"Islamophobia: A Bipartisan Project," By Deepa Kumar – July 2, 2012
When the New York Times ran its
story on Obama’s “kill list,” showing the president poring over
names of people to potentially assassinate in drone strikes, it sparked a
controversy. The content of that controversy was not over this
extraordinary revelation about Obama’s use of power
but rather over the leaking of state secrets, which Republicans accused
him of doing to bolster his re-election campaign. Some liberal
commentators (at Salon, The Nation etc.) were rightfully horrified and condemned such activity. But the Democrats—and
much of the liberal establishment—remained silent.
Deep in the Times article,
another shocking revelation that hasn’t received as much attention as
the “kill list” is the Obama administration’s effort to erase the deaths
of some innocent victims by categorizing
“all military-age males in a strike zone as combatants.” This excludes
them from the civilian casualties count, allowing the administration to
claim that civilian casualties have been minimal. All Muslim men in
“combat zones” in Afghanistan, Pakistan, Somalia
and Yemen have been presumed to be terrorists, and therefore worthy of
death, simply for being of “military age.”
How did we get to a
place where innocent Muslim men can be killed with impunity around the
world with little public outcry? The short answer is that Muslims have
been long been constructed as “terrorists” upon
whom righteous terror can be rained. The image of the Muslim enemy in
the US is not new. While Hollywood and television play a key role in
conveying that image to the public, they did not create it. The “Muslim
enemy” is inextricably tied to a long history
of US imperialism.
The US and the Middle East
After World War II, the
United States began take control of the Middle East from France and
Britain. In so doing, all forces that stood in the way of US hegemony
were cast as enemies, using the language of Orientalism
developed in Europe. (I discuss this in greater detail in my book, Islamophobia and the Politics
of Empire.)
Through much of the
1950s and ’60s, secular Arab nationalists and leftists who failed to
cooperate with this US agenda were seen as stooges of the USSR or as
“terrorists.” The latter image intensified with the
birth of the Palestinian Liberation Organization (PLO) and its use of
armed struggle. The PLO was coded as “terrorist” because of the close
relationship between the United States and Israel.
Following the infamous
incident at the 1972 Munich Olympics in which a group of Palestinians
took Israeli athletes hostage and murdered them, the Nixon
administration launched “Operation Boulder,” giving law
enforcement agencies carte blanche to investigate Arab immigrants
and Arab American citizens in search of connections to “terrorist”
activities related to the Arab-Israeli conflict. Thus, a violent act
committed in Munich by a handful of Palestinians
became the basis on which all Arabs were designated as “suspicious”; the
process of racial profiling had begun in earnest.
The “Arab terrorist”
morphed into the “Islamic terrorist” after the 1979 Iranian revolution.
When US embassy personnel were taken hostage in Iran for 444 days, the
crisis generated daily front-page and headline
news that effectively associated Islam with terror. Ayatollah Khomeini
became the personification of all things evil, and all things Muslim.
The Middle East henceforth would be seen through the lens of “Islam,” a
distorted construction of the religion and the
people who practiced it.
Under President Jimmy
Carter Iranians were targeted, but it was for Reagan to take this much
further though his counter-terrorism policy. He issued a secret National
Security Directive designed to create a network
of agencies that would prevent “terrorists” from entering or staying in
the US. One program by the Alien Border Control Committee called for
mass arrests of immigrants from Iran and from Arab nations. During the
first Gulf War, in 1991, the elder Bush launched
a surveillance program against Arab Americans, which Bill Clinton would
take to an entirely new level with the passage of the Antiterrorism and
Effective Death Penalty Act (AEDPA), a precursor to the PATRIOT Act,
which, among other things, made it legal to
deport immigrants based on secret evidence.
Post-Cold War Politics
The 1990s witnessed a
decade between what professor and Middle East expert Fawaz A. Gerges
refers to as the “confrontationists” and the “accomodationists” in the
American foreign policy establishment. The confrontationists
argued that Islamism was the new post–cold war “Other” and that the
United States needed to confront and challenge this adversary in the
“clash of civilizations” that was to follow. The key ideologue leading
this charge was Bernard Lewis (a close associate
of the neocons), who penned his views in 1990 in a now-famous essay
titled
“The Roots of Muslim Rage,” in which he raised the alarm about an
impending “clash of civilizations.” Samuel Huntington then popularized
this concept in an essay titled “The Clash of Civilizations?” in Foreign Affairs,
followed by a book with the same
title (minus the question mark). Huntington put forward the thesis that
in the new post–cold war era, conflict would be characterized by
cultural differences between various civilizations. He named about seven
or eight such civilizations, arguing that the Islamic
civilization was among the more dangerous threats to the West.
This view was reflected in a slew of other articles. Journalist Judith Miller argued
in Foreign Affairs that US policymakers should not try to
distinguish between “good” and “bad” Islamists because there was a
consensus among all Islamists to defeat the West. Confrontation, rather
than co-optation or dialogue, was the only way to thwart
this new enemy. Daniel Pipes, Martin Indyk (who served on Bill Clinton’s
National Security Council), Jeane Kirkpatrick (a one-time Democrat
turned dogged cold-warrior Republican) and others added their voice to
this chorus. The “clash” thesis was not a partisan
position; confrontationists belong to both political parties. The
difference between the accommodationists and confrontationists was not
over the goal of US hegemony; it was about strategy and rhetoric. During
the 1990s, the accommodationist line dominated
in Washington. The Bush père and Clinton administrations sought
to win over Muslim-majority countries by appealing to universal values
and, under Clinton, free market policies.
Domestically, however,
the hysteria against Muslims mounted during this period. The fear
generated by the attempted bombing of the World Trade Center in 1993
ensured that in 1995, when white right-wing Christian
terrorist Timothy McVeigh bombed a federal building in Oklahoma City,
killing 168 people, Arabs and Muslims were immediately blamed. Congress
passed AEDPA in 1996. In short, even before the events of 9/11, the
groundwork had been laid for the legalized targeting
of Muslims and Arabs.
The “War on Terror” Decade
The events of 9/11
brought this legal apparatus in line with the foreign policy
establishment. Barely had the ashes settled from the Twin Towers when
loud proclamations that “Islamic terrorists” represented existential
threats to the United States began to echo in the public sphere. From
then on, US policy was geared towards “keeping Americans safe” from
Muslim “evildoers.” The “clash of civilizations” rhetoric became the
ideological basis for the wars in Afghanistan and
Iraq as well as domestic attacks on Muslims and Arabs.
The war on Iraq,
however, did not go the way the neocons wanted it to. Instead of
greeting US forces as liberators, the Iraqi people resisted and rejected
US hegemony. During his second term, Bush moved away
from “hard” power and toward winning “hearts and minds.” But by the end
of his second term, the failing occupations in Afghanistan and Iraq—as
well as an economic crisis of proportions not seen since the Great
Depression—meant that it was time for a changing
of the guard. Obama was voted into power by an electorate disgusted by
the hubris and arrogance of the Bush regime. The ruling elites also gave
him their blessing, hoping to put a friendlier face on US imperialism.
The Democrats were ready to take on this role.
In January 2007, a
leadership group on US-Muslim relations headed by Madeleine Albright,
Richard Armitage (former deputy secretary of state under George W. Bush)
and a number of academics produced a document
titled “Changing Course: A New Direction for US Relations with the
Muslim World.” The document, which received high praise, argued that
distrust of the United States in Muslim-majority countries was the
product of “policies and actions—not a clash of civilizations.”
It went on to argue that to defeat “violent extremists,” military force
was necessary but not sufficient, and that the United States needed to
forge “diplomatic, political, economic, and cultural initiatives.” The
report urged the US leadership to improve “mutual
respect and understanding between Americans and Muslims,” and promote
better “governance and improve civic participation” in Muslim majority
countries. The report’s call to action stated that it would be vital for
the next president to reflect these ideas in
his/her inaugural speech and to reaffirm the United States’ “commitment
to prohibit all forms of torture.”
Barack Obama has proven brilliantly effective at embodying such a posture. In one of his first
speeches, in Cairo, Obama rejected the “clash of civilizations”
argument, emphasizing the shared common history and aspirations of the
East and West. Whereas the “clash” discourse sees the West and the world
of Islam as mutually exclusive and as polar opposites,
Obama emphasized “common principles.” He spoke of “civilization’s debt
to Islam,” which “pav[ed] the way for Europe’s Renaissance and
Enlightenment,” and acknowledged Muslims’ contributions to the
development of science, medicine, navigation, architecture,
calligraphy and music. This was no doubt a remarkable admission for an
American president, but one that Obama clearly saw as vital to
bolstering the United States’ badly damaged image in the “Muslim world.”
Indeed, this speech marked a significant rhetorical
shift from the Bush era; a shift to the language of liberal imperialism
and liberal Islamophobia.
The key characteristics
of liberal Islamophobia are the rejection of the “clash of
civilizations” thesis, the recognition that there are “good Muslims”
with whom diplomatic relations can be forged and a concomitant
willingness to work with moderate Islamists. Liberal Islamophobia may be
rhetorically gentler but it reserves the right of the US to wage war
against “Islamic terrorism” around the world, with no respect for the
right of self-determination by people in the
countries it targets. It is the “white man’s burden” in sheep’s
clothing.
“The truth is that my
foreign policy is actually a return to the traditional bipartisan
realistic policy of George Bush’s father, of John F. Kennedy, of, in
some ways, Ronald Reagan,” Obama once said. Since taking
office, he has embraced and expanded Bush’s second-term policies. He has
deployed 30,000 more troops to Afghanistan, expanded the war into
Pakistan, tried to bully Iraq into granting an extension of the US
occupation (which failed), carried out drone attacks
and “black ops” in Yemen and Somalia and participated in the NATO-led
war in Libya.
Domestically, Obama has
continued Bush’s policies of torture, extraordinary rendition and
pre-emptive prosecution. American Muslims continue to be harassed and
persecuted by the state. Obama has even gone further
than Bush in several ways, not only by securing the power to execute US
citizens suspected of ties to terrorism without so much as a trial but
also by signing the National Defense Authorization Act (NDAA), which,
among other things, allows the military to detain
indefinitely without charge “terror suspects” who are US citizens. His
2011 “counter-radicalization” strategy
document elicits the help of Muslim American teachers, coaches and
community members, who are to be turned into a McCarthy-type informant
system.
Yet liberal
Islamophobia does not target all Muslims. It acknowledges that there are
“good Muslims.” The report heaps praise on Muslim Americans who have
cooperated with the state arguing that “we must counter
al-Qa’ida’s propaganda that the United States is somehow at war with
Islam” and instead affirm that “Islam is part of America, a country that
cherishes the active participation of all its citizens, regardless of
background and belief. We live what al-Qa’ida
violently rejects—religious freedom and pluralism.” Obama added that
“our rich diversity of backgrounds and faiths makes us stronger.” This
is the modus operandi of liberal Islamophobia: to roundly reject
Islam-bashing—and then proceed to institute proposals
that target Muslims
When Representative
Peter King held his McCarthy-style hearings in March 2011 to determine
the extent of “Muslim radicalization” in the United States, he was
rightly criticized by liberals. However, that August,
when Obama institutionalized this process through his
“counter-radicalization” strategy, there was nary a peep.
At the end of the day, the fear of “Islamic terrorism” is manufactured to grease the wheels of empire. Statistics
show that Americans are more likely to die from lightning strikes
and dog bites than an act of terrorism. In the ten years since 9/11, a comprehensive
study shows that of the 150,000 murders in the United States, eleven
Muslim Americans were responsible for the deaths of thirty-three people
(besides themselves). Yet, this did not stop King from starting yet
another hearing on Muslim American “radicalization”
in June 2012.
Complaining that
his earlier efforts had been “vilified by the politically correct media, pandering politicians and radical groups” King squawked
that his efforts were intended to “protect America from a terrorist
attack.” While his anti-Muslim racism is thoroughly disagreeable, he is
not incorrect when he states
that this is a “nonpartisan” issue and “of serious concern to national
security and counterterrorism officials in the Obama administration.”
Indeed. King is simply continuing what is a bipartisan policy with a
long history. The mistake that progressives make
is to focus on the most rabid Islamophobes, while giving liberal
Islamophobia a pass. Whatever form it takes, racism should be called out
for it is.
