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Zero Dark Thirty: Selling Extra Judicial Killings

January 12, 2013 by Deepa

THE MOVIE Zero Dark Thirty has sparked widespread debate, mainly about whether it justifies torture by portraying savage interrogation techniques as necessary to extract information about Osama bin Laden’s whereabouts so he could be assassinated.

Criticism of the film has come from the highest levels of the political establishment. In a letter to the CIA, Sens. Dianne Feinstein, Carl Levin and John McCain, members of the Senate Select Committee on Intelligence, fault the movie for suggesting that the CIA uncovered the key lead to track down bin Laden through torture.

Film director Kathryn Bigelow and screenwriter Mark Boal, who worked with the CIA in the making of this film, likely did not expect such pushback since they seem to have got a green light from the White House.

Some writers have risen to the filmmakers’ defense, such as Mark Bowden, author of The Finish: The Killing of Osama bin Laden, who argued in the Atlantic that the film is not pro-torture because its first scene shows that torture could not stop an attack in Saudi Arabia.

However, many more commentators have stated that the film distorted the facts, insisting that bin Laden’s whereabouts were discovered through means other than torture. Several actors, including well-known liberals Ed Asner and Martin Sheen, are campaigning to urge fellow members of the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences to vote against giving Oscars to Zero Dark Thirty in any category.

Rebranding the Killing Machine

While much of the discussion of the film has focused on the question of torture, scant attention has been paid to a larger–and in my view, more significant–message of this film: that extrajudicial killing is good. The film teaches us that brown men can and should be targeted and killed with impunity, in violation of international law, and that we should trust the CIA to act with due diligence in pursuing them.

At a time when the key strategy in the “war on terror” has shifted from conventional operations to extrajudicial killing, here comes a film that normalizes and justifies this strategy. There may be a debate about torture regarding Zero Dark Thirty, but don’t expect one about assassinations. On this, there is bipartisan consensus.

Zero Dark Thirty has very clear-cut “good guys” and “bad guys.” The CIA characters, in particular Maya and Dan, are the heroes, and the brown men, be they Arab or South Asian, are the villains.

The first brown man we encounter, Omar, is brutally tortured by Dan, as Maya, the protagonist (played by Jessica Chastain), watches with discomfort and anxiety. We soon learn, however, that Omar and his brethren wanted “to kill all Americans,” thereby dispelling all doubts, justifying torture and establishing his villainy.

In an interesting reversal (one established by the TV show 24), torture, a method normally associated with villains, is now associated with heroes, who are only doing what needs to be done. This shift is acceptable because all the brown men tortured in the film are guilty, and therefore deserve such treatment. Maya soon learns to overcome her doubts and becomes a willing participant in the use of torture. In the process, audiences are invited to advance with her from discomfort to acceptance.

A clear “us” versus “them” mentality is established, where “they” are portrayed as murderous villains, while “we” do what we need to in order to keep the world safe. One scene in particular captures “their” irrational rage against all Americans: when Maya is attacked by a barrage of machine-gun fire as she exits a safe house in her car. We are then told that her identity as a CIA agent is not public, and that in fact, all Americans are the targets of murderous rage and brutal attacks in Pakistan.

Pakistan, the country in which a majority of the film is set, is presented as a hellhole. In one of the early scenes, Maya, as a CIA freshman new to the area, is asked by a colleague what she thinks of Pakistan. She replies: “It’s kind of fucked up.”

Other than being the target of bombing attacks, what seems to make Pakistan “fucked up” to Maya is Islam. In one scene, she is disturbed late at night by the Muslim call to prayer sounding loud enough that it wakes her from her sleep. Disgusted by this, she grunts “oh God” and rolls back to sleep. Maya also uses the term “mullah crackadollah” to express her contempt for Muslim religious leaders (I have never heard this term before and hope that I transcribed it correctly. I certainly don’t wish to waste another $14 to watch the film again, and will wait until it is out on DVD to confirm this).

What does not need re-viewing to confirm is the routine and constant use of the term “Paks” to refer to Pakistani people, a term similar to other racist epithets like “gooks” and “Japs.” The film rests on the wholesale demonization of the Pakistani people. If we doubt that the “Paks” are a devious lot who can’t be trusted, the film has a scene where Maya’s colleague and friend is ambushed and blown to bits by a suicide bomber she expected to interrogate.

Even ordinary men standing by the road or at markets are suspicious characters who whip out cell phones to inform on and plot against the CIA. It’s no wonder, then, that when Pakistanis organize a protest outside the U.S. embassy, we see the demonstrators with contempt and through the eyes of Maya, who is standing inside and whose point of view we are asked to identify with.

For a filmmaker of Bigelow’s talent, it’s shocking to see such unambiguous “good guys” and “bad guys.” The only way to be brown and not be a villain in her narrative is to be unflinchingly loyal to the Americans, as the translator working for the CIA is. The “good Muslim” does not question–he simply acts to protect and promote American interests.

Against the backdrop of this racist dehumanization of brown men, Maya and her colleagues routinely use the word “kill” without it seeming odd or out of place. After Maya has come to terms with the anguish of losing her friend in the suicide attack, she states: “I’m going to smoke everybody involved in this operation, and then I’m going to kill Osama bin Laden.” When talking about a doctor who might be useful in getting to bin Laden, she says if he “doesn’t give up the big man,” then “we kill him.”

At the start of the film, Maya refuses a disguise when she re-enters the cell in which Omar, the initial torture victim, is being held. She asks Dan if the man will ever get out and thereby reveal her identity–to which he replies “never,” suggesting that Omar will either be held indefinitely or killed.

A top CIA official blasting a group of agents for not making more progress in the hunt for bin Laden sums up the role of the agency in the following manner: “Do your fucking jobs and bring me people to kill.” By this point in the film, the demonization of brown men is so complete that this statement is neither surprising nor extraordinary.

The resolution of film’s narrative arc is the execution of Osama bin Laden, and for the filmmakers, it’s obvious they used this end point believing that no one could possibly object to the murder of this heinous person, other than the “do-good” lawyers who are chastised in the film for providing legal representation for terrorists.

Here then is the key message of the film: the law, due process and the idea of presenting evidence before a jury should be dispensed with in favor of extrajudicial killings. Further, such killings can take place without public oversight. The film not only uses the moral certainty of assassinating bin Laden to sell the audience on the righteousness of extrajudicial killing in general, but it also takes pains to show that this can be done in secret because of the checks and balances involved before a targeted assassination is carried out.

Maya is seen battling a male-dominated bureaucracy that constantly pushes her to provide evidence before it can order the strike. We feel her frustration at this process and identify with her when she says that she is “100 percent” sure that bin Laden is where she says he is. Yet a system of checks and balances that involves scrupulous CIA heads, plus a president who is “smart” and wants the facts, means that due diligence will not be compromised, even when we know we are right.

This, in my view, is the key propaganda accomplishment of the film: the selling of secret extrajudicial killings at a time when this has been designated the key strategy in the “war on terror” for the upcoming decade.
The Disposition Matrix

As I argued in my book Islamophobia and the Politics of Empire, the Obama administration has drawn the conclusion, after the failed interventions in Iraq and Afghanistan, that conventional warfare should be ditched in favor of drone strikes, black operations and other such methods.

The New York Times exposé on Barack Obama’s “kill list,” published last year, revealed this strategy is one presided over by the president himself.

John Brennan, his top counterterrorism adviser, is one of its key authors and architects. Brennan’s nomination to head the CIA is a clear indication that this strategy will not only continue, but that the spy agency will become a more openly paramilitary force that carries out assassinations through drone attacks and other means, with little or no public oversight.

As Greg Miller wrote in the in the Washington Post, the Obama administration has been working on a “blueprint for pursuing terrorists” based on the creation of a database known as the “disposition matrix.” Developed by the National Counterterrorism Center, the matrix brings together separate but overlapping kill lists from the CIA and the Joint Operations Special Command into a master grid and allocates resources for “disposition.” The resources to “dispose” of those on the list include capture operations, extradition and drone strikes.

Miller notes that Brennan has played a key role in the process of “codify[ing] the administration’s approach to generating capture/kill lists.” Based on extensive interviews with top Obama administration officials, Miller states that such extrajudicial killing is “likely to be extended at least another decade.” Brennan’s nomination to the CIA directorship no doubt will ensure this.

In other words, at the exact point that a strategic shift has been made in the “war on terror” from conventional operations to targeted killing, there comes a film that justifies this practice and asks us to trust the CIA with such incredible power.

No doubt the film had to remake the CIA brand, dispelling competing Hollywood images of the agency as a clandestine and shady outfit. The reality, however, is that unlike the film’s morally upright characters, Brennan is a liar and unabashed torture advocate (except for waterboarding).

As Glenn Greenwald wrote at the Guardian, Brennen has “spouted complete though highly influential falsehoods to the world in the immediate aftermath of the Osama bin Laden killing, including claiming that bin Laden ‘engaged in a firefight’ with Navy SEALS and had ‘used his wife as a human shield.’”

Zero Dark Thirty, nominated for the Best Picture Oscar, is a harbinger of things to come. The National Defense Authorization Act (NDAA) signed into law by Obama earlier this month includes an amendment, passed in the House last May, that legalizes the dissemination of propaganda to US citizens. This, writes left-wing author Naomi Klein, “legalizes something that has been illegal for decades: the direct funding of pro-government or pro-military messaging in media, without disclosure, aimed at American citizens.”

We can therefore expect not only more such films, but also more misinformation on our TV screens, in our newspapers, on our radio stations and in social media websites. What used to be an informal arrangement whereby the State Department and the Pentagon manipulated the media has now been codified into law. Be ready to be propagandized to all the time, everywhere.

We live in an Orwellian world, where the government has sought and won the power to indefinitely detain and to kill U.S. citizens, all wrapped in a cloud of secrecy, and to lie to us without any legal constraints at all.

The NDAA allows for indefinite detention, and a judge has ruled that the Obama administration need not provide legal justification for extrajudicial killings under U.S. law–thereby granting carte blanche authority to the president to kill whoever he pleases with no legal or public oversight.

Such a system requires an equally powerful system of propaganda to convince the citizenry that they need not be alarmed, they need not speak out, they need not think critically–in fact, they need not even participate in the deliberative process except to pull a lever every couple of years in an elaborate charade of democracy. We are being asked, quite literally, to amuse ourselves to death.

Posted in 9/11, CIA, Cultural Racism, Osama bin Laden, Pakistan, Terrorism, War on Terror | Tagged , , , , , , | 5 Comments »

Furor in France: Mission Civilisatrice and “Muslim Rage” in the Motherland

September 25, 2012 by Deepa

with Sarah Grey

As Muslims around the world protest their contemptuous treatment by the West, catalyzed by the provocative, racist American film Innocence of Muslims, the French media added fuel to the fire of by publishing offensive cartoons of the prophet Muhammad. Left-wing alt-weekly Charlie Hebdo ran cartoons that depicted a naked, turbaned Muhammad in profoundly racist and offensive ways. To make matters worse, French interior minister Manuel Valls announced that demonstrations against Islamophobia would be officially banned and that “any incitement to hatred must be fought with the greatest firmness.”

In Paris, 150 protestors (out of 250) were arrested after a peaceful protest at the US embassy—and on Friday, protest permits were withheld as Valls warned that police would be on alert to break up any unauthorized protests by force.

The French government denounced the cartoons as “irresponsible,” and European Affairs Minister Bernard Cazeneuve lectured that “when you are free, in a country like ours, you always have to measure the impact of your words.”

In practice, though, it appears that “measuring one’s words” applies more to Kate Middleton’s topless photos than to racist bigotry. A French judge issued an injunction against further publication of the Middleton photos in the interest of decency, while no such consideration was given to the decency of publishing openly racist imagery. Such blatantly disparate choices in the same week expose a colonial mindset: while royalty should be treated as, for the lack of a better word, royalty, ex–colonial subjects (most French Muslims are from former French colonies) may be denigrated with impunity and their right to protest and exercise free speech may be curtailed.

French Muslims have had much to protest; the cartoons are only the tip of the iceberg. They are treated as second-class citizens in a variety of ways, and in recent years angry protests by French Muslims and their left-wing allies have demanded decent living conditions in the working-class banlieues as well as labor rights for undocumented workers. Recently demonstrations in Gennevilliers raised the injustice of the firing of four Muslim workers for fasting during the holy month of Ramadan.

What is particularly insidious is that behind the much-vaunted French tradition of liberté, égalité, fraternité, a colonial mentality can masquerade as progressiveness.  Full-face coverings such as the burqaand the niqab were banned from the public streets in 2011. This follows upon the nearly decade-long ban in public schools of religious coverings, particularly the hijab.  Both these acts were justified on the grounds that they “promote secularism” and “protect” Muslim women from oppression; violators are fined or forced to attend classes on “French citizenship.”

A full two centuries after Napoleon invaded Egypt and promised to bring liberty to its people, his mission civilisatrice (civilizing mission) remains alive and well.  Ironically, though, Napoleon actually proffered greater respect for Islam—even going so far as to claim that the French were “Muslims” in his widely circulated manifesto—than his descendants today.[i]

The French have a long and proud tradition of massive street protests, but it would appear that this tradition is reserved for the “right” kind of people.  A poll by the survey group TNS found that 58 percent of French respondents thought that freedom of speech was a “fundamental right,” yet 71 percent supported the ban on Muslim protest.

The propaganda that is responsible for winning this sort of consent is rooted in a long history of presenting Muslims as an “other” who must be brought into the fold and taught the “right”—or French—way to live.

Such attitudes are widespread among imperial nations. The US magazine Newsweek ran a cover photo of bearded, angry Muslim men with the headline “Muslim Rage.”  Picking up the baton from Bernard Lewis, whose 1990 essay “The Roots of Muslim Rage” introduced the world to the term “clash of civilizations,” former Dutch parliament member and rabid Islamophobe Ayaan Hirsi Ali wrote that furious, violent rage is “the defining characteristic of Islam.”

If we allow them to protest, the logic goes, there will be no stopping the flood of Muslim rage.  And so, rather than extending the courtesies of the famed French freedom of speech to its Arab and Muslim citizens, the “socialist” François Hollande administration has responded by banning their voices entirely from the public debate. Charlie Hebdo, whose Paris offices are under police protection, sold out of its Muhammad issue last Wednesday.

Such racist hypocrisy is not new to the French left.  For instance, the French Communist Party did not support the Algerian struggle for national liberation.  Jean-Paul Sartre, in his preface to Frantz Fanon’s The Wretched of the Earth, blasted his compatriots: “You who are so liberal, so humane, who take the love of culture to the point of affectation, you pretend to forget that you have colonies where massacres are committed in your name.”

Today, while the sun has long set on the French empire, its colonial mindset and ideology persist.

It should come as no surprise, then, that when one group of people is targeted as France’s “other,” the floodgates open wide to other forms of racism. Charlie Hebdo’s racist cartoons not only depict the Prophet in profoundly offensive ways, but also include anti-Semitic caricatures of Jewish rabbis. And when the hijab was banned in French schools, so were Jewish students’ yarmulkes.

National Front fascist Marine Le Pen, who won nearly 18 percent of the vote in the first round of presidential elections earlier this year, called publicly this week for a ban on yarmulkes on the public streets, stating that it was an “obvious” logical extension of the ban on Muslim veils.

The mixing of anti-Jewish with anti-Muslim sentiment, illustrated so viscerally in the disgusting Charlie Hebdo cartoons, dates back at least to the first Crusade in 1099, when Muslims and Jews alike were swept out of Jerusalem and murdered in the first pogroms. The crusaders even stopped in Germany on their way east to murder Jews there.  During the Reconquista of Moorish Spain, too, Jews who had been living peacefully side by side with Muslims were driven out and murdered by Christians.  (Many fled to safety in the Muslim Ottoman Empire.)  Islamophobia and anti-Semitism have coexisted for at least a millennium.

Throughout history, when one ethnic group has been targeted as evil, dangerous, or threatening, such treatment has opened the door to the oppression of other minorities and this has been especially true of Jews and Muslims in Europe.

In the twenty-first century ,we have seen a wave of struggles explode across the Middle East and North Africa that have inspired people in the US, Spain, Greece, and elsewhere. This time, the Western left has to get it right—we have to learn the lessons of the past and eschew ethnocentrism in the interest of true international solidarity. If liberté, égalité, fraternité are to mean anything, they must apply equally to everyone—not least of all to our Muslim brothers and sisters.

–

written with:

Sarah Grey is a freelance writer, book editor, and indexer at Grey Editing in Philadelphia. Her work has been published in International Socialist Review, Monthly Review, GRID, Motivos, and 101 Changemakers: Rebels and Radicals Who Changed US History, forthcoming from Haymarket Books.

[i] See the discussion in Deepa Kumar’s Islamophobia and the Politics of Empire, p. 27.

 

Posted in Islamophobia | Tagged , , , , | Leave a Comment »

Anti-American Protests: Cutting Through Media Propaganda

September 15, 2012 by Deepa

PROTESTS OVER the vile racist film Innocence of Muslims that began outside U.S. diplomatic institutions in Egypt and Libya have spread across the world, from Bangladesh and India to Iran, Iraq and Morocco.

The mainstream media in the U.S., from Fox News to National Public Radio, have framed these protests through the simplistic lens of “anti-American violence in the Muslim world.” This framing communicates an entire world view that is taken for granted.

First, it discredits protest against the U.S. by painting the demonstrators as violent. This focus on the violence and on the sensational allows the media to conveniently skip over the complex reasons why people in the Middle East, South Asia and North Africa might be angry with the U.S.

This particular racist film–which portrays the Prophet Muhammad as a womanizer, a pedophile, a bumbling idiot, and a bloodthirsty fanatic and anti-Semite–is the tip of the iceberg. It has become a symbol of the disrespect with which the U.S. holds people in Muslim-majority countries, and it has brought to the fore deep-seated grievances over how the U.S. conducts itself in the Middle East and elsewhere. Yet this complexity is left out in favor of simplistic explanations and caricatures.

Second, by using the term “Muslim world,” the media invite us to look at people in Muslim-majority societies primarily through the lens of religion. While sections of the demonstrators are there to express outrage at the film, the focus on Islamist involvement in the protests to the exclusion of other voices casts this as a religious rather than a political confrontation. Thus, the protesters are presented not as political actors, but religious zealots.

Third, what follows from this is that the U.S. is an innocent victim–a misunderstood champion of democratic rights, secularism and free speech under attack from the irrational fanaticism that we have come to expect from “those Muslims.”

In short, what is a political clash is turned instead into a cultural conflict and the “clash of civilizations” between the secular West and the religious and backward “Muslim world.”

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SPEAKING ABOUT the Libya attacks, Secretary of State Hillary Clinton lamented: “I ask myself, how could this happen? How could this happen in a country we helped liberate, in a city we helped save from destruction?”

Fully 11 years after the events of 9/11, the same question is being asked about why people in the Middle East might be angry with the U.S., and the same ridiculous explanations are on offer–it is a clash of values, a clash of civilizations.

In 2001, George Bush explained: “They hate…a democratically elected government. Their leaders are self-appointed. They hate our freedoms: our freedom of religion, our freedom of speech, our freedom to vote and assemble and disagree with each other.”

A few days ago, Clinton said: “All over the world, every day, America’s diplomats and development experts risk their lives in the service of our country and our values, because they believe that the United States must be a force for peace and progress in the world, that these aspirations are worth striving and sacrificing for. Alongside our men and women in uniform, they represent the best traditions of a bold and generous nation.”

The difference between the two statements, it seems, is that the “clash of civilization” rhetoric has developed in these 11 years from a supposed hatred of our freedoms right here to a hatred of our soldiers and diplomats over there.

What has also changed is that the “self-appointed leaders” Bush refers to have faced challenges from the uprisings that began in North Africa and the Middle East in 2011. U.S.-backed dictators in Tunisia and Egypt were swept from power by people’s movements and a reluctant U.S. went along with the changes, backing counter-revolutionary forces in an attempt to control the outcome.

You wouldn’t know that to hear the new “buyer’s remorse” for alleged U.S. support of the “Arab Spring.” The protests today are being presented as the inevitable outcome of an unruly people when the iron hand of the dictator has been removed. The logic of course is that “some people are just not ready for democracy.”

At first, Clinton, in an effort to win Arab public opinion, said that the Libya attacks were the work of “a small and savage” group, and that Libyans in general are good. The familiar lines were redrawn between “good Muslims” and “bad Muslims,” and a slew of “good Muslims” were trotted out on television to sing praises to the U.S. effort to “bring democracy” to the “Muslim world,” and to apologize for the acts of the fundamentalists.

The formula is so predictable it might as well be a soap opera.

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THE SECOND episode of the soap focused on distancing the film Innocence of Muslims from overall U.S. values. Hillary Clinton declared: “The United States government had absolutely nothing to do with this video. We absolutely reject its content and message.”

The White House then asked Google, the owner of YouTube, to “review” its posting of the film. The assumption here is that when Muslims watch such caricatures of their religion, they leap up like crazed fanatics and go out and kill people and destroy property. After all, they are not civilized enough to appreciate our values of free speech.

So what begins with a focus on “bad Muslim” and “savages” then becomes generalized to the whole childlike population that must be protected from themselves. As the poet Rudyard Kipling put it over a century ago, the colonized is “half devil, half child.” The “half child” must be taught to appreciate our civilized values.

As the liberal commentator E J. Dionne put it on NPR: “I think this situation is particularly complicated for our country because we believe both in free speech, even for vile speech, but we also believe in religious toleration and respect for the faiths and non-faith of others. And I think we have a problem because a lot of people in Muslim countries aren’t used to a government that doesn’t have to approve all speech.”

What gets omitted from this picture is that Innocence of Muslims is a product of the far right in the U.S. It is not an anomaly in an otherwise secular and tolerant nation. Rather, it joins a slew of similar films and other propaganda–such as the Third Jihad, which was shown to NYPD recruits as part of their training–produced by a well-funded Islamophobic network.

The main producer of the film, Steve Klein, is an anti-Muslim bigot who, as Max Blumental writes, emerged from the same axis of Islamophobia that produced Anders Behring Breivik, the Norwegian right-wing terrorist responsible for a mass murder that cost 77 lives. There is a well-funded international network of anti-Muslim groups that are just as reactionary as the most hardline Islamic fundamentalists.

In the U.S., the Islamophobic network attacked mosques and incited fear and hatred. Just last month, a mosque in Joplin, Mo., was burned to the ground, and six Sikhs in Oak Creek, Wis., were killed by a neo-Nazi. Since 2010, there has been a 50 percent increase in anti-Muslim hate crimes.

The far right everywhere has a proclivity to burn things down and kill people, it seems–but don’t expect to see this portrayed in the mainstream media. While there will be continued reporting on the shady dealings of the people involved in the production of this anti-Muslim film, we are unlikely to see systematic coverage of the far right in the U.S., much less a reference to these vile people as “savages.”

That would upset the soap-opera formula, because then the land of liberty, free speech, democracy and apple pie would be just as complex a society as Muslim-majority countries where a range of political attitudes occupy the spectrum.

It would mean admitting that there are extremists right here who stand for more or less the same things that the Islamic fundamentalists stand for. The Southern Poverty Law Center reported that there are over 1,000 far-right hate groups in the U.S.

But the protests in the Middle East and North Africa since the Libya incident should not be reduced to a “clash of fundamentalisms” either. It is not simply the U.S. far right provoking the Islamist far right to respond. Rather, thousands who have come out to demonstrate against U.S. embassies and diplomatic missions in the region are expressing their frustration against the part the U.S. government has played in propping up counter-revolutionary forces in the region.

When the Arab uprisings began in late 2010 and early 2011, the U.S. believed that its dictator ally in Egypt, Hosni Mubarak, would hold on to power. The Obama administration didn’t take a position against Mubarak–in fact, it even stood by him. After the first rounds of protests, Clinton emphasized the need for an “orderly” and “peaceful” transition”–in other words, time for the U.S. to find a suitable pro-U.S. replacement for Mubarak.

While the Obama administration rhetorically welcomed the “Arab Spring,” the strategy was to control the outcome of the uprisings so that the example of Tunisia and Egypt, and the model of mass uprising for social change, would be limited to the spring of 2011.

The U.S. has consequently supported the forces of counter-revolution. In 2011, the U.S. sent three shipments of weapons to the Egyptian military that were used to lethally attack protestors. It has also stood by the counter-revolutionary efforts of its allies Saudi Arabia and Qatar. In Bahrain, where the U.S. Navy’s Fifth Fleet is headquartered, Saudi troops were brought in to drench the uprising in blood–and the U.S. turned a blind eye.

This is not the first time the U.S. has played such a role. In the 1950s, workers’ struggles in Saudi Arabia were defeated by the Saudi monarchy with the help of the American oil company ARAMCO. A “free princes” movement to bring about very rudimentary democratic reforms in that country was similarly squelched with U.S. assistance.

Democracy and oil don’t go together as far as the U.S. elite is concerned–as the 1953 CIA-orchestrated coup to depose the democratically elected Iranian head of state Mohammed Mossadegh shows.

Could this history of U.S. involvement be behind the anger and protests that have swept the region? Such explanations are hard to find in the mainstream media. While the New York Times admitted that the “broadening of the protests appeared to reflect a pent-up resentment of Western powers in general” in a front-page story on September 15, the images that cover more than half the page are of angry bearded Muslim men, fire and ashes, and burning U.S. flags.

Reminiscent of the coverage of the 1979 Iranian revolution, political actors with legitimate grievances are reduced to angry Islamic mobs.

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EPISODE THREE of the unfolding soap involved an attempt to control the spread of protests. The U.S. sent troops to Yemen and Sudan, with Clinton stating, “The people of Egypt, Libya, Yemen and Tunisia did not trade the tyranny of a dictator for the tyranny of a mob,” distancing the protesters from the rest of the population who are to be “rescued” by the U.S.

She also called on the “good Muslims” to act. As she put it, “Reasonable people and responsible leaders in these countries need to do everything they can to restore security and hold accountable those behind these violent acts.” What it means to be “reasonable” is to shut up and fall in line behind the U.S.

Perhaps she misses Mubarak, whom she has referred to in the past as a “family friend,” and who would have known how to use ruthless violence and torture to subdue political dissent.

Also absent from the mainstream media discussion is the part played by the U.S. in funding, arming and training Islamists during the Cold War. The Holy Warriors who fought the U.S. proxy war against the USSR in the 1980s were assembled and trained by the CIA and Pakistani ISI. The key recruiter to the Afghan war was none other than Osama bin Laden, a valued CIA asset, who would go on to form al-Qaeda.

Yet there is nary a peep about the part played by the U.S. in strengthening these forces.

Eleven years after 9/11, the media are still asking the same question: Why do they hate us? And the same tired answer is being provided, but this time by the liberal imperialists wielding the “clash of civilizations” rhetoric with perhaps greater skill than their neocon predecessors.

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Sikhs, Muslims, Drones and Guilt by Association

August 6, 2012 by Deepa

This piece first appeared at Progressive.org

The tragic death of six Sikhs in suburban Milwaukee sheds light on the ugly ways that bigotry works. Since 9/11, Sikhs have often been the target of hate crimes. Balbir Singh Sodhi, a gas station owner in Arizona, was the first such casualty. He was murdered just four days after 9/11 because, his murderer said, he was “dark-skinned, bearded and wore a turban.”
The hate crimes against Sikhs have continued over the last decade. Sikh temples have been vandalized, and according to Representative Joseph Crowley (D-NY), two Sikh men were murdered last year in hate crimes.
This is how cultural racism operates: anyone who bears the markers of the “enemy” must necessarily be guilty. For members of the Sikh community, this bizarre attitude is baffling. Some have gone out of their way to insist that Sikhs are not Muslim and should therefore not be targeted in these ways.
Yet, the horrific murders in Wisconsin should teach us that racism is about the dehumanization of an entire group of people: It is the worst kind of guilt by association.
If the Sikh community is not to blame for the events of 9/11, neither is the Muslim community. It was not Islam that caused the 19 hijackers to carry out the attacks. It was the nihilistic political views of those particular assassins. Similarly, it was not something intrinsic to white American males that precipitated this attack on the Sikhs in Wisconsin. It was the neo-Nazi attitudes of this particular white gunman.
Page was a white supremacist and the leader of a white-power band named End Apathy, according to the Southern Poverty Law Center. He was even supposed to have had a tattoo of 9/11 on his upper right arm.
The context for this crime is the climate of prejudice in the United States that “the war on terror” has created.
Central to “the war on terror” is the ideology of Islamophobia. Rep. Peter King (R-NY) has held hearings hyping the risk of radical Islam here at home. Rightwing politicians such as Michele Bachmann and Newt Gingrich have also used reckless rhetoric targeting the entire Muslim American community.
In U.S. military policy, Islamophobia allows the United States to carry out drone strikes against Muslim men perceived to be terrorists in several countries around the world with impunity. Many victims of these “kill lists” are not terrorists, but innocent people.
Dehumanization and guilt by association enable the United States to kill innocent people in Afghanistan, Pakistan and Yemen.
Dehumanization and guilt by association enable a killer to gun down worshipers in Oak Creek, Wisconsin.
As we mourn the latest killing, we need to denounce this dehumanization and guilt by association. They are the handmaidens of the murderer.

Posted in Cultural Racism, Guilt by Association, Islamophobia, Sikhs | Tagged , , , , , , | Leave a Comment »

The GOP’s Muslim “Southern Strategy”

August 1, 2012 by Deepa

When Mitt Romney stated that it was Israel’s “culture” that was responsible for the country’s superior economic development he was simply recycling an argument long used to explain black poverty in the US.  African American’s were poor, it was argued, because of a “culture of poverty” and a “pathology” which leads them to have children out of wedlock or become dependent on welfare. This framework, developed a few decades ago, became a staple part of political culture with both Republicans (Reagan’s famous “welfare queens”) and Democrats (Clinton’s ending of “welfare as we know it”) using it to further their electoral campaigns.

So it’s not surprising that Romney should chose to rehash this argument in the Palestinian context—its Arab “culture” that is responsible for the economic misery that Palestinians live under, right? Occupation has nothing to do with it. What we see at work here is not only a rehashing of old Orientalist frames, but the addition of Arabs and Muslims to the “Southern strategy.”

Cultivated in the 1960s and 70s, the GOP’s “Southern Strategy” was a means by which white voters in the South could be won over by subtle appeals to anti-black racism. African American men were coded as criminals to be locked up and a new form of racial control was born. Nixon and later Reagan exploited the fear of “lawlessness,” supposedly brought on by the civil right movements, as a way to position the GOP as “tough on crime” and to win Southern whites away from the Democratic Party. Appealing to white working class voters’ anxieties about what de-segregation would mean for them economically, the GOP also argued against welfare.

The election of Obama in 2008, and Democratic victories in Southern states like Virginia and North Carolina that year, signaled a blow to the old “Southern strategy.” Yet if Obama’s African American roots were no longer going to be as useful, his Muslim familial connections would quickly rise to prominence. Obama was “accused” during his campaign of being a “secret Muslim,” a charge that would come back again and again reaching a crescendo during the “Ground Zero mosque” controversy in 2010. 18% of the public believed that Obama was Muslim in 2010. This figure remains about the same today, but larger numbers of conservative GOP voters (34%) identify Obama as Muslim in 2012 than in 2008 (when the number was 16%).

The new GOP Southern strategy now highlights Muslims and Arabs as the key threats to national security and “law and order,” even while the old one lingers on. This strategy is not subtle in its racist appeals in the way that anti-black racism had to be in the post-civil rights era. It is much more blatant drawing upon a long history of bipartisan attacks on Arabs and Muslims.

Thus, Sen. Scott Brown (R-Mass) is raising money for his reelection campaign in part by praising the endorsement of a libertarian blogger who claims Obama is Muslim. Similarly Michelle Bachmann’s accusation that Hillary Clinton’s aide Huma Abedin is a Muslim Brotherhood (MB) agent is a part of this approach. It is a means of appealing to the Republican base (about 25% of the electorate) which holds far right wing values.

For this base, Romney is not a candidate they can get excited about (as was evident in the GOP presidential primaries). When Bachmann accused Abedin of infiltrating the government on behalf of the MB she was both employing McCarthyite type fear mongering tactics and positioning the Republican party, and Romney, as a “lesser evil.” That is, if Romney is not the darling of the far right, he is certainly better than a Democratic Party infiltrated by Muslim agents (be they Obama or Abedin).

Bachmann’s attack on Abedin, and its ringing endorsement by Glenn Beck, Rush Limbaugh and the far right wing media apparatus, demonstrated that she could corral this base and bring them along on a Romney-Bachmann ticket. When asked on CNN about her VP ambitions Bachmann coyly replied that it was not her decision to make. More recently, John Bolton (a key Romney foreign policy advisor) expressed disagreement at the push back Bachmann was facing and came to her defense.

None of us should be surprised if Romney does indeed make her his choice for Veep. Yet, it is worthwhile to note that it was none other than McCain who began the attack on Bachmann. Perhaps recognizing the pitfalls of his Sarah Palin adventure, McCain seems to be sounding the alarm of including politically inexperienced, verbally inept, far rightwing tea party candidates on a presidential slate. Dick Cheney similarly weighed in advising Romney not to pick Sarah Palin as his running mate.

Whatever Bachmann’s future may hold, anti-Muslim racism is going to play a part in the GOP’s strategy this election year. But don’t expect Obama and the Democrats to debunk this by taking a principled anti-racist position. Romney has been squealing that Obama has betrayed the country by leaking national security secrets. Obama outflanked Romney from the right by revealing his “kill lists” thereby demonstrating that he can be “tough on terror.” The range of debate at the top of society is going to be stiflingly narrow unless we build social movements that can challenge and speak out against Islamophobia.

Posted in GOP, Islamophobia, Obama, Southern Strategy, Terrorism | Tagged , , , , , , , | 1 Comment »

Terrorizing Muslims: A Bipartisan Project

July 3, 2012 by Deepa

This article first appeared at the Nation website.

The New York Times story on Obama’s “kill list,” showing the president poring over lists of biographies and selecting the names of people to be assassinated in drone strikes, 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 reelection 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. What we see at work here is that Muslim men in “combat zones” have been operationalized as guilty, 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 thoroughly terrorized. That is, Muslim men have been effectively 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 “Islamic terrorist” threat is inextricably tied to a long history of US imperialism.

The US and the Middle East

After World War Two, the United States began to 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 either 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 “terrorist” due in no small part to the close relationship between the US 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 authority to question Arabs (including US citizens) to determine if they were involved in “terrorist” activities related to the Arab-Israeli conflict. Israeli intelligence forces helped shape this operation.[i] 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 Anti-terrorism and Effective Death Penalty Act (AEDPA), a precursor to the PATRIOT Act, and which, among other things, made it legal to deport immigrants based on secret evidence.

Up until the late 1990s, the demonization of Muslims through the legal apparatus was largely a domestic response to overseas events. Within the foreign policy established, however, there wasn’t a consensus that the “Islamic terrorist” would be the new post-Cold War enemy on the global stage.

Post-Cold War Politics

The 1990s witnessed a debate between what professor and Middle East expert Fawaz Gerghes 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 US 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 a Foreign Affairs article 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 Sr. and Clinton administrations sought to win over Muslim-majority countries by appealing to universal values and, under Clinton, neoliberal 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 then 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 the legal apparatus into conjunction 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 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 mind.” 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 guards. Obama was voted into power by an electorate disgusted by the hubris and arrogance of the Bush regime. The ruling elite also gave him their blessing, hoping to put a friendlier face on US imperialism. The Democrats were ready and prepared 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 US’s image as a just and democratic nation.

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 US’s 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, and in some ways of Ronald Reagan,” Obama once said.[ii] 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), extended 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 preemptive 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 “terror suspects” who are US citizens indefinitely without charge. 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.

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 US, 11 Muslim Americans, who were designated as “terrorists,” were responsible for the deaths of 33 others. Yet, this did not stop King from starting yet another hearing on Muslim American “radicalization” in June, 2012.

Complaining that his earlier work had been “vilified by the politically correct media, pandering politicians and radical groups” he 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 “non-partisan” 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.

[i] Elaine Hagopian, “Minority Rights in a Nation-State: The Nixon Administration’s Campaign Against Arab Americans,” Journal of Palestine Studies, vol. 5, no. 1 / 2, Autumn 1975, 97–114, quote on pp. 100–101.

[ii] Ryan Lizza, “The Consequentialist,” The New Yorker, May 2, 2011.

Posted in Islamophobia, Obama, Terrorism, US Imperialism | Tagged , , , , , | Leave a Comment »

The NYPD: Islamophobia in Blue

February 6, 2012 by Deepa

NEW YORK City police officers were shown a movie called The Third Jihad which warns that ordinary Muslims are part of an age-old conspiracy to dominate the world. The police chief and his spokesperson participated in this “counter-terrorism training,” and then lied about their involvement. And Mayor Michael Bloomberg, who touts himself as a champion of religious tolerance, doesn’t plan to do anything about it.

This latest series of events that unfolded in late January only sheds more light on the depth of anti-Muslim racism in New York City. Home to about 800,000 Muslims, as well as the world’s largest police department, the Big Apple has become the crucible of entrenched Islamophobic policies enacted by the state since September 11.

“This is not stereotyping,” Talat Hamdani said at a January 26 press conference at City Hall.

Talat’s son Salman died on 9/11 as a first responder, but his sacrifice has never been officially recognized because police initially viewed him as a suspect in the attacks. “This is legal persecution of American Muslims,” Talat said. “This is our city, our state, our country.”

Almost a year ago, in January 2011, Tom Robbins of the Village Voice broke the story about the NYPD showing this racist film to its officers. At the time, police spokesman Paul Browne claimed the movie was only screened a few times, and that the clips of Ray Kelly in it were from old footageand not the police commissioner’s direct participation with right-wing filmmakers.

But when police were forced to comply with a Freedom of Information Act request from the Brennan Center for Justice, it came to light that the movie was a regular part of training for months, that more than 1,500 officers had viewed the film, and that Kelly had given a 90-minute interview for the pseudo-documentary.

After a year of denials and evasions, the truth was out, and it received some attention in the mainstream media. Yet this is only the tip of the iceberg.

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The Islamophobia network

The NYPD now wants to dismiss this film as a “wacky movie”–in Paul Browne’s words–and to distance themselves from it. Yet the list of interviewees for the film include a number of establishment figures, such as former New York City Mayor Rudolph Giuliani, former CIA Director James Woolsey, former head of Homeland Security Tom Ridge, Connecticut Sen. Joseph Lieberman and others. This pseudo-documentary is part of an effort by a well-established network of Islamophobic groups whose credibility is based on their connections to the security and political establishments.

The Third Jihad was produced by the Clarion Fund, which was previously best known for mailing millions of free copies of another anti-Muslim film called Obsession to swing-state voters just before the 2008 election.

The Clarion Fund received over $18 million from 2001 to 2009 from several wealthy right-wing organizations like the Richard Mellon Scaife Foundation, Lynde and Harry Bradley Foundation and the Fairbrook Foundation, a pro-Zionist organization. These foundations also pour money into other Islamophobic organizations such as Robert Spencer’s Jihad Watch, Daniel Pipes’ Middle East Forum and more.

The Islamophobic network believes there is a conspiracy by Muslims to take over the U.S. and to replace the constitution with Muslim or Sharia law.

“This is the true agenda of much of Islam in America…to infiltrate and dominate America,” says the narrator of The Third Jihad, as an image of the White House topped by a supposedly Islamic flag appears on screen.

In the time-honored tradition of demagogues, the narrator of The Third Jihad argues that the Muslims who “seem” to be decent ordinary people are the most dangerous of all: “Americans are being told that most of the mainstream Muslim groups are moderate, when in fact, if you look a little closer, you’ll see a very different reality. One of their primary tactics is deception.”

Any doubts the officers in training might have had about whether the movie reflected official police department views would have been dispelled by the appearance of Ray Kelly, who is interviewed in the movie about the threat of a nuclear attack.

It short, this is not a “wacky” movie by some fringe elements. Rather, it reflects the efforts of the security establishment and the political elite to create an atmosphere of fear and suspicion in order to win public consent for the “war on terror.”

This isn’t the first time that police have been subjected to these warped and racist views. A nine-month investigation by Thom Cincotta and Political Research Associates found that the Islamophobic network routinely holds counter-terrorism training sessions with law enforcement personnel around the country. The use of The Third Jihad to train NYPD officers is but the latest revelation of such practices.

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Racial profiling

After a year of NYPD scandals and cover-ups over from the brutality unleashed on Occupy Wall Street protesters and an epidemic of corruption cases, it’s not earth-shattering news to most New Yorkers to hear that Ray Kelly and Paul Browne have been caught lying again.

But this latest deception is especially ominous coming on the heels of the revelation–also initially denied by Kelly and Browne–that the department worked with a CIA agent to create a “Demographics Unit” that has been spying on hundreds of mosques, Islamic bookstores and Muslim campus organizations.

According to the Associated Press, which broke this scandal, “[P]olice subjected entire neighborhoods to surveillance and scrutiny, often because of the ethnicity of the residents, not because of any accusations of crimes. Hundreds of mosques and Muslim student groups were investigated and dozens were infiltrated.”

To add injury to insult, Muslim Americans who had come forward to help law enforcement were also spied upon. As CBS News reported, “Some of the same mosques that city leaders visited to hail their strong alliances with the Muslim community have also been placed under NYPD surveillance–in some cases infiltrated by undercover police officers and informants.”

As the furor grew over the last week of January, Ray Kelly was finally forced to apologize for his participation and use of The Third Jihad. But the NYPD has announced no plans to find out who was responsible for showing the film or to give a corrective training for officers who watched it. Furthermore, Kelly has consistently defended the tactics of the Demographics Unit and the larger trend of what Associated Press reporters have called “the NYPD’s transformation from a police department solving murders and muggings to a domestic intelligence agency.”

As a result, a growing number of Muslim leaders and allies have called for Kelly’s resignation. Retired police sergeant Noel Leader explained the reasoning on Democracy Now!:

Under the New York City Police Department Patrol Guide, under prohibited conduct, it clearly states that no member of the New York City Police Department can associate themselves with hateful organizations, hateful material or hateful individuals. Police Commissioner Kelly clearly violated this procedure, and he should resign. If he doesn’t resign, the mayor should terminate him.

But Bloomberg says he supports his police chief: “I think it’s fair to say that there is a little bit of embarrassment that this film was made. I think anything like this doesn’t help credibility…You know, Ray Kelly probably visits more mosques than a lot of other people who believe in the faith and practice there.”

“A little bit of an embarrassment” captures well the billionaire mayor’s view of the issue. Bloomberg would rather his police department’s policies not be made public because he has spoken eloquently and often in favor of religious tolerance–most prominently voiced in 2010 regarding construction of the Park51 Cultural Center in lower Manhattan (the “ground zero mosque” to its opponents.)

Bloomberg didn’t do this for the 800,000 Muslims living in his city, whose civil liberties he has grievously abused. His chief concerns were his image as an “open-minded” politician and the image of New York as a cosmopolitan center free from the sway of ignorant bigots.

Meanwhile, Bloomberg hasn’t hesitated in defending the NYPD–even when its racist policies are exposed to the light of day.

For instance, in 2007, the NYPD Intelligence Division produced a report titled “Radicalization in the West: The Homegrown Threat,” which argued that counter-terrorism efforts need to “shift focus to a much earlier point” than the plotting of violent acts. The report argues that police need to identify potential terrorists before violent thoughts have even entered their heads.

The report’s authors describe a four-step “radicalization process.” Police, they argue, need to stop this sinister sequence in the early “Pre-radicalization” and “Identification” phases, before it gets to the later “Indoctrination” and “Jihadization” phases.

Thus, the NYPD authors believe that the department’s focus should be on Muslims who don’t “seem like” terrorists and might not even know that they are terrorists, which makes the final section of “Radicalization in the West” almost identical to the central point of the The Third Jihad:

The subtle and non-criminal nature of the behaviors involved in the process of radicalization makes it difficult to identify or even monitor from a law enforcement standpoint. Taken in isolation, individual behaviors can be seen as innocuous; however, when seen as part of the continuum of the radicalization process, their significance becomes more important…

The individuals are not on the law enforcement radar. Most have never been arrested or involved in any kind of legal trouble. Other than some commonalities in age and religion, individuals undergoing radicalization appear as “ordinary” citizens, who look, act, talk and walk like everyone around them.

And it isn’t just the NYPD that has been involved in such activities. Around the U.S., Muslims and Arabs have been subjected to a form of racial profiling that has been referred to as “pre-emptive” prosecution. Muslims who have done nothing illegal are being targeted on the assumption that they might do something. Agent provocateurs have infiltrated mosques and Muslim communities to entice people into “terrorist” plots–when they aren’t entirely fabricated. Through this process, hundreds have been arrested and put in jail.

The net effect has been the demonization of an entire community. In the 1940s, more than 100,000 people of Japanese descent were put into concentration camps following the attack on Pearl Harbor and the beginning of the Second World War. Today, Muslim Americans are being targeted in the same way for the events of 9/11.

As Abdul Malik Mujahid, a leader of the Muslim Peace Council, put it:

The Muslim community in the United States has been living in a virtual internment camp ever since 9/11. Since then, more than 700,000 Muslims have been interviewed by the FBI. That means nearly 50 percent of all Muslim households have been touched by this “investigation.” Practically all mosques have been “checked for nuclear bombs” or other fear-provoking reasons. That’s the level of trust we “enjoy” in the Muslim community.

This is the standard way in which nations at war operate. In every instance, a menacing enemy must be found–whether it’s Germans who endured anti-German raids during the First World War or the Japanese internment camps during the Second World War.

Now, the “war on terror” has applied this same intense scapegoating to a conflict that is seemingly endless and borderless.

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Fighting Back

The latest revelations are galvanizing Muslims and supporters of religious freedom to organize around the call for Ray Kelly’s resignation. A week after the initial press conference, hundreds marched to NYPD headquarters.

“This is the year of revealed truths,” Imam Al-Hajj Talib Abdur-Rashid, president of the Islamic Leadership Council of New York, told the crowd. “Around the world the purposely deceptive are being exposed…Now is the time to trust in Allah, break through fear, and stand for justice.”

Many speakers connected the NYPD’s lies and hostility towards Muslims with its daily humiliation and brutality towards African Americans and Latinos, including the fatal shooting of an unarmed Bronx teenager the day before the march.

These actions are positive first steps, building on several years of increased organization and activism against Islamophobia, from the rallies in defense of the Park51 Cultural Center, to the participation of 100 imams in an antiwar rally last April, to Muslim leaders’ boycott of Bloomberg’s interfaith breakfast last month.

As this movement builds in the coming weeks, we need to recognize that we are not just up against an isolated incident or misguided police policy. We are challenging the logic of a nation in semi-permanent war to dominate the world’s largest oil- and gas-producing regions, which happen to lie beneath the feet of woman and men who mostly practice Islam.

At the press conference, some city council people called for the police to continue fighting terrorism, but to do so without religious profiling. But as NYPD Confidential blogger Leonard Levitt wrote, “In the department’s best-publicized cases that have emerged from this spying, the suspects all seem to be people with mental problems, susceptible to being talked into plotting terrorism by well-paid informants.”

Trying to separate counterterrorism from profiling is like asking for an omelet without eggs–because the “war on terror” is not about keeping us safe, but about keeping us afraid, and therefore supportive of war–precisely through religious profiling. The image of the “Islamic terrorist,” which has been cultivated since the 1980s, is about creating a menacing enemy against whom endless war can be waged.

In this sense, it functions exactly as the “red scare” and the McCarthyism of the Cold War era functioned. Back then, Americans were told to spy on “reds” and radicals, who were seen as agents of the former USSR, bent on physically destroying the U.S. and the “American way of life.” Today, the “green scare” is about creating a Muslim enemy that acts as an agent of al-Qaeda or Hamas, and whose goal is to destroy the U.S. from within.

Just as McCarthyism created a climate of fear that made the prosecution of the Cold War much easier for the political elite, today, Islamophobia serves as the ideological handmaiden of the “war on terror.”

Whatever possibilities of terror attacks that do exist aren’t because Muslims are susceptible to some four-stage process of radicalization, but because their co-religionists have suffered grave offenses at the hand of the U.s. government. Any talk about counter-terrorism that doesn’t start with ending U.S. wars and occupations will inevitably strengthen the rhetoric of Islamophobia and the practice of racist scapegoating.

“When we talk about Muslims being stereotyped and criminalized, and I think that can’t happen to me, I’m completely wrong,” says Virgilio Aran, an organizer with Laundry Workers Center United. Virgilio and another Latino activist tried to attend the January 26 press conference, but weren’t allowed onto the steps of City Hall when they refused a request to produce identification papers, a request not made of other attendees.

“The struggle of our Muslim brothers is the struggle of every community,” says Aran. “That was a reinforcement of it in my consciousness.”

It’s time for all those interested in justice to break through fear and take a stand against the “war on terror.”

This article first appeared on Socialistworker.org and is a co-authored work with Danny Lucia.

Posted in Islamophobia | 4 Comments »

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