New York Magazine (Opinion)
By Jonathan Chait
November 16, 2015
Marco
Rubio appeared on This Week yesterday morning, where he took umbrage at
Hillary Clinton’s statement that the United States is “at war with
jihadists” but not “at
war with Islam.” Rubio declared himself baffled by Clinton’s carefully
parsed distinctions. “I don't understand it,” said Rubio. “That would be
like saying we weren't at war with the Nazis, because we were afraid to
offend some Germans who may have been members
of the Nazi Party, but weren't violent themselves.” If we tease out
Rubio’s metaphor, the Muslim faith as a whole is equivalent to Nazism,
and violent jihadi terrorists are the equivalent of the Nazi leadership.
Rubio has a knack for grasping the midpoint
of Republican Party doctrine at any given moment, and his comments
reflect the party’s renewed conviction that the war against terrorists
must be defined in the broadest possible terms.
The
Obama administration, like the Bush administration before it, believes
in defining the conflict in the most narrow terms. There is a very good
reason for this. The
United States is not actually at war with Islam. Non-extremist Muslims
account for the lion's share of the victims of jihadist terror, and are
needed as allies in the conflict. Air strikes and counterterrorism may
be important tools against ISIS, but in the
long run, we need non-radicals to maintain the loyalties of the
majority of the Muslim world. If the Muslim world gravitates toward its
most extreme elements, the West will find itself in an unwinnable
struggle against an enemy that can generate fighters moving
invisibly among 1.6 billion people worldwide. The radicals want to
persuade the rest of the Muslims that they represent Islam writ large in
a clash against Christians and Jews. The West’s strategy is predicated
on breaking down this link, making it as hard
as possible for them to claim that the West is at war with Islam as a
whole.
And
yet, since the Bush administration departed the scene, Republicans have
jettisoned Bush’s cautious strategy of distinguishing between Islam and
its violent minority.
A catalyzing event in the party’s Islamophobic turn was a now mostly
forgotten 2010 episode in which conservatives grew hysterical over a
plan to build a Muslim cultural center in lower Manhattan. Mainstream
Republicans like Mitt Romney and Rubio denounced
the center. (Chris Christie, who spoke forcefully against rising
Islamophobia, was already an outlier among his party.)
The
attacks in Paris reinvigorated this impulse. Republicans as a whole
have seized upon a need to broaden the terms of the conflict as their
main point of differentiation
with the Democrats. In a new op-ed today, Romney insists, “We must
begin by identifying the enemy. We will not defeat it if we are afraid
to call it by its name.” He cites no historical examples of wars that
were lost due to leaders failing to identify their
enemy with the correct verbiage — he simply treats the strategic value
of offending Muslims as self-evident. On the other end of the party
spectrum, Donald Trump [See update at bottom] is issuing inflammatory
calls to close down mosques. Figures like Ted Cruz
and Jeb Bush are calling for the United States to admit only Christian
refugees, thereby positioning the United States as indifferent to ISIS’s
primary victims.
And
Rubio has rushed out a new video in which he vaguely demands a “clash
of civilizations.” Rubio plays it a bit coy, repeatedly describing the
conflict as “them” and
“us,” without specifying who is them and who is us. This is a
characteristically Rubio-esque evasion that allows the most rabid
Islamophobes to read his position as a call for a Crusades-style war
between Christianity and Islam, but without tying Rubio explicitly
to such a formulation. (He can always insist that he meant “us” to
include non-violent Muslims.) The problem, of course, is that the most
inflammatory interpretation of Rubio’s words is available not only to
Christian culture warriors but also to Islamic culture
warriors. Indeed, the entire Republican Party has transformed itself
into a propaganda machine working in effect, if not intent, to reinforce
ISIS’s message that the Christian and Muslim worlds are locked in
violent, unresolvable conflict.
Update:
Reading Trump's remarks more closely, I should clarify that he said he
would "strongly consider" it, rather than endorse it. This is marginally
less barbaric but
still utterly beyond the pale.
For more information, go to: www.beverlyhillsimmigrationlaw.com
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