What Right-Wing Fear-Mongering Has Wrought

on 05/21/2015 at 7:18 am

I remember having a conversation years ago with a close friend of mine who was lamenting that some of his classmates in his law school never consider any non-Muslim acts of terror to be terrorism. Not the Okla. City Bomber, the IRA, Scott Roeder, or other far right wing or Christian extremists — in their eyes, non-Muslims can never commit terrorism.

While we know this to be false, this willful blindness to events of the world has shaped how we handle anti-terror investigations and has infected the talking points of even the new presidential hopefuls. This is nothing new, though, as anyone who has been watching FOX News for the past ten years or more can attest to.

And while Fox News shrugs off accusations that their extreme rhetoric pushed by their pundits is not the cause for these acts of domestic terrorism, the evidence says otherwise.

In a recent example, Robert Doggart (a failed congressional candidate and an ordained minister) was arrested, last month, for plotting an attack on a Muslim-American community in Upstate New York named Islamberg.

Here’s a video of Hannity on Fox calling Islamberg a terrorist training camp:

While all these accusations are unfounded and have consistently been debunked, Doggart still planned to gather guns and men to massacre the citizens of the town.

The rub is that, while this genocidal plot has been foiled, the mainstream media has not covered this story.

“Our small group will soon be faced with the fight of our lives. We will offer those lives as collateral to prove our commitment to our God.” Doggart continued, “We shall be Warriors who inflict horrible numbers of casualties upon the enemies of our Nation and World Peace.”

Sound familiar? That’s right, it’s similar to the rhetoric ISIS and other religious terrorists spout. So if this isn’t terrorism, then what truly is terrorism? This talk of “Muslim extremists” has made us afraid of our neighbors and put us into a constant state of fear, which makes me feel that the terrorists did win in 9/11. With Americans plotting the deaths of other Americans, restrictions of freedom and privacy rights and the talking heads and politicians pushing racist (because let’s be honest, their Islamophobic rhetoric is racist) policies, is this the America that we want to fight for?

Xenophobia is nothing new but it should never be something we accept. Whether it’s against Muslims, Jews, Christians, Sikhs, Blacks, Native-Americans, illegal immigrants or the next group that media organizations try to demonize, we have to open our eyes and see the real problem. When we do that we can, hopefully, come up with more realistic solutions instead of lashing out in fear, hatred and ignorance.

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