The Rise of American Hatred

The Terry Jones affair — regarding that crazy man determined to burn the Quran — is usually presented in the media like an epiphenomenon, an unfortunate episode and the product of a sick and fanatic mind. That is in part the truth, but it is not the whole truth. The Jones affair reveals something more: since the election of Barack Obama, the U.S. has witnessed the rise of a hate movement directed against the president, immigrants and Muslims. The main proponent of this movement is the Republican Party and its right-wing allies in the so-called serious media.

Do you think I exaggerate? Let’s rewind the sequence of events over the past few years. Everything began during the 2007-08 electoral campaign. After their electoral disaster, the Republican Party was taken over by a street gang — a band of hoodlums — who, by recruiting Sarah Palin, allowed the most fanatic elements to bask in the limelight, a spot they would have never occupied under Ronald Reagan. Their criticisms of the Democratic Party became ever more bitter and vicious when Mr. Obama was chosen to be the Democratic presidential candidate.

His victory, massive and decisive, did not shut them up. In the summer of 2009, in the midst of the health care reform debate, the venom spewed out, and the scum bubbled up, spurred on by the Republican leadership, Fox News, the editorial page of the Wall Street Journal, Rush Limbaugh and others. In plain view, some of these characters stood at the entrance to buildings where the president was speaking, a pistol strapped to their leg, proclaiming “the tree of liberty must be refreshed from time to time with the blood of patriots and tyrants.”* Meanwhile, Sarah Palin asked her partisans to “reload,” and she published a gallery of photos of politicians targeted to be “taken down” in the elections.

The rage also spreads on other fronts. Immigration, for example, is always a sensitive topic, even if everyone acknowledges that immigrants provide the blood that feeds America’s extraordinary prosperity. Last July, this didn’t stop the Republican governor of Arizona from supporting a vile bill against illegal immigrants, while at the same time revealing — without a shred of evidence — that the police had discovered four decapitated bodies at the Mexican border. She took a long time to “correct” this falsehood, but the damage was done, because the lie spread like wildfire in the media, terrorizing American citizens and reinforcing their anti-immigrant tendencies.

If political combat has at times all the attributes of war and its tendency to extremes, it doesn’t have to be so for those whose job it is to reflect on the most sensitive questions. However, regarding Islam, it now seems that there are no holds barred, even in the mainstream media. A few days ago, in the blog of the editor-in-chief of the renowned weekly The New Republic, the venom again spewed out. Martin Peretz, writing on American Muslims, said: “I wonder whether I need honor these people and pretend that they are worthy of the privileges of the First Amendment which I have in my gut the sense that they will abuse.” One can only imagine the uproar if he had said this about Jews or Blacks. When it’s about Muslims, a remark like that just sails through.

The American right has become a movement of crackpots and extremists, and Terry Jones evolved out of this noxious milieu. Even Marine Le Pen believes so. Yes, even the daughter of Jean-Marie Le Pen, the future president of the National Front, recently declared in Newsweek that “the American right is much more to the right than the National Front.” What does this mean?

For poor Mr. Obama, his Secret Service detail should really redouble their vigilance, because one day some right-wing nut will feel the obligation to “water the tree of liberty with the blood of tyrants.”

The author (j.coulon@cerium.ca) is director of the Francophone Network for Research on Peace Operations affiliated with CERIUM at the Université de Montréal.

*Editor’s Note: This quote is originally attributed to Thomas Jefferson.