With Walid Phares, Mitt Romney Plays With Fire

The Adam Serwer era of Mother Jones begins with Adam's monster expose of Walid Phares, the former apparatchik of a bloodstained Lebanese Christian militia who now co-chairs Mitt Romney's Mideast advisory group. The piece has too many holy-shit quotes to excerpt at length, so you should just read the whole thing, but this is one of my favorites: 

Despite the bloody fighting among Christians, the lesson that many Lebanese Christian exiles took from the war was that Islam was to blame for the destruction that ensued. "There is a problem with Islam…If you want to follow the Koran by the book you have to be like [Osama] bin Laden," says one former Lebanese Forces militiaman. "It is a reality. And Walid Phares knows this reality. He's lived here."

Now: Romney is running a culture war masquerading as a foreign policy. So a reduction of the challenge of terrorism to a religiously-determined Clash With The Muslim would certainly fit into that approach. But like Omar with Proposition Joe, this kind of thing can come back on you. 

Romney, after all, is a Mormon. He must know what it's like to be part of a religious group that's looked upon with contempt and doctrinal derision, experienced unfair attacks in the popular culture and subject to blithe armchair theology in the media. Mormons aren't the subject of the kind of two-minutes-hate that Muslims are. But when you start stoking the flames of these kinds of prejudices -- and that, at his core, is what Walid Phares is about -- you don't know where the fire can spread. 

Comments

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