the worst spasm of paranoia and bigotry since the Cold War.
Peter Beinart on the political roots of the enemy within.
Peter Beinart on the political roots of the enemy within.
With each new attack on a mosque, each new anti-Muslim slur by a prominent politician or pundit, each new poll showing that large swaths of Americans think President Obama is lying about his faith, it becomes clearer that we are in the midst of a national psychosis: the worst spasm of paranoia and bigotry of the post-Cold War age. The interesting question is: Why now?
The answer lies in the intersection of isolationism and war. At first glance, it seems odd that America is witnessing this eruption of anti-Muslim hate now rather than immediately after the 9/11 attacks. But historically, it’s not odd at all. Consider the “red scares” of the early and mid-20th century. In April 1917, the United States entered World War I. That fall, the Bolsheviks seized power in Russia. But it wasn’t until more than a year later, in November 1919, that Woodrow Wilson’s attorney general, A. Mitchell Palmer, began arresting and deporting thousands of communists, anarchists, immigrants, and labor radicals.
The hysteria that fueled the Palmer Raids resulted partly from World War I itself, which produced a wave of ultra-nationalism, initially targeting Americans of German descent. But by late 1919, Americans had soured on the war. Palmer’s raids began, in fact, the very month that the Senate rejected the Treaty of Versailles, thus spurning Wilson’s effort to permanently entangle the United States in European affairs. Less than 18 months after that, Congress passed the Emergency Quota Act of 1921, which virtually cut off immigration from Eastern and Southern Europe. The paranoid anti-communism of the Palmer Raids, in other words, represented an inversion of the jingoism spawned by war. Frustrated in their efforts to remake Europe, Americans turned their fury inward, redirecting it toward the “enemy within,” which could be defeated at lower cost in money and blood.
The awful irony is that persecuting Muslims at home
actually endangers American security, just as the
red scares of the mid-20th century aided the USSR.
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On the morning of Yom Kippur, we Jews read the following, from Leviticus: “The he-goat designated by lot for Azazel shall be stood alive before Hashem, to provide atonement through it.” It’s an ancient idea, the scapegoat, onto which the nation transfers its burdens and sins. Now we Americans have a new one, the American Muslim, and a new set of sins for which we will, I pray, one day atone. ~ Peter Beinart
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