Choose Your Fascism

If the only explanation for Trump's 'Islamophobia' is bigotry or mental deficiency a better one is needed to account for the data. A much simpler explanation for the fear which drives the Trump crowds is a loss of confidence in government assurances that they will keep the public safe.

As the blogger Ace of Spades put it, "think about this for a moment though. How many people who are deeply, deeply offended about keeping non-citizen Muslims out of the US think it's perfectly fine to force Christian bakers to provide a cake for same sex ceremonies? "

Then there's this.  Referring to Obama's Surveillance Regime ...

It is a false kind of hospitality that rolls out the red carpet to strangers only to direct them straight to the bugged room. It is a strange kind of anti-fascism that uses police state methods to enforce tolerance. We live in a world of "friends and neighbors" only rhetorically. In practice we are well on our way to creating a penitentiary.

Fear is natural in the world of ghosts the Western elites have created through their deceptions. They tell us not to worry but clutch at amulets and nostrums as if they were jumpy themselves. Rukmini Callimachi, writing in the New York Times, seriously argued that president Obama is basing his anti-ISIS strategy on an attempt to avoid fulfilling an Islamic prophecy which holds that "boots on the ground" would signal the last battle in which the infidel will be destroyed.

It is partly that theory that President Obama referred to in his speech on Sunday, when he said the United States should pursue a “sustainable victory” that involves airstrikes and supports local forces battling the Islamic State rather than sending a new generation of American soldiers into a ground offensive.

“I have said it repeatedly: Because of these prophecies, going in on the ground would be the worst trap to fall into. They want troops on the ground. Because they have already envisioned it,” said Jean-Pierre Filiu, a professor of Middle East Studies at Sciences Po in Paris, and the author of “Apocalypse in Islam,” one of the main scholarly texts exploring the scripture that the militants base their ideology on. ...

“To break the dynamic, you have to debunk the prophecy,” Mr. Filiu said. “You need to do so via a military defeat, like taking over Raqqa. But it needs to be by local forces — by Sunni Arabs.”

That so far has been the approach of the Obama administration, which has armed as well as provided air support to a number of militias in northern Iraq and Syria, hoping to give a local veneer to the tip of the sword. The result has been mixed, with gains only in areas that are outside the main Sunni Arab strongholds that the Islamic State controls.

Obama was brought up in Muslim countries and could very well be aware, and influenced by Muslim prophesy. Ridiculous? How many times have Christians been accused of supporting Israel because they believe in biblical prophesy about Armageddon and the second coming of Christ? The answer is, Lots. So it's an interesting hypothesis.