How the US Fueled the Spread of Islamophobia Around the World

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.

The Qarmatians (Al-Qaramita)

By Nadeem Mahjoub Documentary film-makers G. Troeller and M. C. Defarge once asked a cabinet minister in South Yemen, why socialistic ideas were so readily acceptable in that part of the Arab world. He replied: “Because we have been communists for a thousand years! My mother was Qarmatian.” Official Muslim scholars and clerics, and many so-called moderates (whether individuals or groups) oppose sedition ( fitna ). Tensions and contradictions in society should be solved peacefully and even if the ruler was unjust and impious, it is generally accepted he should still be obeyed, for any kind of order is better than anarchy and sedition. “The tyranny of a sultan for a hundred years causes less damage than one year’s tyranny exercised by the subjects against one another.” Revolt was justified only against a ruler who clearly went against the command of God and His prophet.” 1 Here we look at not what happened in the minds of people who call for calm, oppose dissent and preach the re...

Capitalism

Some of this reminds me of how five or six years ago in a class of seven students in a UK elite university three of them (two Germans and one British) were in favour of a "benevolent dictator" (in the Arab context). The bloody horrors of Pinochet showed how capitalism will react when it's threatened

Cairo C. 1900-1934 The accurate translation for Arabic meaning of Cairo is "the invincible".

"If you don't attack the economic power of the elite, soon or later it will attack you." That's what the Arab uprisings, for instance, were unable/failed to do. K for Karl – Revolution (episode 3)

"A second position argues against transition, which is transitology itself. It is well known—especially among economists—as the sudden mobilization of a considerable mass of experts who are generally foreigners,generally Western, who come to preach the good word and to propose ready-made models of democracy. The science of the transition has become a financial windfall, a market. And the word transition has of course become a reflex of language, a term of reference, a call for tenders ( appel d’offres ) to which the whole society was supposed to respond. Consequently, the reticence that one can express is the following: our history is framed, transition is a heteronomy. Every democratic revolution is henceforth supposed to take a unique, imposed path, which is, at the same time, indistinctly democratic and liberal (or neoliberal). A more or less non-“negotiable” package. It is necessary to highlight the imposed character (and imposed from the outside) of this coming to t...

"In the same way that Robinson [Crusoe] was able to obtain a sword, we can just as well suppose that [Man] Friday might appear one fine morning with a loaded revolver in his hand, and from then on the whole relationship of violence is reversed: Man Friday gives the orders and Crusoe is obliged to work. . . . Thus, the revolver triumphs over the sword, and even the most childish believer in axioms will doubtless form the conclusion that violence is not a simple act of will, but needs for its realization certain very concrete preliminary conditions, and in particular the implements of violence; and the more highly developed of these implements will carry the day against primitive ones. Moreover, the very fact of the ability to produce such weapons signifies that the producer of highly developed weapons, in everyday speech the arms manufacturer, triumphs over the producer of primitive weapons. To put it briefly, the triumph of violence depends upon the production of a...

Varoufakis "speaks of how great it was to have the support of Larry Summers, Norman Lamont, and other figures on the Right, but it was support for whom, for what, and in whose class interests? Class analysis is far from the foreground of the picture sketched out here. Closed rooms and class war

"Egypt is no longer the heart of the Arab world"

US

Written in June: The candidate who emerged from this jumble of discontent was the man who promised to do the least. His party is now preparing to give us a national election that will be little more than a referendum on the hated Donald Trump. Finally we have a climate in which the American public would unquestionably choose dramatic change were it offered to them, and the party of change has contrived to ensure that it will not be offered. Instead our choice is between two elderly and conservative white men, both with a history of stretching the truth, both with sexual harassment accusations hanging over them, and neither representing any possibility of energetic democratic reform. The old order has been miraculously rescued once again. Such is the climate of opinion in America that, with the right leader, remarkable things would be possible. Instead we are presented with Joe Biden, an affable DC veteran with a hand in many of the defining disasters of the last 30 years: worker-c...

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