What is Liberal Islamophobia?

Introduction

“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 [what] it is.” (Deepa Kumar, “Islamophobia: A Bipartisan Project”

“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”)

 

These right-wing Islamophobes and the neoconservative establishment, including those in the current administration, believe that Muslims are part of a civilization whose clash with the “West” results from a monolithic, insular, violent, and inherently backward “culture” and is unrelated to history, politics, imperialism, neo-colonialism, struggles over natural resources, or other factors. For them, Islamophobia is not a “real” issue to address.

While we need to organize against these virulent ideologues and the anti-Muslim policies they support, we must also analyze and challenge what’s known as “liberal Islamophobia,” which opposes Islam-bashing but then supports government policies and programs that target and denigrate Muslims and those perceived to be Muslim. Liberal Islamophobia is pervasive, including among those of us who consider ourselves liberal/progressive/radical and have expressed our opposition to Islamophobia.

Looking critically at the ways so many of us may perpetuate Islamophobia and support systems of anti-Muslim racism will enable us to do a better job of being consistent, principled partners to Muslims and others targeted by Islamophobia and anti-Arab racism.  With this in mind, we have created a series of handouts and questions that explore and challenge a range of dangerous Islamophobic beliefs and their consequences.

The handouts include the following:

Liberal Islamophobia and Islam

“I have not been able to discover any period in European or American history since the Middle Ages in which Islam was generally discussed or thought about outside a framework created by passion, prejudice and political interests.” (Edward W. Said, “Islam through Western Eyes

The liberal and right-wing media alike push views of Islam rooted in an overarching Islamophobic assumption: When violence is committed by any individual who is, or appears to be, Muslim, Islam is to blame. (This same “standard” is never used for other religions.) Other Islamophobic beliefs rest on this one.

Liberal Islamophobic Belief: Islam is more violent than other religions.

  • “Of course, a bigot can play this game of selective quotation with any religion. Find a picture of horrifying violence committed by some Jews or Christians—there are a depressingly large number—and juxtapose it with one of the following quotes from scripture: ‘I come not to bring peace, but a sword’ [Matthew 10:34] or ‘Only in the cities of these peoples that the Lord your God is giving you as an inheritance, you shall not leave alive anything that breathes’ [Deuteronomy 20:16]),” notes JAI [Jews Against Islamophobia] Coalition member Alan Levine.” (Adam Horowitz, “‘Jews Against Islamophobia’ Condemns Latest Round of Geller Ads in NYC”)
  • “Looking at Christianity’s brutal history today, one might well advance the argument that all Catholics are bloodthirsty fanatics. Indeed, this logic would be analogous to the argument that Islam is inherently violent and that Muslims have a ‘predisposition’ toward violence. Yet such a generalization is unthinkable. To my knowledge, no mainstream newspaper or magazine has drawn a straight line between the Crusades and the Nazi Holocaust of Jews, let alone between the birth of Christ and various acts of terrorism committed by Christian fundamentalists. Furthermore, as Talal Asad argues, the same people who call the actions of suicide bombers unjustified legitimize the American wars in Iraq and Afghanistan, which have caused the deaths of hundreds of thousands. In short, only the violence of certain groups is highlighted and coded as a product of those groups’ religious affinity.” (Deepa Kumar, Islamophobia and the Politics of Empire)

Liberal Islamophobic Belief: The problem is “extremism.”

While right-wing Islamophobia focuses on all Muslims as potential problems, liberal Islamophobia more often frames it as a problem of “those extremists.” This framing reflects an ideology that does not analyze or look critically at the meaning and consequences of U.S. policies that target and demonize Muslims and other marginalized communities.

  • “[People across] the liberal-conservative political spectrum . . . have some differences on how they understand these issues, but share the same starting point—there is a Muslim problem. Conservatives see that in terms of the clash of civilizations. But liberals also come into this with some analysis and at the center of it is the notion of extremism. What you do when you use that word, you are avoiding the fundamental political issue. If you talk about religious extremism, you are externalizing the violence to the other guy and saying he is a fanatic. His violence comes out of extremism and does not have any wider political context. We ignore the violence of our own government, which is a part of this same cycle of violence.” (“Interview: Author Arun Kundnani on Islamophobia & the Myth of the Liberal Anti-Racist”)

Liberal Islamophobia and the “War on Terror”

“The promise of the ‘war on terror’ was that we would kill them ‘over there’ so they would not kill us ‘over here.’ Hence mass violence in Iraq, Afghanistan, Pakistan, Palestine, Yemen, and Somalia – in the name of peace in the west. The ‘Authorization to Use Military Force’ that the US Congress passed in the days after 9/11 already defined the whole world as a battlefield in the ‘war on terror’. President Obama continues to rely on the authorization to give his drone-killing programme a veneer of legality. This is the old colonial formula of liberal values at home sustained by a hidden illiberalism in the periphery – where routine extra-judicial killing is normalised.”  (“Violence Comes Home: An Interview with Arun Kundnani”)

“At the end of the day, liberal imperialists, for all their talk of “speaking softly,” accept the logic that the US can and should intervene anywhere it wants to around the world to pursue its interests with no respect whatsoever for the right of self-determination of the people in the countries it targets. Liberal Islamophobia is still racist at its core.” (Deepa Kumar, “Author Deepa Kumar on the Imperial Roots of Anti-Muslim Sentiment”)

While liberals most often reject the “clash of civilizations” concept–the idea that there is an implacable conflict between Islam and the “West,” which provides an ideological justification for the global “war on terror”–liberal Islamophobia promotes, in significant ways, key and deeply problematic aspects of U.S. foreign and domestic policy related to fighting “terrorism.”  Though President George W. Bush initiated the “war on terror” immediately after September 11, the Obama administration furthered it.

While we refer to the “clash of civilizations” concept because it is a key driver of the “war on terror,” and to 9/11 because it is an important marker in the U.S. history of Islamophobia, we are mindful that, as Edward E. Curtis IV writes, “African Americans do not fit neatly into post-9/11 anti-Muslim narratives.”  Black Muslims born in the United States have been shaped by their experiences in this country, including enslavement, white supremacy, and pre-9/11 government surveillance. For them and for many Arab American and other Muslims, Islamophobia started well before 9/11.

Liberal Islamophobic Belief: In fighting the “war on terror,” Republicans and other right-wingers are the ones responsible for pursuing policies that target, vilify, and stigmatize Muslims.

“. . . 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]. (Kalia Abiade, “Liberal Islamophobia Reader: A DNC Companion”)

Liberal Islamophobic Belief: The problem isn’t the use of word “terrorist.” We just need to expand this usage to include white supremacists and people with other far right-wing beliefs who commit ideologically motivated acts of violence.

We often hear those concerned with Muslims being unfairly targeted express the view that we should broaden the definition of “terrorism” since, for example, white far-right extremists are responsible for a significant percentage of “terrorist” acts and deaths in the U.S.  Although this view reflects the common usage of “terrorism” to refer to acts of violence committed by individuals who are (or who are perceived to be) Muslim, it fails to challenge the overall framing and understanding of “terrorism,” which does not include government violence and other violence that “terrorizes” targeted communities and individuals.

“. . . the assertion that all these various forms of violence should also be labelled terrorism, as Prime Minister Trudeau recently did for the Québec mosque attack carried out by a self-avowed white supremacist, fails to challenge the legitimacy and cogency of terrorism as a concept.

“This is undesirable for at least two reasons. First, because certain types of violence against civilians — most importantly, violence committed by states — still tend to be excluded from or marginalized in the definition of terrorism. The primary focus remains on non-state actors, even though states are the most significant purveyors of violence in our world.

“Second, it is undesirable because many governments have claimed that the existential threat posed by terrorism requires the expansion of their own powers: through implementation of emergency laws, for example, and deterioration of the rights of individuals, through measures like preventive arrests and detentions. Broadening the category of ‘the terrorist’ may therefore serve states — from the American to the Syrian — seeking to rationalize their own violence as necessary for fighting terrorism.

“Instead of widening the scope of who is considered a terrorist to include white supremacists and fascists, the notion of terrorism must be deconstructed altogether: to demonstrate that the term depends on spurious criteria to distinguish some forms of violence (delegitimized as terrorism) from other, equally terrorizing forms of violence (legitimized as counter-terrorism).” (Azeezah Kanji and S. K. Hussan, “The Problem with Liberal Opposition to Islamophobia,” our emphasis)

 

NOTE: Except when quoting someone else’s words, JAAMR puts the words “terrorist” and “terrorism” in quotation marks to indicate the racialized and highly politicized meaning of those terms.

Liberal Islamophobia and U.S. Government “Counterterrorism” Programs

“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”)

“To be a black Muslim today is to be part of [a] wide cross-section of U.S. Muslims of African descent, U.S.-born and immigrants, who are subjected to a double burden of state violence: as black people and as Muslims. They are subjected to the war on crime and the War on Terror, to surveillance, aggressive policing, and systematic civil rights violations.”  (Su’ad Abdul Khabeer, “Islam on Trial”)

One typical example of liberal Islamophobia involves a fundamental inconsistency: people express opposition to anti-Muslim racism, including condemning hate crimes against Muslims, while supporting, or failing to challenge, government programs and policies that target Muslims. Each administration in power has implemented such initiatives. Support for them ignores the multiple ways that they make Muslims and other targeted people far less safe and curtail their civil liberties and rights.

Liberal Islamophobic Belief: Government “anti-terrorism” programs weed out potential “terrorists”

  • “In a report released last February [2017], the UN Special Rapporteur on Counter-Terrorism and Human Rights Ben Emmerson criticized the prevailing approach towards counter-radicalization as conceptually flawed and ineffective, noting that ‘states have tended to focus on those [areas] that are most appealing to them, shying away from the more complex issues, including political issues such as foreign policy and transnational conflicts,’ preferring instead to emphasize ‘religious ideology as the driver of terrorism and extremism.” (Azeezah Kanji and K. Hussan, “The Problem with Liberal Opposition to Islamophobia”)

During its post-9/11 covert surveillance of Muslims in several Northeast states, the NYPD identified 28 “ancestries of interest”—27 countries, almost all Muslim-majority, and one domestic group, “American Black Muslims.” After six years of spying on the Muslim American community (targeting mosques, cafes, bookstores, social media, and more), the commanding officer of the New York City Police Department Intelligence Division acknowledged in 2012 that this surveillance program “never generated a lead or triggered a terrorism investigation.”

The National Security Entry-Exit Registration System program, implemented after the 9/11 attacks, mandated that all non-immigrant males from 24 Muslim-majority countries (and North Korea) register with the government. Though the program did not yield a single terrorism-related prosecution, it resulted in widespread deportations and exclusions, and its effects on thousands of families remain to this day.” (Diala Shamas, “Four Ways the U.S. Is Already Banning Muslims”) While NSEERS became dormant in 2011, Obama did not end it until 2016.

Liberal Islamophobic Belief:  The Countering Violent Extremism (CVE) Program would enable the government to work together with members of the Muslim community in its fight against “Muslim extremism” and “terrorism.”

Countering Violent Extremism (CVE), Obama’s signature “counterterrorism” program, based on government-private partnerships, provided a veneer of “community cooperation” to his overall strategies for fighting “terrorism,” which involved monitoring and surveilling Muslim communities.  While it continues to amp up aggressive policing and monitoring of Muslim communities, the current administration, which doesn’t share the liberal belief that there are “good Muslims” it can work with, has eliminated this CVE program from its 2018 budget.

  • “Muslim led CVE initiatives grant power to individual groups and leaders to monitor the political activity, speech, and ideas of Muslim Americans. The definitions being utilized for monitoring such activities are set by the state, not by community members. It also grants certain leaders the right to determine what is seen as acceptable dissent, speech, thoughts, and action.” (Darakshan Raja, quoted in Margari Aziza Hill, “Logging It All: CVE and Schisms in the Muslim Community”)
  • “A coalition of American Muslim and civil rights groups issued a joint statement in advance of the [White House’s 2015 Countering Violent Extremism] summit outlining concerns that community engagement ‘from a CVE standpoint sets American Muslim communities apart as inherently suspect’; that ‘CVE tasks community members to expansively monitor the beliefs and expressive or associational activities of other Muslims’ and ‘creat[es] a climate of fear and chill[s] constitutionally protected activity’; and that ‘mutual trust is difficult, if not impossible,’ given the FBI’s larger set of police practices, including ‘deceptively conducting intelligence gathering under the guise of community outreach,’ and relying on ‘law enforcement agencies [to] play the lead role in implementing CVE . . .’” (Amna Akbar, “National Security’s Broken Windows”)
  • “Countering violent extremism is part of the government’s law enforcement mission. It is not the responsibility of Muslims in America to detect and stop such violence.  Thus, the guiding principle should be that Muslims (both collectively and individually) are as unrelated to violent extremism in the name as Islam as are whites to violent extremism committed in the name of Christianity or white supremacy.” (Sahar F. Aziz, “TIM Debate—CVE”)
  • “The emergence of the neoliberal carceral state entails that poor Black communities are increasingly managed and governed as criminals . . . and subjugated to aggressive Anti-Black forms of policing and surveillance . . . . As such, adopting theories and practices of anti-gang policing into counterterrorism programs and practices targeting the Somali community in the Twin Cities, who are already over-policed . . . , raises concerns around racial profiling and criminalization of Somali Muslims. Given that law-and-order policing informs the ways in which Black criminality is reinforced and inscribed on Black communities, institutionalizing Anti-Black forms [of] policing, such as anti-gang initiative[s], within the function and deployment of CVE programs demonstrates how the criminalization of Somalis is at the heart of domestic counterterrorism efforts in Minnesota.” (Zeinab A. Dahir, “Blurred Intersections: The Anti-Black, Islamophobic Dimensions of CVE Surveillance”)

Liberal Islamophobic Belief:  Republicans and other right-wingers are the ones responsible for “counterterrorism” programs that undermine the rights and civil liberties of Muslims (and others impacted by such programs).

  • “Surveillance of Muslim Americans has been expanded under President Obama, dubbed by many as ‘the most liberal president ever,’ and counterterrorism programs are infiltrating local Muslim American geographies in unprecedented ways.” (Khaled A. Beydoun, “‘Muslim Bans’ and the (Re)Making of Political Islamophobia”)
  • “One would think the federal government’s response to [white supremacist, neo-Nazi] and other threats against communities of color would be to develop programs and practices to confront the very real threat of right-wing violence and the alarming increase of such hate groups in the United States. Instead, the Obama Administration’s programs to counter violent extremism (CVE) almost exclusively focus on the recruitment and radicalization of Muslims to engage in terrorist attacks in this country.” (Deepa Iyer and Linda Sarsour, “Obama Wants to ‘Counter Violent Extremism’. He Should Look Beyond Muslims”)
  • “For many black American Muslims, CVE programs remind them of the actions of COINTELPRO (acronym for Counter Intelligence Program), a program conducted by the FBI against civil rights leaders including Dr. Martin Luther King, the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People (NAACP), the Nation of Islam, and the Black Panther Party.” (Margari Aziza Hill, “Logging It All: CVE and Schisms in the Muslim Community”) Started during the Eisenhower administration, COINTELPRO continued during the liberal Kennedy and Johnson administrations.

Liberal Islamophobic Belief: State-sponsored Islamophobia can be best addressed through multiculturalism and the inclusion, tolerance, and assimilation of Muslims.

  • “Early scholarship on Islam in the United States told a diaspora narrative in which Muslims emigrated from an ‘Islamic homeland’ to the ‘West.’ The narrative centered on a bicultural clash between ‘American’ and ‘Muslim’ identities. Muslims were seen as analogous to other ‘ethnic’ immigrants who face the challenges of integration and assimilation into the (White) American mainstream. This ethnicity-assimilation paradigm not only marginalizes nonimmigrants, replicating internal ethnoreligious hegemonies, but it can also elide the distinctions between different groups of immigrants. Moreover, it locates Blackness and critical race studies at the fringes of the study of U.S. American Islam.” (Su’ad Abdul Khabeer, “Muslim Cool: An Introduction”)
  • “Orientalist constructions of ‘the Muslim world’ after 9/11 reinscribe the multiculturalist presumption that political injustice can be resolved simply by awareness of religious or cultural difference, ignoring the larger geopolitical and imperial frames of the war on terror.  Muslim youth have also been forced to play the role of educators for the American public, giving speeches in their schools and in community forums about Islam.

* * *

“. . . the war on terror has highlighted the limitations of liberal multiculturalism as a response to state policies targeting Muslim and Arab Americans after 9/11, although it evades the larger political context and deeper structural racism undergirding Islamophobia as well as anti-Arab racism. The racism and Islamophobia of the domestic war on terror are not simply a problem of religious difference or multicultural tolerance within the nation but are linked to global histories of U.S. involvement in the Middle East and South Asia.”  (Sunaina Maira, “Islamophobia and the War on Terror: Youth, Citizenship, and Dissent,” in John L. Esposito and Ibrahim Kalin, eds., Islamophobia: The Challenge of Pluralism in the 21st Century)

  • “The idea of multiculturalism does not mean simply the fact of ‘many cultures.’ It is both a political and epistemological project. Moreover, the concept of multiculturalism has to be defined in relation to Eurocentrism. I’m uncomfortable with the image of multiculturalism as just celebrating the many cultures of the world, all dancing around the bush. For that, we can go to Disneyland.” (Ella Shohat, “Dislocations: Arab Jews and Multicultural Feminism—An Interview”)

Liberal Islamophobia and the “Good Muslim-Bad Muslim” Paradigm

“‘Good citizenship’ is performed by Muslim American individuals and organizations in a variety of ways, testifying loyalty to the nation and asserting belief in its democratic ideals, often through public testimonials that emphasize that Muslims are peaceful, loyal U.S. citizens. An ‘imperative patriotism’ that deems dissent against state policies unpatriotic has long been used by the United States to suppress radical movements, such as the American Indian movement and the Black Panthers, which were considered enemies of ‘American values.’”  (Sunaina Maira, “‘Good’ and ‘Bad’ Muslim Citizens: Feminists, Terrorists, and U.S. Orientalisms”)

The division of Muslims into two categories—“good Muslims” and “bad Muslims”—perpetuates anti-Muslim racism.  Islamophobic beliefs are at the core of the “good Muslim-bad Muslim” paradigm.

Mahmood Mamdani, who introduced this concept, explains that it rests on the notion that, in a post-9/11 world, “unless proved to be ‘good,’ every Muslim [is] presumed to be ‘bad.’  All Muslims were now under obligation to prove their credentials by joining in a war against ‘bad Muslims.’” (Mahmood Mamdani, Good Muslim, Bad Muslim: America, the Cold War, and the Roots of Terror)

Liberal Islamophobic Belief: Muslims should promptly and publicly condemn every attack by someone who identifies as Muslim and claims, or appears to have, an ideological motivation.

  • “We do not expect Buddhists to apologize as Buddhist extremists massacre Muslims in Burma or for their human rights abuses in Sri Lanka. I also don’t ask Christians to apologize for the genocide that Bosnian Muslims faced less than two decades ago at the hands of Christian Serbs, or for the Lord’s Resistance Army and Christian militias who have killed tens of thousands of civilians and ethnically cleansed Muslims throughout Uganda, the Congo and Central African Republic. Nor do I ask every white American to apologize for hate crimes committed by self-proclaimed White Christian supremacist groups like the Ku Klux Klan. All of us instead recognize that religious fanatics perpetuate violent acts for their own deranged reasons. “Why is an apology only expected of Muslims?”  (Linda Sarsour, “Muslims Do Not Need to Justify Themselves in Face of Extremism“)

Liberal Islamophobic Belief: Most/many Muslims are “good.” We need to identify  the “good Muslims,” so we know whom we want to associate with and support.

  • “Meanwhile within liberal multicultural discourse, it became permissible to speak out against individual acts of hate crimes and discrimination towards Arabs, Muslims, and South Asians, but unacceptable to criticize the so-called ‘War on Terror.’ Such criticism was immediately equated with support for terrorism.” (Rabab Abdulhadi, Nadine Naber, and Evelyn Alsultany, “Gender, Nation, and Belonging: Arab and Arab-American Feminist Perspectives—An Introduction”)
  • “A staunch proponent of CVE [‘Countering Violent Extremism’] Policing, Hillary Clinton’s framing of Muslims as either good or bad is a staple of her national-security vision. This good versus bad Muslim binary was on full display after Clinton functionally sealed the Democratic Party nomination in late April: After winning four presidential primaries on April 26, Hillary Clinton drew a line between ‘hard working, terror hating Muslims’ and (Muslim) terrorists. In front of a raucous audience of supporters in Philadelphia, Clinton . . . only made mention of Muslims in relation to terrorism, and reaffirmed the mythic ‘good versus bad’’ Muslim paradigm. Within the broader context of counter- radicalization policing . . . Clinton’s rhetoric presented Muslim Americans with an already familiar, yet never more threatening, ultimatum: choose the moderate brand of ‘‘terror-hating’ Muslim identity sanctioned by the state, or be branded with the suspicion that invites its scrutiny, surveillance, and civil liberties infractions.” (Khaled A. Beydoun, “‘Muslim Bans’ and the (Re)Making of Political Islamophobia”)

 

Liberal Islamophobic Belief: Muslims should cooperate with government “anti-terrorism” programs, including being willing to monitor their own community.

  • “The aftermath of the September 11th attacks created a ‘Good Muslim/Bad Muslim’ paradigm. An individual willing to accept the disproportionate curtailing of Muslims’ civil liberties purportedly to protect the national security of the majority is deemed a loyal, good citizen by the government. But those who demand equal protection under the law are deemed treacherous agitators both within and outside Muslim communities. Indeed, the ‘Bad Muslims’’ failure to cooperate with law enforcement and vociferous dissent becomes a form of transgression that leads to government and public suspicions of Muslims as having something to hide. . . .” Aziz goes on to speak of how “Muslims suspicious of government motives in community policing initiatives are categorized as ‘Bad Muslims’ whose skepticism is censured as a cause of Muslims’ radicalization post-9/11. In contrast, the ‘Good Muslims’’ willingness to cooperate with law enforcement’s CCP [Counterterrorism Community Policing] programs represents their attempts to assimilate so they can return to their rightful place in the White majority.” (Sahar F. Aziz, “Policing Terrorists in the Community”)

Liberal Islamophobia and Israel

“There are people who identify as liberal . . . [who] ignore the larger political context . . ., whether it’s the war on communities of color or the war on Muslims and Palestinians. It’s a racist framework of Black crime being ‘more dangerous,’ or assuming subconsciously that Black equals criminal. It’s about how you frame it and your historical and political understanding.

“This framework is a lot like the ‘good Muslim/bad Muslim’ narrative, where you are faced with this litmus test: “What’s your view on Israel?” This ignores the narrative of the oppressor and the oppressed, the occupier and the occupied, and ignores any sort of power analysis in our politics. It defines an entire people as ‘good’ or ‘bad’ from the viewpoint of the oppressor, instead of asking, ‘Who fuels these events? Who benefits? Why are these things happening?’” “Stories and Strategies: An Interview with Bina Ahmad”

We see repeatedly how many who oppose anti-Muslim racism in some contexts are not consistent in that opposition when Israel enters the equation. They do not, for example, consider the links between right-wing pro-Israel advocates and anti-Muslim ideologues or challenge the use of anti-Muslim narratives to bolster support for Israeli policies. While they may draw the line about what is acceptable or not in different places, supporters of Israel typically use an Israel-related litmus test to determine whether a Muslim (or Arab) is “anti-Israel” (or not sufficiently “pro-Israel) and, thus, “unacceptable.”

 

Liberal Islamophobic Belief: “Good Muslims” don’t criticize Israel in public.

  • “Many [pro-Israel] groups . . . routinely set preconditions that determine which Muslims are deemed ‘good,’ that is, ‘acceptable.’ The pattern has been for these groups to scrutinize Muslim and Arab American individuals and groups before agreeing to work with, or even talk to, them. This often translates into Jewish [and other pro-Israel] groups working only with Muslim or Arab American groups that do not (or agree not to) publicly criticize Israeli policies, and insisting that these groups explicitly and publicly denounce anti-Semitism—a standard that, for example, Christian groups that are prospective partners do not have to meet. It also means that many Jewish [and other] groups work only with Muslim and Arab American organizations that publicly disassociate themselves from any Muslim or Arab groups that have been accused (evidence not necessary) of supporting pro-Palestine groups or having any alleged connections to Hamas or to ‘terrorism.’ This strategy attempts to control which Muslim and Arab Americans are suitable to work with, while discrediting all others.” (Elly Bulkin & Donna Nevel, “How the Jewish Establishment’s Litmus Test on Israel Fuels Anti-Muslim Bigotry”)

Debbie Almontaser, a Muslim educator, was founding principal of the country’s first Arabic dual language public school. Even before its opening in 2007, she and the school were attacked by anti-Muslim ideologues who accused the school of being a breeding ground for “terrorism.” The school’s opponents didn’t capture much media attention until Israel entered the picture, when Almontaser was falsely tied to intifada NYC t-shirts created by a young Arab women’s group. Once the media started covering the virulently anti-Muslim attacks on her, the city’s tabloid newspaper ran a steady stream of sensationalized Islamophobic pieces that added to her vilification. Mainstream liberal Jewish groups that had worked closely with her for years offered her no support. She had become, in their eyes, a “bad Muslim.” And the New York City Department of Education (D.O.E.) forced her to resign. Eventually, the Equal Employment Opportunity Commission completely exonerated her, determining that public officials “succumbed to the very bias that creation of the school was intended to dispel and a small segment of the public succeeded in imposing its prejudices on D.O.E. as an employer.”

As Almontaser wrote in “The Khalil Gibran International Academy–Lessons Learned?”: “I think that the majority of those from the Jewish community who publicly supported me are also individuals and organizations who have engaged openly in the search for a just solution to the Israeli-Palestinian conflict. They have not made their litmus test of potential partnerships with others dependent on support for Israeli government policies, deciding accordingly which Arabs or Muslims are therefore considered ‘safe.’ I do not think this is a mere coincidence.” (Almontaser quote from Reza Aslan and J. Hahn Tepper, eds., Muslims and Jews in America)

 

Liberal Islamophobic Belief: Challenging Islamophobia and Israel’s policies are unconnected and should be kept distinct and separate from one another.

While many Jewish and other pro-Israel groups speak out against Islamophobia, they do not make–and apparently don’t want to make–the connection between anti-Muslim policies and Israel’s anti-Muslim/anti-Arab/anti-Palestinian politics.

In 2011, the Center for American Progress (CAP), a leading liberal think tank with close ties to the Democratic Party, published Fear, Inc.: The Roots of the Islamophobia Network in America, a tremendously valuable report that details the financial and other ties among the individuals and groups in the network (including some with access to the current administration).

Despite a thoroughly–documented link between the nation’s most prominent anti-Muslim ideologues and the most expansionist and intransigent aspects of Israeli policy, the report contains almost no mention of an Islamophobia-pro-Israel connection.  Wajahat Ali, lead author of Fear, Inc., has described CAP’s strong resistance to the inclusion in the report of the Middle East Media Research Institute (MEMRI), which was created by former members of the Israeli Defense Force to monitor the Middle East press.  MEMRI is the go-to source for those in the Islamophobia network who (along with Breitbart News and others) draw on it to “make the case that Islam is inherently violent and promotes extremism.”

In 2012, Fear, Inc. researcher Ali Gharib and co-author Eli Clifton posted on their CAP blog an entry that mentioned the well-researched link between The Third Jihad, a viciously anti-Muslim Clarion Fund video, and “the Israeli orthodox evangelist organization Aish Hatorah, which works within Israel’s right-wing and settler movements.”  CAP, which had been under pressure from AIPAC about its allegedly “anti-Israel” blogs, promptly scrubbed all references to Israel from the Gharib/Clifton entry on the video’s rampant Islamophobia. The result was a blog that omitted a critical piece of information about the use by those in the Islamophobia network in America of anti-Muslim hate to further their vision of Israeli expansionism.

Islamophobia and Liberal Media Outlets

“While liberal purveyors of anti-Muslim prejudice have found an open door in the conservative and far-right media spaces, including Fox News, their messages have also become a regular fixture of progressive media, including late-night talk shows, radio programming, and televised political punditry.” (Nathan Lean, The Islamophobia Industry: How the Right Manufactures Hatred of Muslims, second edition).

 

Liberal Islamophobic Belief: Liberal media outlets are generally accurate and fair sources of news and information about Muslims

  • “New research from Erin Kearns and colleagues at Georgia State University shows that . . . [t]here is a systematic bias in the way terrorism is covered — just not in the way the president thinks.

“Kearns says the ‘terrorism’ label is often only applied to cases where the perpetrator is Muslim. And, those cases also receive significantly more news coverage.

“‘When the perpetrator is Muslim, you can expect that attack to receive about four and a half times more media coverage than if the perpetrator was not Muslim,’ Kearns says. Put another way, ‘a perpetrator who is not Muslim would have to kill on average about seven more people to receive the same amount of coverage [on CNN and in a political range of print sources] as a perpetrator who’s Muslim.’” (Shankar Vedantam, “When Is It ‘Terrorism’? How The Media Cover Attacks By Muslim Perpetrators”)

 

Liberal Islamophobic Belief: Liberal media outlets include a range of Muslim voices and expertise in their coverage of Islamophobia

  • “According to research by Media Matters for America, a progressive research and information centre, during a five-day period (January 30 to February 3) after the immigration order was signed into law, only seven of the 90 commentators CNN featured to discuss the order were Muslims.

“MSNBC, widely perceived to be the most progressive of the three primary cable news networks, only had two Muslims out of 28 during that period.

***

“Liberal news media remain forums where liberal Orientalism thrives–treating Muslims as subjects worthy of sympathy and pity, but ultimately, individuals unfit to add expertise on laws that directly impact their lives, offer direct testimony, and ultimately, cast them as outsiders in stories that are entirely about them and their community.

***

“While conservative media outlets are wed to featuring specific Muslim personalities to propagate a caricature, carry forward a stereotype, or showcase a native informant bent on slandering the faith, liberal media outlets call on a small handful of Muslim voices to meet what seems to be a minimal quota while relying on white males to carry the intellectual and analytical load.”  (Khaled A. Beydoun, “Why Can’t Muslims Talk about the Muslim Ban on TV?”)

 

  • “In terms of media representation of American Muslims, Black Muslim women are often erased. A recent example was a featured segment on Muslims on the Today Show, which failed to include a Black Muslim among the five guests. In many ways, this fits the stereotype that Muslims only come from the Middle East and South Asia.” (Margari Aziza  Hill, Being a Black American Muslim Woman – A Study of Challenges)

Liberal Islamophobia and Muslim Women

“From the outset, it is worth emphasizing that there is no singular, unitary ‘Muslim woman’ that can represent the experiences and grievances of the diversity of women who identify as Muslim.  Muslim women come from various racial and ethnic backgrounds, hold diverse political viewpoints, and adopt beliefs ranging from staunch secularism to religious orthodoxy.  That said, the diversity of Muslim women often experience similar adverse experiences because they are falsely stereotyped as meek, powerless, oppressed, or sympathetic to terrorism.

     “Muslim women of all races and levels of religiosity face unique forms of discrimination at the intersection of religion, race, and gender because the September 11th terrorist attacks transformed the meaning of the Muslim headscarf.”  (Sahar F. Aziz, “From the Oppressed to the Terrorist: Muslim-American Women in the Crosshairs of Intersectionality”)

 “At this moment, we need renewed calls for building transnational solidarity among Muslim women and with allies, rather than engaging in oppression olympics. We need a deeper examination of the multiple forms of structural violence Muslim women experience, such as anti-Black racism, anti-Muslim violence, patriarchy, classism, ableism, gender-based violence, war, imperialism, poverty, and how these forms of state violence, alongside others, intersect.” (Darakshan Raja, “Muslim Feminists Respond: On Headscarves and Interfaith Solidarity”)

Our work against anti-Muslim racism must necessarily include challenging Islamophobic narratives about Muslim women (and Arab women, who are often conflated with Muslims)– narratives that depict them as needing “saving” from a “sexist religion” or as lacking “agency” or some other stereotype that is rooted in an anti-Muslim woman framing. These narratives are staples of liberal politics and the liberal media in a country that perpetuate Islamophobia toward Muslim women. Considering the staying-power of these Islamophobic narratives across the political spectrum, we need to think intentionally about how to be an accountable partner, intersectional feminist, and anti-Islamophobia activist.

Liberal Islamophobic Belief: Islam is more sexist than other religions.

  • “As Islam spread, it adopted the cultural practices of various empires, including that of the neighboring Persian and Byzantine empires. Among the Christians who populated the Middle East and the Mediterranean there were more rigid customs associated with women. In the Christian Byzantine Empire, the sexes were segregated, women were not supposed to be to be seen in public, they had to be veiled, and were given only rudimentary education. As the expanding Islamic empire incorporated these regions, it also assimilated these cultural and social practices. In short, the particular misogynistic practices that Islam came to adopt were largely inherited from the religious customs of the neighboring–and conquered–Christian and Jewish societies. The significant point here is that sexist attitudes towards women, far from being unique to Islam, were prevalent among Christians and Jews as well.” (Deepa Kumar, “Islam and Islamophobia”)
  • “More helpful than the attempt to categorize cultures on a scale of more patriarchal to less patriarchal would be to examine how patriarchy manifests itself in ways that are similar and different across cultures or communities.” (Leti Volpp, “Blaming Culture for Bad Behavior”)

“. . . [M]ost discussions construct ‘honor killing’ as symptomatic of ‘Islamic culture’ (note the elision between religion and culture in this formulation), while acts of man-on-woman homicide in the United States are presented either as acts of individualized pathology or excessive passion. In this logic, American men are represented as acting out of jealousy (a ‘natural’ emotion) against their sexual rivals (albeit swept away by its force), while Muslim men are understood to be compelled by ‘their culture,’ irrationally and blindly acting out its misogynist customs and traditions. An individualized account of domestic violence in the West is secured, in other words, against tautological account of ‘Islamic culture.’ Once this premise is conceded, it follows that an appropriate strategy of combating this form of violence in the West is to transform individual behavior, whereas in Muslim societies one would need to reform, if not eradicate, ‘Islamic culture.’ Such a polemical account, in its drive to quantify sexism (West equals less; Islam equals more), fails to realize that both forms of violence are equally cultural as they are gendered, each depending upon distinct valuations of women’s subordination, sexuality, kinship relations, and various forms of male violence.” (Saba Mahmood, “Feminism, Democracy, and Empire: Islam and the War on Terror,” in Gendering Religion and Politics: Untangling Modernities)

Liberal Islamophobic Belief: Muslim women lack agency

  • “As several Third World Feminists have argued, a historical weakness of liberal feminism in the West has been its racist, patronizing attitude towards women of color who have been seen less as allies/agents and more as victims in need of rescue. This attitude prevails both in relation to women of color within Western nation states, as well as women in the global South.”  (Deepa Kumar, “Imperialist Feminism and Liberalism”)
  • “By rejecting Islam as foreign to American society and the legal system, by justifying military intervention in Muslim majority countries, and by chastising Muslim communities for insisting on their freedom to practice their religion, this [secular American feminist] form of Islamophobic discourse as well inscribes Muslim women’s bodies with meaning that they have no control over and that uses them as pawns or tools in a politics of neoconservative imperialism internationally and a political agenda of scapegoating a conveniently targetable minority population and its religion in domestic politics. Neither allows Muslim women any agency unless they are willing to denounce both their religion and their communities and societies.”  (Juliane Hammer, “(Muslim) Women’s Bodies, Islamophobia, and American Politics”)
  • “. . . one of the challenges that Arab-American women face is that American society tends to lump all women from Muslim countries into the category of ‘Arab’ (as in the case with Afghan women) and to view all ‘Arabs’ as ‘Muslims’, and all Muslims as practicing a particular rigid kind of Islam. This puts Arab-American women in a unique position because they are faced with the conflation of ethnic and religious identity while, in fact, not all Arabs are Muslims, and all Muslims are not Arabs. Islam is represented as monolithic, and Arab women, whether Muslims or not, as passive victims of their religion or culture. Such images impact the position of Arab diasporic communities in America where anti-Arab sentiments prevail.” (Amal Abdelrazek, “Scheherazad’s Legacy: Arab-American Women Writers and the Resisting, Healing, and Connecting Power of their Storytelling,” in Gender, Nation, and Belonging: Arab and Arab-American Feminist Perspectives)

Liberal Islamophobic Belief: “Good” Muslim (or Arab) women endorse and promote “Western liberal feminist values” and priorities

  • “Muslim women spokespersons are important for a liberal feminist narrative about Muslim societies: their ‘personal confessions’ are promoted and marketed because they provide ‘authoritative’ and authentic testimonials about their oppression by Muslim and Middle Eastern men.” (Sunaina Maira, “‘Good’ and ‘Bad’ Muslim Citizens: Feminists, Terrorists, and U.S. Orientalisms”)
  • “Several Muslim women, including Nonie Darwish, Wafa Sultan, and Ayaan Hirsi Ali, have made successful careers as women who have defected from Islam and become spokespersons for its inherent backwardness. While the oppressed Muslim woman narrative has cross-ideological appeal and has been taken up as a cause by both the Right and the Left, these native informants collaborate with right-wing agendas that aim not only to help oppressed women but also to denounce Islam entirely. Darwish, an Egyptian, is the founder of Arabs for Israel, the director of Former Muslims United, and the author of two books arguing that Islam is a retrograde religion. Sultan, a Syrian, claims that Islam promotes violence; she is the author of a book titled A God Who Hates. Hirsi Ali, a Somali, embraced atheism after 9/11; she has written numerous books in which she argues that Islam is incompatible with democracy.” (Evelyn Alsultany, “Arabs and Muslims in the Media after 9/11: Representational Strategies for a ‘Postrace’ Era“)
  • “The question of who has the power to define the Muslim woman’s struggle is also important. This cannot be brushed over and homogenized. Conflating the struggles of Muslim women globally, from Pakistan, Iran, Egypt, Palestine to Europe and the United States plays into the Islamophobic arguments that reduce all Muslims to a monolithic and homogenous identity. When mainstream feminists adopt this outlook, they engage in erasure and silencing of the margins. In fact, this has been one of the staunchest critiques of the mainstream feminist movement.” (Darakshan Raja, “Muslim Feminists Respond: On Headscarves and Interfaith Solidarity”)
  • “Head covering becomes a defining presence in our lives, regardless whether it is relevant to this particular woman’s life or not. Many of us are often expected to speak only to issues deemed by others as detrimental to our progress as women and as people. The “veil”, “female circumcision”, and “honor” crimes are but three examples that have become the standard litmus test by which our feminism is measured and evaluated, and the basis for which we get hired and fired, granted monetary rewards for our projects, or granted native informant passes to national feminist gatherings. We collectively and individually insist not to play to the tune of such reductive, ahistorical, and de-contextual framing of our struggles as liberal feminist crusaders refuse to acknowledge our right to define our agendas or to name our concerns on our own terms.” (Rabab Abdulhadi, Nadine Naber, and Evelyn Alsultany, “Gender, Nation, and Belonging: Arab and Arab-American Feminist Perspectives—An Introduction”)

Liberal Islamophobic Belief: Muslim women, especially those in “non-Western” countries, need to be “rescued” from Muslim men

  • The politics of rescue of Muslim women is also steeped in liberal concepts of individualism, autonomy, and choice that shape a binary and neo-Orientalist world view. A resurgent imperial feminism assumes that it is the United States or Western culture that must bring ‘freedom’ to certain areas of the world, even if paradoxically via a military force–another case of white men (and white women) trying to save brown women from brown men. Missionary feminism has long produced a cultural discourse of saving Muslim women in different colonial encounters with terrorists or insurgents, ignoring the indigenous women’s movements and the complexities of race, nationalism, and class at work.” (Sunaina Maira, “‘Good’ and ‘Bad’ Muslim Citizens: Feminists, Terrorists, and U.S. Orientalisms“)
  • “. . . [T]he ideology of free choice has often been allied with imperial projects of violence. From the French colonization of Algeria to the American invasion of Afghanistan, multiple wars have been waged around the world in the name of bringing choice to Muslim women. But individual choice is not necessarily seen in all places and times as the central organizing principle of human life, as it is within liberal states. As Lila Abu-Lughod, Professor of Anthropology and Women’s and Gender Studies at Columbia University, appropriately asks: ‘Might other desires be more meaningful for different groups of people? Living in close families? Living in a godly way? Living without war?’” (Azeezah Kanji and S. K. Hussan, “The Problem with Liberal Opposition to Islamophobia”)
  • When Muslim women are visible, they are largely portrayed as ‘over there,’ the objects of Western feminist pity living under oppressive regimes in the Middle East—representations that elide the historical legacies of Muslim women in the U.S. and the profound entanglements of race, gender, class, sexuality, and religion which shape their narratives and subjectivities.” (Sylvia Chan-Malik, “‘A Space for the Spiritual’: A Roundtable on Race, Gender, and Islam in the United States”)