EXCERPT (from the Introduction)
“We’re an empire now, and when we act, we create our own reality.”
Anonymous Senior Bush Aid
Bringing Hate Speech into the American Mainstream
“These people [the Iranians] are assholes,” President George W. Bush explained to Admiral William Fallon, his new Commander of U.S. Central
Command,1 who had just had the temerity to suggest that “we need to do something to get engaged with these guys.” The anecdote, which
was given much fanfare, outed what many suspected. The President had a visceral dislike of Iranians that informed his Iraq-Iran strategy, a
strategy that did not “offer a real approach” to dealing with Iran or the region. Fallon, on the other hand, was lauded as a commander who
stood up to the Bush White House’s high-octane, oil-driven war rhetoric, rejecting the military option regarding Tehran. In a subsequent
interview with al-Jazeera, Fallon openly criticized the “constant drumbeat” of war emanating from Washington, adding that it was “not helpful.”
2 He eventually had to resign when his difference of opinion with the administration became public in an Esquire magazine interview.3 Because
he was valorized for his protest against the push for war, the Admiral’s own epithet was largely overlooked. In the same Esquire interview, Fallon
called the Iranians, not assholes, but “ants” who “when the time comes, you crush them.”
Following September 11, 2001, the ceiling of acceptable hate-speech against Muslims, particularly Arabs, was blown off. Borderline provocateurs
like Ann Coulter could say in print what previously a good editor, or at least decorum, would have prevented. “We should invade their countries,
kill their leaders and convert them to Christianity,” she wrote two days after 9/11, “We carpet-bombed German cities; we killed civilians. That’s
war. And this is war.”4 The violence of the language did not recede. It increased proportionally to the drastic increase in the violence of US
foreign policy. Just as Bush called Iranians “assholes” and the head of US military forces abroad called them ants, Marine Corp Lt. General
James Mattis, Commander of the Joint Forces Command, some years later would say “You go into Afghanistan, you got guys who slap women
around for five years because they didn’t wear a veil. You know, guys like that ain’t got no manhood left anyway. So it’s a hell of a lot of fun to
shoot them.”5 The justification and entertainment in killing Muslims abroad was accompanied by a barrage of previously unspeakable thoughts
that mainstream white America had regarding Muslims and Islam. Since 9/11, Muslims, Arabs, Iranians and Islam itself have been the objects of
derision in public, on the TV, print media and the radio. From the morning to evening, we hear of “the great honorable qualities of that good
old time religion Islam: honor killings, female circumcision, not allowing women to drive ... [saying] Jews are monkeys, pigs.”6
While many demonize the hate-mongering Right whose orgy of hate-speech has only become the naturalized white noise of cable and radio talk
shows, liberal circles still rely on Islamophobic stereotypes and misrepresentations as foils for their own particular views. Consummate liberal
Democratic leader Howard Dean’s comments regarding the “Ground Zero Mosque” are telling. Speaking on WABC radio, he states building an
Islamic Center two blocks away from the World Trade Center would be “a real affront to people who lost their lives” on September 11, 2001. In
the classic tradition by which Democrats have always qualified their racism, he continues by saying, “I think it is great to have Mosques in
American cities; there is a growing number of American Muslims. I think most of those Muslims are moderate. I hope they will have an influence
on Islam throughout the world because Islam is really back in the 12th century in some of these countries like Iran and Afghanistan where they’
re stoning people to death and that can be fixed and the way it is fixed is not by pushing Muslims away, it is by embracing them and have them
become just like every other American, Americans who happen to be Muslims.”7 Dean’s narrative is not surprising and nothing new. Indeed, this
book will demonstrate how people from all walks of American cultural and political life share misinformed and Islamophobic narratives. Dean’s
vision involves properly co-opting and assimilating Muslims into American culture, whereby they not only do not pose a threat to US hegemony
and white supremacist culture but, in fact, work within Muslim communities globally to bring them into the American fold.
While liberals and progressives have been critical, even disparaging, of Christian religious fundamentalism, Muslims seem to pose a particular
threat and challenge, as Dean’s comments show. This is not unique within liberal and even progressive discourses where Muslims are often
singled out. For example, in the work of atheist scientist Richard Dawkins or atheist war-cheerleader Christopher Hitchens, all religions are
irrational and superstitious but Islam has a extraordinary penchant for suppressing heterodoxy through violence and a built-in prohibition to
self-inquiry.8 Even when progressive intellectuals and activists argue against militarism and US imperialism, the intransigence and backwardness
of Islam and Muslims are invoked as the reason for the futility of any military conflagration with them. For example, Johann Gultung, founder
of Peace Studies and a long time anti-war activist, calls for a paradigm shift in how the US interacts with the world—but he draws on
stereotypes to argue for the dismantling of the US Empire and for global social justice. His analysis replicates the analysis of rightists and
neoliberals as well, contending that Muslims have a different conception of and relationship to time, society, history and politics. They hold
firmly to the defense of Islam “against infidels” and are prohibited from capitulating to rule in their homelands by Christian and Jews.
Therefore, war with the Muslim world is a futile enterprise because Muslims have an open sense of time that allows them to battle against
“infidels” endlessly. In other words, the United States would do best to end its wars with Muslims because inside every Muslim is a
fundamentalist who will tirelessly fight the domination of non-Muslims.
From Left to Right, religious to atheist, Islamophobia pervades all levels of American life. Bush and his supporters are easily cast as
Islamophobic boogeymen who think every Muslim is an “asshole” and a “terrorist.” On the other hand, Democrats and liberals just as readily
deploy stereotypes that invoke Arab and Muslim irrationality and hostility to modernity, to justify their own support for US economic and
political hegemony. We will see that Islamophobia is manifest in multiple sectors of American society, exuding from the media, political think
tanks, pseudo-“expert” pundits, “native informers,” rogue academics, lobbies and activist organizations. Muslims not only feel the daily barrage
of hate-speech and hate-acts through insulting and deriding analyses and images that flood television, print media and even billboards on
highways. They also are under surveillance by the government, profiled in public places like streets, mosques, universities, and have their
movements tracked, their associations, finances and charitable giving monitored. Additionally, they are spied on, coerced and prosecuted by the
United States government. Every discussion in US civil society and media about war, Iraq, and Afghanistan manifests Islamophobia. Every
discussion about the war on terror is structured by Islamophobia. Every discussion on “repairing relations with the Muslim World” is
underwritten by Islamophobic mindsets.9 Every discussion of Palestine is infused with Islamophobic precepts. Every discussion of Iran, its
nuclear potential and its regionalism, is an expression of Islamophobia. Every discussion of oil and energy sovereignty is bounded by a strategic
and willful hate and fear of Muslims.10
Islamophobia as an Ideological Formation of US Empire
All of this said, Islamophobia is not a political ideology in itself nor is it an isolated dogma just as Islam itself is not a political ideology.
Islamophobia does not have a platform or even a political vision. Islamophobia is something more substantive, abstract, sustained, ingrained
and prevalent. This book contends that Islamophobia is an ideological formation. This does not mean that it is the purview of any particular
political party. Rather, an ideological formation is created by a culture that deploys particular tropes, analyses and beliefs, as facts upon which
governmental policies and social practices are framed. This book argues that Islamophobia, in its current form, is a new ideological formation
that has taken full expression since the collapse of the Soviet Union. Islamophobia does not originate in one particular administration, thinker,
philosopher, activist, media outlet, special interest group, think tank, or even economic sector or industry though indeed, these actors are
collectively responsible for the virulent dissemination of anti-Muslim and anti-Arab stereotypes and beliefs, circulated in order to naturalize and
justify US global, economic and political hegemony. The Bush administration unabashedly wore its disdain for Muslims and Arabs on its sleeve
from the first day of his administration. The subsequent chapters will show that even the Clinton and Obama administrations are rife with
Islamophobic paradigms and acts that couple with a similarly imperial American outlook. Indeed, we have witnessed the unprecedented
mainstreaming of Islamophobia since 9/11. An extremist flake such as Robert Spencer, for example, has authored two vitriolic, racist screeds on
Islam that became New York Times bestsellers while Bruce Bawer’s incendiary and hackneyed The Enemy Within was nominated by the
prestigious National Book Critics Circle for the best book of criticism.11
While scholars, activists and community groups as well as projects such as Fairness and Accuracy In Reporting have taken on the ideological
hacks and pseudo-intellectuals in the mainstream,12 this book adopts a different tack. Rather than understanding Islamophobia as a series of
actions and beliefs that target Muslims and arise from a generic misunderstanding of who Muslims are and what Islam is, it reveals that
Islamophobia is an ideological phenomenon which exists to promote political and economic goals, both domestically and abroad. The effects of
Islamophobia can be a series of acts institutionalized by the United States government ranging from war to programmatic torture to
extrajudicial kidnappings, incarcerations and executions to surveillance and entrapment. The effects of Islamophobia are experienced in the daily
lives of Muslims who encounter harassment, discrimination and hate speech in the street, anti-Muslim rants on nationally syndicated television
and radio shows, and hate acts such as mosque bombings. These effects, however, will only be understood as scattered albeit tangentially
related acts if they are not seen to be located in a complete paradigm or discourse of Islamophobia that permeates American culture and society.
For these effects to work in unison with a rhetoric that justifies them, Islamophobia must act concurrently on two levels; the level of thought,
speech and perception; then, the material level of policies, violence and action. Therefore, this book is structured by a dual methodology that
excavates how Islamophobia operates as a powerful ideological formation that facilitates American Empire. On the one hand, the book anchors
its analysis on works by Bernard Lewis and Fareed Zakaria, on “native informants” such as Ayaan Hirsi Ali and Irshad Manji, and on speeches by
presidents Bush and Obama as well as their cabinet members and underlings whose analyses and political philosophies provide the discursive
bedrock that naturalizes and justifies Islamophobia as state, foreign, security, economic and energy policy, domestically and abroad.
To streamline the massive, multifaceted ideological edifice of Islamophobia, two similar but competing paradigms of Islamophobia by Bernard
Lewis and Fareed Zakaria will be mapped out. As bears repeating, these two are certainly not progenitors of the Islamophobic narratives
deployed post 9/11, but arguably their work condenses Islamophobic narratives that have previously circulated and accumulated over the
preceding decade. Lewis and Zakaria distilled many Islamophobic tenets into two separate but intersecting Islamophobic discourses that
explicitly intend to legitimize the deployment of US political power in the Middle East and the control of its own domestic populations. The
talking points within these two versions of Islamophobia are continually repeated throughout the mainstream media, in policy circles, and by
native informants (persons of Muslim or Arab descent who are purportedly best placed to lay bare an inside view or critique of Arab/Islamic
culture), but more importantly, echo in the speeches of Bush and Obama.
On the other hand, this book will show how these Islamophobic discourses have very real effects. In other words, the words of Islamophobia are
the raw materials for the sticks and stones that break Muslim bones. Through engineering, managing, mediating and directing Euro-American
hatred and fear of Muslims and Arabs inside the US and globally, new levels of domestic control and surveillance could be achieved. Domestic
policies that previously would have been considered unconstitutional, even un-American, could be justified as necessary matters of security and
self-preservation. Torture (from water-boarding to extreme isolation of American defendants in the United States), racial profiling, kidnapping
and extraordinary renditions, extrajudicial assassinations, freezing habeas corpus, and total war against and occupation of sovereign countries
are the effects of the deployment of Islamophobic foils, stereotypes, paradigms and analyses.
This book will examine the violent and not-so-subtle effects of Islamophobia, particularly how attacks on Muslims and Arabs in the US are
multipronged. Government organizations and agencies work with the legislature, the Executive and even the judiciary in targeting, profiling and
disenfranchising Muslim and Arab Americans of their Constitutional rights. Political interest groups, lobbies and political action committees
work with local, state and federal authorities to isolate, intimidate and harass Muslim communities, student organizations, activists, and
scholars. Likewise, the media efficiently disseminates overtly anti-Muslim propaganda that demonizes Muslims and Arabs and amplifies
mainstream hostility to Islam and its adherents. We will also see how against the backdrop of a sheet of Muslim-hating white noise, extremist
acts are committed against Muslims, Arabs and minorities who are mistaken for them.
Indeed, the book is not comprehensive. Unfortunately, the list of anti-Arab and Islamophobic hate acts, speech, activists, legislators and
incidents are far too numerous to review. If this book were to name the litany of Islamophobic acts committed by the government, private
citizens, public organizations and Hollywood and the media, then it would be a tome-like catalogue of hate. While diligently tracking Arab-
hating and Islamophobia is important, this book hopes to crack open the complexities of the ideological formation itself, to understand how it
is constructed and organized, and critically observe how it is manifested in American society. For this reason, Islamophobia is defined and
examined in terms of discursive archetypes taken in the form of two master-narratives as provided by Lewis and Zakaria. Rather than discuss
every Islamophobic rogue pseudo-scholar, political hack, charlatan native informant, opportunist pundit or activist journalist, the works of a
handful of Islamophobes serves to define the scaffolding upon which Islamophobic acts and policies are grafted and American foreign and
domestic policies find justification.
Clinton-Bush-Obama: Islamophobia Continuity
Much has been written on how the Bush presidency used 9/11 to transform the nature of civil liberties, the presidency, and politics in the United
States. Bush’s “War on Terror” and subsequently Obama’s “War on al-Qaeda” have facilitated outward repression of environmentalists, anti-
war activists, anarchists and others who have engaged in dissent as well as continued the degeneration of American civil liberties.13 However,
this book strongly asserts that Islamophobia precedes 9/11. It also asserts that it has outlived the Bush administration. Continuity exists
between presidents, reaching back to George H.W. Bush. Operatives who have masterminded the mainstreaming and institutionalization of
Islamophobia into the minds of Americans, if not the legal system itself, have appeared and reappeared in different positions and places
throughout the decades since the fall of the Soviet Union. The continuity is strong between the Obama and Bush administration, and the
seepage of policies originated against Arabs or Muslims into use against other social sectors is ongoing, as the example of Kris Kobach’s work
on population tracking demonstrates. The former Bush Administration attorney helped Attorney General John Aschroft create the National
Security Entry-Exit Registration, a tracking program that requires that all citizens from mostly Arab countries be fingerprinted and monitored
during their stay in the United States. Kobach’s attack on civil liberties of non-American citizens made its debut in the Ashcroft Department of
Justice. Only later, does it reemerge in the recent pogroms against Latinos in the United States, where he has helped draft a Kansas law that
permits law enforcement to stop anyone suspected as being undocumented. 14
Private hate acts, policies of profiling, surveillance, entrapping and prosecuting Muslim Americans and immigrants by the use of agent-
provocateurs and spurious, vague and broad charges of “material support for terrorism” continue regardless of the change in presidency.
Policies of extraordinary rendition and extrajudicial assassination have increased. Prosecution of Muslims who were illegally kidnapped and
detained by the United States military, including a 15-year-old defendant who normatively should have been given restorative treatment as a
child soldier, continue. Rather than prosecuting Dick Cheney, Donald Rumsfeld and Alberto Gonzalez as war criminals, in view of their clear
violation of established international conventions against torture and the treatment of prisoners of war, the Obama Department of Justice’s
Attorney General, Eric Holder, has fought to continue the suppression of the civil liberties of Muslims in the United States. His office has
challenged the grievances of those like Maher Arar and Khaled al-Masri, who were kidnapped by the US and tortured by Syrian and US
authorities respectively. These are just a few of many similar undertakings that strongly indicate to us that Islamophobia is not an episodic
phenomenon. To the contrary, it is a sustained campaign that finds its origins with the rise of the unipolar world.
Therefore, issues addressed in this book extend beyond the heady days of the Bush regime, which brazenly violated Muslim and Arab American
rights, targeted Muslim and Arab American communities, activists and scholars, and used militarism as the principal tool in its Islamophobic
foreign policy, incorporating many recent examples of Islamophobic speech and hate acts to prove its points. In fact, many disturbing if not
glaring acts of violence against Muslims and Arabs in the United States during GW’s first term have been omitted in favor of including recent
incidents, speeches, policies and prosecutions. In addition, the book provides as many mainstream and accessible sources that are readily
available to a general, non-specialist readership as possible. That is, the method of this book relies on the academic rigor that defines good
scholarship, diligently footnoting and citing all incidents, sources and texts that it references. However, as the basis of its scholarly method, I
have intentionally relied on articles, documents and books that are obtainable by a non-specialist. This includes relying almost exclusively on
mainstream Anglophone publishing and media outlets. In other words, I have not relied on the specialized skill set that distinguishes scholars’
academic methods from other more mainstream, albeit not pedestrian, research methods of policymakers and journalists.
The complexity of Islamophobia is challenging. The unrelenting developments of the past several years have made it difficult, in fact, to
complete this book due to a surfeit of materials. When does one stop noting and analyzing significant developments when they unfold every
day? The dual approach of this book serves to give its insights longevity and relevance beyond when the incidents, prosecutions and gurus
cited are themselves long ascribed to history. In the end, Islamophobia is a political and cultural construct. Therefore, this book has no intention
to defend Islam. Islam needs no defense. It is as complex, elegant, sophisticated, complicated and contradictory as, for example, are Christianity,
Judaism, Buddhism, and Hinduism. It is heterogeneous with several heterodox and orthodox sects, schools and communities. This book is not
an apologia for Islam nor is it a defense of the religion or a defense of Muslims. The very idea that Islam needs to be defended, I would argue, is
Islamophobic, as it completely erases the intricacy of the religion and reduces the cultural, regional, and religious variations to a monolithic
religion with a monolithic believer, i.e., The Muslim.
Vagaries of Islamophobia: Europe and the United States
The fact that we today are still discussing “what is Islam,” who are Muslims, “why do they hate us,” and so forth is shocking especially as
scholarship of eminent Orientalists such as Jacques Berques, Maxime Rodinson and Albert Hourani demolished the idea of Islam as a singular
religion without any internal variations between peoples, times, and geographies.15 Too many good studies of Islam have been published to
justify what continues to be not an inquiry but an inquisition into Muslim identity and faith.16 Such a phenomenon indicates that Islam is not
only a religious practice but, in the global era, it has taken on a larger status—particularly in light of the fact that Islamist forces seem to be
offering the primary resistance to the direct incursion of American or proxy forces into the Muslim homelands. Arguably as a result, Islam has
been involved in the reformation of Muslim “identity politics” in the past decades. However, Islam as an identity marker means different things
for different people in different places. This book, however, will not examine issues of Muslim-American identity that bait questions like whether
Muslim American women may wear the hijab, or headscarf. Or why their reasons for wearing it might differ from the reasons why Egyptian
women have adopted it in the wake of an authoritarian “secular” state. Or why Muslim communities in the United States eagerly assimilate and
have among the highest median income and education level among American ethnic minorities while many European Muslim communities tend
to be more insular.
With the knowledge that Islam is deployed as a socio-cultural, political identity marker, this book must also avoid discussion of the differences
between European and North American Islamophobia. Islamophobia is not a universal condition or a monolithic ideological construct. I would
contend that European and American Islamophobias are two separate socio-political phenomena just as I would argue that right wing Christian
Arab Islamophobia, whether expressed by Maronites, Orthodox, Chaldeans or Copts, is a separate phenomenon emerging from their own
particular historical and social conditions. Just as Islam takes on meanings within a construct of identity politics informed by local political and
social contexts and conditions, Islamophobia is deployed with particular ideological intent and effects that differ depending on specific and
varying social, political, historical and economic conditions. The tradition of North American Islamophobia differs from its European
counterpart. Recent European documentaries like the BBC’s “Generation Jihad” exude anxiety that arises from Britain’s colonial past. Muslim
immigrants are seen as a pariah community, whose anti-assimilationist philosophy makes them vulnerable to the threat of “Islamic”
radicalization.
Europe’s fear of Muslims is rooted in its paternalism towards non-Western peoples at a time when that unchallenged paternalistic authority no
longer exists. The colonial centers have always had historical discomfort with interacting with brown people as equals, especially with those to
whom they presented themselves as mandated to civilize.17 European anxiety with their brown subjects originates in their history of colonial
rule and the post-colonial defeats at the hands of nationalist liberation movements, which was only to be succeeded by the recuperation of
European economic power through neocolonialism. But also, European Islamophobia finds its origins in the anxiety about and hatred of its
own European others, namely European Jewry. Hence, in the post-Holocaust and post-Israel era, Europe’s propensity to anti-Semitism and its
hatred of Jews was displaced onto its new Muslim immigrants.18 But also, the displacement of anti-Semitism onto Muslim communities in
Europe is a transposition of feelings of loss, resentment, and anger that the former imperial powers of Europe no longer enjoy their global
empires while still having to bear the social, cultural and economic burden and responsibility of their colonial past. As a consequence, the rise of
Islamophobia in Europe has expressed itself in terms of fears of the “Islamification” of Europe, the degeneration of institutionalized secularism,
the bankrupting of the welfare state and the “demographic bomb.”19 In sum, this book examines American Islamophobia only... [cont'd]
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