Day: November 2, 2018
American Islamophobia
The scale of Islamophobia in America is startling. On Thursday New America and the American Muslim Institution (AMI) unveiled their study on perceptions of Muslim Americans among non-Muslims. The survey conducted roughly 1,000 interviews nation-wide and zoomed in on Washington DC and 3 other cities for additional insight. Only 56% of respondents saw Islam as compatible with American values, and one in three respondents would feel uncomfortable with seeing a Muslim woman wearing a veil, or with a mosque or Islamic center being opened in their neighborhood.
Panelists Robert McKenzie, Director and Senior Fellow at New America, and Shafiq Khan, a Board Member at AMI, were also surprised by the results from DC. It was their expectation based on their own experiences and conversations with many local Imams and community leaders that DC was a significantly more open and worldlier city than the United States as a whole. Instead, the results showed that on some questions DC exhibited more bigotry than the national average.
Partisan affiliation was the best predictor of anti-Muslim attitudes, with Republicans 30% more likely than the overall group to see Islam as incompatible with American values. This result dovetails with recent work
showing that American’s racial attitudes are increasingly organized along with the partisan divide.
The average respondent put Muslims at 17% of the America population, while the real makeup is somewhere closer to 1 percent. Disproportionate media coverage may be to blame, especially in the larger context of conspiracy theories, “culture wars,” and majority fears about marginalization. If so it would raise the question of how best to fight the caustic narrative around American Muslims without continuing to blow the issue out of proportion.
Unpleasant surprise was the major takeaway from the discussion. Islamophobia, despite expectations, is not relegated to some extremist fringe, but is now widespread among the American populace.
Still, further investigation is in order. The interviews were intentionally conducted in October of this year, when Islamophobia would be heightened due to the midterm elections. But as of yet there is no second round of surveys to confirm or rebut that assumption. The survey made no distinction between American views of Muslim and other immigrants, or between recent immigrants and the long established African-American Muslim community.
After delivering evidence of the scale of the problem Khan and McKenzie seemed unsure of what is needed as a remedy. McKenzie wanted to hand the report over to local journalists and politicians, hoping they would leap into action to address their communities and set the record straight. The report and its presentation raised more questions than it answered.
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The flim flam election
Here are just a few of the nonsense claims I am hearing a few days before the American midterm elections, which will decide the January majorities in the House and Senate as well as control of state legislatures and governors:
- The migrant caravan in southern Mexico is a threat to the national security of the United States. It is not. The few thousand mostly women and children walking north are still at least a month away from the Texas border. Judging from past “caravans” of this sort, fewer than half will arrive there and present themselves as asylum-seekers, a claim that will be adjudicated on a case-by-case basis in accordance with US law. There is no evidence at all that there are “unknown Middle Easterners” and gang members in the group, as President Trump has claimed.
- George Soros and other Democrats financed the migrant caravan. There is also no evidence whatsoever for this claim. In Latin America, Soros’ Open Society Foundation addresses mainly governance and human rights, focused on Brazil, Mexico, and Colombia. I’d guess the program is far more likely to contribute to people staying in their home countries than leaving them, by addressing local grievances and improving government performance.
- The US military deployment will protect us. No, because the US military is not allowed to do so inside the US. Nor will it fire, as President Trump has suggested, on stone throwers. The 5000 or so troops he is ordering to the border (supposedly to be increased later) will do support tasks for Customs and Border Protection, which has handled similar caravans in the past without much strain. This is an unnecessary and costly deployment ordered purely for political reasons: to show the President is doing something about the threat he has hyped.
- President Trump has negotiated a great nuclear agreement with North Korea. There is no nuclear agreement with Pyongyang, only a one-page statement that is not as strong as previous North Korean commitments to denuclearization. Kim Jong-un has stiffed Secretary Pompeo, who has been trying to convert that very general commitment into a real agreement. The lovefest has produced no offspring. The North Koreans have not even produced a rudimentary inventory of their nuclear program, never mind signed up to the kind of detailed constraints that Obama imposed on Iran in the nuclear deal from which Trump has withdrawn.
- The US-Mexico-Canada Agreement (USMCA) is much better than the lousy North American Free Trade Agreement (NAFTA) and is already having an impact. The two are basically the same, with some updates that include both things the US wanted and things Mexico and Canada wanted. USMCA doesn’t go into effect until 2020. NAFTA governs trade until then.
- Trump has been great for the economy. The economy is good, largely due to the almost eight years of growth under President Obama. The employment gains and fall in unemployment since January 2017 are nothing more than continuation of the what was already happening:
But there are storm clouds on the horizon: short-term interest rates and inflation are headed up, the stock market is teetering, and the Trump tariff war is endangering US exports and increasing the price of US imports.
7. The Republicans will provide better health care, with insurance for people with pre-existing conditions. This proposition doesn’t pass the laugh test. The Administration is determined to annihilate the Affordable Care Act (Obamacare). Without Obamacare, which ensures that healthy people have incentives to sign up for health insurance, there is no way to cover pre-existing conditions except by charging market rates that will eliminate coverage for most people with them. No one should be fooled.
This is the flim flam election: a test of whether Americans can see through the lies and realize that they have been conned. I’m not predicting the outcome, but I will canvas over the weekend in Virginia’s 8th Congressional District and hope everyone I know will be trying to get the vote out.
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