The terrorist attacks in Paris are being used to further the interests of the US ruling class. More US military intervention in the Middle East is being proposed, and there is a push to strengthen the national security state.

Islamophobia has reached new depths. Muslims are facing increasing harassment, abuse and physical attacks. “The picture is getting increasingly bleak”, said Ibrahim Hooper of the Council on American-Islamic Relations. “There’s been an accumulation of anti-Islamic rhetoric in our lives that has triggered these overt acts of violence and vandalism.”

In Connecticut, shots were fired at the Baitul Aman mosque in Meriden hours after the Paris attacks. At the state university, the words “killed Paris” were scrawled under an Egyptian student’s name on his dorm room door.

In Austin, Texas, an Islamic centre was defaced with faeces and torn pages of the Koran thrown at the door. In Houston, a man was arrested for threatening to “shoot up a mosque”. Four Florida mosques received telephone messages threatening a firebombing.

Toxic at the top

The Republican presidential candidates are at the forefront of whipping up the hatred.

The current front-runner, Donald Trump, has called for a national registry of Muslims and floated forcing them to carry special ID cards listing their religion. He also said he would close mosques in which “bad things” are happening.

Florida senator Marco Rubio went further, saying he’d not only close mosques, but Muslim cafes and restaurants.

Candidate Ben Carson said that no Muslim should ever be allowed to be president. Texas senator Ted Cruz claimed that sharia law “is an enormous problem” in the US. Rand Paul called for “heightened scrutiny” of Muslims. Mike Huckabee called Islam “a religion that promotes the most murderous mayhem on the planet”.

The “moderate” Republican Jeb Bush wants to allow only Christian Syrian refugees into the US. Ohio governor John Kaisich proposed a federal agency to spread “Judaeo-Christian Western values”

While the Republicans are in the vanguard of Muslim-hatred, many Democrats are joining in. Praising the internment of Japanese Americans in concentration camps during WWII, the Democratic mayor of Roanoke, Virginia, thinks that is a good idea for Syrians in the US today. “It appears that the threat of harm to America from ISIS now is just as real and serious as that from our enemies then”, he said.

The Republican-controlled House of Representatives voted to suspend the Syrian refugee intake into the US. Forty-seven Democrats voted with the Republicans.

Since the Syrian civil war began, the Obama administration has let in only 2,200 Syrian refugees, 77 percent of whom were women and children. His proposal is to allow only 10,000 more – a drop in the bucket given the size of the refugee crisis. Moreover, each applicant would have to go through a two-year scrutiny first.

The media are part of the anti-Muslim hysteria. More and more use the term “radical Islam” to explain who the “enemy” is.

On 27 November, an anti-abortion fanatic attacked a Planned Parenthood clinic, killing three and wounding nine. None in the media are calling him a follower of “radical Christianity”.

Attack on rights

Along with the attacks on Muslims, there is a renewed push to intensify government surveillance. As investigative journalist Glenn Greenwald wrote in the Los Angeles Times:

“Bodies were still lying in the streets of Paris when CIA operatives began exploiting the resulting fear and anger to advance long-standing political agendas. They and their congressional allies instantly attempted to heap blame for the atrocity not on Islamic State but on several pre-existing adversaries: internet encryption, Silicon Valley’s privacy policies and [former NSA contractor turned whistleblower] Edward Snowden.

“The CIA’s former acting director, Michael Morell, blamed the Paris attack on internet companies ‘building encryption without keys’, which he said was caused by the debate over surveillance prompted by Snowden’s disclosures. Senator Dianne Feinstein blamed Silicon Valley’s privacy safeguards …

“Former CIA chief James Woolsey said Snowden ‘has blood on his hands’ because, he asserted, the Paris attackers learned from his disclosures how to hide their communications behind encryption. Woolsey thus decreed on CNN that the NSA whistleblower should be ‘hanged by the neck until he’s dead, rather than merely electrocuted’.”

It is true that Snowden’s revelations included disclosure of how the US government spies on its own citizens as well as anyone else it wants to. This disturbed not only ordinary people in other countries, but foreign corporations and governments. To win back confidence, the big US telecommunications firms took steps to allow foreign companies to keep their business secrets from US competitors, and to reassure users of these services that they could guarantee some degree of privacy.

The government would like to have unlimited spy powers over everyone in the world; to have the “keys” to encryption devices. If it were to get such powers, and the rest of the world found out, there would be hell to pay for Silicon Valley. Moreover, strong encryption is not a mysterious secret – ISIS programmers, and anyone else, could devise their own encryption programs with their own keys.

The spooks are just trying to get as much as they can.

Middle East

Finally, there is renewed debate among the capitalist politicians about what to do about ISIS in the wake of Paris.

The US military is increasingly involved in Syria, but, after the debacles in Afghanistan and Iraq, there is no stomach among the US population for another massive invasion.

So what to do?

Republican elder statesman John McCain proposes that the troops on the ground come from Turkey, Jordan, Saudi Arabia and the other Arab monarchies. They would go in and wipe out Assad, with US support. Then these troops would turn on ISIS.

Obama says such a coalition of Sunni countries “must” provide the boots on the ground to take on ISIS, but leave Assad alone for now. However, these predominantly Sunni countries have shown zero interest in sending forces to fight the Sunni-based ISIS.

Turkey has allowed outside fighters to pass into Syria to fight with ISIS and is most interested in fighting the Syrian and Turkish Kurds, not ISIS. The US supports the Iraqi and Syrian Kurds, who are opposed by US allies in Bagdad and Ankara, along with Assad (who was once a US ally). US nemesis Iran is fighting ISIS in Iraq.

In this tangle of allies, who are also mutual enemies with shifting allegiances, it is clear there are no easy answers for Washington.

The only thing on which there seems to be consensus is to “bomb the shit out of ISIS”, as Trump puts it, with help from France, some other Western countries and now Russia. This will inflame, and already is inflaming, Syrian and Iraqi Sunnis.

In the unlikely event that bombing alone will defeat ISIS, who will occupy the former ISIS territories in Syria and Iraq? Sunni monarchies? Iraqi and Iranian Shias? Kurds? France, Russia and the US?

More war will only lead to more barbarism and horror, including more ISIS-type terrorism.