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A interesting opinion piece on the fading relevance of Islam related issues and the War on Terror in the wider discourse.
Why America's decade-and-a-half freakout over Islam is over
I think he has a point, you can notice it even here in the War Room. Before the withdrawal from Afghanistan there were barely any threads related to Islam. Even after it feels as if the perception of the event wasn't really filtered through the same "WoT" lens, if anything Afghanistan and the clusterfuck over there is emblematic of American fatigue with the WoT. So many people are deeply cynical about the real motivations behind the WoT that they're less likely to buy into the kinds of talking points that were once the norm in the discussion around such issues.
As he points out other countries have taken on the mantle. You've got authoritarian countries like China and Burma with heavy crackdowns on their Muslim minorities which they justify with reference to WoT terminology. And with the recent Islamist murders in France combined with the crackdown on Muslims and their institutions it seems to have intensified even in other Western democracies. But here in the US few seem to care anymore.
Why America's decade-and-a-half freakout over Islam is over
As multiple Presidents took pains to reassure us, America never actually went to war with global Islam. But given the rhetoric gushing out from much of the American press and American society for a decade and a half, you could forgive someone for thinking we had. During the years between 9/11/2001 and the fall of ISIS in 2017, Islam was the chief bogeyman of conservative America and much of the foreign policy establishment. It wasn’t just conservatives who spilled a lot of ink over Islam either — the entire New Atheist movement basically broke with the Left over the issue. Anxieties about Islam were decidedly mainstream — the cover of TIME Magazine on June 30, 2003 read: “Should Christians convert Muslims?”.
But what’s really weird is how quickly all of this seems to be receding into memory. Islamophobic attacks have fallen at a rapid clip since early 2017. A recent poll found that only 20% of Americans (and 34% of Republicans) now want to ban immigration from Muslim countries. Other polls have also found that anti-Muslim sentiment is now strongly unpopular in America. Islamophobia is far from dead, but it’s no longer widely accepted, and it no longer feels connected to a wider anxiety about geopolitical conflict.
Here's his reasons in bullet points which you can read more on in the articleBut I think it’s worth asking why the perception of a conflict between the U.S. and global Islam has receded. I see several reasons — some unambiguously positive, others more ominous.
- The U.S. won the War on (Islamist) Terror
- The Right found other people to worry about
- ISIS discredited jihadism
- The Middle Eastern Stately Quadrille
- The War on Islam shifts elsewhere
I think he has a point, you can notice it even here in the War Room. Before the withdrawal from Afghanistan there were barely any threads related to Islam. Even after it feels as if the perception of the event wasn't really filtered through the same "WoT" lens, if anything Afghanistan and the clusterfuck over there is emblematic of American fatigue with the WoT. So many people are deeply cynical about the real motivations behind the WoT that they're less likely to buy into the kinds of talking points that were once the norm in the discussion around such issues.
As he points out other countries have taken on the mantle. You've got authoritarian countries like China and Burma with heavy crackdowns on their Muslim minorities which they justify with reference to WoT terminology. And with the recent Islamist murders in France combined with the crackdown on Muslims and their institutions it seems to have intensified even in other Western democracies. But here in the US few seem to care anymore.