Recently an old and respected friend sent me a video link to one Dr Robert Jeffress, a Baptist preacher expounding on Islam from an apparently learned position and in a very reasonable tone of voice, concluding that anyone who urges a balanced view on Islam is misguided, that “around the world today you have Muslim men having sex with four-year-old girls”, and that the religion is “evil”. (My friend is a Catholic and probably isn’t aware that the same preacher has referred to the Roman Catholic church in the past as “the Whore of Babylon”.)
Why is this significant? Because I am an atheist British centrist, and have known my friend, a US conservative, for more than thirty years; we have steadfastly avoided talking politics. Clearly his motivation about the subject has become overwhelming, to the point where for the first time in three decades he is prepared to jeopardise our friendship.
It’s particularly galling because he knows I know many Muslims, and they are not as the preacher says. I don’t agree with a lot of their views, but they are just normal people getting on with life. They are my neighbors, I work with a few, I helped rebuild alongside them after the tsunami, and count several, both men and women, as friends. Worse still, the last time my friend was in the UK, while eating in a Kurdish restaurant and drinking Lebanese beer, we happened to witness through the window hundreds of Jews, Christians and Muslims walking together for peace and mutual comprehension, in a march that started at the local synagogue and ended at the local mosque.
Yet he still felt the need to send me something that implies I am misguided and my friends and neighbors are evil pedophiles; that this Baptist preacher’s interpretation of the Koran and the billion or so people in the world who are Muslim is the only one that matters.
Not living in the US, I don’t know how widespread this simplistic view of the subject is, but it does appear to be gaining traction there. Add to that the aborted Koran-burning stunt, the Park51 protests, and here the rash of single-issue Dopers for whom nearly every posting is on the subject of Islam, which posts contain grains of truth, but also an overwhelming swathe of broad-brushing, cherry-picking, misrepresentation and peppered with dozens of other logical fallacies, impervious to sincere debate - and it starts to look like a bit like a movement.
(Disclaimer: I am clearly not so naive to claim that there aren’t clearly deep problems in many parts of “the Muslim world”, some of them threatening to our way of life, but the particular kind of rhetoric I mention crushes, in my opinion, the sort of discourse that could actually produce results.)
Is this a nascent neo-McCarthyism?
Obviously this is an imperfect comparison in the detail, since the opponent is overwhelmingly different, and because the philosophies in the anti-Islamic fervor are not reflected in the political leadership, and only seem to be being adopted as policy on a local level as yet (e.g. the turning down of permission to build mosques), but as a phenomenon I see parallels: a hysteria, a paranoia, the snuffing out of open-minded discourse with the implication that one has been hoodwinked or is a secret “Muslim-lover”.
McCarthyism itself was a fad: it did not wait until the fall of Communism before it died out. Some of its principles sunk into US policy (the Cuba embargo; the necessity for us foreigners to declare if we have ever been Communists in order to get a tourist visa) but as a movement, it faded out even as the Soviet empire grew.
Will the current levels of reason-stifling debate and rhetorical hysteria retreat eventually? Will its proponents turn their attention to a new target?
Or is it only going to get worse?