On 9/11: Defend the Islamic Center

Anyone progressive is outraged by the Tea Party and its ultra-right supporters’ poisonous attack against Muslims that is the essence of their campaign to stop the building of an Islamic Community Center near the World Trade Center site. An additional threat comes from these reactionaries’ ploy to rally on Sept. 11 at the site and exploit the grieving relatives of 9/11 victims.

It is the duty and responsibility of working-class organizations to defend the Muslim people in their entirety in the strongest way possible. We must also show and build solidarity with our millions of working-class Muslim sisters and brothers.

This racist offensive is a multi-edged threat. A close look shows that working-class organizations must give priority to confronting and stopping it.

With this reactionary offensive, right-wing Republicans are playing on a mixture of racism and anti-Muslim bigotry to help win control of Congress. This ploy is typical U.S. racist electoral politics. Think Richard Nixon’s “Southern strategy” or Ronald Reagan’s 1980 opening campaign speech in Philadelphia, Miss., which identified his candidacy with KKK racism at the site of the 1964 murders of civil rights workers.

An additional goal of the ultra-right — Glenn Beck, Sarah Palin, Newt Gingrich and their ilk — is to pretend to speak for U.S. workers with this hate campaign. They want to scapegoat Muslims for problems now facing millions, including growing personal debt, lower wages, unemployment, home seizures and evictions, and denial of health care.

Alabama Gov. George Wallace’s 1968 and 1972 national campaigns resembled this aspect of the Tea Party’s program. Wallace targeted African Americans, who were then in an epic struggle to win their civil rights. The Tea Party and its even more rightist allies also have exposed their anti-Black racism by physically confronting members of the Congressional Black Caucus and spewing out barely veiled racist attacks on President Barack Obama.

The Tea Party and its cronies openly campaign against immigrants in a similar attempt to misdirect the anger of U.S.-born workers over harsh conditions caused by the capitalist system’s failure to provide jobs.

Does the Tea Party speak for workers? Among its main funders are two reactionary multi-billionaires, Charles and David Koch. The two have given hundreds of millions of dollars to right-wing causes, including the Tea Party, as detailed by Jane Mayer’s article in the Aug. 30 New Yorker magazine. Sometimes the brothers contribute to win relief from government oversight of their oil industry’s pollution. Sometimes they avoid or prevent taxes. Sometime they promote their ideological battle against all government social services, which includes funding media racists and bigots.

In addition, the corporate media gives enormous publicity to the Tea Party, much of it favorable and almost all of it omitting the dangers raised by this poisonous grouping.

Last, but equally important, the George W. Bush administration exploited propaganda dehumanizing Muslims in order to promote the imperialist invasions and occupations of Afghanistan and Iraq. The same kind of vicious propaganda aids Washington’s continued threats against Iran and Somalia as well as its support for the Israeli occupation of Palestine. Anti-Muslim propaganda is essential to the U.S. imperialist war drive.

Faced with this challenge, working-class political organizations and unions must give priority to the effort to confront the Tea Party reactionaries and their racist allies.

First of all, we must work tirelessly among workers of all backgrounds to build solidarity with the Muslim community.

Second, we must expose the reactionary and near-fascist character of many of the forces in and around the Tea Party, as well as the phony character of their claim to represent U.S. workers.

Third, we must explain just why some of the richest people put their money behind these groups that pretend to be “populist.” Using similar lies to those of the fascist and Nazi parties in 1920s and 1930s Italy and Germany, this phony “populist” grouping does the dirty work for the super-rich. What gives the current campaign its dangerous potential is that it takes place during a prolonged capitalist economic crisis that shows no signs of abating.

Fourth, we must never forget that working-class solidarity is international. We must fight against the occupations of Afghanistan and Iraq even as we fight for workers’ rights at home.

Working-class organizations must build unity, now more than ever, to fight for jobs, better pay and social benefits, to combat racism and war. The first step in doing that this September is to confront the Tea Party’s anti-Muslim campaign.

Any manifestation of solidarity with the Muslim center helps. Most important is the demonstration on Sept. 11 to confront the racists, called by the Emergency Mobilization against Racism and Anti-Muslim Bigotry. It will gather at 1 p.m. east of City Hall in New York. (For more information see iacenter.org.)