Glenn Greenwald explain how the perpetuation of fear is what maintains the cohesion and strength of the right wing blogosphere.
Pew released a new poll today regarding the political beliefs and attitudes of American Muslims and — needless to say — our right-wing warriors, within hours of its release, have exploded in shrieking alarm. These revelations about American Muslims are “hair raising!,” and the warrior-pundits are working in unison to milk every ounce of anti-Muslim fear-mongering that can be squeezed from this new poll.
It is literally difficult to overstate the prominence that fear and hatred of Muslims assumes in the worldview of these right-wing war proponents. They frantically search every news story for any possible angle to seize in order to exploit anti-Muslim hysteria. It is the centerpiece, the animating “principle,” of the vast bulk of their public commentary.
The intensity of their hope and excitement when the Virginia Tech shootings first occurred — could he be Muslim? — was palpable, overflowing. Charles Krauthammer ran to Fox News within 48 hours to claim that a tattoo of Seung-Hui Cho “draws its inspiration from the manifestos, the iconic photographs of the Islamic suicide bombers” and Krauthammer blamed “Islamic terror” and the Palestinians for inspiring the shootings. Once it was established that Cho was no Muslim, they lost interest completely in the story and went in search of new Muslim villains.
Malkin’s Hot Air site has as one of its central purposes the scouring of news wires in order to find possible stories of Scary Violent Islamists in the U.S, resulting in one inane and hysterical item after the next of this strain.