Michelle Bachmann’s latest antics have provoked an unusually strong backlash. The latest development came Wednesday, when hawkish Republican Sen. John McCain denounced Bachmann for making “sinister accusations” that “have no logic, no basis, and no merit.” McCain was referring to Bachmann’s insinuations that longtime Hillary Clinton aide Huma [...]]]>
Michelle Bachmann’s latest antics have provoked an unusually strong backlash. The latest development came Wednesday, when hawkish Republican Sen. John McCain denounced Bachmann for making “sinister accusations” that “have no logic, no basis, and no merit.” McCain was referring to Bachmann’s insinuations that longtime Hillary Clinton aide Huma Abedin may be tied to an allegedly large-scale Muslim Brotherhood infiltration of the U.S. government. (Abedin is otherwise known as the wife of former congressman Anthony Weiner.) Perhaps the funniest take comes from Juan Cole, who uses Bachmann’s own haphazard guilt-by-association methods to prove that she herself is a Brotherhood agent.
While the sheer nuttiness of Bachmann’s accusations has understandably prevented commentators from taking them seriously, we should at least recognize that they spring from a broader nexus of conspiratorial thinking about Muslims that has far wider currency on the right. As I’ve written elsewhere, there has been a mini-boomlet of these conspiracy theories since President Obama’s election, fueled by a set of common tropes: the omnipresence of Muslim Brotherhood infiltration among American Muslims, the “creeping” spread of sharia law through the American judicial system, and the aiding and abetting of these currents by the ambiguously-Muslim Obama himself.
Bachmann and her congressional allies were clearly working from this playbook. Allegations against Huma Abedin herself are not new; only last year, well-connected neoconservative political operative Eliana Benador suggested that Weiner may have secretly converted to Islam upon marrying her. (Benador justified this strange theory with reference to another trope of the literature — the alleged pervasive reliance of Muslims on taqiyya, i.e. religiously-sanctioned deception.)
Allegations of crypto-Muslim identity are also far from unique to Weiner; Center for Security Policy (CSP) chief Frank Gaffney, for instance, took to the Washington Times soon after Obama’s Cairo speech to suggest that “the president not only identifies with Muslims, but actually may still be one himself.” Gaffney, not coincidently, was the main source for Bachmann’s original letter against Abedin — although, as Alex Seitz-Wald notes, he was dropped from Bachmann’s latest defense of her position. Yet Bachmann has a long history of relying on Gaffney’s half-baked theories; she and Rep. Trent Franks (another signatory of the Abedin letter) were two sponsors of the 2010 CSP report “Sharia: The Threat to America,” which advocated harsh McCarthyite prescriptions against Muslims to counter the alleged spread of sharia in America. (Still another signatory of the Abedin letter was Rep. Lynn Westmoreland, perhaps best known for 2008 comments in which he disparaged Barack and Michelle Obama as “uppity.”)
The mastermind of the broader anti-sharia movement is a Gaffney staffer, CSP counsel David Yerushalmi, who — prior to cloaking his intentions in rhetoric about sharia — advocated making “adherence to Islam,” in any form, “a felony punishable by 20 years in prison.” Yerushalmi himself has recently published in support of anti-sharia legislation in National Review, the conservative flagship, at the invitation of Andy McCarthy, yet another Bachmann favorite, whose book The Grand Jihad is perhaps the leading text claiming an Obama-backed Muslim Brotherhood conspiracy against America. And so on.
All this is merely to say that if John McCain is sincerely concerned about Bachmann’s latest fulminations, he should recognize that they have much deeper roots than he might like to admit. This kind of zany Islamophobia has taken hold of a large portion of the right, and getting rid of it will require more than a few ad hoc interventions.
]]>“I cannot bear Netanyahu, he’s a liar,” Sarkozy told Obama, unaware that the microphones in their meeting room had been switched on, enabling reporters in a separate location to listen in to a simultaneous translation.
“You’re fed up with him, but I have to deal with him even more often than you,” Obama replied, according to the French interpreter.
But rather than Israel being concerned that world powers, the US and France, find their leader an obnoxious presence, it is portrayed even here as a problem for the President.
“Obama’s apparent failure to defend Netanyahu is likely to be leapt on by his Republican foes, who are looking to unseat him in next year’s presidential election and have portrayed him as hostile to Israel, Washington’s closest ally in the region.
Pushing Netanyahu risks alienating Israel’s strong base of support among the U.S. public and in Congress.”
Republican Presidential candidate Michelle Bachmann wasted no time in using the gaffe for her campaign purposes.
AP reports that, “The Minnesota congresswoman says Obama is showing his lack of commitment to Israel. Bachmann called on Obama to immediately apologize to Netanyahu and said Obama (backslash)should ‘demonstrate leadership and demand that the French President Sarkozy do the same’” Bachmann said Obama is putting space between the U.S.-Israeli relationship and allowing Iran time to obtain nuclear weapons.”
The issue is likely to gain some traction as well on Capitol Hill, as the Anti-Defamation League, whose mission has expanded to frequent defense of Netanyahu and whose voice carries weight in the halls of Congress, also sharply criticized Obama.
“We are deeply disappointed and saddened by this decidedly un-Presidential exchange between Presidents Sarkozy and Obama,” Abraham H. Foxman, ADL National Director, said in a statement. “President Obama’s response to Mr. Sarkozy implies that he agrees with the French leader.
“In light of the revelations here, we hope that the Obama Administration will do everything it can to reassure Israel that the relationship remains on a sure footing and to reinvigorate the trust between President Obama and Prime Minister Netanyahu, which clearly is not what it should be,” Foxman continued. “What is sad is that we now have to worry to what extent these private views inform foreign policy decisions of the U.S. and France – two singularly important players in the peace process.”
For both Foxman and Bachmann, the problem is not Israeli policies, nor Netanyahu’s reputation for being an extremely difficult person to deal with, a characterization well known in Israel. All responsibility for the difficulties rests with Obama, and it is only he that has to act to “repair” the relationship between the two countries.
It also, apparently, escaped their notice that the exchange came at the end of a conversation where Obama complained to Sarkozy over France’s support for Palestine’s recent bid to join UNESCO.
Bachmann was quick off the mark, but she was soon joined by a line of Republicans behind her.
Mitt Romney tweeted: ““Overheard conversation at G-20 another sign of Obama’s low regard for Israel and its leader…I will stand by our allies, not tear them down.”
John McCain chimed in with this: ““I happen to be a great admirer of Prime Minister Netanyahu…and that kind of comment is not only not helpful, but indicative of some of the policies towards Israel that this administration has been part of.”
And never mind that Obama said nothing whatsoever about Israel, and neither did Sarkozy. Both men simply remarked about another leader who is well known, even in the US Jewish community for his inability to get along well with others.
With the coincidence that these unguarded comments were made public at the same time as the International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA) was releasing its troubling report on Iran’s nuclear program, it might be that Obama will feel even more compelled to give in to Israel demands, given his apparent belief that he must be more beholden to this right-wing Israeli government than any President before him or lose significant campaign backing.
]]>The central problem with the report is that the authors identify “sharia” with the most literalistic and brutal versions of sharia, and therefore fail to understand what the term might actually mean to the bulk of Muslims worldwide. (When Matt Duss asked Gaffney at Wednesday’s press conference to name any Muslims scholars or theologians who had been consulted in the writing of the report, Gaffney was unable to produce any names.) As a result their prescriptions would amount in practice to a criminalization of virtually any form of Islam.
Here are some of their policy recommendations (p. 143 of the report):
“…extend bands currently in effect that bar members of hate groups such as the Ku Klux Klan from holding positions of trust in federal, state, or local governments or the armed forces of the United States to those who espouse or support shariah.”
“Practices that promote shariah – notably, shariah-compliant finance and the establishment or promotion in public spaces or with public funds of facilities and activities that give preferential treatment to shariah’s adherents – are incompatible with the Constitution and the freedoms it enshrines and must be proscribed.”
“Sedition is prohibited by law in the United States. To the extent that imams and mosques are being used to advocate shariah in America, they are promoting seditious activity and should be warned that they will not be immune from prosecution.”
“Immigrations of those who adhere to shariah must be precluded, as was previously done with adherents to the seditious ideology of communism.”
I am not a scholar of Islam, but any competent one will tell you that sharia is a far broader term than the “Team B” authors seem to think it is – it basically refers to Islamic religious precepts in general, to the point of being virtually synonymous with Islamic religious practice. As a result any practicing Muslim, no matter how moderate or extreme, will consider himself or herself to be “sharia-compliant” according to their own understanding of what sharia requires. This does not, of course, mean that they will endorse the brutal hudud penalties that have become the most notorious symbols of sharia to non-Muslims, that they will seek to impose these precepts on others, or that they will seek to make them the law of the land. But to demand that a practicing Muslim to renounce sharia is tantamount to demanding that they renounce Islam itself.
This is precisely what the report’s recommendations demand, whether or not it’s what the authors intend. Any Muslim who “espouses” or “adheres to” sharia – that is, any practicing Muslim – will thereby be banned from government or military service, prohibited from immigrating to the country, and even opened to prosecution for sedition. The only Muslims immune from this witch-hunt are those “who are willing publicly to denounce shariah” – a surefire recipe for the creation of conversos and crypto-Muslims, but hardly one consistent with the First Amendment.
We might be charitable to the “Team B” authors and argue that they’re simply ignorant: not understanding what sharia actually means, they have identified it with its most extreme manifestations, and therefore wrongly believe that by asking Muslims to renounce sharia they are simply asking them to renounce radical Islam. A less charitable explanation would be that they know exactly what they’re doing, and are seeking to outlaw Islam itself.
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