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It’s taken Barack Obama more than seven years to actually set foot inside an American mosque, but he finally did it yesterday. He delivered a speech to the Islamic Society of Baltimore to deliver a pretty simple message about inclusiveness:
The speech served as a bookend to a 2009 address Mr. Obama delivered at Cairo University, where he called for “a new beginning between the United States and Muslims around the world.” In Baltimore, the president did not talk about intractable international conflicts like the Israeli-Palestinian dispute and focused instead on the more prosaic reality of vandalized mosques and bullied American Muslim children.
“These children are just like mine,” Mr. Obama said. “And the notion that they would be filled with doubt and questioning their places in this great country of ours at a time when they’ve got enough to worry about — it’s hard being a teenager already — that’s not who we are.”
…
Mr. Obama ended his speech by reminding Muslim Americans, “You are not alone, your fellow Americans stand with you.” And he reminded others that the country’s diversity “is not a weakness, that is one of our greatest strengths.”
“We are one American family,” he said. “We will rise and fall together.”
That’s all it was, just a speech about how American is American no matter what or how or whether you worship. He didn’t surrender and pledge allegiance to Abu Bakr al-Baghdadi or anything like that. Nice, right?
Well, no. Haven’t you all figured out by now that we can’t have nice things? Enter the barking nitwits trying to win the Republican nomination:
“We have a lot of problems in this country,” Republican presidential candidate Donald Trump noted during a Fox News interview Wednesday night. “There are a lot of places he can go, and he chose a mosque … I don’t know if he’s — maybe he feels comfortable there.”
And of course, where one opens his mouth, another must quickly follow:
At a town hall meeting in New Hampshire later that night, rival Marco Rubio registered his disapproval of Obama’s trip, citing it as one of the ways the president attempts to divide Americans “along ethnic lines and racial lines and economic lines and religious lines.”
“I’m tired of being divided against each other for political reasons like this president’s done,” Rubio told the virtually all white New Hampshire crowd. “Always pitting people against each other. Always.”
“Look at today – he gave a speech at a mosque,” Rubio said. “Oh, you know, basically implying that America is discriminating against Muslims. Of course there’s going to be discrimination in America of every kind. But the bigger issue is radical Islam… [I]t’s this constant pitting people against each other – that I can’t stand that. It’s hurting our country badly.”
It’s bad enough that it took Obama seven years to speak at a mosque in large part because at least two-fifths of all Republicans think Obama is a Muslim. But it’s a sign of how truly far off the ledge the Republican Party has gone that Obama delivered a message pretty much identical to the one that Republican President George W. Bush (the one who destroyed an entire majority Muslim nation for shits and giggles) delivered, also at a mosque, right after the 9/11 attacks, and two of that party’s three leading presidential contenders felt the need to criticize him for it. To be fair, JEB had nice things to say about Obama’s mosque visit, but JEB isn’t really a serious contender at this point so he’s free to say whatever he wants.
Obama did criticize anti-Muslim bigotry in broad terms, and said that all Americans need to push back against it. He also, for what it’s worth, talked about the need for Muslim leaders to push back against extremism, though you won’t see anybody talking about that today. But here’s the thing: if you’re Donald Trump, or Marco Rubio, and you get offended, or pretend to be offended, when somebody talks about how we really shouldn’t be bigoted toward American Muslims, then guess what? You’re probably a bigot! Or, at least, you’re pandering to them!
If you believe, as Donald Trump apparently does, that it’s never appropriate for a US president to speak at a mosque, you’re probably a bigot! And if you attribute this president’s visit to a mosque to the idea that “he feels comfortable there,” then you’re also a racist! Congrats on hitting both marks!
If you’re Marco Rubio, who missed the point of Obama’s speech by a full 180 degrees, then I don’t really know what do say, other than to note that you’re part of the reason why Obama’s speech was necessary in the first place.
EDIT: Vox’s Max Fisher, who is generally worth reading on Islamophobia-related topics, has parsed Rubio’s comments a lot more thoroughly than I did, and, well, it’s not pretty:
Rubio’s message is that Obama went to the mosque because he has a secret agenda to “pit people against each other” and to divide Americans “along ethnic lines and racial lines”; that anti-Muslim bigotry is a non-problem on par with sports rivalries; and that challenging this bigotry somehow undercuts the effort to address “the bigger issue,” which is “radical Islam,” and that this is the real threat.
Rubio’s implied message is not just that anti-Muslim bigotry is overstated, but that efforts to combat bigotry are worrying because they “divide” Americans and because they enable the “radical Islam” that threatens Americans — and which Rubio has previously said credibly threatens the destruction of the United States itself.
Rubio did not explain why giving a speech against Islamophobia is in tension with the “bigger issue” of defending against radical Islam. But it does not take tremendous imagination to hear the dog whistle that accommodating equal rights for American Muslims will somehow hurt our effort to track down terrorists, which itself suggests that all Muslims should be treated as second-class citizens.
The Foreign Exchanges Companion 