Six days after the Sept. 11, 2001 terrorist attacks, President Bush delivered a speech at the Islamic Center of Washington, DC, making clear his belief that the Islamic radicals who attacked America did not represent all Muslims. “The face of terror is not the true faith of Islam,” Bush said. “That’s not what Islam is all about.” In recent months, however, Bush’s message of tolerance has been increasingly rejected by key conservative leaders, many of whom have begun to irresponsibly cultivate fear and hostility toward American Muslims. Journalist Michelle Goldberg wrote that “the hysteria over the Cordoba Initiative” — the Islamic cultural center to be built in lower Manhattan — “has marked a tipping point. Recently, conservatives, including conservative politicians, have indulged in the sort of full-throated, shameless anti-Muslim prejudice more typical of the European far right.” While it was tasked with protecting the country, the Bush administration seemed to recognize that alienating Muslims worldwide was a bad idea, even if its actual policies of war and occupation ended up doing just that. Now, however, unmoored from the responsibilities of governance, the American right is unabashedly embracing a platform of blatant fear-mongering and Islamophobia, and promoting a deeply divisive discourse of war between America and Islam.

NATIONAL OUTBREAK OF ANTI-ISLAMIC PROTEST: Driven by the rhetoric of leaders like Newt Gingrich and Sarah Palin, controversy over the so-called “Ground Zero Mosque” has spilled over into conservative protests against Muslim places of worship elsewhere in the country. The Atlantic’s Max Fisher notes that “crowds of protesters, sometimes aligned with the conservative Tea Party movement, are now rallying against proposed mosques in such locations as Murfreesboro, Tennessee; Sheboygan, Wisconsin; Bridgeport, Connecticut; and Temecula, California.” The New York Times recently reported that “local skirmishes make clear that there is now widespread debate about whether the best way to uphold America’s democratic values is to allow Muslims the same religious freedom enjoyed by other Americans, or to pull away the welcome mat from a faith seen as a singular threat.” Examining recent conservative rhetoric against both Muslims and immigrants, the Center for American Progress’ Matthew Yglesias wrote in the Washington Post, “Politicians are making hay out of the mosque only because public opinion seems to oppose it. They are reflecting, as well as stoking, a groundswell of public hostility toward outsiders.”

THE ISLAMOPHOBIA NETWORK GOES MAINSTREAM: For years, a network of well-funded right-wing organizations and individuals have been peddling a false vision of Islam as irretrievably hostile to the United States and modernity, and of American Muslims themselves as a potential fifth column. Since 9/11, pundits like Daniel Pipes, Frank Gaffney, and Andrew McCarthy have made a fine living trafficking in anti-Muslim invective, but have mostly remained on the margins of the debate. Now the adoption of this anti-Islamic discourse by an ostensibly “serious” conservative leader like Newt Gingrich represents a significant escalation. Speaking at the American Enterprise Institute on July 29, Gingrich used a series of discredited anecdotes to argue that Islamist radicals are infiltrating America’s legal system, and declared that Cordoba House represented “an act of triumphalism,” because “Cordoba is the city in Spain where a conquering Muslim army built a mosque on top of a church.” Echoing Gingrich, and expressing his willingness to join “a mass demonstration in front of [New York Mayor Michael] Bloomberg’s office,” former CIA head and Saddam-Al Qaeda conspiracy theorist James Woolsey insisted, “There is absolutely no reason to put [an Islamic cultural center] there except triumphalism.” In a detailed post correcting Gingrich, scholar Carl Pyrdum noted that this argument “elides three hundred years of Christian and Muslim history.” Far from “symboliz[ing] their victory,” Pyrdum wrote, “the [Cordoba] Mosque was held up by Muslim historians a symbol of peaceful coexistence with the Christians” of Spain.

TIME FOR PROGRESSIVES TO STEP UP: Analyzing the upsurge in anti-Islamic rhetoric among conservatives, George Washington University’s Marc Lynch wrote that “the progressive side bears some of the blame” in having failed to offer a coherent counter-narrative to the right-wing’s “war of civilizations.” Slate’s Will Saletan wrote, “If the prospect of losing our Constitution to religious government frightens you, don’t worry about the tiny Muslim-American minority. Worry about the anti-mosque majority Gingrich is working to mobilize.” Defending Cordoba House, the Atlantic’s Jeffrey Goldberg wrote that Imam Rauf, the leader of the Cordoba Initiative, “represents what [Osama] Bin Laden fears most: a Muslim who believes that it is possible to remain true to the values of Islam and, at the same time, to be a loyal citizen of a Western, non-Muslim country.” Goldberg continued, “Bin Laden wants a clash of civilizations; the opponents of the mosque project are giving him what he wants.” “America has real enemies in the world — forces that want to kill us and destroy our democratic values,” wrote the CAP’s Sally Steenland. “We would be smart to refute their claims by more forcefully declaring and acting on what we know to be true — that Islam and democracy are wholly compatible, that Muslims were part of America before we were a nation, that they have fought alongside their fellow Americans in every war we have endured, and today are helping to strengthen our national security and fulfill our country’s promise of equality, liberty, and justice for all.”