Liberal security politics amplified right-wing Islamophobia’s reach and power

Evidence

This success, however, was in no small part due to the role played by the liberal establishment. In the months prior, the media had whipped up hysteria around the threat of “homegrown terrorism.” This green scare was integral to Obama’s announcement to deploy 33,000 more troops to Afghanistan. In short, even though the right-wing Islamophobia network had been active for a few decades, the climate created by official liberalism in the form of support for more security measures to ferret out the “terrorists” in our midst bolstered their ability to take the argument further. Liberal Islamophobia interacts dialectically with conservative and Far Right Islamophobia to produce the “Muslim” as a threatening race. — Deepa Kumar, Islamophobia and the Politics of Empire, 659

Categorization

Category: Causal Relationships

• XREF: Parallels the dynamic in ‘Complaints About Immodesty Go Way Back’ where establishment norms empowered conservative moral panics.
• SEED: An essay angle: how centrist ‘moderate’ positions on security create the permission structure for far-right racism — the liberal establishment as the enabler, not just opponent, of Islamophobia.

Related

• Liberal homegrown-terror hysteria amplified right-wing Islamophobia (similarity 0.93)
• Liberal security politics amplified right-wing Islamophobia against the NYC Islamic center (similarity 0.92)
• Liberal security hysteria functionally powered the right-wing mosque campaign’s success (similarity 0.91)
• Homegrown-terror hysteria in liberal media enabled the Ground Zero mosque campaign (similarity 0.87)
• The liberal retreat over Cordoba House expanded the anti-Muslim hate group base (similarity 0.86)
• Domestic anti-Muslim campaigns needed liberal commentary to reach the mainstream (similarity 0.86)
• Liberal retreat in the Cordoba House fight doubled the right-wing anti-Muslim base (similarity 0.86)
• Liberal and conservative Islamophobia jointly enable far-right conspiracy theories (similarity 0.85)
• Liberal anti-racist rhetoric licenses and amplifies far-right conspiracy theories. (similarity 0.84)
• Liberal defenses of Muslims feed rather than block right-wing conspiracy theories (similarity 0.83)
• Islamophobia spans the political spectrum and is embedded in empire’s infrastructure (similarity 0.83)
• Liberal Islamophobia under Obama worsened conditions for Muslims at home and abroad (similarity 0.83)
• Official green-scare policy creates the terrain on which far-right conspiracy theories grow (similarity 0.82)
• Liberal Islamophobia condemns Islam-bashing while championing programs that target Muslims (similarity 0.82)
• Islamophobia spans liberal and conservative mainstreams, not just the fringe right (similarity 0.82)