ASIA TIMES ONLINE: Every political season has its hot-button issues. There's race, abortion, lunar colonies. But the hottest hot-button issue these days, judging from comments by Republican presidential hopefuls as well as what happened during the 2010 mid-term elections in the US, is Islam.
Islam dominated the headlines during the summer of 2010. Remember Terry Jones and his pledge to burn the Koran? Or those persistent rumors of President Barack Obama's Muslim faith? Plus, of course, that controversy over Park51, the Islamic cultural center planned for Lower Manhattan. Those 2010 elections became a litmus test for how a lot of American politicians stood on Islam. An embarrassing number of them are against it.
Although they flirt with racism, sexism, and homophobia at their own risk, US politicians indulge in anti-Islamic sentiment with near impunity.
One reason for that is the antipathy that nearly half of Americans feel toward Islam. According to a September 2011 study from the Brookings Institution and the Public Religion Research Institute, 47 percent of Americans believe that Islam doesn't jibe with American values. Republicans are more likely than Democrats to hold this view.
But the real dividing line runs right through the Republican Party. If you watch Fox News or belong to the Tea Party, according to that study, you're primed to see Islam as a threat. As a result, the presidential hopefuls have used Islam to mark their political territory and fire up their base. » | John Feffer* | Friday, March 02, 2012
* John Feffer is co-director of Foreign Policy In Focus at the Institute for Policy Studies
