Building national unity at times of crisis by ascribing undesirable values to religious out-groups has been a pattern of governance in America's democracy that has often obfuscated the political and economic sources of the crisis to the benefit of the state. Today's explanations of 9/11 in terms of religion and our contemporary conceptualizations of anti-Muslim bigotry in terms of a social phobia of Islam continue this pattern at a significant cost to every American's civil liberties.

QUESTION: Worth tracing the historical examples of this pattern — which crises and which out-groups were scapegoated, and at what cost to civil liberties each time.

Carl W. Ernst, Islamophobia in America_ Th…, loc. 301