Inexplicable Las Vegas shooting highlights right-wing addiction to Islamic terror
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haaretz.com
The man who perpetrated the horrific massacre in Las Vegas
this week was converted to Islam before his name became known, and he
continues to convert after his death as well. Numerous news and social
media sites that cater to the right willingly succumbed to reports that
64-year-old Stephen Paddock of Mesquite, Nevada had turned into a devout
Muslim without any of his relatives or acquaintances knowing about it.
At first they relied on Israel’s Reshet Bet, which reported that Paddock
was actually Samir al-Hajib, who converted at the age of 20. Then ISIS itself got into the act,
anointing the killer as Abd al-Bar al-Ameriki, “a soldier in the
service of Islam” who had answered the call to “harm the countries of
the Crusader coalition.”
The
political motives of those who are desperately seeking a link between
Paddock and Islam, from Donald Trump on down, are clear and obvious. A
mass killing that has no connection to Islam gives American liberals a battering ram to assault right-wing support for free guns for all.
Islamic terror, on the other hand, exempts the right from the need to
provide excuses or explanations and gives it an instrument with which to
whip up public rage, call for closing the ranks against a common enemy
and condemn all those who don’t join the choir as collaborators who are
stabbing America in the back.
Though the
right hates to be reminded of it, radical Islam is often its best
friend. America’s humiliation by Khomeini revolutionaries in Tehran
helped Ronald Reagan beat Jimmy Carter in 1980. The war against Al-Qaida
after the 9/11 atrocities pushed George Bush to a second term in 2004. A
comprehensive study carried out by the Rand Corporation almost a decade
ago found that terror attacks that were carried out within three months
of elections added an additional 1.35 percent of the vote to the
Israeli right, a bonus big enough to give the Likud’s Yitzhak Shamir the
edge in the 1988 elections and to make Benjamin Netanyahu prime
minister by a razor-thin margin in 1996. Perhaps more than any other
leader in the world, Netanyahu is a prime example of how a talented and
eloquent right-wing leader can climb to the top on the back of Islamic
terror, and then stay there for what is beginning to seem like eternity.
But the
reliance of the right on Islamic terror isn’t simply tactical. It is
essential to its core identity and addictive as a hard drug. The
existence of an evil and dangerous enemy buttresses the simplistic right
wing view of the world as a battle between black and white, good and
evil, for us or against us, with no middle ground in between. The battle
against Islamic terror allows the right to foster nationalism,
chauvinism and hatred of foreigners, which are all part of its essence
as well as tools that serve its purposes.
The more
the right wing succeeds in inflating the undeniable threat posed by
Islamic terrorism, the easier it gets to concoct a perpetual state of
emergency that shunts aside controversies and crimes, enables the
erosion of civil rights and the rule of law and exempts the public and
its leaders from the need to account for their actions. The horrific
suicide bombings of the second intifada more than a decade ago, for
example, erased in Israeli minds any connection between the occupation
and its consequences and paved the way for the unrestrained and
guilt-free de facto occupation that is happening now.
By
obsessively focusing on Islamic terror however, the right is sowing the
seeds of its own decline as a part of democracy, in America and Israel
both. There is a close correlation between the compulsive addiction of
right wing parties to eternal war against Islam over the past two
decades and their transformation to intolerant and anti-pluralistic
groups that eject anyone who is suspected of moderation or complex
thought. Even when it is being beaten on the battlefield, Islamic terror
and its adherents could not dream of sweeter victory.
Chemi Shalev
Haaretz Correspondent
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