I’m used to negative politics and personal attack ads.  The strategy of attacking your opponents character is probably as old as politics itself, but it’s gotten particularly virulent in recent years.  Unfortunately, it’s seldom elucidating in terms of someone’s ability to govern.  Women and men who have made mistakes in their past or who have truly disastrous personal lives, may well be effective policy makers.  At the very least, though, we ought to be able to expect these personal attacks to be factual, and far too often they aren’t.  Just follow FactCheck.org or Politifact.com and you will see far to many examples of ads called to task for being untrue.

Sadly, I’ve grown used to these.  They disgust me, but they don’t infuriate me.  What does enrage me is negative campaigning the resounds beyond the campaign and affects our society more broadly.  This is advertising that plays on fear, intolerance and ignorance, impugning the character not only of an individual candidate but of an entire race, religion, ethnicity, or other group.  In a particularly egregious example, popular Minnesota Congressman Keith Ellison, a Democrat and a Muslim, is now being challenged in the race by Gary Boisclair, an anti-abortion activist, and member of Randall Terry’s Society for Truth and Justice (STJ), one of 25 candidates they are running in carefully selected advertising markets, less in hopes of getting the candidate elected than as a cover for running explicit anti-abortion tv advertising.  It’s a sleazy but clever strategy, one that the organization itself cops to.  I kind of admire it.  But Bosclair is also using campaign ads promote a Islamophobic agenda, running ads that explicitly attack Ellison’s religion, and that is unacceptable.

He has released a video that misrepresents Islam by stoking the fear and prejudice in order to smear his opponent.   It maintains that Islam advocates violence against Christians and Jews.  In fact the Qur’an expressly grants tolerance and autonomy to members of those faiths, designating them “People of the Book.”   Campaign ads like Bosclair’s promote fear and hatred, the kind of negative impulses that often leads to violence.
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But most importantly, this type of campaign ad is contrary the spirit of our nation.  This is the United States of America, a country that guarantees freedom of religion and equality of all regardless of creed or race.  To stoke the flames of religious intolerance is unacceptable, even more so when it is done on the basis of overt falsehoods.  Did you notice how many ellipses there are in the quotations used in Bosclair’s commercial?  If a text is manipulated that much, it is suspect.  We have become too used to lies in the attack ads of campaigns, and we can decide as voters the extent to which we want to hold candidates accountable.  But when the attacks go beyond individuals to brand everyone who adheres to a specific religion or is of a certain race or ethnicity to  be a threat, the hue an cry ought to be deafening!

Charlie Hebdo's publisher, known as Charb, with the special edition of the French satirical magazine outside the bombed offices (Picture: AFP/Getty)

After writing  and just before posting this, I learned of the firebombing of the offices of the French satirical magazine Charlie Hebdo after it published a satirical cover featuring the Prophet Mohammed as editor.  There is absolutely no excuse for that kind of criminal activity, and I hope they find those responsible, but it is not difficult to see how the misunderstanding between people of different faiths continues.  Muslims in the West need to learn to take a joke, but that’s hard to do when you feel you’re under attack.  By the same token, freedom of speech is a right that we ought to use wisely, to celebrate our unity, not to unjustly malign our fellow citizens.