"Twenty-five years ago, George W Bush persuaded European leaders to back his war on terror. That disastrous project cost millions of lives and caused mass displacement of people from across the Middle East. It normalised racism and hatred for Muslims, refugees and racialised minorities in the US and Europe. I fear Marco Rubio's speech at the Munich Security Conference, with its calls to defend white, western, Christian civilisation against supposedly contaminating racialised migrants and the standing ovation he received from European elites"
"Rubio's language of a shared and superior American and European civilisation differs from that of his bosses, Donald Trump and JD Vance. His tone is more emollient but his outreach is conspiratorial. Rubio talks of migration and identity and civilisational anxiety, rather than terrorism and hard security threats as Bush once did. In his Munich speech, Rubio flattered Europeans about the continent's colonial past."
Twenty-five years after George W Bush secured European backing for the war on terror, that campaign caused millions of deaths, mass displacement across the Middle East, and normalized racism and hatred toward Muslims, refugees and racialized minorities in the US and Europe. Marco Rubio's Munich Security Conference speech urged defense of a shared white, Western, Christian civilization against racialized migrants and received a standing ovation from European elites. Rubio framed border defense as respectable sovereignty while using conspiratorial, nativist language and flattering colonial legacies. Such rhetoric contains racist subtext and Islamophobic dog whistles that risk discrimination, exclusion and violence amid geopolitical anxiety.
Read at www.theguardian.com
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