Source: http://www.theguardian.com/commentisfre ... ?CMP=fb_gu
Think Trump's an Islamophobe? Meet Ted Cruz's national security adviser
Haroon Moghul
If you were Ted Cruz, and needed to break into the news cycle, consolidate conservative support, and stop the Trump juggernaut, what would you do? Easy: pick on Muslims.
We’ve come to expect this from a party whose supposedly moderate candidates are still prejudiced. Even so, Cruz’s latest move still has the power to dismay.
The presidential hopeful has named Frank Gaffney as a national security adviser to his campaign team. For those of you who don’t know him, Gaffney is a conspiracy theorist whose obsessive focus on Islam and Muslims is clear from his stated concerns about a “worrying pattern of official US submission to Islam and the theo-political-legal program the latter’s authorities call Shariah”. He believes the redesigned logo of the Missile Defense Agency, for example “appears ominously to reflect a morphing of the Islamic crescent and star with the Obama campaign logo”.
It’s hard to find a better description of American decline: from the country that repeatedly put men on the moon to the country whose national security experts are searching for secret Islamic lunar motifs in government images.
That’s not to say that terrorists aren’t dangerous, that it’s Islamophobic to fear radicals, or that there aren’t deeply problematic interpretations of Islam. But they are neither as widespread nor as dangerous as anti-Muslim alarmists like Gaffney claim they are. As an American Muslim myself, who has worked for years with Muslim communities and advised on national security questions, I am endlessly amazed at the insecurities and anxieties of the American right.
Ronald Reagan faced down the Soviet Union. His purported heirs, however, have become convinced that the world’s most powerful nation is on the verge of being taken over by Islamists. This isn’t just silly, though. It’s downright dangerous. The war on terror was predicated on arguments like Gaffney’s. But one crucial part of it, Operation Iraqi Freedom, actually opened the door to Isis in the first place.
Which is why Gaffney’s place on Cruz’s national security team should concern you, even if you’re not American or Muslim.
Cruz is, with Kasich, the only Republican alternative to Trump. If there is a contested convention, there is a possibility he could be the nominee. And though it seems unlikely, he is still one of the five people with a shot at being our next president. Imagine, for a moment, that Frank Gaffney were advising a President Cruz on the right response to Isis or on a new Middle Eastern crisis. He might shape the president’s relationship to American Muslim communities, which is genuinely terrifying, because Gaffney has no relationship to American Muslim communities except to demonize us, mislead the public about us – witness his claim, paraded most recently by Trump, that “27% of Muslims” are “militants”.
Three more of Cruz’s proposed national security advisers are from Gaffney’s thinktank, the Center for Security Policy. There’s no evidence of new or fresh thinking here, not the least hint that Senator Cruz is aware of the lack of correspondence between Gaffney’s theories and reality, the fact that most Muslims do not conform to the stereotypes he presents, or even any serious commitment to making America safe, let alone a nation that can lead.
Imagine, instead, a Republican candidate picking a national security adviser who is Muslim, who has roots in Muslim communities, who can build relationships of meaningful durability. Someone who is trusted and reasonable, who can point out the difference between perceived threat and actual danger, and guide us to a more responsible foreign policy, a healthier and savvier relationship with hundreds of millions of people, a safer America and a safer planet.
Maybe that’s just asking for the (crescent) moon.
