Some see the current state of political polarization in this country as a threat: “It induces alignment along multiple lines of potential conflict and organizes individuals and groups around exclusive identities, thus crystallizing interests into opposite factions,” wrote professors Delia Baldassarri and Andrew Gelman in assessing the state of American politics.
Others see it as a sign of a mature democracy: “The 20th century figures we associate with moderation, compromise, and appeals to the center should perhaps be viewed as manifestations of an earlier, less mature stage of American democratic development,” argues law professor Richard Pildes. “Conversely, the hyperpolarization of the last generation should be understood as the steady-state of American democracy, the manifestation of a more mature American democracy, and hence likely to be enduring.”
But polarization has changed American politics dramatically by creating a narrow band of political platforms catering to a hyperpolarized electorate. MoveOn.org, DailyKos, and the Huffington Post have carved out liberal niches on the Left, catering to a small but vocal number of ultraliberal voters. On the Right, sites such as Red State and the Drudge Report give attention to fringe movements—like the birthers—which gain legitimacy (and notoriety) in this polarized media landscape that is hungry for extreme stories.
If there is a bright spot in the spectrum of voices, it might be people like Jon Stewart and Stephen Colbert, who—though certainly leftward in orientation—effectively criticize politicians across the spectrum, the partisan machinery, and the media with powerful satire. But as Jon Stewart himself seems to acknowledge regularly, they are not a replacement for vigorous and honest debate but a check on the impulses that lead us away from clearing our way through the political fog. Stewart once abandoned his satire to tell the hosts of CNN’s Crossfire that as a serious news program on a channel people turn to for actual news, “You have a responsibility to the public discourse, and you fail miserably.… When you have people on for just knee-jerk, reactionary talk … oh, it’s so painful to watch.… You know, because we need what you do.… This is such a great opportunity you have here to actually get politicians off of their marketing and strategy.” Stewart said the CNN show was “not honest” in advertising itself as a place for serious debate when it actually contented itself with engaging in “partisan hackery.”
Political correctness has grown so thick that, like an untended garden, it is now less about the flowers than it is about the weeds. Too much of American politics has become an exercise in institutional madness, hampering the nation’s ability to solve urgent problems. More and more, Americans are turning to voices such as Jon Stewart, a court jester of sorts, in the hope of finding any glimmer of light—the truth—through all the mudslinging and haze. If comedy and entertainment are all we expect of our national dialogue, clearly we’re abdicating our responsibility as citizens, relying on Jon Stewart to shoulder the burden of breaking routine and snapping us to attention when it’s necessary. That’s a lot to put on a comedian. But it appears to be just what happened with the Ground Zero rescue workers bill (which ultimately passed, in large part, it would seem, thanks to Stewart’s call to action).
In sum, the business of political polarization is booming, at the expense of meaningful discussion and debate on a wide swath of issues of critical importance to the United States. And so far we are providing little incentive to the forces of polarization to moderate themselves. I think it starts with demanding real and honest debate on the biggest issues before us. We don’t need to suffer talking points and epithets anymore.
CHAPTER 4
9/11 AND OTHER MAN-CAUSED DISASTERS
IS IT POSSIBLE to talk about Muslims and terrorism without being called a bigot?
The United States is at war with a “far-reaching network of violence and hatred,” President Obama said at the start of his 2009 inaugural address. He did not name the people trying to destroy the nation as Muslim terrorists. Later he said America’s spirit cannot be broken by unnamed people “who seek to advance their aims by inducing terror and slaughtering innocents.” His lone direct message to the Muslim world was limited to “We seek a new way forward” based on mutual respect. The president’s delicate approach to Muslim terrorism continued during a visit to India in 2010 when a student asked the president his opinion of jihad. President Obama is renowned for using exact language in service of mature dialogue. But in response to that question he suddenly jumped into a sea of fawning deference, ambiguity, and amorphous thoughts—in other words, political correctness. “Well, the phrase ‘jihad’ has a lot of meanings within Islam,” he said, “and is subject to a lot of different interpretations. But I will say that, first, Islam is one of the world’s great religions. And [among the] more than a billion people who practice Islam, the overwhelming majority view their obligations to their religion as ones that reaffirm peace and justice and fairness and tolerance.” Later he managed to mention that violence against civilians is wrong.
The president trod carefully to avoid offending Muslims. But no matter how fast he talked, the heavy weight of political correctness dragged his words down, drowning any clear message. But there is a message about Muslim terrorism that every thoughtful, aware person in the world, including Muslims, should be free to boldly speak without fear of offending anyone. That simple, clear message is that it is wrong for Muslims to kill others in the name of their religion. And to people outside the Muslim world the term “jihad” has become familiar as the war cry of Muslim terrorists killing people in the name of their religion. With the world living in fear of Muslim terrorism, the president might have challenged Muslims to speak out against extreme, violent jihadists acting in the name of God. But instead of delivering the bottom line in direct, plain language, the president got bogged down, pulled into depths of politically correct speech that left his audience stuck and with no clear direction. On the path of straight speaking, the president might have said Muslim terrorists are the ones who corrupt the term “jihad” to justify murdering people. They are guilty of creating a link between Islam and murderous violence. Then the president might have explained why it is an act not of bigotry but of rationality to directly ask if Islamic commands for a faithful life can be reconciled with respect for individual rights guaranteed in a nation living under civil law such as the U.S. Constitution. The president’s politically correct divergence from the hard truth did not comfort Muslims. It did not reassure Jews or Christians. And it did not spur moderate Muslims to speak out against Muslim extremism. It just left the issue on the table.
The more the president and other leaders twist their words to avoid the hard truth about terrorism and its ties to Muslims, the more fear and suspicion are left to fester. Politically correct attempts to avoid that harsh reality open the door to fear, stereotypes, and outbreaks of pent-up anger that lead to anti-Muslim bigotry. This is precisely the conversation I was having with Bill O’Reilly when I admitted to getting nervous when I see people in Muslim garb on airplanes.
As with much of politically correct speech, Obama’s intentions are good; they are noble. The president did not want to paint an entire religion with a broad brush. As the leader of the United States he does not want to shred the Constitution and establish a police state or place Muslims in internment camps. While we don’t want that, we cannot delude ourselves into pretending that those impulses—from fear—don’t exist. We can decide they are the wrong impulses to act on without being told not to express them. It is censorship to discourage talk about the fact that terrorism in the world today is coming largely from Muslim countries and the people embracing it claim to be serving their Muslim faith by engaging in what they call jihad. It does not make you a bigot to recognize that the major terrorist threat in our time to stable governments and civil societies around the globe is rooted in Islam. It does not make us bigots if we dare to speak the truth: Islamic extremism is a grave threat to U.S. national security. The president must be clear in addressing the challenge of
how Americans can effectively resist this threat without condemning an entire religion.
President Obama’s administration came into office bent on changing the language around the Muslim terror threat. As a matter of policy the president and his top staff wanted to encourage a new, less belligerent way of talking about Muslims and terrorism. No more of Vice President Cheney’s declaring that he wants Osama bin Laden’s “head on a platter.” No more of President Bush boasting of seeking al Qaeda terrorists “dead or alive” and challenging America’s enemies in the Middle East to send more combatants to Iraq with the taunt “Bring them on.” President Obama wanted to clear the air of right-wing condemnation, a brand of political correctness that labels any critic as unpatriotic for raising doubts about the need for U.S. forces in Iraq or the Patriot Act’s erosion of civil liberties. It was time to end Bush press secretary Ari Fleischer’s edict that when it came to terrorism and Bush administration war policies, people had to watch what they talked about.
Again, the intentions are noble. But this approach has resulted in a lack of honest, rational conversation about the genuine threat of Islamic terrorism. It is an invitation to mock well-intentioned people for falling victim to the blurry thinking that comes with political correctness. This is the brilliant and evil heart of terrorism. It creates blinding fear to the point that smart, normally articulate people fail to have the honest discussions necessary to craft rational responses to contain terrorists.
In discussing her first testimony to Congress with Germany’s Der Spiegel, Homeland Security secretary Janet Napolitano said she did not want to use the word “terrorism.” Napolitano explained that she preferred to refer to 9/11 and subsequent attacks as “man-caused disasters.” The reason, she explained, is that “we want to move away from the politics of fear toward a policy of being prepared for all risks that can occur.” The impact was not to lessen fear but to indicate her approval of politically correct restraints on anyone who wanted to talk about Muslim terrorism. Her mandates resulted in derision from administration critics. Fox talk-show host Sean Hannity pointed out that Napolitano’s approach undermined confidence in the new administration’s determination to keep the United States safe: “Madam Secretary,” Hannity said, “if you can’t even call it by its name, how exactly do you plan to protect us against it? Shying away from the word ‘terrorism’ in an effort to be politically correct is cowardly, not courageous.” The Homeland Security secretary’s sterilized language also had the effect of making it hard for anyone trying to clearly identify and understand a fierce and implacable enemy, a foe with no ties to other countries, a “nonstate” actor, in government parlance, who is willing to crash airplanes into buildings, plant bombs, and carry out assassinations. The one thing clear about this enemy’s motivation to terrorize and kill Westerners is that they are acting in the name of Islam.
Similarly, Obama’s secretary of state, Hillary Clinton, abandoned the phrase “war on terror.” In the spring of 2009, speaking to reporters who asked her why she did not want to use those words, she dodged the issue: “I haven’t gotten any directive about using it or not using it. It is just not being used,” she said.
Secretary Clinton’s announcement was followed by news of a Pentagon memo asking military officials to avoid using the phrase “global war on terror” in favor of “overseas contingency operations.” In April 2010 the president’s national-security team decided to edit any mention of “Islamic extremism” out of the National Security Strategy, the basic statement of policy for protecting vital U.S. interests. Under President Bush the document had read: “The struggle against militant Islamic radicalism is the great ideological conflict of the early years of the 21st century.” A few months later John Brennan, the president’s top counterterrorism adviser, elaborating on a point Napolitano had broached, explained that the new president had concluded that terrorism was not the enemy. Terrorism is a tactic or a state of mind, he said, diving into the sea of political correctness. Taking national pride into the sea with him, he issued the proud but meaningless claim that Americans refuse to live in fear—even as we spend billions on security and go to war to combat Muslim terrorists.
Before completely disappearing beneath the waves of political correctness, he announced: “Nor do we describe our enemy as jihadists or Islamists because jihad is a holy struggle … meaning to purify oneself … and there is nothing holy or legitimate or Islamic about murdering innocent” people. By that logic the United States is not at war with terrorists, Muslim extremists, or jihadists. Our enemy is to be defined as organizations using violent tactics, such as al Qaeda and its affiliates. There is no longer mention of terrorists or Muslims. And there can be no mention of the gulf that exists between Judeo-Christian religions and Islamists, who would impose perversions of Muslim religious tenets as national laws. Stoning women to death for adultery, cutting off their noses for refusing to become child brides, denying them the right to an education—these things do not happen under civil law accepted by Jews and Christians. That’s a fact. And it is a fact that they are accepted under various interpretations of Islam’s Sharia law.
The best that can be said about these flights into euphemistic fantasy is that they pleased liberals who were fed up with years of hard-line rhetoric from the Bush administration. The worst that can be said about the administration’s policy statements is that they are a blatant departure to the land of muddled thinking born of politically correct speech, a land with eyes blind to the reality of violent Muslim extremists launching worldwide terrorist attacks on people in an office building in New York, people on a train in Spain, people on vacation in Indonesia.
What is frustrating to me as a journalist is that Americans have displayed incredible maturity since 9/11 in dealing with the Muslim terror threat. President Bush visited a mosque in the days after the 9/11 attacks to make a public display of his belief that it was wrong to blame all Muslims for the violence. On September 20, 2001, he told a joint session of Congress: “The terrorists practice a fringe form of Islamic extremism that has been rejected by Muslim scholars and the vast majority of Muslim clerics—a fringe movement that perverts the peaceful teachings of Islam.” The Republican president displayed tact and sensitivity at a moment of national crisis. Meanwhile, American faith leaders held joint worship services around the country for Christian, Jewish, and Muslim clerical leaders to come together and offer an example of unity in the face of the potentially divisive fallout from attacks justified as an Islamic mission. This evidence of maturity and restraint gave the nation a basis for an honest conversation on the topic. As an author of several books on black American history, I can give voice to how far the United States has come in dealing with racism and bigotry. The civil rights movement in the United States achieved many of its goals with appeals to conscience, calls to action based on Christian principles, historical reference to the nation’s founding ideals of all men being equal, and the power of the nation’s commitment to justice under law. These principles withstood riots in the streets, the murder of Nobel Peace Prize winner Dr. Martin Luther King Jr., and bitter, divisive segregationist appeals. Our nation came through the fire, demonstrating the capacity to deal with the racial divide, the deepest cut in our country’s history. Even when it came to war, the country has acknowledged its mistakes of the past. During World War II President Roosevelt ordered one hundred thousand Japanese Americans into detention camps, as if they constituted an enemy within. The remorse and shame over that action prevented any similar treatment of Korean Americans during the Korean War or Vietnamese Americans during the Vietnam War. And in 1988 Congress went so far as to vote for an official apology to survivors of the Japanese internment. America has hard-earned status among the nations of the world when it comes to dealing with racial diversity and minority rights.
As for fear that forthright discussion about Muslim terrorism might result in a spike of religious intolerance directed against Muslims, it is a statement of historical fact that if any cou
ntry in the world has a history of frank, peaceful discussions on religion, it is the United States. The United States is home to remarkable tolerance of varying religious practices, to the point of protecting the rights of nonbelievers; repeated court rulings have come down against the Christian majority labeling the United States a Christian nation. Polling done for a 2010 book on religion in the United States found that an overwhelming majority of Americans said people practicing other faiths can go to heaven. Professors David Campbell and Robert Putnam, the authors of the book American Grace, also reported that wide majorities of Christians in the United States, including the most devout evangelicals, stated their belief that Muslims, Jews, Buddhists, and atheists can all go to heaven. Islam ranks among the least popular religions in the United States today, but the authors note that not long ago Judaism and Catholicism, now among the most respected faiths, were among the least respected. Their rise in the esteem of people of other faiths is offered as evidence of the nation’s capacity for tolerance and ability to engage in reasoned debate on Islamic terror.
So why would President Obama, NPR, or anyone else on the Left or Right want to stop Americans, and particularly O’Reilly and me, from talking to one another about this threat, as if we are not to be trusted? There is a hunger for better information, a deep desire to engage in these difficult conversations when it comes to Muslims and terrorism. Yet so many supposedly well-meaning people in politics and media don’t trust other Americans to take part in these debates. How can Americans avoid these conversations when the FBI and other law-enforcement agencies are tracking Muslim terror suspects and monitoring their conversations in the United States and abroad? When the courts are trying to establish the basis for surveillance and there are legal and ethical questions about profiling Muslims? When government agencies are determining what is within legal limits as they infiltrate places where radical Muslim ideology is being championed, including places of worship, mosques? How can we be told to shut up, be careful what we say, or even be fired for joining a conversation that is under way?
Juan Williams Page 9