U.S. Imperialism Stokes Anti-Muslim Bigotry

Chauvinist Mania Over
“Ground Zero Mosque"

NEW YORK CITY—American and immigrant Muslims are under siege as a rabid campaign mounts against plans to build an Islamic community center two blocks from the site of the September 11 terrorist attacks on the World Trade Center. What is being pilloried as the “Ground Zero mosque” is, in reality, the proposed 13-story Cordoba House/Park51 community center, which includes a mosque along with a pool and many other facilities. Polls showed that Manhattan voters favored the city-approved plans for the Cordoba Initiative’s cultural center by a ten-percentage-point margin. But a Tea Party-style hate campaign got considerable traction in the outer boroughs of New York City and fueled a surge in anti-Muslim rallies nationally. New Islamic centers have been the targets of chauvinist protest in California, Wisconsin, Tennessee, Kentucky and Georgia, and on Staten Island and in Brooklyn in NYC.

In Manhattan, an “anti-mosque” rally mobilized several hundred near the proposed site on August 22, outnumbering counterprotesters. Far-right Dutch politician Geert Wilders, who calls for deporting immigrants, banning the Koran and closing Islamic schools in the Netherlands, has announced he will attend a reactionary mobilization at the World Trade Center site on September 11, the same day that a Florida church plans to hold an “International Burn a Koran Day.” Wilders exemplifies the virulent anti-Islamic reaction sweeping Europe, where measures barring women from wearing the Islamic veil are being adopted in France, Spain and elsewhere, with Switzerland even banning the building of minarets on mosques following a hysterical fear-mongering campaign by ultra-right-wing politicians.

As proletarian fighters against racist capitalist rule, we staunchly oppose the persecution of any religious group and defend the right of the Cordoba Initiative to build its community center. We defend the separation of church and state and the First Amendment right of religious organizations to be free from government control, oversight and interference. At the same time, as atheist materialists we are firm opponents of religion itself—all religion—and the social and political reaction spawned by religious and national-chauvinist backwardness. Religious superstition and belief will fade away only as human want is conquered through socialist revolution and the creation of a communist society worldwide.

The outpouring of racist chauvinism in the U.S. underscores the urgency for trade unionists and all fighters for black and immigrant rights to forthrightly defend Muslim minorities, including against any fascist elements that emerge from the sewers of the “anti-mosque” campaign. The workers movement must oppose the whole construct of U.S. imperialism’s “war on terror,” which feeds the flames of bigotry by labeling people of Muslim faith or origin as “terrorists.” What is needed is a fight against the policies of the misleaders of the labor movement, who from the onset of the “war on terror” signed on as lieutenants for the capitalist rulers in the name of “national unity.” (read on)