Adam Serwer: Herman Cain winning the anti-Muslim primary hands down

In the fine tradition of last summer’s months long nontroversy over a proposed Islamic community center near Ground Zero, GOP presidential hopeful Herman Cain has declared his opposition to a proposed mosque in Murfreesboro, Tennessee.

With no trace of irony, Cain said he thought building the mosque was “an infringement and an abuse of our freedom of religion,” declaring that “this isn’t an innocent mosque”:

”It is another example of why I believe in American laws and American courts,” Cain said. “This is just another way to try to gradually sneak Shariah law into our laws, and I absolutely object to that.”

A little background: The proposed mosque in Tennessee became a target of arson and vandalism in September of last year, not long after the so-called “Ground Zero Mosque” became the freak show story of the summer. A local group tried to block construction, claiming that Islam wasn’t actually a religion. The plaintiffs’ attorney argued that Muslims aren’t entitled to the same rights as others because “these are the same people who flew jets into the World Trade Center on 9/11,” and said the whole thing was an effort to bring Tennessee under Taliban-style Islamic law. The whole controversy prompted the Civil Rights Division of the Justice Department to file a brief noting that Islam is in fact, a religion.

As with Cain’s unconstitutional religious test however, the problem for him and other mosque opponents is not sharia law. It’s U.S. law. There are both federal and state laws on the books that prevent local zoning laws from being used to block construction of religious institutions, which is why opponents argue that Islam isn’t a religion. At both the federal and the state level, those bills were the work of Republicans — it just didn’t occur to them at the time that “religious freedom” applied to Muslims. The judge, not surprisingly, agreed that Islam is a religion and let construction go forward.

More broadly, Cain has spent the last few months fibbing about declaring he’d exclude Muslims from his cabinet or from the judiciary if he were elected. Cain later tried to walk back his unconstitutional religious test for public service, complaining that “I’ve been asked that same question 18,000 times.”

Of course, the reason why Cain keeps getting asked about his anti-Muslim views is that no other 2012 GOPer has matched his extensive use of anti-Muslim rhetoric to win over the Islamophobic wing of the Republican base. Cain may not be doing too well in the polls, but if there’s an anti-Muslim primary underway, he is the clear frontrunner. With people like Newt Gingrich and Rick Santorum in the race, that’s no small achievement, although I’m not sure it’s one to be proud of.

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Adam Serwer: Laughably bogus poll tries to `prove’ Obama is losing Jewish support

Republicans are touting yet another poll that purports to predict the end of the Jewish allegiance to the Democratic Party. Citing a new poll by Republican John McLaughlin and Pat Caddell, the GOP’s favorite “Democrat,” they have convinced themselves that this time, Obama really is in trouble among Jewish voters.

At National Review, Tevi Troy exults that “only 43 percent of Jews plan to vote to reelect Obama in 2012.” Terrible! Except a plurality (48 percent) say they’d “consider” voting for someone else, not that they’d vote for his opponent or that they refuse to vote for him.

McLaughlin’s and Caddell’s poll is laughably bogus. Not only does their sample skew conservative, (only 64 percent of respondents voted for Obama, as opposed to the 77 percent of Jewish votes he actually got) but many questions in the poll are phrased in as leading a manner as possible. Indeed, given the wording of the questions, it’s actually surprising that 63 percent of respondents overall approved of Obama.

Here’s their phrasing for a question on Obama’s policy on Israel:

Considering what President Obama has proposed for Israel just over a year before his 2012 re-election campaign — a return to the 1967 borders, dividing Jerusalem, and allowing the right of return for Palestinian Arabs to Israel — how concerned would you be about President Obama’s policies towards Israel if he were re-elected and did not have to worry about another election?

Prior to being asked this question, respondents were primed by the query: “Should Israel be forced to return to its pre-1967 borders which were susceptible to attack at points where the country was only 8 miles wide?”

Again: Obama hasn’t proposed “a return to the 1967 borders.” He proposed that negotiations begin along those lines with “agreed upon land swaps,” which by definition does not mean a return to the 1967 borders. It’s a position the administration and Israeli Prime Minister Binyamin Netanyahu had agreed upon months before Netanyahu manufactured a fake controversy over it.

What’s surprisnig is that only 67 percent of Jewish voters in the poll said they were concerned about Obama’s policy towards Israel should he be reelected — this, even though McLaughlin and Caddell invented out of thin air the idea that Obama supports a “right of return” for Palestinian Arabs. Supporters of Israel oppose right of return for Palestinians because they believe that would lead to Israel ceasing to be a Jewish state as a result of demographic changes. This question seems to have been designed to elicit panic about Obama among the poll’s staunchly pro-Israel respondents, but even that wasn’t enough to do it.

The phrasing in this poll is comically skewed towards eliciting the most negative responses possible. As always, the game is to perpetuate the sad conservative meme that this time, really this time, American Jews are going to abandon their liberalism and vote Republican because Obama is a huge anti-Semite. The only thing this poll reveals is how badly some want to keep this storyline going.

Update from Greg Sargent: I asked Washington Post polling manager Peyton Craighill to assess the value of this poll. His answer was unequivocal:

“This is a clear example of advocacy polling. They’ve generated leading questions to elicit a desired result to prove a point. In no way does this represent neutral, independent research.”

The only thing this poll reveals is the lengths some folks will go to in order to keep alive the storyline that Obama is forever on the verge of losing Jewish support — a claim they evidently hope will become a self-fulfilling prophesy if they repeat it often enough.

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