Could America have its own night of broken glass against Muslims?

When compared to nearly all of their Western contemporaries, Americans work longer hours, receive less vacation days and accept lower pay. Thus the long Columbus Day weekend is a welcome respite from the tedium, and as the sun sets on another summer, a majority of Americans spent it milking the last beams of sunshine for the year.

For an ever-growing number of Americans, however, long weekends, and weekends in general, are an opportunity to glorify “free speech”. That is if you consider the armed intimidation of a minority group to be an illustration of the Constitution’s First Amendment.

Over the holiday weekend, a record number of organised mosque protests were convened across the US continent. From California to Kentucky, from Florida to Colorado, a total of 22 protests against mosques and Islamic cultural centres were scheduled to take place. In states where it is legal to open carry guns, protestors were encouraged to bring their weapons - including semi-automatic assault rifles.

Organised by a hate-group that operates under the innocuous nom-de-guerre Global Rally for Humanity, the plea is for “fellow patriots” to unite in protest against the presence of Muslims in America.

Thankfully, the protests “fizzled out”. The anti-Islam protest in Huntsville, Alabama had a “grand total of zero anti-Muslim activists” in attendance, according to Hate Watch.

While a lower than expected turnout might sound like cause for celebration, it’s more likely many would-be protestors (armed militiamen) were chased off by the bright glare of the national media spotlight, rather than a sudden change of heart a low-turn out might otherwise suggest.

Make no mistake, these protests represent a dangerous new level of Islamophobia in this country. While the weekend may have fallen well short of the organiser’s expectations, the year 2015 has already heralded a record number of mosque protests - the low water mark featuring 250 mostly armed protestors gathered around a mosque in Phoenix, Arizona, earlier this year.

In many ways, what we are witnessing today is anti-Muslim bigotry spilling out from the comments section of right-wing blogs onto the streets. These armed protests are a mass hate crime waiting to happen.

Since 9/11, Americans have been subjected to nearly 15 years of non-stop anti-Islam, anti-Muslim hysteria. In the mind of an Islamophobe, the 2001 terrorist attacks do not represent a violent deed carried out by a bunch of nihilistic criminals, but Islam writ large.

As such, the 9/11 attacks are the gift that keeps on giving for those who stand to gain the most by demonising and dehumanising Muslims. From the crude racism of Pamela Geller, Robert Spencer, and Frank Gafney to the intellectualised bigotry of the New Atheists (Richard Dawkins, Sam Harris, and Ayaan Hirsi Ali), Americans have been bombarded with anti-Muslim propaganda. From “Islam is the greatest force for evil in the world today” to “Islam is a nihilistic cult of death”; from “the only future Muslims can envisage – as Muslims - is one where non-Muslims are converted to Islam, politically subjugated or killed” to erroneous Sharia and Eurabia conspiracies, the unsophisticated among the masses are made easily afraid.

From fear comes violence. While a 9^th grade history book will tell you that, it appears it’s a lesson dangerously forgotten.

Well before Nazi Germany began its systematic extermination of European Jewry, a near decade of anti-Jewish propaganda culminated in kristallnact, also referred to as Night of Broken Glass, whereby non-Jewish German citizens were effectively given carte blanche to attack synagogues and Jewish-owned businesses. In the end, more than 1,000 synagogues were burned, and 7,000 Jewish businesses destroyed.

To avoid invoking Godwin’s law, we can turn the page to a more recent history.

In many ways the anti-Muslim atmospherics of 1980s Serbia is emblematic of America today. When Serbian militias began ethnically cleansing neighbouring Bosnia of its Muslim population in 1992, the violence wasn’t turned on like a switch. It was a process. It took Serbian President Slobodan Milosevic three full years of relentless anti-Muslim propaganda to prime the Serbs for secular nationalistic violence against Bosnian Muslims. He not only depicted Serbia as “a fortress defending European culture and religion from the Islamic world,” his government also pumped the same anti-Muslim slogans, conspiracies and stereotypes into the body politic and mainstream Serbian society that you hear from the likes or Geller, Harris, Dawkins, Ayaan, Spencer and Gafney today.

Propaganda has always been a key component of all genocides, and it serves us well to examine the anti-Muslim propaganda that previewed the recent mass extermination of Muslims.

“In articles, announcements, television programmes and public proclamations, Serbs were told they needed to protect themselves from a fundamentalist Muslim threat, and must arm themselves,” notes Gabrielle Kirk McDonald in Substantive and Procedural Aspects of International Criminal Law: The Experience of National and International Courts.

Edward Vulliamny, a journalist for The Guardian who was in Serbia and Bosnia during the conflict, described Serbia’s anti-Muslim propaganda as “relentless,” “cogent,” and “potent.” He said, “It was a message or urgency, a threat to your people, to your nation, a call to arms, and yes, a sort of instruction to go to war for your people… it pushed and pushed. It was rather like a sort of hammer bashing on people’s heads I suppose.”

The result: Serbian nationalists murdered more than 100,000 Bosnian Muslims.

The organisers of last weekend’s mosque protests have also urged protestors to bring their weapons, and have described Islam as a “threat to American values and the American way of life.” In a recent interview, Jon Ritzheimer, an “avowed atheist” and organiser of Global Rally for Humanity, expressed surprise that none of his “patriots” had yet attacked Muslims.

Dean Obeidallah, a Muslim American and columnist for CNN, observes, “Anti-Muslim bullshit has truly been off the charts lately.” In the last few weeks alone we have seen Ben Carson declare that Islam is not compatible with the US Constitution. Also, we saw Donald Trump refuse to challenge a person at his event who announced, “We have a problem in this country. It’s called Muslims.”

But if you think anti-Muslim animus in America today is confined to mosque protests, and stupendously ignorant statements made by would-be elected officials and Islamophobic scaremongers - think again. Hate crimes against Muslims are on the rise.

In fact, hate crimes against Muslim Americans have “skyrocketed” since 2001. The FBI says that before 9/11, there were roughly 20 to 30 anti-Muslim hate crimes per year, but since 2011 that number has climbed skywards to roughly 150 per year.

Am I suggesting today’s atmospherics lend themselves to the ethnic cleansing of Muslim Americans? Well, it’s hard to think of the unthinkable. But we thought another genocide in Europe was unthinkable until Bosnia happened.

Rather than ask is it possible for widespread and large-scale anti-Muslim violence to take place in America, the better question is what will anti-Muslim atmospherics look like the day after the next cataclysmic terrorist attack? What happens if that attack coincides with another major economic downturn? And what happens if a Muslim-bashing Republican wins the presidency?

Is the unthinkable so unthinkable? History says not.

- CJ Werleman is the author of Crucifying America, God Hates You. Hate Him Back, Koran Curious, and is the host of Foreign Object. Follow him on twitter: @cjwerleman

The views expressed in this article belong to the author and do not necessarily reflect the editorial policy of Middle East Eye. 

Photo: Protesters and counter-protesters rally outside the Islamic Community Center on 29 May, 2015 in Phoenix, Arizona.