Thanks to Glenn Greenwald for pointing out that the U.S. media is acting as though Donald Trump just invented bigotry this week (one of those ugly details I'm happy to miss by never watching television). But not only is explicit bigotry toward Muslims not new, implicit bigotry toward Muslims has been the foundation of the largest public project in the United States for the past quarter century.
Republican presidential campaign rhetoric is red-hot regarding Islamic terrorism, with Sen. Cruz suggesting the use of nuclear weapons to see "if sand can glow in the dark," a threat even more troubling than Donald Trump's call to temporarily bar Muslims from entering the U.S., writes Robert Parry.
Given that an ISIS attack in Paris just helped fuel the sweeping election victory of an actually fascist party in France, it's a bit mystifying how someone can be so sanguine about the likelihood of a Trump victory in the U.S. In fact, with a couple of even low-level ISIS attacks successfully carried out on American soil, it's not at all hard to imagine.
Sorry to disappoint those crying for a war against Islam, but the vast majority of those who kill with a gun in the U.S. are angry white men. Like Ted Cruz, Donald Trump, and Marco Rubio. "White terrorism" in America is a bigger problem by orders of magnitude than ISIS-inspired terrorism. "War" with individuals who cannot even be identified does not, cannot make anyone in the U.S. safer.
Despite much media focus on a rift between Obama and Netanyahu, the U.S.'s unconditional ideological, military and economic support for Israel has continued uninterrupted.