Saturday, August 18, 2007

Baiting with the Burka

Glenn Greenwald and Talking Points Memo have been worrying about the extent to which conservatives believe that there is going to be an Islamic takeover of the United States in the near future.

This exchange between Naomi Wolf and Melanie Morgan is what Greenwald and TPM have in mind.
Wolf: It gets back to what I was saying earlier about the nature of lying. Let's not forget that they got us into this war on the basis of a series of lies.... This weaving out of lies was a pretext for an invasion that served their own political purposes. In the wake of the invasion, they were able to terrify the American people, subjugate the American people, drive through a series of laws that dismantled key checks and balances, allowed overreaching executive power, and completely eviscerated what the founders set in place, thus weakening America.

Morgan: Keep attacking, keep attacking Naomi, because you're going to look great in a burka. You're going to look super in a burka.

Greenwald stresses the extent to which the fear of an Islamic takeover highlighted by Morgan's comment about burkas is an actual fear that [conservatives] have -- not a theoretical fear but one that is pressing, urgent, at the forefront of their worldview." It's surprising to see Greenwald, who is usually aware of the tremendous dishonesty of contemporary conservatism, be this naive. But TPM is no better. Steve Benen approvingly cites Greenwald, then Josh Marshall prints a reader comment about how this kind of fear of Islamic takeover is part of the "generalized fear of the other" that characterizes places like West Texas.

But the "Islamic takeover" meme is pure sham. The context of the Melanie Morgan/Naomi Wolf exchange is significant here. Melanie Morgan isn't any more afraid of an Islamic takeover than Glenn Greenwald, but she is eager to bait a liberal feminist like Naomi Wolf. There are times when I think that the no. 1 priority of conservatives is sticking it verbally to liberals--driving liberals crazy, making liberals "outraged," upsetting liberals, confusing liberals, or making them sputter. In this case, Melanie Morgan was seeking to wrong-foot Naomi Wolf by saying something that was both preposterous and bigoted while needling Wolf as a feminist critic of fashion (in The Beauty Myth). Saying that Wolf would "look good in a burka" was a "three-for" for Morgan and Morgan probably began working up the provocation the minute she heard Wolf would be on the show.

Conservative activists like Melanie Morgan, Michelle Malkin, Ann Coulter, and Rush Limbaugh don't see radical Islam, Islamic terrorism, al-Qaida, Mexican immigrants, gays, or criminals as the primary "other" in their lives. They see white liberals as their primary enemy or other and have devoted themselves to baiting liberals since the McCarthy era. Martin Luther King's "content of our character" line, the analogy between Saddam Hussein and Hitler, bullying treason accusations, and images of Republican political omnipotence have just been a few of the things with which the right has been trying to bully white liberals into states of anger, political disorientation, and a sense of impotence.

But these kinds of baiting lines all have relatively short half-lives before liberal commentators begin to catch up. So, conservatives have to keep coming up with new modes of baiting and embarrassing liberals. Having seen right-wing posters at work as posters in Slate's Fray, I can say that conservatives actually work at coming up with new insults, accusations, and baiting lines. It's interesting to see.

But the right now has a special problem. With the failure of the Iraq War, failure of the Bush administration, failure of the surge, and upcoming failure in the 2008 election, the American right is encased in failure. As a result, all of the old attack lines have been neutered and conservatives are even more desperate than usual to come up with new ways to bait their liberal enemies. Yesterday, Melanie Morgan employed the image of American women wearing burkas. Tomorrow, it might be pedophilia, black guys watching too much television while in prison, French strikers, or Hillary.

True, there are probably a number of conservatives in West Texas or Western Kentucky who have bought the Islamic takeover idea. They're the same people who get upset about "family values," gay marriage, urban crime, putting the Ten Commandments in public schools, and any number of other right-wing hobby horses. However, the activists who manipulate these fears for a living will soon be promoting new anxieties and convincing new suckers.

Obviously, liberals should be willing and able to debate all these points. Conservatives are very good at making it seem like they care about these things. It's important to remember, however, that the most important priority of conservatism is attack and defeating liberals.

6 comments:

Anonymous said...

Absolute truth. It's a point I often made on PW, that the this enemy was a stalking horse to defeat libs, just like the Commies of before. The same "national security" arguments, the same "a terrorist/Commie" agent under every bed, the same "they use our system against us, and, of course, the same "they are playing a long game here, slim, and they're so wily, they will wait us out.

It was bunk then and it's bunk now. These people claim to be afraid of a bunch of engineering students and an Egyptian doctor. To win elections, have an enemy with which to bludgeon their actual target, and to scare the hell out of the American people, they will take these criminals and declare them existential.

There's an interesting thread on the PW pub on killing civilians. it's similar to threads on every right wing blog. It shows how they take three goat herders and turn them into the NY Times and the East side of Manhattan. It's sad, really, that they think their fellow citizens are the enemy. But, until they come under the sway of people of than clowns, babies, and Rudy Guiliani, we need to keep them away from power.

Anonymous said...

Apparently it's time to expand "intolerant of intolerance" to "hatefully intolerant of their hateful intolerance"

Head in the sand much timb? Go to dearborn MI and have one of the thankful just to be here muslim immigrants look you in the eye and tell you "they" are going to win. It's not likely to affect your view, but it should. It need not be a majority, or even a large minority for significant problems to occur.

Anonymous said...

I know...their invasion are off the coasts right now, just waiting for the election of Senator Clinton to land and complete the jihad. She'll, of course, surrender and we'll all live under Sharia.

As for the folks in Dearborn, maybe I could go down to the PW pub and find ten people who will say we will in Iraq. Are those kooks any more representative than the kooks (who, shockingly, most reporters can't seem to find) you allege exist?

so, in the absence of any American Muslim pulling a Tim McVeigh... Remember Tim McVeigh? Maybe I should be afraid of the religious zealot/army under my bed. After all, 19 out a billion Muslikms bombed the WTC and Pentagon and I'm supposed to be afraid of them, surely Randy and Tim represent the mainstream thought of Christian Former servicemen?

See, you don't believe the latter, but you are persuaded the former is true? Why? Because some people who wanted to wage a war against liberals saw an opportunity to use this event.

Anonymous said...

After all, 19 out a billion Muslikms bombed the WTC and Pentagon

See also:

WTC 93
London transit 7/7
London Night Clubs (attempt)
Glasgow Airport
Lockerbie
Madrid Trains
French "youth" riots
Celebratory demonstrations post 9/11
Political Murders and death threats (a la Van Gogh/Hirsi Ali, Rushdie)
Chechen Seperatists
That Russian grade school and theater I don't have time to look up.
Red Mosque Pakistan
Jose Padilla
Shoe bomber

I'm leaving a few out, but you may be able to tease out a common thread in all these, without having to squint too hard.

Anonymous said...

You write a litany of military and terrorist acts around the world and expect me to believe there is a grand design common in the domestic affairs of Pakistan and Richard Reid?

Are you that daft to imagine a group of Chechynan separatists are in a grand scheme with an engineer from Saudi Arabia currently holed up in the mountains of Pakistan?

Oh, yes, and the Contras were taking orders from Andropov and Gorbachev....I mean after the Kremlin had issued its marching orders for the day to the NYTimes and all.

That is some serious paranoia

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