To borrow from Bill Maher, I’m going to go ahead and make my own “New Rule.”

NEW RULE: Republicans and right-wing activists cannot get breathlessly indignant every time someone calls them out for racism while actively promoting vile Islamophobic hate speech.

Here is the latest campaign ad from Renee Ellmers, a Sarah Palin-backed candidate for Congress in North Carolina:

This ad looks more like something you’d get from a Grand Wizard than a “Mama Grizzly.” It’s excruciatingly clear that the religious persecution of Muslims is heavily loaded with racism. The Right’s continued use of Muslims as their convenient political punching bags casts them as “other,” foreign, not American and certainly not white. Let me be clear: bigotry based purely on religion is unacceptable on its own, but if anyone can say with a straight face that this latest wave of vicious Islamohphobia is not a clear cut example of racism, that person is not living in reality. The fact that mainstream society and the media somehow tolerate this is a scary statement about where we are as a country in our current political climate.