Bryan Fischer is now his own trigger warning: part 1
...or "Bryan Fischer: neo-imperialist?"
TW: Bry- oh you read the title!
You can read the introduction to this series here, which explains my reasons for starting this group of posts.
Fischer: on coerced and forced assimilation
TW: Islamophobia, eliminationism, ethno-religious cleansing, second class citizenship
This has been a windfall decade for the Islamophobes of the "clash of civilization" sort, but Bryan Fischer really takes the cake at saying a decade later the sort of things Ann Coulter would in the wake of thousands dead, namely that we should cleanse the world of (the obviously hostile) Muslims, by conversion or force:
"[...] if we want to see freedom come to those darkened, benighted lands, we should be sending missionaries in right after we send in the Marines to neutralize whatever threat has been raised against the United States. So we say to them, look, if you don’t want our missionaries, fine, that’s your choice, we’ll take our missionaries and our Marines, we’ll take them home, but we’re gonna let you know we have no hesitation about returning with lethal force if the forces in your country threaten us again. This time it’s Marines and missionaries, next time it’ll be Marines and missiles."
You'll notice, in this narrative about how there's only three options the US can take with Muslims (ignore them in their foreign, "darkened, benighted lands"; convert them; eradicate them), it presumes Muslims are in some distant location where Americans can flagrantly ruin their lives for no reason other than their Muslim identity. So how does Fischer feel about Muslims in the United States? He thinks we should ban immigration of Muslims, since-
"Islam, all the values in Sharia law, are absolutely, fundamentally contrary to all of the values and freedoms that we cherish in the West, and so I’ve suggested we need to rethink whether we can afford any more Muslim immigration into the US, whether we can afford to have more mosques built [in the United States...]"
Of course, this incompatibility is rarely explained in terms other than a vague affiliation between all of the millions of Muslims in the world and 9/11, but when it is, he brings out the horrific anti-Muslim memes, such as that Muslims at a vaguely-Muslim-friendly event which roughly coincided with Eid (the celebration at the end of Ramadan) which was a few days after 9/11 last year, was insensitively close to 9/11. Unless all Muslims everywhere constantly apologize for what one small segment of the world's Muslim population has done, Fischer can't view any of them as compatible with his country, and consequently has repeated talked about bans on Muslim immigration.
In terms of what he wants done about this, he's not content with merely an incredibly draconian ban on specific religious groups immigrating, he wants to reduce their quality of life in the United States - ostensibly to facilitate conversions or repatriations. He invited a guest onto his program who explained that if Muslims don't like being banned from, for instance, military service, as Fischer's advocated for before, "they can go back to where they came from".
This isn't just about military service, however, as Fischer's called for the revocation of Muslims' rights to be free of a religious test to be President, to be free to build properly zoned mosques, to express their faith publicly, or even basic First Amendment rights. There's a couple of indications too, that Fischer doesn't want this to just be a passive process of mass discrimination, where new mosques aren't built and new Muslims don't arrive or convert, but where his prayers for the destruction of mosques are answered.
While he had the propriety to mask his prayer for the destruction of mosques as something God would (somehow) do, Fischer has been quiet clear on how he views Anders Breivik's massacre of 77 Norwegian liberals for their toleration of Muslim immigration. While Fischer condemned him as accepting "jihadist" logic and consequently abdicating a claim to (non-Catholic) Christianity, he admitted that in his opinion, "[m]uch of his [Breivik's] analysis of cultural trends in Europe and the danger created by Islamic immigration and infiltration is accurate".
Discontent with only screaming "ASSIMILATE, ASSIMILATE" at Muslims the world over like some variant on Dr. Who's daleks, Fischer also levies this garbage at Native Americans. Aside from the standard racism (Native Americans are treated as a uniform and monolithic group which is always a single 'they', that no Native Americans converted to Christianity and if they did they were quickly accepted into white America not forced on a death march for thousands of miles along with those that didn't convert, etc), he gives us this lovely "compassionate conservative" statement:
Native Americans "were, virtually without exception, steeped in the basest forms of superstition, had been guilty of savagery in warfare for hundreds of years, and practiced the most debased forms of sexuality [...] The native American tribes ultimately resisted the appeal of Christian Europeans to leave behind their superstition and occult practices for the light of Christianity and civilization. They in the end resisted every attempt to “Christianize the Savages of the Wilderness,” to use George Washington’s phrase [...] Many of the tribal reservations today remain mired in poverty and alcoholism because many native Americans continue to cling to the darkness of indigenous superstition instead of coming into the light of Christianity and assimilating into Christian culture."
(The original post at the American Family Association has been taken down, but Right Wing Watch still has their excerpts up, as well as a clip from his radio show where he reiterated these points.)
What prompted this, of course, was the inclusion of Indigenous as well as Christian invocations at the multiple funeral service in the wake of the shooting of Representative Giffords, which killed six civilians at the event she was visiting. As with Muslims building mosques or having imams that shared opinions, any non-Christian viewpoint expressed in public in the United States is treated as a target for assimilation by Fischer. He states in this rant, "They rejected Washington’s direct counsel to the Delaware chiefs in 1779, 'You do well to wish to learn our arts and ways of life, and above all, the religion of Jesus Christ.'" which was how they were "morally disqualified" from sovereign control of their own land. The past forced assimilation and ethnic cleansing of the United States, according to Fischer, is a justified an inevitable result of Native Americans non-compliance with Fischer's brand of Christianity, which to him is the greatest sin.
TW: Bry- oh you read the title!
You can read the introduction to this series here, which explains my reasons for starting this group of posts.
Fischer: on coerced and forced assimilation
TW: Islamophobia, eliminationism, ethno-religious cleansing, second class citizenship
This has been a windfall decade for the Islamophobes of the "clash of civilization" sort, but Bryan Fischer really takes the cake at saying a decade later the sort of things Ann Coulter would in the wake of thousands dead, namely that we should cleanse the world of (the obviously hostile) Muslims, by conversion or force:
"[...] if we want to see freedom come to those darkened, benighted lands, we should be sending missionaries in right after we send in the Marines to neutralize whatever threat has been raised against the United States. So we say to them, look, if you don’t want our missionaries, fine, that’s your choice, we’ll take our missionaries and our Marines, we’ll take them home, but we’re gonna let you know we have no hesitation about returning with lethal force if the forces in your country threaten us again. This time it’s Marines and missionaries, next time it’ll be Marines and missiles."
You'll notice, in this narrative about how there's only three options the US can take with Muslims (ignore them in their foreign, "darkened, benighted lands"; convert them; eradicate them), it presumes Muslims are in some distant location where Americans can flagrantly ruin their lives for no reason other than their Muslim identity. So how does Fischer feel about Muslims in the United States? He thinks we should ban immigration of Muslims, since-
"Islam, all the values in Sharia law, are absolutely, fundamentally contrary to all of the values and freedoms that we cherish in the West, and so I’ve suggested we need to rethink whether we can afford any more Muslim immigration into the US, whether we can afford to have more mosques built [in the United States...]"
Of course, this incompatibility is rarely explained in terms other than a vague affiliation between all of the millions of Muslims in the world and 9/11, but when it is, he brings out the horrific anti-Muslim memes, such as that Muslims at a vaguely-Muslim-friendly event which roughly coincided with Eid (the celebration at the end of Ramadan) which was a few days after 9/11 last year, was insensitively close to 9/11. Unless all Muslims everywhere constantly apologize for what one small segment of the world's Muslim population has done, Fischer can't view any of them as compatible with his country, and consequently has repeated talked about bans on Muslim immigration.
In terms of what he wants done about this, he's not content with merely an incredibly draconian ban on specific religious groups immigrating, he wants to reduce their quality of life in the United States - ostensibly to facilitate conversions or repatriations. He invited a guest onto his program who explained that if Muslims don't like being banned from, for instance, military service, as Fischer's advocated for before, "they can go back to where they came from".
This isn't just about military service, however, as Fischer's called for the revocation of Muslims' rights to be free of a religious test to be President, to be free to build properly zoned mosques, to express their faith publicly, or even basic First Amendment rights. There's a couple of indications too, that Fischer doesn't want this to just be a passive process of mass discrimination, where new mosques aren't built and new Muslims don't arrive or convert, but where his prayers for the destruction of mosques are answered.
While he had the propriety to mask his prayer for the destruction of mosques as something God would (somehow) do, Fischer has been quiet clear on how he views Anders Breivik's massacre of 77 Norwegian liberals for their toleration of Muslim immigration. While Fischer condemned him as accepting "jihadist" logic and consequently abdicating a claim to (non-Catholic) Christianity, he admitted that in his opinion, "[m]uch of his [Breivik's] analysis of cultural trends in Europe and the danger created by Islamic immigration and infiltration is accurate".
Discontent with only screaming "ASSIMILATE, ASSIMILATE" at Muslims the world over like some variant on Dr. Who's daleks, Fischer also levies this garbage at Native Americans. Aside from the standard racism (Native Americans are treated as a uniform and monolithic group which is always a single 'they', that no Native Americans converted to Christianity and if they did they were quickly accepted into white America not forced on a death march for thousands of miles along with those that didn't convert, etc), he gives us this lovely "compassionate conservative" statement:
Native Americans "were, virtually without exception, steeped in the basest forms of superstition, had been guilty of savagery in warfare for hundreds of years, and practiced the most debased forms of sexuality [...] The native American tribes ultimately resisted the appeal of Christian Europeans to leave behind their superstition and occult practices for the light of Christianity and civilization. They in the end resisted every attempt to “Christianize the Savages of the Wilderness,” to use George Washington’s phrase [...] Many of the tribal reservations today remain mired in poverty and alcoholism because many native Americans continue to cling to the darkness of indigenous superstition instead of coming into the light of Christianity and assimilating into Christian culture."
(The original post at the American Family Association has been taken down, but Right Wing Watch still has their excerpts up, as well as a clip from his radio show where he reiterated these points.)
What prompted this, of course, was the inclusion of Indigenous as well as Christian invocations at the multiple funeral service in the wake of the shooting of Representative Giffords, which killed six civilians at the event she was visiting. As with Muslims building mosques or having imams that shared opinions, any non-Christian viewpoint expressed in public in the United States is treated as a target for assimilation by Fischer. He states in this rant, "They rejected Washington’s direct counsel to the Delaware chiefs in 1779, 'You do well to wish to learn our arts and ways of life, and above all, the religion of Jesus Christ.'" which was how they were "morally disqualified" from sovereign control of their own land. The past forced assimilation and ethnic cleansing of the United States, according to Fischer, is a justified an inevitable result of Native Americans non-compliance with Fischer's brand of Christianity, which to him is the greatest sin.