Tim Stanley

How Republicans became the anti-Islam party

Ilhan Omar will come up a lot in the 2020 US election. She’s part of the ‘Democratic Squad’ of congresswomen that Republicans hate, along with Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, Ayanna Pressley and Rashida Tlaib — but she outshines them all by being a foreign-born hijabi who supports boycotting Israel and is accused of immigration fraud. If Donald Trump goes after Omar, it’ll polarise Democrats around her and conservatives around him, which is the role that Islam seems condemned to play in American politics: a trigger word to whip up the base. It prompts the question, why are Trump supporters so scared of Islam? And are their fears justified?

It’s easy to slot this prejudice into centuries of irrational panic about immigrants and outsiders, from the Irish, Jews and Japanese to Germans like Trump’s paternal forebears but concern about Islam is rooted in concrete recent experience. The 9/11 attacks were the most devastating terrorist acts in American history, and the culprits were indisputably Muslim, even if they weren’t models of the faith. In an all-American twist, some of the killers built up their courage before the hijack in a strip joint in Las Vegas. They didn’t leave a good impression; one of the girls said Marwan al-Shehhi ‘spent about $20 for a quick dance and didn’t tip more’.

After 9/11, George W. Bush could easily have embraced a populist anti-Islamic agenda to rally the base. Yet, to his credit, he did the opposite. Bush went to war with al-Qaeda and Saddam Hussein, all the while insisting that Islam itself was a religion of peace. Outwardly, conservatives expressed wartime loyalty to their president. In their hearts, the administration’s sophisticated distinction between Islam and radical Islamism never took hold. In fact, it bred disaffection.

Many grassroots conservatives assumed that Republican elites signed up to this political correctness out of moral cowardice, and fear of being called racist by Democrats and left-leaning media.

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Written by
Tim Stanley
Tim Stanley is a leader writer at the Daily Telegraph and a contributing editor at the Catholic Herald. Tim Stanley’s Whatever Happened to Tradition? History, Belonging and the Future of the West is out now.

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