A long interview with Beydoun, author of American Islamophobia: Understanding the Roots and Rise of Fear and The New Crusades: Islamophobia and the Global War on Muslims.
My selection:
“We live in the United States of Amnesia, and we forget the explosion of bigotry, hostility, nationalism, and militarism that happened instantaneously.”
“The neoconservative government which presided over the Bush administration had catapulted the likes of Samuel Huntington and Bernard Lewis. The best way to think about them is these are Neo-Orientalists who believe that the West is sort of this monolithic, aligned, geographic/civilizational entity, and as a consequence of 9/11—even before 9/11— was on this predictable path towards perpetual war with the Muslim world… I think there were always Muslim boogeymen before 9/11.
What’s really troubling about the response with the War on Terror is that it conflated an entire faith group or an entire global population of 1.7 billion people with the very horrific and atrocious act of a handful of people.
I think what is distinct about American culture and American society at large is that it has a hyper violent trajectory, and a lot of that is rooted in American history where mobilizing the thirst for violence on the part of the American people is not hard to do, especially in the wake of massive tragedy like the 9/11 terror attacks.
And one quick note to make mention of is, it’s important to think about the global War on Terror as a politically and economically expeditious instrument that the US government used to expand its interests, not only in the Middle East, but globally. So, it was an imperial and rational tool that enabled the expansion of the American Empire.” [In a specific context and conjuncture: the collapse of the USSR and capitalist ‘globalisation’, among other local contexts].
Part of being American in the last 20 years since this War on Terror has been launched, is to be Islamophobic, in the same way that being American in Jim Crow America, when segregation was the law of the land, was to be anti-Black. More than just culture and policy, I think it’s even deeper than that. These sorts of definitive arrows or moments recreate what it means to be American. It’s baked into the very existential matter of what identity means, because of media, culture, and law.
There was a program coming out of China in 2016, called Destroy All Terrorism in the Xinjiang Region, something very nefarious like that. And once you read the fine print of the policy, it sounds a lot like the counter-radicalization policy being used by the Obama administration. Even before that, Prevent, which was a similar policing program used in the UK, the language—the framing of prospective terror threat, the process in which somebody Muslim becomes a radical—is almost adopted wholesale by the Chinese government from American and British origins.
One thing I try and do with my work is to demystify this idea that Islamophobia is only a culture, perspective, or legal system coming from conservative or right-wing elements. It might be more explicit when it’s coming from the Republican Party, but Democrats and liberals have been just as wed to Islamophobic currents and attitudes as the right has been.
I think that in largely liberal democratic states, like New Zealand, Sweden, Australia, and France, you have very concerning strains of Islamophobia that rise from these vacillating movements of populism, where politicians or pundits in these places use Islamophobia as a strategy to galvanize and mobilize followers, and to justify things like economic decline, rise in immigration, declines in the population of whites living in that country, “white anxiety”, things of that nature, to spur this frightening rise of vigilante violence.
And the level of dehumanization can reach just such terrifying extremes. The Christchurch shooter livestreamed it like he was playing a video game, just not viewing people as people at all. And we might say, that man is such a hideous sociopath, such an extremist. But then truly when you look at United States formal policy, with the use of drone strikes on weddings, you could look at the Christchurch massacre and say, how could someone kill people like they were ants or like they were video game characters?
The comparison with the war in Ukraine is “not a comparison to slight or critique Ukrainian struggle or people in any way. It’s just a meta narrative that highlights the double standards drawn along lines of race and religion where the American public at large, and American news outlets of importance, in the newspapers of record, elevate the human value of the Ukrainian people and Ukrainian victimhood far beyond the kind of attention and value that’s attributed to individuals in places like Palestine, Kashmir, or Yemen, and now the earthquakes in Turkey and Syria, which aren’t a war, but a human crisis nonetheless, in ways not entirely drawn to race—I think whiteness has a big part to do with the story.
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