There is an ugly specter haunting this 2008 election, the specter of Islamophobia. Both candidates have so far refused to visit Muslim organizations, but haven’t hesitated to visit Christian and Jewish groups. The message is clear: Muslims are outsiders, beyond the pale, perhaps exotic and even interesting in certain ways, but also dangerous, because being seen with them could have unpredictable political results. In electoral terms, American Muslims are the new untouchables.

At the same time, both candidates have gone out of their way to reassure Jewish voters, often in ways that aren’t particularly helpful. Consider the puerile groveling of the candidates before the American-Israeli Political Action Committee. Was Barack Obama actually wearing an Israeli flag beside the American flag in his lapel, or was that just a figment of Jon Stewart’s imagination? In any case, the entire performance was a distasteful exercise in Orwellian doublespeak, supposedly celebrating tolerance while actually swearing public obeisance to a brutal, rightwing apartheid regime.

This is especially ironic because according to recent articles by Chris Hayes in “The Nation,” the rumor that Barack Obama is a secret Muslim originated in 2004 with an anti-Semite who sought to turn Jews against Obama. But the rumor campaign also suggested that there was something wrong with being a Muslim, and that they were likely to hide their religious identity. This fed into larger conspiracy theories about Muslims, suggesting that they were part of a plan to “bring America down from within.”

Then came the July “New Yorker” cover depicting Obama as a Muslim terrorist and his wife Michelle as a gun-toting militant. It’s all too typical of a certain kind of smarmy, it’s-okay-because-I-say-so attitude on the part of the NY editorial staff; and also typical of their tendency to play around with pictorial satire involving vulnerable groups while carefully steering clear of those strong enough to fight back. For example, they’d never commission a cover of hook-nosed Jews burning the American flag, and then claim they were only satirizing anti-Semitism. Every Jewish organization in America would denounce them — and rightly so. Visual satire is different than the written kind, because racist images have a way of going directly into the collective unconscious of the people, regardless of satirical intent. That’s probably why “Mad” magazine, which specializes in a certain kind of low-brow satire, has mainly stayed away from them.

An especially painful example of how bigoted images backfire can be found in the venerable German satirical magazine “Simplicissimus,” which in Germany of the 1920s satirized both Jews and Prussian officers. In the minds of its editors, they were skewering all groups equally, and were therefore obeying the unwritten laws of satire. But they forgot that images of leering, rapacious Jews had been a part of Christian culture for centuries, and were therefore especially dangerous. Predictably, it was the anti-Semitic images that many readers of “Simplicissimus” ended up remembering. Later, much later, after Europe lay in ruins, the editors admitted their miscalculation.

The core issue, as Barack Obama himself has pointed out, is the continued identification of Muslims with violence, which feeds into centuries-old Christian hatreds and prejudices. Given the volatile effect of racial and religious caricatures, the “New Yorker” can’t predict how their satirical cover art will affect the public image of Muslims, regardless of their intent. And they’ve made it clear that they don’t care.  

But they should care, because Islamophobia could bring this country down. If there is another terrorist attack on American soil, or more than one, do you think for a moment that there won’t be voices calling for the internment of Muslims? The neocons and the neo-fascists of AM Hate Radio are already gearing up for it. Hateful images of violent Muslims, like violent images of people of color, add to the fears of the people, because they bypass cognition and go directly into the unconscious mind.