Islamophobia – Jews Against Anti-Muslim Racism

Islamophobia/Anti-Muslim Racism

Islamophobia has a long history in the United States. It intensified greatly in the years after 9/11 and has become even more pervasive since the 2016 presidential election. Muslims and those perceived to be Muslim live in a country increasingly driven by anti-Muslim racism and by the domestic and global “war on terror,” which targets, demonizes, and kills Muslims.

Islamophobia takes many forms, from the actions of individuals and non-public groups to programs and policies that have the power of government and other institutions behind them:

“Private [or individual] Islamophobia is the fear, suspicion, and violent targeting of Muslims by individuals or private actors. This animus is generally carried forward by nonstate actors’ use of religious or racial slurs, mass protests or rallies, or violence against Muslim subjects. . . .”
“Structural Islamophobia is the fear and suspicion of Muslims on the part of institutions—most notably, government agencies—that is manifested through the enactment and advancement of policies. These policies are built upon the presumption that Muslim identity is associated with a national security threat, and while they are usually framed in a facially neutral fashion, such policies disproportionately target Muslim subjects and disparately jeopardize, chill, and curtail their civil liberties. . . .”
“The third dimension of Islamophobia focuses on . . . the process by which state policies legitimize prevailing misconceptions, misrepresentations, and tropes widely held by private citizens.” (Khaled A. Beydoun, “Islamophobia: Toward a Legal Definition and Framework”)

A core Islamophobic belief is that “Unless proved to be ‘good,’ every Muslim [is] presumed to be ‘bad.’” (Mahmood Mamdani, Good Muslim, Bad Muslim: America, The Cold War, And the Roots of Terror)

Examples of Islamophobia

Note: There is a dynamic interaction between these two types of Islamophobia.

INDIVIDUAL ISLAMOPHOBIC ACTS/HATE SPEECH	STRUCTURAL/STATE SPONSORED ISLAMOPHOBIA
Call by individual anti-Muslim racists for keeping Muslims out of the country and creating legal mechanisms for deporting Muslims	Muslim Bans 1.0, 2.0, 3.0: three 2017 Executive Orders that attempt to fulfill Trump‘s call for a “total and complete shutdown of Muslims entering the United States”, disfavoring a particular religion in violation of the First Amendment
Fatal shooting on the street of an imam and his assistant as they walked home from afternoon prayers.	Anti-Muslim ideologues in the current administration: White House advisors, the CIA Director, the Attorney General, and others with links to groups that are part of the Islamophobia network in America
Call for national anti-Sharia demonstrations across the country by a grassroots anti-Muslim group	Introduction of more than 120 bills in state legislatures since 2010 to ban what the ACLU describes as the “mythical ‘Sharia threat’ to our judicial system”
Arson, bombing, and defacement of mosques or other Islamic institutions; threats, assaults	“Counter-radicalization” programs that discriminatorily target Muslim communities and threaten Muslims’ freedoms of speech, association, and religion
Classmates harassing Muslim students: mocking, verbal insults, abuse, cyberbullying, tugging or pulling off hijabs	Offensive anti-Muslim behavior and comments made by public school teachers, administrators, and other officials. No accountability by administration toward those harassing or bullying students.
New anti-Muslim video (Pamela Geller and other Islam bashers)	Tweeting by Trump of anti-Muslim smear videos from a right-wing British group
Training by a virulently anti-Muslim former FBI agent for the Global Faith Institute and a firearms training organization	Training in multiple states by this same agent for local and federal law enforcement agencies and associations in multiple states

Liberal Islamophobia

While we focus on the rabid Islamophobia of those in the Trump administration, along with the anti-Muslim ideologues and others who are among his most outspoken supporters, we should remain extremely mindful of the ways in which what is known as “liberal Islamophobia” has, in significant ways, helped drive key aspects of U.S. domestic and foreign policy.

“The way liberal Islamophobia works is that it roundly criticizes Islam-bashing, thereby preempting charges of racism, but then it goes on to champion programs that target and vilify Muslims.” (“Author Deepa Kumar on the Imperial Roots of Anti-Muslim Sentiment”)
“. . . under the leadership of President Obama and former Secretary Clinton, we have witnessed the expansion of the war on terrorism, the repeal of due process, the premiere of discriminatory countering violent extremism (CVE) programs, the multiplication of drone killings targeting Muslims abroad, and the widespread surveillance of Muslims at home, all while leaders on the left celebrate a narrative of inclusion that’s been featured at the DNC (Democratic National Convention].
“While liberal Islamophobia may feel better, it often leads to the same scrutiny, surveillance, militarization, and warmongering as the more obvious right-wing Islamophobia. And because it comes in a nicer package, we need to be even more attentive in order to identify and stop it.” (Kalia Abiade, “Liberal Islamophobia Reader: A DNC Companion”)

Liberal Islamophobes also often accept—and sometimes even promote—right-wing narratives in the name of supporting women’s rights.

“. . . anti-Muslim neo-conservative rhetoric is sometimes difficult to separate from secular feminist discourse, which sometimes but not always aligns itself with neoconservative agendas regarding Islam and Muslim communities. It is at the more complicated intersections, when secular American feminists decide to become spokespersons for Muslim women and against their oppression that Islamophobic rhetoric and expression becomes somewhat more difficult to debate. Well-intentioned and yet patronizing discourses on “white women saving brown women from brown men” abound and have a distinct history of their own. Such feminist discourses have been described as imperial feminism, as feminist orientalism in relation to Muslim women, and as outright racist.” (Juliane Hammer, “(Muslim) Women’s Bodies, Islamophobia, and American Politics”)

Islamophobia as a Form of Racism

Activists and scholars increasingly understand and identify Islamophobia as a form of racism.

Islamophobia as Anti-Muslim Racism: The scholars and activists who developed the #IslamophobiaIsRacism Syllabus reframed “‘Islamophobia’ as ‘anti-Muslim racism’ to more accurately reflect the intersection of race and religion as a reality of structural inequality and violence rooted in the longer history of US (and European) empire building. Conceptually, a focus on anti-Muslim racism is connected to an analysis of history and forms of dominance – from white supremacy, slavery and settler colonialism, to multiculturalism and the security logics of war and imperialism – that produce various forms of racial exclusion as well as incorporation into racist structures.” (Su’ad Abdul Khabeer, Arshad Ali, Evelyn Alsultany, Sohail Daulatzai, Lara Deeb, Carol Fadda, Zareena Grewal, Juliane Hammer, Nadine Naber, and Junaid Rana, “ISLAMOPHOBIA IS RACISM: Resource for Teaching & Learning about anti-Muslim Racism in the United States”)
Islamophobia as Structural Racism: “My emphasis is on Islamophobia as a form of structural racism directed at Muslims and the ways in which it is sustained through a symbiotic relationship with the official thinking and practices of the war on terror. Its significance does not lie primarily in the individual prejudices it generates but in its wider political consequences—its enabling of systematic violations of the rights of Muslims and its demonization of actions taken to remedy those violations. The war on terror—with its vast death tolls in Afghanistan, Iraq, Pakistan, Somalia, Yemen, and elsewhere—could not be sustained without the racialized dehumanization of its Muslim victims.” (Arun Kundnani, The Muslims Are Coming!: Islamophobia, Extremism, and the Domestic War on Terror.)
Racialized Populations: “Differently racialized populations in the United States—First Nations, Mexican, Asian, and more recently people of Middle Eastern and South Asian descent—have been targets of different modes of racial subjugation. Islamophobia draws on and complicates what we know as racism.” (Angela Davis, “Recognizing Racism in the Era of Neoliberalism”)
Cultural Racism: Writing about “cultural racism,” Nadine Naber explains the construction of a complex “‘Arab/Middle Eastern/Muslim’ category: . . . [T]he arbitrary, open-ended scope of the domestic ‘war on terror’ emerged through the association between a wide range of signifiers such as particular names (e.g., Mohammed), dark skin, particular forms of dress (e.g., a headscarf or a beard) and particular nations of origin (e.g., Iraq or Pakistan) as signifiers of an imagined ‘Arab/Middle Eastern/Muslim’ enemy. In this sense, the category ‘Arab/Middle Eastern/Muslim’ operated as a constructed category that lumps together several incongruous subcategories (such as Arabs and Iranians, including Christians, Jews, and Muslims, and all Muslims from Muslim-majority countries, as well as persons who are perceived to be Arab, Middle Eastern, or Muslim, such as South Asians, including Sikhs and Hindus).” (“‘Look, Mohammed the Terrorist is Coming!: Cultural Racism, Nation-Based Racism, and the Intersectionality of Oppressions after 9/11’”)

Islamophobia/Anti-Muslim Racism at the Intersections

An intersectional perspective is essential for understanding and challenging Islamophobia. For example:

Anti-Black and Anti-Muslim Racism: “[The] one-third of the U.S. Muslim population [that] is black . . . exist right at the intersection of these two forms of racism”—Islamophobia and anti-Black racism. (Donna A. Auston, “Mapping the Intersections of Islamophobia & #BlackLives Matter: Unearthing Black Muslim Life and Activism in the Policing Crisis”)
Class and Anti-Muslim Racism: “Indigent Muslim Americans are disparately profiled, policed, and prosecuted and they are frequently overlooked victims of both public and private Islamophobic violence.” (Khaled A. Beydoun, “Between Indigence, Islamophobia, and Erasure: Poor and Muslim in ‘War on Terror’ America”)
Gendered Islamophobia: “The preoccupation in the United States with women in hijab, or presumably ‘oppressed’ Muslim and Arab women, coexists with a desire to rescue them from their tradition in order to bring them into the nation. At the same time, there is a deep anxiety about Muslim and Arab men as potential terrorists and religious fanatics who are antithetical to Western liberal democracy and ultimately inassimilable.” (Sunaina Maira, “‘Good’ and ‘Bad’ Muslim Citizens: Feminists, Terrorists, and U.S. Orientalisms”)
Class, Gender, and Anti-Muslim Racism: “. . . working-class immigrants were often perceived to be in closer proximity to ‘geographies of terror’ (i.e., Muslim-majority nations) and were therefore perceived to be in closer proximity to the ‘potential terrorists’ than their middle-class counterparts. Throughout my field site, socioeconomic class intersected with race and gender, in that dominant discourses tended to construct working-class masculinities as agents of terrorism and working-class femininities as passive victims of ‘the terrorists.’” (Nadine Naber, “‘Look, Mohammed the Terrorist Is Coming!’: Cultural Racism, Nation-Based Racism, and the Intersectionality of Oppressions after 9/11”)
Sexuality, Islamophobia, and Homophobia: “As LGBTQ Muslims, we are keenly aware of the homophobic and transphobic policies of the Trump administration, and we know that the possibility of including a question about acceptance of homosexuality on the proposed ‘values test’ [for entry to the U.S.] is not driven by sincere concern for LGBTQ people. Rather, it is intended to be a ‘wedge’ that divides our Muslim and queer communities. We refuse to be used as a wedge against our own communities and families. When members of our communities and families are stigmatized as national security threats, it harms all of us. We call upon all people to reject Islamophobia and anti-Muslim bigotry in all of its forms.” (Muslim Alliance for Sexual and Gender Diversity, “MASGD Statement on Trump Administration ‘Muslim Ban’”)