Alright y'all, welcome back to the show.
It's Anti-War Radio.
I'm Scott Horton and our first guest on the show today, well, I don't know, maybe our only guest on the show today is Stephen Salisbury.
And he's got the spotlight article today on AntiWar.com.
Of course it's in the archive under Tom Englehart's name because Tom Englehart writes an introductory essay for all of his Tom Dispatch pieces that we rerun.
So it'll be under Tom Englehart's name from here on out, but it's by Stephen Salisbury.
He's a cultural writer for the Philadelphia Inquirer, Tom Dispatch regular.
His most recent book is called Muhammad's Ghosts, an American story of love and fear in the homeland.
And we've talked with him before about scaremongering against Muslims and bogus terrorism cases and so forth.
Today's article, again it's the spotlight at AntiWar.com.
Muslim baiting doesn't work.
Doesn't work?
Come on.
Well, that's what the numbers show.
When you, it's very counterintuitive, particularly when you recall the 2010 elections and the run up to them, which was absolutely dominated by this crazy talk about the so-called mosque at ground zero.
And every politician on the right was, on the cultural right I should say, was jumping in and attacking this proposed Islamic community center down in lower Manhattan.
And it got labeled the mosque at ground zero, even though it wasn't really a mosque and it wasn't at ground zero.
But you know, you may recall, Gingrich likened it to Nazis and Sarah Palin came up with one of her most famous lines, peaceful Muslims, please refudeate.
It was, it went utterly viral.
And that campaign really, in my mind anyway, legitimized kind of anti-Muslim trash talking in mainstream politics.
Because now, as we look at the run up to the 2012 presidential campaign, virtually everyone, with the exception I might add of Ron Paul, virtually every one of these guys has taken a swipe at Muslims, including Mitt Romney, who denounced the mosque at ground zero back in 2010.
But if you then look at the results of the elections, there were maybe a dozen, two dozen campaigns, many of them thousands of miles away from Manhattan, where candidates were denouncing Muslims and Islam and conflating the whole with terrorism and violence and murder and the mosque at ground zero was a victory mosque and so forth.
A lot of those people lost, and the few who won, and there were some who won, won by very thin margins and even though they did go down the Islamophobic road, the anti-Muslim rhetoric was not ultimately the determining factor in their elections.
An example of that would be a woman named Renee Elmers, who won a congressional race in North Carolina.
And she's a nurse, a former nurse, she's now a member of Congress.
Her main issue was the abomination of health care reform, and so she was hammering on that all the time, but in the middle of her campaign, she saw all these other folks denouncing this Manhattan project, and she got her media people to put together what was an absolutely inflammatory TV spot in which she talked about a victory mosque and totally blurred the distinction between ordinary Muslims and terrorists and murderers and so forth, and she managed to win her election by about 1,500 votes.
But as I say, the main issue for her in her very conservative district was the horrors of health care reform, and the issue of the mosque and Islam was sort of an add-on, kind of an embellishment for her rhetorical attacks on her opponent.
But most of the candidates who went down this road, in fact, lost.
The whole Mosque at Ground Zero craziness began, actually, in New York State, when Rick Lazio, who was the establishment candidate in the Republican gubernatorial primary, called on Andrew Cuomo, who was then State Attorney General, to investigate this mosque, which was, in Lazio's view, a threat to the safety and security of Manhattan residents.
And he made that the centerpiece of his campaign, Lazio did, and Cuomo, of course, did not decline to investigate this community center project.
It's a local zoning issue, really.
And in the Republican primary, Lazio was trounced by Carl Palladino, who was a Tea Party-backed candidate from Buffalo, who had some other issues.
But he was, I guess you could call him a forceful personality, and Lazio was easily dispatched.
But then Palladino kept his charging on the Mosque at Ground Zero all the way through to the bitter end of the campaign, and Cuomo utterly trounced him, and never made the mosque an issue in his campaign, refused to denounce it, and so forth.
And that happened over and over again.
Well, you know, it should be mentioned here, too, that this is the midterm, and really, when Bush didn't lose the House and the Senate in his first midterm, that was kind of real, the exception to the rule, just because of September 11th was still a year in the past.
But Obama got what?
This was the rise of the Tea Party, the economy didn't get better, he was in real trouble, the Democrats lost a bunch of seats, the right-wing Republicans were on the march, and still, those who preferred to trash this mosque ended up faring not as well as those who refused in general, huh?
Well, I would argue that, yeah, you brought up a number of issues which I think ultimately overshadowed any of this Islam-bashing, and people were hurting, and they're still hurting.
Well, but I mean, in that context, it's the time of the year when the more right-wing guy wins in the primary, and the Republicans, you know, especially when it's so much reaction to the sitting president, the moderate doesn't win the primary, it's the Tea Party guy that wins the primary, the populist guy, the challenger, when they had won anyway, beat the establishment guys.
I think that's true.
You know, there's a very good example of that scenario in Florida, the 22nd Congressional District, which in 2010 featured Alan West challenging Ron Kline, who was the incumbent Democrat, and West had challenged Kline in 2008, and was roundly, soundly beaten.
So he came back in 2010.
Now, West was one of the very loudest anti-mosque people, and never missed an opportunity to bash Islam.
All right, now, while we're right there, we've got to take this break.
Okay.
We're going to have more about Islam-bashing, and how it doesn't work so well in electoral politics after all.
It's Stephen Salisbury, cultural writer for the Philadelphia Inquirer.
We'll be right back after this.
All right, y'all, welcome back to the show.
It's Anti-War Radio.
I'm Scott Horton.
I'm talking with Stephen Salisbury, author of the book, Muhammad's Ghosts, which is about one of these horrible FBI, bogus terrorism cases.
Right.
More than one, I forget.
Why don't you answer that, Stephen?
And it's Stephan, not Stephen, I'm sorry.
Yeah.
Stephan, tell us, actually, maybe answer that, but also, is it not the case that all the Muslims in America, which is, what, like a hundred million of them or something, that they all want to enslave us under Sharia law?
And why aren't you concerned about that?
Well, I don't think there are a hundred million Muslims.
This is actually a political issue, the number of Muslims.
But there's somewhere between six and eight million, maybe ten million, somewhere around in there.
I'm not all that concerned about Sharia law, no.
Nor am I concerned about canonical law, or Jewish law, or anything else.
But my lack of fear of these things, apparently, is not shared in about twenty different states where legislation has been introduced to bar courts from making use of Sharia law and reaching judgments.
And a number of anti-Muslim websites and bloggers and pundits and so forth have denounced Sharia law as the end of the world.
I mean, what Sharia is, it's almost impossible to define it.
You get two Muslims together, they'll argue about what actually Sharia is.
Well, I mean, the extent of this in the courts is what?
Basically, the courts recognizing customs in marriages and divorces and things like that?
That's essentially mostly what it is.
Sharia, a lot of it is devoted to dietary issues and stuff like that.
There's a guy named Frank Gaffney.
You probably know him, and maybe he's even been on the program.
But he's an unreconstituted anti-Muslim head of something called the Center for Security Policy, I think.
And he issued a report about a month or two ago, in which he finally was coming out with the irrefutable documentation about how Sharia was taking over the American judicial system.
And it highlighted 50 different cases in which Sharia had been considered by the American courts.
And this went out all over the country to media outlets and so forth.
And it sounds really ominous, you know, 50 different cases.
But if you actually looked at the 50 different cases, every single one of them, I mean every single one, the courts had rejected Sharia law as having any basis or validity in the case at hand.
There were, I think, five or maybe six cases in which the trial judge had ruled in a way that could be argued was in line with Sharia.
And in each of those five or six cases, the appellate court said that the judge had erred and threw it all out.
Can you give us any context?
What kind of decisions are we talking about here?
Well, we're talking, you know, financial disputes, marriage issues.
So in other words, these are basically civil matters between the parties involved only.
This is not a matter of, like, everybody has to follow some teaching of Muhammad.
No, no, no, no, no.
And I'm sorry to ask such stupid questions because this ought to be obvious.
But as you said, apparently, you know, you're one of the few who ain't afraid for some reason.
You know, we've got to get a little bit of real context out of this.
I don't honestly think Americans are particularly afraid of Sharia.
I don't think Americans even know what it is.
And I'm not sure that I could give you a real definition of Sharia.
I mean, certainly if you go outside, you can't see any coming at you.
No, but, you know, the fact is, I mean, here's the bottom line.
This is, we live in America.
And one of the fundamental values of America is freedom of religion.
And you start passing laws that go to the heart of someone's practice of a religion.
And after all, I mean, Islam has got a billion and a half followers all over the world.
And, you know, many millions in this country.
It is a religion.
It's not a cult, as a lot of the people on the right would like to have it.
It's not a political movement.
It is a religion.
One of the fundamental values is freedom of religion.
You don't pass laws restricting freedom of religion.
Now, that doesn't mean, if you have a religion that calls for the killing of people, that you don't, but you still don't bar the religion.
That law is already on the books.
Murder is illegal.
And, you know, there aren't any religions that advocate murder anyway, as far as I know.
Except, you know, maybe some bizarre cult somewhere.
Unreconstituted followers of Charles Manson or something.
But Islam...
Well, tactics aside, I mean, even religiously mandated jihad is always, in the Quran and in the propaganda, even of the worst terrorists, it's always still defensive jihad.
You know, people went...
Even John Walker Lynn, his father, just wrote this long essay for the Guardian.
And the reason John Walker Lynn was helping the Taliban fight the Northern Alliance was because it was mandated in his religion that he defend Muslims who are being attacked, who are the victims of aggression by a bunch of, in this case, mass rapists, murderers, warlords, former sons of the KGB.
Well, you know, it's interesting.
If you look at...
You mentioned the plots a little while ago.
If you look at some of the more...
Some of the...
Most of the plots that the FBI has uncovered, more or less, in the last several years, virtually every one of the people that's been prosecuted was not engaging in an act that was based on...
He was not acting out of religious motivation.
He was acting out...
They were acting out of political motivation.
People like...
Well, most of those, it seems like to me, Stephen, have been completely bogus, with very few exceptions.
Well, right.
Like the shoe bomber and...
Right.
...
Mutalab, and this guy, Zazi, the Denver cab driver.
Apparently, his plot was not drummed up by some FBI informant.
Right, right.
He said, he's actually quoted in the paper today, in this AP story about his father, it says, quote, he told this to the court, I would sacrifice myself to bring attention to what the U.S. military was doing to civilians in Afghanistan.
Right.
Nothing mystical about that.
There's a war going on, and he was joining up the other side of it, as a soldier, basically.
Right.
Well, see, I would make the larger argument that 9-11 itself was...
A lot of the people on the right have bought into, essentially, Osama bin Laden's propaganda.
I mean, bin Laden argued that what happened on 9-11 was for the benefit of Islam, in the name of Islam.
And, you know, that's...
I would argue that that's just a lot of nonsense, that what it was was a political attack, for political reasons.
It had nothing to do with Islam.
There's nothing in Islam, in any...in the Quran or anywhere else that says it's okay to go and attack and murder 3,000 people who've done nothing to you.
That's just nonsense.
But, you know, bin Laden had an issue with U.S. bases in Saudi Arabia, he had an issue with Israel and Palestine, and those were his motivations.
Well, and the whole Muslim world condemned the 9-11 attacks, unanimously.
Yeah.
I mean, we've done everything we can to screw up all that goodwill, but you talk about, you know, like Condoleezza Rice or Rahm Emanuel about making an opportunity out of a crisis.
We had an opportunity to say, hey, you know what?
Yeah, we backed some dictators, but that was the Cold War or something, and okay, it's been ten years extra, but we're sorry and we're cool, let's all be friends, and we could have had it made.
We could have had that whole liberal revolution in the Middle East this whole time.
Well, that's not what happened, though, is it?
You know, we went right into Iraq.
I mean, everything got detoured into Iraq, and, you know, the rest is, you know, many bodies later.
It's really one of the great tragedies.
9-11 itself was a huge tragedy in what's happened since then.
It is, in a way, and certainly for the people of the Middle East, it's just as huge a tragedy.
How many Iraqis have been killed in the Iraq War, which still is grinding on?
A million.
Yeah, I mean, it's huge numbers.
Now the focus is on Afghanistan, Libya.
This is not religion.
This is politics.
Yeah, empire.
And, you know, it's really, it's a great script, right?
If you're an empire, anybody who fights back against you becomes the excuse for you being an empire in the first place after the fact.
You know, it's pretty easy.
You can bait, you know, it's the old bait-and-switch.
All right, that's Devin Salisbury.
The book is Muhammad's Ghost.
Writes for the Philadelphian Choir, tomdispatch.com.
Thanks very much, Devin.
Thank you, Scott.
Sorry for saying your name wrong.
