Same Imaginary War, Different Real Battlefield

Apparently the Wingers have decided that Real Americans are forgetting to hate Islam as the Source Of All Evil as much as they should be, so they are taking the battle to mosques themselves.  President Bush's message that Islam is not evil (one of the few things he got right), or the idea of American religious freedom in general, well that no longer applies to Muslims in the United States.  TPM's Evan McMorris-Santoro:

Frankly, the New York story is probably enough to prove the point that fear of Muslims is the new, well, black among the right-wing crowd. But the Ground Zero site is far from the only Muslim construction project to cause a 5-alarm panic among conservatives. Over near the other shining sea in California, a Baptist congregation and a group calling itself the "Concerned Community Citizens" is ramping up opposition to the construction of a mosque and community center in Riverside County.

The proposed building has been in the works since 2000 and has the unanimous support of the area's interfaith council. But area conservatives are starting to get antsy at the idea, worrying that unless some free exercise of religion is prohibited in California stat, the mosque could turn the county into "a haven for Islamic extremists," as the Los Angeles Times reports:

"The Islamic foothold is not strong here, and we really don't want to see their influence spread," Bill Rench, pastor at the Calvary Baptist Church, told the paper. "There is a concern with all the rumors you hear about sleeper cells and all that. Are we supposed to be complacent just because these people say it's a religion of peace? Many others have said the same thing."

There's a clear political bent to all of this hand-wringing about Muslim cultural centers and mosques on American soil. After all, there are quite a few Islamic houses of worship in the country already, and no Muslim fanatic has blown up a suicide bomb in Riverside County, California yet. This push to attack mosque construction has gone hand-in-hand with the uglier side of the tea party movement and other conservative resurgences following the election of Barack Obama to the White House. (Indeed, CAIR -- the Muslim civil rights group -- embraced the NAACP's resolution about bigotry in the tea party movement shortly after the NAACP passed it.)

For another example of the ultra-right's newest brand of fear politics in action, one need only look to Murfreesboro, Tennessee, a small college town about an hour away from Nashville. In the contested 6th Congressional district Republican primary, Lou Ann Zelenik has attacked the other two Republicans running for not being incensed enough about the Muslim community's plan to build a community center in the town. (There's already a mosque in Murfreesboro, so Zelenik is stuck with being outraged over just the after-school programs and classrooms part of the equation here.)

In a web ad for her campaign, Zelenik makes no bones about what she's running on -- it's fear, plain and simple. "Stand with Lou Ann against Muslim extremists," the ad reads. And in a statement to the press about the community center, Zelenik make clear how far she's willing to go to win with by fomenting intolerance toward Muslims:

"Until the American Muslim community find it in their hearts to separate themselves from their evil, radical counterparts, to condemn those who want to destroy our civilization and will fight against them, we are not obligated to open our society to any of them," she said.

Hey, collective punishment decrying all Palestinians as evil works for the Israelis.  And how can we forget Malkinvania's book length call to round up all US Muslims in internment camps?   The teabagger nutjobs at the federal level are bad, but the local ones are the folks who will find a zoning board excuse to prevent mosques being built, or deny them permits, or do everything they can to shut down existing ones, to label Muslim-Americans as the Enemy, and to do everything they can to harm them "before they harm us."

Won't it be great when they take over your city, county, state and country when you refuse to vote on Election Day and grumble about there being no difference between the Democrats and the Republicans?