, two blocks away from the World Trade Centre site (Ground Zero), was damaged in the 9/11 attacks. The firm, owned by Sharif El-Gamal, had planned to build a condominium, but then decided to create an Islamic cultural centre, to be run by the Kuwaiti-American Sufi leader Feisal Abdul Rauf. In December 2009, Rauf announced plans for his Cordoba House. The local Community Board backed him, and so did most of the political establishment. To most people Rauf appeared harmless. As William Dalrymple put it in The New York Times, his slightly New Agey rhetoric makes him sound, for better or worse, like a Muslim Deepak Chopra. Laura Ingraham of Fox even told Rauf's wife, Daisy Khan, the head of the American Society for Muslim Advancement: I like what you're trying to do.

We want to push back against the extremists, Rauf told The New York Times in December. That is how the story was framed.

In July 2010, six months after the project appeared sanctified, Sarah Palin sent out a plea on Twitter: Ground Zero Mosque supporters: doesn't it stab you in the heart, as it does ours throughout the heartland? Peaceful Muslims, pls refudiate [ sic]. Sarah Palin picked up the trail from the fulminations of Pamela Geller's blog, Atlas Shrugs, which was given a sounding board by Rupert Murdoch's New York Post and, later, by Fox News. Pamela Geller's tone is instructive. When the Community Board approved the project, she wrote, This is Islamic domination and expansionism. The location is no accident. Just as al-Aqsa was built on top of the Temple in Jerusalem.

The tenor resembles that of David Gaubatz, whose Muslim Mafia: Inside the Secret Underworld That's Conspiring to Islamize America is an influential book in the far Right. Mark Williams of the Tea Party Express took up the cudgels with similar language. On September 11, as Terry Jones will burn his Qurans in Gainesville, Pamela Geller's Stop Islamization of America will host a rally in New York City. She will share the stage with the Dutch politician Geert Wilders, himself a notorious Islamophobe.

On August 13, Obama spoke solemnly on behalf of Cordoba House. The next day he walked away from his endorsement. Senior members of the Democratic Party (including the Senate leader) made public statements against the mosque and cultural centre. Vice-President Joe Biden hastily told the press that the President doesn't believe that the Tea Party is a racist organisation. I don't believe that. Very conservative. Very different views on government and a whole lot of things. But it is not a racist organisation. The toxicity has overwhelmed the White House. It is unable to be principled against racism.

The NAACP has been fierce. Attacked openly by the Tea Party Express, its leader Ben Jealous has fired back. On October 2, the NAACP and the labour movement have planned a rally in Washington, DC. Called One Nation, the rally hopes to begin a push back against the white fright that has paralysed public discourse. Such a show of strength, it is hoped, might turn the tide against the far Right.