“In the first weeks of Israel’s assault on Gaza, the six-year old Palestinian American boy, from a suburb of Chicago, was stabbed 26 times by his family’s landlord in a hate crime.

The United States is currently awash in rhetoric justifying Muslim and Arab deaths. Joseph Czuba, 71, the landlord charged with killing Wadea and gravely injuring his mother, was on the receiving end of that rhetoric.

Czuba was reportedly an avid listener of conservative talk radio. According to Czuba’s wife, he’d grown irate over supposed plans for a ​“national day of jihad,” a mistranslated call for mass protests that was weaponized by rightwing media to cause panic.

While the overwhelming support for Israel — from Republicans and Democrats — makes for an increasingly rare point of consensus, the Right is using this moment for its own scaremongering agenda. That includes vilifying Muslims and tearing apart the Left through a new red scare…”