3 Islamophobia in America

Sunando Sen, a first-generation Indian immigrant, lived in New York City. He owned a small business, a copy shop on the Upper West Side. At the age of forty-six, he was murdered by a woman who reportedly admitted that she “hate[d] Hindus and Muslims ever since 2001 when they put down the Twin Towers.”1 Friends remembered Sen as a gentle and “honorable” man, who was “loved by the entire community in which he worked.”2 As Sen waited on a subway platform, he was suddenly pushed from behind, into the path of an oncoming train. He died instantly. The woman who killed him later said, “I’m prejudice[d] . . . I pushed him in front of the train because I thought it was cool.” She was charged with a hate crime, and pleaded guilty to manslaughter. Her lawyer argued that mental illness led to the horrific crime while asking the court for leniency. She was sentenced to twenty-four years in prison.3

Too often, crimes like this one are explained away as the acts of “deranged” or intellectually disabled individuals. Even the most heinous crimes—the horrible massacre at the Sikh Temple of Wisconsin and the unconscionable murders of Balbir Singh Sodhi, Deah Barakat, Razan and Yusor Abu-Salha, and many others—have been written off in this way: the result of “one bad apple.” While it is fortunately true that relatively few people have gone so far as to commit murder, the risk of experiencing violent and nonviolent hate crimes is a fact of life for Middle Eastern Americans. And, of course, Islamophobia as it manifests in America is more than just the frequency or severity of hate crimes.

Islamophobia in America is structural, systemic, and institutional. It finds expression through culture, politics, and policy. The physical nature of many hate crimes makes visible the often-invisible structures of race, but through closer analyses it becomes possible to see not only moments of racist violence but also ongoing patterns of racist discrimination and exclusion that shape life in America in ways both subtle and profound.

Like other forms of racism, Islamophobia is a multifaceted, overdetermined phenomenon. Understanding its root causes requires acknowledging the elemental parts in the social production of race: racial projects. Islamophobia is best understood as a racist project, one that distributes resources in service of maintaining the race-based subordination of marginalized groups. In previous chapters, I described how race and racism happen in general terms, and I explained how the Middle Eastern American racial category has emerged through the same social processes that created all racial identities. Recognizing that racism is inherent in Islamophobia brings several advantages for explaining how it has been so durable and prominent in American culture for so long.

Part of the value of looking specifically at how race plays a key role in the production of Islamophobia comes by leveraging the explanatory power of detailed, careful analyses of White supremacy. Generations of critical scholarship have provided an account of the insidious power of White supremacy, the ideology that underpins most racist structures in the United States. Understanding that Islamophobia stems from the same White supremacist roots as other expressions of racism can clarify how seemingly separate issues—for example, stereotypical portrayals of Arabs in Hollywood films and the murder of South Asian Americans like Sunando Sen—are actually closely and deeply linked. As Andrea Smith explains, White supremacy is maintained by three central logics: slavery/capitalism, genocide/colonialism, and Orientalism/war.4 These interrelated pillars that have supported White supremacy throughout American history can clearly be seen at work in the production of Islamophobia. Expanding from Smith’s understanding of White supremacy, the anti-Islamophobia activist and scholar Deepa Iyer writes:

. . . we could offer another pillar to [Smith’s] framework, one called Islamophobia/national security that derogates Muslims and anyone perceived to be Muslim in order to preserve the illusion of collective safety. These pillars of White supremacy enable the United States to go to war; to deny people rights to their languages, histories, and homes; to militarize police forces in our cities; and to enact laws that profile, target, imprison, detain, and deport communities of color and immigrants.5

The very same logics that support White supremacy also lay at the center of the social processes that reproduce Islamophobia. Consider the rapid expansion of active hate groups in the United States over the past decade, many of which are specifically anti-Muslim.6 These groups make explicit their goal of supporting White supremacy, as they combine “anti-immigrant, anti-gay, and anti-Muslim” priorities, as Iyer describes.

Understanding Islamophobia in this way reveals that there is no distinction between the racism that enables the indefinite detention of Middle Eastern Americans on suspicion of terrorism, and the racism that suppresses the voting rights of people of color, that incarcerates disproportionate numbers of Blacks and Latin@s, that perpetuates vast race-based inequities of income and wealth. There is a common ancestry in America’s worst racial sins: the campaigns leading to genocide of Native Americans, the brutal reign of chattel slavery, the de jure system of Jim Crow segregation, Japanese American internment camps, mass incarceration, deportation, and Islamophobia. All of these stem from White supremacy.

In this chapter, I break out and analyze several key aspects of American Islamophobia. This by no means results in an exhaustive analysis, but recounting some of the problems caused by Islamophobia nonetheless clearly drives home two conclusions. First, while religion, gender, and other axes of inequality intersect and are at work here, there can be no question that Islamophobia is fundamentally a form of racism. It flows from the same well that sustains all of the forms of structural racism that have been endemic in the United States since its founding. Second, Islamophobic racism in the United States is not new; on the contrary, it has presented significant problems for a long time. These conclusions illuminate one half of the racial paradox that is Middle Eastern racial identity, showing how it is freighted with tremendous social forces in the United States. But knowing this does not by itself solve the racial dilemma—namely, whether it is beneficial for Middle Eastern American advocates to describe Islamophobia as racism. Leaving this question aside for the moment, in the remainder of this chapter I will focus on the unpleasant task of describing Islamophobia in some detail.

Islamophobia in American Culture

The common “Orientalizing” that began to reach the New World colonies as early as the 1500s deeply embedded race-based prejudice toward Middle Easterners in American culture. Though elements of the older images of an “exotic” or “backward” Orient remain, by the latter part of the twentieth century, the American popular imaginary more commonly depicted a “dangerous” Middle East. The shift in cultural representations of the Middle East from primarily “mysterious” and “atavistic” to predominantly “threatening” is a fascinating and complex topic. Melani McAlister, in her treatment of post–World War II Orientalism, identifies the 1967 war between the state of Israel and several Arab nations as a crucial turning point.7 The representation of this war as the “Six Day War,” where Israel swiftly defeated the armies of Egypt, Jordan, and Syria, helped propel in America the image of a fanatical and dangerous Middle East where “the Arabs” would shoot first and ask questions later. The popularity of this idea portended the culturally resonant “clash of civilizations” thesis, which placed the West and its allies (including Israel) against a dangerous and uniquely violent Middle East. By the end of the 1900s, this kind of thinking dominated the already racialized American discourse about people from the Middle East. Around this time, Edward Said, Nadine Naber, and other scholars noted that it was quite acceptable in polite company to make blatantly ignorant, bigoted statements about Arabs and Muslims.8 Because of rhetoric like this, the terms “Middle Eastern,” “Arab,” and “Muslim” today all refer to basically the same ascribed racial identity. And, of course, this same Middle Eastern racial category has ascribed Sikhs and South Asians as well.9

Cultural Islamophobia before 2001

Depictions of dangerous Middle Easterners, prominent in American popular culture by the late 1960s, was supplemented with racialized representations of treacherous “oil sheiks” during the oil crisis in the 1970s. This image appeared frequently during the “oil shock” caused by the Organization of Arab Petroleum Exporting Countries declaring an embargo to protest American involvement in the 1973 war between Israel and its Arab neighbors. An oft-repeated, racially fraught image of the duplicitous Arab served as a scapegoat for Americans upset by economic recession and high gasoline prices. Blatantly racist images of these swarthy, hook-nosed “oil sheiks” appeared in countless editorial cartoons and films in the 1970s and early 1980s.10 This “oil sheik” image was so ubiquitous that the FBI used it to set up a “sting operation” aimed at corrupt members of Congress. A trap was set by assigning covert Italian American agents, with ostensibly convincing Middle Eastern appearances, to pose as wealthy oil executives (“oil sheiks”) from Lebanon and other Arab countries.11 These undercover agents sometimes used disguises to enhance their “Middle Eastern look,” and the ruse worked. Several elected officials believed that these wealthy and duplicitous “oil sheiks” would pay bribes in exchange for political favors. This led to criminal convictions against a United States Senator and various other public officials. The FBI referred to the operation as ABSCAM, short for “Arab Scam.”12 This dramatic operation served as the central plot device in a big-budget 2013 Hollywood film, a period drama set in the early 1980s, American Hustle.13 The impact of the FBI lending legitimacy to the stereotypes about Arabs caused significant harm, although there has been little public outcry about questionable FBI sting operations using Middle Eastern stereotypes, before or since.14

Another crucial moment in the development of the “dangerous Middle Easterner” stereotype came during the 1979 Iran Hostage Crisis.15 The American embassy in Tehran was seized by gun-toting revolutionaries who then held the embassy staff hostage for fourteen months. Television news showed these Islamic revolutionaries on a daily basis. It is difficult to overstate how much this national crisis contributed to the shift away from the Middle Eastern “oil sheik” stereotype toward the “terrorist” stereotype. Indeed, the word “terrorist” would become fully synonymous with Middle Easterners by the mid-1980s. Several horrific terrorist attacks in this era contributed to the burgeoning stereotype, including the destruction of the American embassy and a Marine barracks in Lebanon, the bombing of Pan Am Flight 103 by two Libyan citizens, multiple deadly attacks carried out by Hezbollah, the hijacking of an American cruise ship by the Palestinian Liberation Front, and many more examples. Of course, terrorist attacks were carried out by all kinds of militants throughout the 1970s and 1980s, but attacks by Middle Easterners attracted perhaps the most sustained attention in the United States.

It is important to emphasize that in the 1980s, the stereotypical image of a terrorist was not applied exclusively to Muslims. Instead, this blanket stereotype attached to multiple communities that were racialized in the Middle Eastern category, especially Arab Americans and Sikh Americans. In 1984, the Indian government carried out a military crackdown against Sikh militants and later that year, Prime Minister Indira Gandhi was assassinated by two of her Sikh bodyguards, partly in retaliation for the Indian Army’s assault on the Golden Temple. In American discourse, these and other events were wrapped up with existing portrayals of Middle Eastern terrorism and violence, and South Asian Americans, particularly Sikhs, became thoroughly enmeshed into the racialized category of “Middle Eastern terrorists.”18 At the time, Indian government officials explicitly labeled Sikhs as “terrorists” to rally international support for their efforts to suppress the Sikh independence movement.19 The American reaction to the violence in India again illustrates the racialized erasure of distinctions between Arabs and South Asians—and especially the racialized conflation between people of the Sikh and Muslim faiths.

By the mid-1990s, the conflation of “terrorist” with “Middle Eastern” was so pervasive that when a 1995 terror attack destroyed the Murrah Federal Building in Oklahoma City, many professional analysts, investigators, and journalists immediately assumed that the attack must have been carried out “by Arabs.”20 In reality, the perpetrators were White, Christian, and American.

The presumption that all terrorists are Middle Eastern dominated the news cycle again in 1996 when a Boeing 747 jumbo passenger jet—TWA Flight 800—exploded shortly after takeoff from New York’s John F. Kennedy airport. Investigators and the media immediately began working under the assumption that terrorists from the Middle East brought down the jet. The New York Times ran an article under the headline “Investigators Focus Closely on Terrorism as Cause of Explosion,” and it reported that a surface-to-air missile strike or a bomb were leading theories as to the cause of the disaster. The article noted that shoulder-fired Stinger missiles were “readily available in the Mideast,” leaving unstated the assumption that any terrorists who would fire such missiles must have come from that region.21 Time reported that the FBI and CIA asked their international counterparts in the Middle East to report any leads in regards to which terrorist group might be responsible for the loss of TWA Flight 800.22 Eventually, the investigation revealed that there was no way a missile or bomb could have been responsible for the accident. Investigators pinpointed a design flaw with electrical wires positioned near the aircraft’s fuel tank that caused a spark and the catastrophic explosion.

These examples illustrate that, by the end of the 1900s, the popular American conception of terrorism was linked deeply with the racial category of Middle Easterners, a group that included not only Arabs or Muslims but anyone who “looked Middle Eastern.” This popular discourse assumed that the culture and people of the Middle East were somehow predisposed to terrorist violence. This essentialist thinking impacted Arabs, Muslims, Sikhs, and South Asians as a racist trope under which physical appearance became a crude marker of identity and an anchor for fear-inducing prejudices.

Islamophobia after 2001

The attacks of 9/11 profoundly exacerbated these racial dynamics. Within hours of the terrorist attacks, Osama bin Laden and his notorious al-Qaeda network were deemed responsible by officials and the press. A spike in reported hate crimes and discrimination against Middle Eastern Americans soon followed. Concern about “backlash” hate crimes brought the problem of Islamophobia into mainstream public discourse. President Bush and many other political leaders repeatedly emphasized that Islam and Muslims were not America’s enemy, and that the nineteen 9/11 attackers did not represent Islam. On September 17, 2001, the President went to the Islamic Center of Washington, DC, and said, “The face of terror is not the true faith of Islam. That’s not what Islam is all about. Islam is peace. These terrorists don’t represent peace. They represent evil and war.”23 Despite Bush’s persistent efforts, commentators who placed the blame for 9/11 squarely on Muslims and the religion of Islam found a large, receptive audience in the ensuing months and years.

Many held out hope that the initial spike in Islamophobia after 9/11 would give way to a return to normal, that the “backlash” would recede as memories of the attacks faded. Hate crimes occurred with frightening frequency in the months immediately following 9/11, ranging in severity—from insults shouted at people walking by, to vandalism of private homes and places of worship, to violent crimes like bullying in schools, assault, and murder. The American-Arab Anti-Discrimination Committee (ADC) received reports of more than seven hundred violent hate crimes, including several murders, in the first nine weeks after 9/11 alone.24

FBI statistics recorded a sharp decline in hate crimes after those initial nine weeks.25 However, official FBI numbers notoriously undercount the actual number of hate crimes. It is therefore difficult to quantify exactly how many Islamophobic hate crimes occurred. The FBI statistics only capture those crimes actually reported to law enforcement. Even worse, before 2014, the FBI did not have separate categories for anti-Arab and anti-Sikh hate crimes, meaning that such crimes may have been counted as “anti-Other” or “anti-White,” or even “anti-Muslim,” depending on how the initial report was collected. Separate from the FBI numbers, many advocacy organizations (like ADC) keep a count of hate crimes reported to them, but those numbers have flaws as well. Despite these imperfections, both FBI statistics and reports to advocacy organizations support the conclusion that since 2002, there have been a persistently high number of hate crimes affecting Middle Eastern Americans—at least one hundred reports per year, compared to fewer than fifty per year before 9/11.

Some of the worst of these hate crimes include the murders of Middle Eastern Americans like Balbir Singh Sodhi and Sunando Sen, the massacre at the Sikh Temple of Wisconsin in 2012, and hundreds of acts of vandalism at private homes and at places of worship like mosques and gurdwaras. For example, in 2015, just days after the shocking murder of three young Muslim Americans in Chapel Hill, a swastika was painted on a Hindu temple, and a nearby school was tagged with the words, “Muslims get out.”26 There have been scores of racially motivated assaults on shopkeepers, taxi cab drivers, and people simply walking down the street. To take just one example, in September 2015, a Sikh American man in Chicago was brutally assaulted by a man who allegedly shouted, “Bin Laden! Go back to your country!”27 Meanwhile, some bigots have taken to declaring their places of business as “Muslim-free zones,” meaning they refuse to provide equal accommodation to Middle Eastern Americans.28 Stories about Islamophobic hate crimes like these appear in the press on an almost weekly basis. The racial element of these crimes is usually readily apparent. Because the victims “looked Muslim,” they were vulnerable to these hate crimes. Unfortunately, the hope that Islamophobia would fade away after a temporary post-9/11 moment proved unfounded. A great deal of Islamophobic discrimination has persisted for more than fifteen years after 9/11.

Apart from frequent hate crimes, Islamophobic employment discrimination has remained a chronic issue as well. Middle Eastern American workers from all sectors of the economy have reported that their employers failed to provide reasonable accommodation for religious and cultural practices. Advocacy organizations provided legal counsel in hundreds of workplace discrimination cases related to Islamophobia after employers unlawfully fired, refused to hire, or failed to accommodate employees properly with regard to their religious or ethnic background. Reports of discrimination against people who “look Middle Eastern” increased to such an extent following the 9/11 attacks that the US Equal Employment Opportunity Commission (EEOC) published a document specifically regarding “individuals who are or are perceived to be Muslim, Arab, South Asian, or Sikh.” According to this document, complaints of discrimination by members of the groups on this list—a list explained only by the common Middle Eastern American racial category—saw “a significant increase.”29 Despite a concerted effort by advocates and government agencies to curtail this kind of discrimination after September 11, 2001, EEOC statistics show that employment discrimination claims continued to increase; these claims accounted for nearly 15% of all workplace discrimination charges filed in the United States between 2001 and 2006.30

To sum up, Islamophobia runs through American culture in myriad ways. Here, I reviewed some of the most troubling hate crimes (violent and otherwise), a few examples of stereotypical representations in various forms of media (including the news media and popular television and film), and the seemingly intractable problem of employment discrimination that frequently affects Middle Eastern Americans. There are many other aspects of Islamophobia in American culture that deserve more attention than I can provide in the limited space available here. For now, let us turn to look at expressions of Islamophobia in American politics.

Islamophobia in American Politics

Before the 9/11 attacks, strains of Orientalism pervaded American foreign policy, and from time to time, elected leaders made outbursts that explicitly demeaned Middle Eastern Americans. After 9/11, however, Islamophobic rhetoric became a prominent feature at all levels of mainstream American politics, from local city council races to campaigns for President of the United States. In recent years, a well-funded industry of political professionals has helped to promote Islamophobic ideas in the American political sphere. Beginning in the early part of the 2000s, American politicians seemingly could not resist the temptation to use blatant Islamophobia to gain perceived electoral advantages. In other words, making Islamophobic statements was seen as a winning campaign strategy. This was more than just campaign rhetoric. It was also reflected in policy.

In the debate over “post-9/11” counterterrorism and security policy, for example, some public officials aggressively advocated for law enforcement to target Muslims for surveillance under the spurious and bigoted reasoning that Muslims are more likely to commit terrorist attacks. I discuss the impacts of Islamophobia on policies and programs later, after first focusing on the persistent hateful rhetoric in political speech and electoral campaigns.

Much Islamophobic campaign rhetoric, notably, treated Islamophobia as a “wedge issue.” Often without providing any specific critique of Islam, and without promoting any particular policy, many politicians used bigoted Islamophobic rhetoric to deride their opponents as weak, to instill fear about dangerous immigrants, and to distract attention away from other issues. In this way, Islamophobia was used to generate support for candidacies and political priorities that often had nothing to do with terrorism, or Muslims. This tried-and-true political strategy to use Islamophobia as a “wedge” served as a tool to rile up the base, to drive erstwhile supporters back into the fold, and to keep attention away from potential weaknesses.

Sitting just under the surface of these efforts was a decade-long multi-million-dollar campaign that promoted using Islamophobia as a tactic throughout American politics.31 Wealthy individuals and conservative political foundations provided some $40 million over a ten-year period to self-proclaimed “Islam experts” to travel around the United States endorsing “model legislation” to trump up Islamophobic ideas. These so-called experts produced research reports, created propaganda “documentary” films, and appeared on television news programs to promote their ideas and describe the dangers posed by Islam. In 2008, these Islamophobic activists began promulgating legislation to “ban” the Islamic canonical law, or Sharia. By 2016, seven states passed these “Sharia bans,” and additional bills had been introduced in more than half of all state legislatures and in the US Congress that sought to somehow “protect America” from the nonexistent threat of Sharia. Virtually every bill proposed in all of the different legislatures used identical language designed by this network of Islamophobia activists.32 The chief architect of the anti-Sharia bills, David Yerushalmi, admitted that the purpose of these bills was “heuristic,” meaning that they would succeed not by actually banning Sharia law, but instead the process of enacting these bills would generate suspicion about Middle Eastern Americans.33 The point of the anti-Sharia effort was to stoke suspicion, to use Islamophobia as a wedge issue.

These efforts to fuel suspicion about Middle Eastern Americans have been met with remarkable success. Consider that at least fifty-three proposed mosques and Islamic centers around the United States faced resistance in their efforts to build or expand their services between 2006 and 2012, with an especially significant increase in opposition after 2009.34 But perhaps the most visible impact of the well-funded Islamophobia campaign was not generating policy changes or swaying the opinions of the American public, but rather the incredible frequency with which blatantly Islamophobic statements came from prominent elected political leaders, including members of Congress and the President of the United States.

Mainstream American political leaders, from President George W. Bush to New York City Mayor Rudolph Giuliani and many others, warned often about the dangers of “Islamo-facism” at home and abroad, despite a lack of evidence of a unique threat from the Middle East.35 Terrorism perpetrated by Muslim Americans accounted for a tiny fraction—less than 1%—of violent deaths in the US for more than a decade after September 11, 2001, representing what one analyst called a “miniscule threat to public safety.”36

In fact, the deadliest terrorists in American history have been American-born radical Christians, such as the perpetrators of the bombing of the Murrah building in Oklahoma City or members of the Ku Klux Klan and similar White supremacist organizations that carried out countless massacres throughout the twentieth century. Examples of this kind of racist terrorism abound: church arson, murderous attacks at family planning clinics, vigilante border policing, and many other hate crimes.37 However, many mass shootings and other violent acts carried out by non-Middle Eastern Americans routinely are not discussed as “terrorist attacks,” as I discuss in detail later in this chapter.

Attacks carried out by Middle Eastern Americans, on the other hand, are commonly recognized as terrorist attacks by law enforcement, political leaders, and the media. Perhaps this is because White, American-born terrorists did not constitute the kind of visible threat from outsiders that American politicians could use to energize voters to support “war on terrorism” policies. By contrast, the stereotypical image of the Middle Eastern terrorist provides tremendous political purchase. Even though it proved both reckless and immoral, many American politicians have seen it fit to intentionally fan the flames of Islamophobia.

The advocacy organization South Asian Americans Leading Together (SAALT) found that “xenophobic and racist images and language” in political rhetoric affecting “South Asians, Muslims, Sikhs, and Arab Americans” occurred with “unprecedented frequency” after 9/11.38 SAALT collected dozens of examples of political leaders using language that portrayed these communities as a threat to national security. For example, in 2006, US Senator Conrad Burns said that the United States is up against “a faceless enemy” of terrorists who “drive taxicabs in the daytime and kill at night.”39 Along the same lines, James Inhofe, also a US Senator, stated during a 2010 committee hearing: “All terrorists are Muslims or Middle Easterners between the age of twenty and thirty-five, that’s by and large true.”40 In 2012, presidential candidate Herman Cain said that he would require a loyalty oath from any Muslims serving in his administration, explaining that “there is a greater dangerous part of the Muslim faith than there is in any of these other religions.”41

SAALT’s research also documented several instances where Middle Eastern American public officials and candidates for political office faced xenophobic attacks during campaigns. Candidates were called epithets like “raghead” and “turban topper” by their opponents and political pundits. Some faced accusations that they were “supported by Hamas” or other militant organizations. One city council candidate in Florida even suggested that if his South Asian opponent won the city council seat, terrorism would be the result, stating: “As far as I know, he could be a nice guy, but these kind of people get embedded over here. . . . You remember 9/11.”42

In the early 2000s, rhetoric that intentionally used Islamophobia when discussing terrorist attacks became a hallmark of American political speech. Routinely, candidates for high office encouraged voters to elect a candidate who is “tough” on terrorism and not beholden to “political correctness”—in other words, willing to make blatantly Islamophobic statements. Beginning in 2007, Islamophobic rhetoric was specifically targeted at then-Senator Barack Obama, as he ran as a Democratic candidate for president. In 2007, the Fox News Channel aired a story claiming to show evidence that Obama was educated at a “radical Muslim madrassa.”43 In 2008, Republican vice presidential nominee and Alaska Governor Sarah Palin accused Obama of “palling around with terrorists.”44 This rhetoric was so effective that during the 2008 campaign, 13% of the American public incorrectly believed that Obama was, somehow, secretly a Muslim.45 Even during his 2012 campaign for reelection, 17% of registered voters believed Obama was Muslim, even though the president was Christian.46 The implication was that Obama’s stance on terrorism would not be tough enough, or worse, that his candidacy represented an incredible conspiracy by Muslim radicals to seize control of the American military. Throughout his presidency, Obama, the first African American to win a major party’s nomination for President (and, of course, election and reelection), faced persistent rumors and conspiracy theories that suggested he was Muslim and not an American citizen, even after the White House produced his birth certificate and pointed out contemporaneous birth announcements from Hawai’i.

As the Obama campaign dealt with these ridiculous and racist rumors, the 2008 Republican presidential primary campaign featured several outlandish, extreme claims based on Islamophobia. Republican presidential candidate and Congressman Tom Tancredo stated that he believed Middle Eastern terrorists were plotting to detonate a nuclear bomb inside an American city. He assured voters that, as president, he would deter such an attack by threatening Islamic religious sites: “If it is up to me, we are going to explain that an attack on this homeland of that nature would be followed by an attack on the holy sites in Mecca and Medina.”47 Since 2004, every presidential election has featured this kind of grandstanding by candidates, with many posturing to espouse the most outwardly “tough” stances toward stopping Middle Eastern terrorism. This race to the bottom of the Islamophobic gutter led to the rise of offensive statements about Muslims, including those made by Donald J. Trump and other candidates for the Republican presidential nomination in 2016. After the horrific deadly shooting at an LGBT nightclub in Orlando, Trump doubled down on his previous calls to “ban Muslims,” by proposing to ban immigration from any country with a “proven history of terrorism.”48 Even though the perpetrator was not an immigrant, Trump and other Republican leaders sought to link the Orlando massacre to national policies on immigration and security by appealing to Islamophobia.

Indeed, candidates standing for nomination to become President of the United States seemingly felt a need to prove that they held Islamophobic beliefs about the “enemy,” the supposedly single greatest source of terrorism. During the 2016 campaign season, many critics of the Obama administration claimed that the President had failed to protect America from the threat of terrorism, in part because he was not Islamophobic enough. Senator Ted Cruz, for example, repeatedly criticized Obama for failing to “name the enemy—radical Islamic terrorism.”49 Because President Obama refused to say that the Muslim faith contributes to terrorism, Cruz and others contended that he could not be trusted to defend America.

Political rhetoric based on Islamophobia goes beyond mere conspiracy theories and shameful pandering to voters. The racialized caricature of “radical Islamists” and “Islamo-fascism” mainly serve to legitimize and expand discriminatory state policies and practices.

Islamophobia in American Policy

After the fall of the Soviet Union in the late 1980s, numerous prominent policymakers and pundits shifted attention to the supposed threat posed by the “Muslim world” in ways that would replace the Soviets as the chief antagonist of the United States.50 The groundwork in the late 1900s set the stage for the sweeping response to the 9/11 attacks, which saw law enforcement, intelligence agencies, and the military act aggressively in an effort to prevent another attack. Much of what would become known as the “War on Terror” resulted in policies and programs that had disparate impacts on Middle Eastern Americans.

Obviously, the government has a duty to prevent terrorist attacks. The law enforcement officers, intelligence analysts, and other officials who do the painstaking work of counterterrorism have no doubt saved many lives, and few would disagree that their work is of critical importance. Nevertheless, the imperative to improve security and prevent terrorist attacks does not provide any reason to discriminate against Middle Eastern Americans. Evidence (and, indeed, common sense) has repeatedly shown that there is no racial, ethnic, religious, or national group that is more likely to carry out violent attacks than any other. The legitimate threat posed by terrorism cannot be used to justify discriminatory policies, but unfortunately that is precisely what has taken place over the past several decades.

The War on Terror

The term “War on Terror” was not coined until 2001, when a massive shift to focus on counterterrorism across law enforcement and the military was described by President George W. Bush on September 20 in a speech to Congress.51 But the policies that supported the War on Terror began coalescing many years earlier. As early as the 1970s, federal agencies crafted policies meant to curb terrorism that were aimed directly at Middle Eastern Americans.

The fundamental tactics of surveillance and disruption programs employed by the government that disproportionately target Middle Eastern Americans were developed even earlier, in the 1950s and 1960s. In those two decades, the Department of Justice (DOJ) undertook what came to be known as the Counterintelligence Program, or COINTELPRO, to actively undermine the work of all sorts of advocacy organizations. The program, specifically authorized by FBI Director J. Edgar Hoover in 1956, began as an attempt to expose communist (and Soviet) sympathizers, and it quickly escalated into a program that actively undermined all sorts of “New Left” political advocacy.52 In addition to surveillance, the FBI planted agents provocateurs to stoke factionalism and entrap advocates into committing illegal acts. In 1976, a Congressional investigation (popularly known as the Church Committee) declared COINTELPRO “intolerable in a democratic society.”53 Even after this stinging indictment, many of the tactics developed in COINTELPRO nevertheless continued, kept alive in several federal programs that remain active today.

COINTELPRO’s influence was apparent in “Operation Boulder,” which began in the summer of 1972. For this clandestine program, the White House directed the FBI to target Arab American advocacy organizations and Arab American individuals nationwide. As specifically authorized by President Richard Nixon, federal agencies conducted wide-ranging surveillance and recordkeeping on all “‘ethnic Arabs,’ defined as all persons of Arab parentage or ancestry.”54 Immigration and customs authorities undertook special screening of Arab visitors and immigrants. Over a period of several years, the FBI interrogated many Arab American advocates and even wiretapped the telephone conversations of the president of the Association of Arab American University Graduates (AAUG), a leading advocacy organization. The program required a special screening for all nonimmigrant Arabs, such as those with student or tourist visas. Operation Boulder’s apparent objective, begun in the wake of the shocking murder of Israeli athletes at the Munich Olympic Games by Palestinian extremists, was to find and monitor any organization in the United States that might sympathize with Palestinian nationalism.55

In the 1980s, paranoia about the possibility of Arab American-led terrorism reached such heights that President Ronald Reagan’s Department of Justice even considered creating an internment camp to house “alien undesirables” while they awaited deportation.56 One DOJ document from 1986, “Alien Terrorists and Undesirables: A Contingency Plan,” estimated the total number of Arab American students currently in the US, suggesting that the FBI might round them all up as detainees. The DOJ listed “certain countries, all Arab, as being likely origins of terrorist aliens.”57 The plan had developed far enough to designate a proposed detention camp site in rural Louisiana. Fortunately, the plan was never put into action.

Arab American communities in the 1980s confronted an atmosphere of increasing “counter-terrorism” efforts directed toward them. Perhaps the most infamous example for Arab Americans came with the case of the “Los Angeles Eight.” Eight political activists, seven of them Palestinian and one Kenyan, were placed under surveillance by the FBI for three years beginning in 1987, ostensibly to prevent a terrorist attack. During this time, the FBI found them distributing Palestinian magazines, yet did not observe them engaged in any illegal or dangerous activities. Nevertheless, the FBI worked with authorities from the Immigration and Naturalization Service (INS) to find grounds to deport them. Shortly thereafter, in 1987, the eight were arrested and charged with various violations of immigration law. INS sought to have them deported on the grounds that they were fundraising for an organization considered under American law to be illegal due to communist and terrorist ties, namely the Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine. Deportation hearings kept the activists in legal limbo for years, but they were never deported. After 2001, the Bush administration kept the case alive, using new “War on Terror” powers to further the case for the deportation of the activists.58 Finally, in 2007, twenty years after their ordeal began, an immigration judge working on a case involving two of the eight activists said that the whole ordeal was “an embarrassment to the rule of law.” The Department of Homeland Security later that year finally dropped the prosecution of the remaining members of the “LA 8.”59

Meanwhile in the 1990s, the implicit assumption that “Arabs” posed a unique threat to the United States set into place the legal and policy framework that would directly inform the response to the terrorist attacks on 9/11. In 1991, during the Gulf War, FBI agents fanned out across the country, interviewing various “business and community leaders of Arab descent in the United States.”60 This was supposedly an effort to find “Iraqi-supported terrorists.” Later, the 1996 Antiterrorism and Effective Death Penalty Act made sweeping changes to immigration policy, and gave the federal government the power to officially designate any entity as a “terrorist” organization. That designation subjected the “terrorist” organization to sanctions and prohibited Americans from providing support to it. The policy also allowed for “secret evidence” to serve as the basis for deportation proceedings, allowing the government to withhold that evidence even from lawful permanent residents facing deportation. The vast majority of cases where these powers were invoked involved Middle Eastern or Middle Eastern American organizations and individuals.61

Building on the framework of twentieth-century surveillance and counterterrorism strategies, shortly after the 9/11 attacks, a plethora of discriminatory policies and programs emerged. The initial wave of discrimination developed during the official investigation into how the 9/11 attacks occurred. The declaration of a “state of national emergency” made on September 14, 2001 granted new powers that spread the influence of this discrimination further, and these privileges were significantly expanded by the rapid and near-unanimous passage of the USA Patriot Act in October of that same year. The Patriot Act gave law enforcement a wide range of new authorities in the areas of surveillance, border patrols, and financial interdiction. It was renewed with little debate in 2005. Many provisions of the renewed Patriot Act expired briefly in 2015, but after just one day, the new USA Freedom Act extended most of the counterterrorism provisions until 2019. The powers granted to intelligence and law enforcement agencies under these laws led to an unprecedented expansion of the so-called security state. Some of the programs developed by these agencies, in keeping with history stretching back to the 1970s, were conducted in ways that blatantly discriminated against Middle Eastern Americans. Most of these actions were taken under the false, bigoted assumption that future terrorists would most likely emerge from Middle Eastern American communities.

The sweeping abuse of the new authorities of the “War on Terror” began within days of the 9/11 attacks. As part of the official investigation into those attacks, a roundup conducted by the Department of Justice (DOJ) and the Immigration and Naturalization Service (INS) took into custody at least twelve hundred people by October 2001. Almost all of these detainees were Arab and Muslim immigrants.62 Various agencies detained these people on “material witness” and immigration charges. Many of those detained became known as the “Disappeared,” because they would suddenly vanish from their homes after nighttime raids by the authorities.63 Later in 2001, the Attorney General of the United States directed local law enforcement agencies around the country to conduct “voluntary” interviews with some five thousand people in predominantly Middle Eastern American neighborhoods.64 Around this time, federal agencies launched the Terrorism Information and Prevention System, or Operation TIPS. This initiative encouraged American citizens to report any and all suspicious terrorist activity, and predictably, it resulted in a plethora of unjustified intrusions into the lives of Middle Eastern Americans. One such intrusion happened in Connecticut in November 2001, when the police received a report that two “Arabs” were talking about anthrax. In fact, the two men were Pakistani, and they were arrested at a gas station along with an Indian man and another Pakistani man who just happened to be at the gas station at the same time. One of the men, Ayazuddin Sheerazi, was detained for eighteen days.65 Although Operation TIPS was cancelled in 2002, elements of it lived on in the form of “see something, say something” policies still active in public facilities across the country, and in the controversial Terrorism Liaison Officer program.66 All of these policies—each resulting in the unfair targeting of Middle Eastern American communities—are rationalized as emergency efforts necessary to protect national security during an apparently unending time of crisis. Taken together, these policies (and others) resulted in fear and displacement—and a curtailment of basic civil rights and citizenship rights—for Middle Eastern Americans.

In the months after 9/11, federal agencies began to curate a “no-fly list,” which barred certain individuals from boarding airplanes traveling to or from the United States. As the list continued to grow for more than a decade, with no due process or even notification given to those placed on it, evidence suggested that it contained a disproportionate number of Middle Eastern names.67 The first successful complainant to have her name removed from the “no-fly list” was Professor Rahinah Ibrahim, an academic who lived in California. Her lawsuit in 2008 was ultimately successful, after the government admitted that an FBI agent had simply checked the wrong box on some paperwork, which led to Professor Ibrahim being inadvertently placed on the “no-fly list” and subject to loss of her rights. Despite this minor clerical error, the government vigorously fought the lawsuit for more than five years, presumably to avoid setting a precedent. Professor Ibrahim’s name was finally removed from the “no-fly list” in 2014.68 Despite constant complaints that the “no-fly list” violates basic civil rights, it and similar “watch lists” continue to remain in place indefinitely.

In addition to “watch lists” that ostensibly only affect specific individuals and not entire communities, other discriminatory programs simply affect all immigrants and travelers from Muslim-majority countries. In 2002, the INS instituted special immigration requirements that applied only to people from Muslim-majority nations and North Korea, requiring them to check into local immigration offices for photographs and fingerprinting, along with other “special registration” protocols.69 This blatantly discriminatory program, known as the National Security Entry-Exit Registration System, continued until 2011, at which time similar biometric security measures became standard for all visitors to the United States, not just those from Muslim-majority nations.

Apart from these efforts at the border and around airports, federal agencies have found some remarkably creative ways to discriminate against Middle Eastern Americans. Beginning in 2002, the FBI and the Department of Energy conducted secret monitoring of mosques and private homes belonging to Muslim Americans in a paranoid search for hidden nuclear weapons. They found nothing of interest.70 Later, in 2009, according to their own documents, the FBI undertook special efforts to collect as much information as possible on the “Middle Eastern and Muslim population” in Michigan under the reasoning that the relatively large size of those communities made the state “prime territory for attempted radicalization and recruitment.”71 A similar program was revealed in 2012, where the FBI used “mosque outreach” programs—intended to create an atmosphere of trust and sharing between the FBI and Muslim American communities—to conduct illicit surveillance of attendees.72

In the midst of all these other programs, from 2001 through 2010, Muslim American charities also came under heavy government scrutiny, which had a chilling effect on philanthropic and political donations.73 Rather than focus investigations on the activity of the charities’ managers, to see whether they clandestinely funneled money to illegal or terrorist groups, federal investigators looked at the donor lists as well. Many people who made good-faith donations to these charities reasonably worried that their names had been added to a terrorist watch list. The ACLU accused the government of violating the religious freedom of Muslim Americans, for whom giving to charity is a central tenet of faith.

Even when the laws explicitly limited government power to prevent violating constitutional protections and civil liberties, the Bush and Obama administrations ignored those restrictions to conduct blanket, dragnet surveillance. In 2005, the New York Times reported the existence of a clandestine program, known internally as the “President’s Program,” an illegal monitoring system through which various US intelligence agencies surveilled the telephone conversations and emails of ordinary Americans.74 This program went beyond even the expansive authorities given to the intelligence agencies by the Patriot Act. When knowledge of these secret spying programs were revealed, President Bush assured the public that only “terrorist cells” were targeted for scrutiny.75 In 2008, the “President’s Program” received retroactive legal approval in the form of the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act (FISA) Amendments Act, which created a secret court tasked with approving surveillance requests from the government. According to classified documents leaked by former National Security Agency (NSA) contract employee Edward Snowden in 2013, intelligence services again went beyond the limits in that law, circumventing the the FISA Amendments Act and the Patriot Act as they systematically collected vast amounts of communications data.76 Defending the controversial programs, President Obama claimed that they were needed to prevent terrorism while insisting that “America is not interested in spying on ordinary people.”77 In their justifications for these programs, both Presidents Bush and Obama relied upon the popular image of terrorists as visible outsiders, as “others.” By saying that “ordinary people” would not be targeted, but “only terrorist cells,” Bush and Obama effectively used a political “dog whistle” to reinforce the predominant, false belief that “terrorists” do not come from the ranks of “ordinary” Americans but instead originate from an easily recognizable group of outsiders.

This rhetoric tracks precisely how the counterterrorism policies and programs work in practice. Despite evidence to the contrary, Middle Eastern Americans are believed to be the primary sources of terrorism, and therefore those communities need to be watched the most closely by the authorities. A recent analysis of confidential government documents found that Dearborn, Michigan—a small suburb of Detroit (population 96,000) that includes a relatively large proportion of Middle Eastern American families—is second only to New York City in the concentration of “known or suspected” terrorists on federal watch lists.78 This analysis, like many others, definitively shows the implicit and explicit reliance on stereotypes about Muslims and Middle Easterners as dangerous outsiders active in the production of counterterrorism policies and practices.

Discriminatory Surveillance

This presumption that Middle Easterners are the sole source of the terrorism threat pervades American counterterrorism efforts at all levels. Following in the footsteps of federal agencies, the nation’s largest municipal police force, the New York Police Department (NYPD), built a massive counterterrorism operation targeted directly at Middle Eastern Americans.

An investigative report from the Associated Press (AP) revealed that, beginning in 2002, the NYPD ran a clandestine program systematically targeting Muslim Americans for surveillance.79 Known as the “Demographics Unit,” a secret counterterrorism task force sent teams of undercover police officers into neighborhoods with large numbers of Muslim inhabitants. These undercover “rakers” kept records of mundane daily life at those cafes, restaurants, and bookstores where Muslims congregated. The dragnet conducted background checks on people who had legally changed their names to (or from) Muslim or Arabic-sounding ones.80 Undercover counterterrorism officers even spied on the NYPD’s own counterterrorism allies from the Muslim community, going so far as to assign agents to monitor Shaykh Reda Shata, who was a leading supporter of FBI and police counterterrorism efforts.81 The NYPD even extended its surveillance activities to Muslim student organizations at Yale University, the University of Pennsylvania, and Rutgers University, all of which are located outside New York.82

According to hundreds of internal documents reviewed by the AP, devout Muslims were specifically targeted, apparently stemming from the bigoted belief that more religious Muslims are more likely to be dangerous. The AP noted that one Bangladeshi restaurant was “identified as a hot spot for having a ‘devout crowd’ . . . [and] was noted for being a ‘popular meeting location for political activities.’”83

By its own admission, the NYPD’s “Demographics Unit” produced no leads and no arrests in a terrorism-related case.84 Multiple civil rights organizations called for an independent investigation of this program, and in 2013, the New York City Council passed an ordinance to require increased oversight for the NYPD over Mayor Michael Bloomberg’s veto.85 Finally, in 2014, the program was suspended after newly elected Mayor Bill de Blasio replaced the police commissioner. In 2016, the NYPD attempted to resolve before trial a lawsuit filed on behalf of Muslim Americans affected by this program, in which the department agreed to new limits on their surveillance powers.86

The NYPD was not the only large law enforcement agency to discriminate against Muslims and Middle Eastern Americans in its counterterrorism efforts. The FBI had an agent training program that included patently offensive materials falsely asserting that devout Muslims are likely to become terrorists.87 One image from a slideshow used during FBI counterterrorism training is reproduced in figure 3.1. The crudely illustrated image purports to show how Christians and Jews became more “nonviolent” over time from 1400 BCE through 2010, while Muslims conversely stopped developing in 622 and have remained “violent.” Shortly after Wired published internal FBI documents describing wildly inaccurate and patently offensive instructional materials like this image, the bureau began a “comprehensive review” of all of its reference material pertaining to religion and culture.88 A few months later, the FBI asked the Army’s Combating Terrorism Center at West Point to send experts to conduct a purge of any inappropriate training materials.89 These bigoted training materials might have had a profound effect, because the FBI dedicated a huge amount of resources into creating a massive network of informants dedicated to spying on Middle Eastern American communities across the United States.

The FBI’s program of conducting counterterrorism investigations where an informant “discovers” a terrorist plot and then FBI agents make a dramatic arrest, clearly resembles police entrapment. Trevor Aaronson provides an example of this pattern in his investigation of the case of Muhammad Hussain, a troubled young man from Baltimore. Born Antonio Martinez, he spent much of his youth “angry and lost” as a small-time thief. He converted to Islam and took a new name. Eventually, he began expressing his anger on Facebook, and he “drifted toward a violent, extremist brand of Islam.”90 If he had been White and Christian, he might have been referred to counseling. But the FBI was carefully watching Facebook for expressions of violence associated with Islam. On December 7, 2010, Hussain was befriended by a man pretending to be a hardened terrorist from Afghanistan, and he was ready with a violent mission for the troubled young man. In reality, this “hardened terrorist” was a paid FBI informant. Together, Hussain and the undercover FBI agent developed a plot to detonate a bomb in a car outside an Armed Forces Career Center. The plan and the bomb were fake, and Hussain was taken into custody minutes after he pushed a button that he thought would cause a massive explosion. No one was actually harmed.

Suddenly, FBI agents rushed in and arrested the man they’d later identify in court records as “Antonio Martinez a/k/a Muhammad Hussain.” Federal prosecutors in Maryland charged Martinez with attempted murder of federal officers and attempted use of a weapon of mass destruction. He faced at least thirty-five years in prison if convicted at trial.91

Hussain first claimed entrapment but eventually pleaded guilty to the weapon of mass destruction charge and was sent to prison for twenty-five years. The DOJ heralded the FBI’s success in this case, saying, “We are catching dangerous suspects before they strike.”92 Hussain’s picture appeared widely in national media reports showing that a young, brown, Muslim man was caught just before he could detonate a deadly bomb at a military recruiting center. Almost none of these news reports mentioned that this terrorist attack was not genuinely planned, but rather it was staged by the FBI. Media reports like this one, which frequently appear whenever the FBI completes a counterterrorism “sting,” amplify the racial project represented by this discrimination. Photographs of the accused terrorists, almost always young, Middle Eastern men, closely associated with terrorism, appeared again and again in media reports generated by this FBI program.

Enabling these efforts is a massive web of thousands of FBI informants, operating at a scale that dwarfs even the infamous COINTELPRO effort from the 1950s and 1960s. The FBI’s annual counterterrorism budget exceeds $3 billion, and the clandestine informants program no doubt consumes a significant portion of that amount.93

The FBI has consistently and repeatedly denied that it targets the Muslim community in its counterterrorism efforts. After the long-rumored secret network of FBI informants infiltrating Middle Eastern American communities was confirmed to be real, the Attorney General vigorously defended the program. At a 2010 banquet benefitting Muslim Advocates, a Muslim American advocacy organization, Attorney General Eric Holder said that the confidential informant operations “have proven to be an essential law enforcement tool in uncovering and preventing potential terror attacks.”94

The NYPD “Demographics Unit” and this FBI “tool” both flow from the stereotype that Middle Easterners are more likely to get involved in terrorism than the average American. These programs are clear examples of racial profiling—using race to create a profile of a likely terrorist, and then distributing law enforcement resources accordingly.

Despite years of civil rights advocacy and recent protests against racial profiling, the practice remains legal in most of the United States. A Supreme Court ruling in 1996 nullified a lower court’s ruling that required law enforcement to assume that “people of all races commit all types of crimes.”95 In 2012, a federal judge dismissed a lawsuit that sought to prevent FBI informants from entering mosques without a specific cause, because, he reasoned, it is sometimes necessary to “sacrifice individual liberties for the sake of national security.”96 Finally, in 2014, after years of controversy, the DOJ released new guidelines for federal law enforcement that Attorney General Holder claimed would end the practice of racial profiling and also stop discrimination on the basis of gender identity, sexual orientation, national origin, and religion. Unfortunately, the guidelines leave a massive loophole for “national security” efforts, an exception that appears to allow the controversial FBI “sting operation” program (and all other “counterterrorism” programs) to continue, even if evidence shows that they are, in fact, policies that rely on racial profiling.97

Defining Terrorism

Through all of these so-called counterterrorism efforts, the term “terrorism” has been deployed in ways that reinforce the racial stereotype that Middle Easterners are somehow predisposed to commit political violence. In several instances, violent actions committed by a Middle Eastern perpetrator were classified as “terrorist” even as similar actions carried out by non-Middle Easterners were not. For instance, in 2002, a lone gunman opened fire at a ticket counter at Los Angeles International Airport, killing two and injuring four others before security personnel shot and killed the assailant. The FBI concluded that this was a terrorist attack, because the perpetrator, an Egyptian American man named Hesham Mohamed Hadayet, intended to “advance the Palestinian cause . . . through the killing of civilians and the targeting of an airline owned by the Government of Israel.”98 In 2013, a similar shooting took place at Los Angeles International airport, this time carried out by a White American man originally from New Jersey, Paul Anthony Ciancia. Witnesses said that Ciancia entered the airport and opened fire on Transportation Security Administration (TSA) security guards, killing one before being captured by police. Investigators determined that Ciancia had a political motive, evidenced by a note he was carrying that denounced the TSA as a tyrannical government agency. However, he was charged with first-degree murder—not a terrorism charge—and the attack was not classified as terrorism. The attack did not appear on an official timeline of terrorist attacks maintained by the National Counterterrorism Center (NCTC).99

Many other similar examples, of when non-Middle Eastern perpetrators carried out violent acts that were not recognized as terrorism, suggest that in contemporary American discourse and policy, the term “terrorism” refers mainly to the Middle Eastern race of a perpetrator of a violent act. Juan Cole observed, “Arabs and Muslims who melt down are not in today’s America allowed to be just ‘quiet’ or ‘troubled’ individuals. They are always seen as emblematic of their ethnic group, and one or two of them are enough to make a conspiracy.”100 All of these characterizations that apply the word “terrorism” only to acts committed by Middle Easterners serve to reinforce the bigoted idea that Middle Easterners are inherently violent.

Even after a White supremacist carried out the massacre at the Sikh Temple of Wisconsin in 2012, the official reaction was to wait for a careful analysis of all the possible motives of the attacker before labeling the attack “terrorism.” Only after the investigation had proceeded for six days did Attorney General Holder declare the attack “an act of terrorism, an act of hatred, a hate crime.”101 After yet another mass casualty shooting rampage, at the Emmanuel Baptist Church in Charleston in 2015, there was finally some widespread discussion of the threat posed by White supremacist terrorism, but even then some commentators insisted that the attack may have been the result of “mental illness,” and therefore not political or racist in motivation.102

Consider another pair of attacks, one recognized as terrorism and the other seen as merely caused by a mental instability. In 2015, Robert Lewis Dear attacked a Planned Parenthood clinic in Colorado, killing three. He was not considered to be a terrorist by most Americans. But he terrorized not only the people he personally victimized in Colorado. People around the country understandably feared a potential outbreak of similar attacks. In this instance, Dear was motivated by a political cause: to force an end to the right to choose abortion. Dear should have been classified as a terrorist, by any reasonable definition of terrorism. Instead, commentators and investigators focused on the mental health of Dear, again questioning whether he was simply mentally ill and an aberration, rather than part of a longstanding, active political movement threatening family planning clinics. This attack was not recognized as terrorism in large measure because the perpetrator was White.

Meanwhile, when married couple Syed Farook and Tashfeen Malik killed fourteen people at a San Bernardino County Department of Public Health holiday party, the attack was immediately assumed to be terrorism even before any evidence of motive was available. Eventually, the FBI found evidence that Farook and Malik were “potentially inspired” by the overall goals of organizations like the so-called Islamic State, even though they themselves were “not part of a [terrorist] network.” Conclusions about their terrorist motivations were based on their “telephonic connections” with other “people of interest” in separate counterterrorism investigations.103 The strength of this evidence was never questioned. Alternative explanations were not seriously considered for the cause of this mass shooting, which at first did not seem all that different from the many other horrific mass shooting events that took place in 2015 across the United States. Few accounts of the attack considered whether Farook and Malik suffered from mental illness or if they sought violent revenge for some personal or professional dispute. In any case, the primary reason the San Bernardino shooting was immediately and unquestioningly recognized by most Americans as terrorism is because the perpetrators were racially classified as Middle Eastern Americans.104

As fears of additional “lone wolf” terrorist attacks continued to animate policymakers, the Obama administration launched a new effort that once again contributed to the stereotyping of Middle Eastern Americans as predisposed to terrorism. This new effort was called Countering Violent Extremism (CVE). In part, the name CVE was developed as a replacement for “War on Terror.” The architects of this program avoided using the loaded term “Islamic extremism.” By changing the label to “violent extremism,” the implication was that terrorism could come from any source of extremism, not just radical Islam. Critics, however, worried that despite the change in rhetoric, in practice CVE once again targeted Middle Eastern American communities for discriminatory scrutiny. Most of CVE’s domestic operations center on “empowering local partners” to find “radicalized” individuals and report them to the authorities, in ways that have disturbing echoes to the failed Operation TIPS effort from a decade earlier. In support of CVE, federal agencies partnered with community centers, places of worship, and private businesses to “enhance engagement with . . . local communities who may be targeted by violent extremists.”105 Arjun Singh Sethi, with the advocacy organization Sikh Coalition, noted that in practice, the CVE program:

. . . encourages a hypersensitivity to the mundane behavior of young American Muslims and demonizes acts that are protected by the First Amendment. Innocuous activities like growing a beard, attending a fiery sermon, protesting US foreign policy, or fraternizing with Muslim political groups become “warning signs” that are reported to police under the guise of countering violent extremism.106

CVE expanded throughout the 2010s, becoming a holistic effort by law enforcement and intelligence agencies to find and stop terrorists before they strike. Advocates repeatedly appealed for the basic rights of terrorist suspects, arguing that “self-radicalizing” individuals suspected of terrorism should not be arrested or imprisoned for expressing controversial attitudes. They suggested that the FBI and other agencies should make use of mental health or other support resources instead of always setting in motion a sting operation. In an attempt to respond to these concerns, the FBI issued plans to set up “Shared Responsibility Committees,” which would have social workers, counselors, clergy, and other community leaders advise the FBI on potential terrorist suspects. Advocates like Abed Ayoub of the American-Arab Anti-Discrimination Committee expressed concern that these committees would actually serve mainly as yet another vehicle for FBI “intelligence gathering and surveillance.”107

As CVE attracted controversy domestically, President Obama rapidly expanded a troubling targeted-assassinations program overseas. Assassinations of terrorist suspects were reported to have been frequently carried out by unmanned aerial vehicles (or “drones” or “flying death robots”). These “signature strikes” have been used exclusively to target Middle Easterners, including some US citizens. President Obama himself personally ordered the extrajudicial execution of Anwar al-Awlaki, an American citizen who was reputed to be a high-ranking member of al-Qaeda living in Yemen.108 The terrifying frequency of drone strikes in his home village led Yemeni activist Farea al-Muslimi to testify before a US Senate committee:

I have met with dozens of civilians who were injured during drone strikes and other air attacks. . . . I have met with relatives of people who were killed as well as numerous eyewitnesses. They have told me how these air strikes have changed their lives for the worst.109

Al-Muslimi went on to explain that in his view, drone strikes were counterproductive to the mission of preventing anti-American sentiment and terrorism. He explained that after studying in America in high school and college, he was a prominent cultural ambassador for the US in Yemen. He made it his mission to spread the word about the generosity and greatness of the American people. This work was made “almost impossible” by the drone strikes, he said.110

As these controversial policies unfolded, the Obama administration promoted the pervasive racial stereotype that Middle Easterners are more likely than others to become terrorists. Even though some of the Obama administration’s statements won praise for doing away with the “war on terrorism” rhetoric of the Bush administration, many official statements and policies in the Obama era have either failed to adequately combat or have actively contributed to the perception that only Middle Easterners commit terrorist acts. For example, President Obama’s then-Counterterrorism Advisor and later the Director of the CIA, John Brennan, gave a speech to introduce a new National Security Strategy overview in 2010.111 His speech made it quite clear that the Obama administration had redoubled its efforts to “secure our homeland” by recognizing “the threat to the United States posed by individuals radicalized here at home.” Brennan listed seven recent attacks by “radicalized” Americans, to underscore the severity of the threat posed by terrorism. Remarkably, each of the seven terrorist attacks on his list was carried out by a Muslim. Conspicuously absent from Brennan’s list of terrorist attacks was any discussion of the threat posed right-wing extremists, such as the Christian Hutaree “militia,” an organization that had around that time been planning coordinated, deadly terrorist attacks in Michigan. Brennan also neglected to mention the White supremacist who opened fire at the Holocaust Memorial Museum, a terrorist attack that claimed the life of police officer Stephen Tyrone Johns.112 Brennon even neglected to mention that a pipe bomb had exploded in a Florida mosque just days before his speech, an apparent terrorist attack that was under active investigation by the FBI at the time.113 By neglecting to mention the mere existence of attacks like these, Brennan used his speech to further solidify the bigoted idea that only Middle Eastern Americans commit terrorism.

Perhaps Brennan was being intentionally ignorant. He may have been mindful of an episode from the year prior, 2009, in which the Department of Homeland Security (DHS) issued a report warning that “right-wing extremists”—White extremists—presented a major terrorist threat.114 The publication of this report prompted a tremendous outpouring of criticism from Republican legislators, who demanded that DHS reconsider part of the analysis that said military veterans may have a propensity to commit violent terrorist acts.115 The analysis cited an FBI report that found, from 2001 to 2008, some two hundred White supremacists who claimed to be veterans were, in fact, “active in the extremist movement.” After initially defending the report, Homeland Security Secretary Janet Napolitano eventually apologized. After this apology, the Obama administration carefully calibrated its messaging and apparently avoided mentioning right-wing extremism as a potential source of terrorism. In fact, as Brennan’s speech and subsequent administration policy decisions make clear, the Obama administration seemed almost eager to keep the label of terrorism restricted only to acts carried out by Middle Easterners.

When Joseph Stack flew his airplane into a federal building in Austin, the Department of Homeland Security immediately concluded—within hours of the crash—that although they “do not yet know the cause of the plane crash,” still it was safe to say, “at this time, we have no reason to believe there is a nexus to terrorist activity.”116 The White House reaffirmed this conclusion, when Obama’s press secretary stated flatly that the “plane crash” was not an act of terrorism.117 Homeland Security Secretary Janet Napolitano concurred by explaining that Stack was “a lone wolf” who “used a terrorist tactic,” but that alone did not imply that he was “in the same bucket” as the Oklahoma City bombing or al-Qaeda.118 To be clear, this was a suicide attack wherein the pilot of an airplane intentionally crashed into a high-rise office building. Internal Revenue Service manager Vernon Hunter was killed in the attack. The parallels to the 9/11 attacks could not be more obvious, nor could the political motivation be any clearer with regards to this attack on offices of the federal government. But, according to the Obama administration, this was not in any way a terrorist attack. Stack was White.

In short, reforms to counterterrorism policies initiated by the Obama administration, intended to change and improve the War on Terror policies from the Bush era, unfortunately mainly offered more of the same: racialized rhetoric that contributes to Islamophobic discrimination. All the while, everyone involved in the creation and maintenance of these policies insists that they abhor racial profiling and will not stand for discrimination. The cognitive dissonance required for leaders like President Obama and Attorney General Holder—both deeply committed to anti-racism—to uphold and expand clearly Islamophobic policies is, in part, enabled by the racial paradox that lies at the center of Islamophobia.

Islamophobia Is Racism

This review of Islamophobia has been far from exhaustive. Nevertheless, it shows definitively that Islamophobia is best understood as structural racism. It should go without saying that intersections of race, class, gender, sexuality, religion, and other axes of inequality simultaneously operate in the reproduction of Islamophobia. That does not diminish the fact that Islamophobia is a race-based problem that manifests across multiple layers of culture, politics, and policy. The racial paradox underpinning Islamophobia—the persistent refusal to acknowledge the racist logics at its very core—has allowed it to flourish in the United States even as most Americans claim to seek an end to racism.

There can no longer be any doubt that Islamophobia flows from the collective racialization of Arabs, Muslims, Sikhs, and South Asians in the United States into a Middle Eastern American racial category. This is a racial formation process borne and maintained through linked histories and shared experiences across many generations. Various threads of social divisions between Europeans and “Orientals” survived and expanded during the European Renaissance, and bigoted ideas about North Africa and Southwest Asia were transported with the original European colonists to the Americas.

Beginning shortly after the founding of the United States, the first federal immigration and naturalization policies in the 1790s codified into law the exclusion of people from regions now known as South Asia and the Middle East. Even after a shift in policy during the 1950s and 1960s put an end to explicit racism in immigration policies, Islamophobia continued to find expression in mainstream American culture. By the twenty-first century, the War on Terror relied upon the racialization of Middle Easterners in the American imagination to link the specter of terrorism to the broader Middle East—Afghanistan, Iraq, Iran, and beyond—and to denizens of the United States with heritage anywhere near those places. The worst excesses of the War on Terror—torture, drone strikes, and dragnet surveillance—were targeted at Middle Easterners in ways that legitimated and extended these durable racial logics. Islamophobia is therefore intrinsic to the racial project that establishes “Middle Eastern” as a racial identity category.

Yet the racial paradox remains. While Islamophobia is undoubtedly racism, so far it has eluded proper recognition as a key part of the American legacy of racial despotism. Without this recognition, the Middle Eastern American racial category remains in the shadows, and the full extent of Islamophobia remains hidden as well. Part of the trouble is the constant objection that Islamophobia cannot be called racism because Islam is not a race. Explicitly anti-Islamic rhetoric can be, in theory, deployed in ways that do not directly involve the Middle Eastern racial identity. Nevertheless, race is the only effective theoretical lens to understand Islamophobic discrimination, hate crimes, and discourses as they actually manifest. Understanding race as the driver of Islamophobia provides a clear explanation for hate crimes that target “Middle Eastern-looking” individuals and communities. Furthermore, race-based analyses show that discriminatory profiling policies supposedly targeting only Muslims actually impact people who “look Middle Eastern” more broadly. Nearly all references to “Muslims” in American discourses conjure a racialized image of a Middle Easterner. Policies, practices, and rhetoric that intentionally single out Muslims lend credence to this racial image. These are quintessential racial projects, efforts to distribute resources along racial lines. Because Islamophobia affects diverse communities that have been gathered under the “Middle Eastern” racial umbrella—especially (but not exclusively) Arab, Muslim, Sikh, and South Asian Americans—Islamophobia is a particularly complex race-based problem to confront. That is precisely the challenge undertaken by Middle Eastern American advocacy organizations.

At the crux of that challenge is the racial dilemma. Middle Eastern American advocates have long struggled to reconcile the racial paradox inherent in Middle Eastern identity, one that is amplified greatly by the scourge of Islamophobia. Advocates working in this arena must wade through the cacophony, the constant crisis generated by Islamophobic discrimination. Just keeping up with urgent requests for help after hate crimes and discriminatory actions is, by itself, overwhelming. Getting ahead of the crisis, finding ways to reframe the struggle against Islamophobia proactively, has been a monumental challenge for many years.

Here is the rub: simply knowing that Islamophobia is in fact racism provides no guidance to navigating the racial dilemma. In other words, even after recognizing that racism is inherent in Islamophobia, it does not follow that Islamophobia should be described as racism by advocates. It may well be better to avoid the language of racism, to gain an advantage in the fickle realms of culture, politics, and policy. In short, it is by no means clear in the twenty-first century that the most effective civil rights strategy is to call out racism by name. The racial dilemma around Islamophobia is formidable, to say the least.