Trump to become first president to speak at anti-LGBT hate group's summit

[Dill]

(10-13-2017, 08:20 PM)hollodero Wrote: Well. I wouldn't argue too much about "leftist" outlets being quite partisan and maybe following questionable ideologies, but as long as there is FOX news and Breitbart I feel complaining about HuffPo is a bit of a one-sided view. You mentioned the "enemy of my enemy"-perspective, and while there might be truth to that (I honestly do not know), it's also exactly how I feel the conservative (or "right") spectrum treats the alt-right movement. One difference being, again, that Islam is not an influential political movement, and claims stating otherwise are blowing thngs out of proportion.
With Linda Sansour, I'm going on a limb here and claim this person just isn't that important to begin with. It's tough to demand condemnation of just every creature claiming to be on a certain side. This looks like a Kathy Griffin situation, a situation where I just can say of course it was wrong what this person did, but it's only this person and trying to paint her wrongdoing as the left's wrongdoing is unfair, just as it would be unfair to associate white supremacist's wrongdoing with the political right. While this analogy is flawed, I guess the logic behing it can maybe be accepted.

"Blowing things out of proportion" is not an accident.

The "alliance" between those they term "leftists" and the Fox-Geller version of Islam has been a staple of the US rightwing media since 9/11,* when many Americans (including Bush) refused wholesale condemnation of a world religion for what some of its followers had done.  "Leftists" (as social liberals are called in the US) attack religious bigotry in the US but are assumed to be "silent" about misogyny in Islam because they hate the US and love its enemies. (Islam, a religion, is an enemy like a foreign state with a foreign policy in this world view. And rightists are suddenly leftists or liberals when it comes to women's rights in other countries.)  The less you know about history and foreign policy, "leftism" and Islam, the clearer the so-called alliance becomes. 

Disinformation drives Islamophobia in the US. Believe it or not, some US states, like Oklahoma, have passed laws banning Sharia, though Oklahoma's was overturned in federal court. The anti-sharia groups are still at it though, working 24/7 to prevent the immanent Muslim takeover. http://bansharialaw.com/oklahoma/  Every Sunday throughout the Bible belt, thousands of ministers address millions of followers on subjects like stealth sharia, the worldwide persecution of Christians, and how the Obama deep state is preventing Trump from restoring Christianity to its central place in US government and culture and Israel to its central place in foreign policy. (Southern Baptists alone have more than 15 million members--double the population of Austria.)

I think one key to understanding this right wing world view and the associative logic whereby it brings "enemies" together as friends might be its rejection of Enlightenment ideals of universal humanity and human rights in favor of ethnic/religious/national identities--tribalism, but in a world dominated by social media and saturated with images and sound bites of global consumer capitalism.  If you defend Their humanity and rights, that is siding with Them against your own people. (No danger of Trump doing that! Hence this group forms his base.)  You become "anti-American" for defending common humanity, and a true American if you persecute others in the name of religion--yours in some cases, theirs in others.

Americans aren't the only ones who do this, of course.  One sees now in Europe as well as the US how respect for common human rights as the ground for political legitimacy is being displaced by appeals to "civilization"--not as a universal, desirable state of civility and law beyond barbarity, but as something particular--Western Civilization--wielded the way people used to appeal to ethnic and religious nationalism to define the Other. In the Middle East, Israeli Jews who defend Palestinian rights are called self-hating Jews and traitors by right wing Israelis. In predominately Muslim countries one sees the same, anti-modern tendency--much more understandable in countries where liberal politics never much presence in the culture and history. Their rightists and conservatives are also angry about (real) leftists and liberals who ally themselves with "the West" and Christians by harping about universal human rights, including those of women.


*See for example Dinesh d'sousa's The Enemy at Home: The Cultural Left and Its Responsibility for 9/11 (2007). This book has an entire chapter explaining the lefist-Islamist alliance.