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About Us & RulesThe Muslims Are Coming!: Islamophobia, Extremism, and the Domestic War on Terror
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The Muslims Are Coming!: Islamophobia, Extremism, and the Domestic War on Terror
by Guest Sat Apr 05, 2014 10:15 am
“An important and moving investigation of the costs of the ‘war on terror’ for those who have been its targets.” – David Cole
Death came instantly to Imam Luqman, as four FBI agents fired semiautomatic rifles at him from a few feet away. Another sixty officers surrounded the building on that October morning, the culmination of a two-year undercover investigation that had infiltrated the imam's Detroit mosque. The FBI quickly claimed that Luqman Abdullah was "the leader of a domestic terrorist group." And yet, caught on tape, he had refused to help "do something" violent, as it might injure innocents, and no terrorism charges were ever lodged against him.
Jameel Scott thought he was exercising his rights when he went to challenge an Israeli official's lecture at Manchester University. But the teenager's presence at the protest with fellow socialists made him the subject of police surveillance for the next two years. Counterterrorism agents visited his parents, his relatives, his school. They asked him for activists' names and told him not to attend demonstrations. They called his mother and told her to move the family to another neighborhood. Although he doesn't identify as Muslim, Jameel had become another face of the presumed homegrown terrorist.
The new front in the War on Terror is the "homegrown enemy," domestic terrorists who have become the focus of sprawling counterterrorism structures of policing and surveillance in the United States and across Europe. Domestic surveillance has mushroomed— at least 100,000 Muslims in America have been secretly under scrutiny. British police compiled a secret suspect list of more than 8,000 al-Qaeda "sympathizers," and in another operation included almost 300 children fifteen and under among the potential extremists investigated. MI5 doubled in size in just five years.
Based on several years of research and reportage, in locations as disparate as Texas, New York, and Yorkshire, and written in engrossing, precise prose, this is the first comprehensive critique of counterradicalization strategies. The new policy and policing campaigns have been backed by an industry of freshly minted experts and liberal commentators. The Muslims Are Coming! looks at the way these debates have been transformed by the embrace of a narrowly configured and ill-conceived antiextremism.
Death came instantly to Imam Luqman, as four FBI agents fired semiautomatic rifles at him from a few feet away. Another sixty officers surrounded the building on that October morning, the culmination of a two-year undercover investigation that had infiltrated the imam's Detroit mosque. The FBI quickly claimed that Luqman Abdullah was "the leader of a domestic terrorist group." And yet, caught on tape, he had refused to help "do something" violent, as it might injure innocents, and no terrorism charges were ever lodged against him.
Jameel Scott thought he was exercising his rights when he went to challenge an Israeli official's lecture at Manchester University. But the teenager's presence at the protest with fellow socialists made him the subject of police surveillance for the next two years. Counterterrorism agents visited his parents, his relatives, his school. They asked him for activists' names and told him not to attend demonstrations. They called his mother and told her to move the family to another neighborhood. Although he doesn't identify as Muslim, Jameel had become another face of the presumed homegrown terrorist.
The new front in the War on Terror is the "homegrown enemy," domestic terrorists who have become the focus of sprawling counterterrorism structures of policing and surveillance in the United States and across Europe. Domestic surveillance has mushroomed— at least 100,000 Muslims in America have been secretly under scrutiny. British police compiled a secret suspect list of more than 8,000 al-Qaeda "sympathizers," and in another operation included almost 300 children fifteen and under among the potential extremists investigated. MI5 doubled in size in just five years.
Based on several years of research and reportage, in locations as disparate as Texas, New York, and Yorkshire, and written in engrossing, precise prose, this is the first comprehensive critique of counterradicalization strategies. The new policy and policing campaigns have been backed by an industry of freshly minted experts and liberal commentators. The Muslims Are Coming! looks at the way these debates have been transformed by the embrace of a narrowly configured and ill-conceived antiextremism.
- http://www.versobooks.com/books/1512-the-Muslims-are-coming
Guest- Guest
Re: The Muslims Are Coming!: Islamophobia, Extremism, and the Domestic War on Terror
by Guest Sat Apr 05, 2014 10:20 am
Arun Kundnani's book, vastly more intelligent than the usual "war on terror" verbiage, focuses on the war's domestic edge in Britain and America. His starting point is this: "Terrorism is not the product of radicalpolitics but a symptom of political impotence." The antidote therefore seems self-evident: "A strong, active and confident Muslim community enjoying its civic rights to the full." Yet policy on both sides of the Atlantic has ended by criminalising Muslim opinion, silencing speech and increasing social division. These results may make political violence more, not less, likely.
The assumptions and silences of the counter-radicalisation industry end up telling us far more about particular ideological subsections of Anglo-American culture than they do about the Muslims targeted. The two dominant security approaches to Muslim citizens described by Kundnani – "culturalist" and "reformist" – highlight ideology rather than sociopolitical grievances.
Culturalism's best-known proponent is Bernard Lewis, Dick Cheney's favourite historian, who locates the problem as Islam itself, a totalitarian ideology-culture incompatible with democratic modernity. So Mitt Romney explains the vast divergence between Israeli and Palestinian economies thus: "Culture makes all the difference" – and decades of occupation, ethnic cleansing and war make no difference at all. Writer Christopher Caldwell believes residents of the Paris banlieue rioted in 2005 because they were Muslims (although many weren't), and not because of unemployment, poor housing and police violence. Perhaps the silliest culturalist intervention was Martin Amis's essay "The Second Plane", where Amis breezily admitted he knew nothing of geopolitics but claimed authority nevertheless from his expertise in "masculinity" – 9/11 was explained by Muslim sexual frustration. Such discourses are part of an influential tradition. In 1950s colonial Kenya, psychiatrist JC Carothers understood the Mau Mau uprising as "not political but psycho‑pathological".
More charitable than culturalism, reformism identifies the problem as a perversion of Islamic doctrine. With General Petraeus's Iraqi "hearts and minds" campaign, reformism came to dominate the post-Rumsfeld Pentagon; what started in counter-insurgency was soon considered as relevant to Bradford as Basra. It involved an accumulation of anthropological "knowledge" through surveillance (David J Kilcullendescribes counter-insurgency as "armed social science"), and it underlay the assumption of Obama's 2009 Cairo speech that positive recognition of moderate Muslim culture could solve political conflict. Qur'an-reading Tony Blair shared the notion that terrorism's "root cause" was "a doctrine of fanaticism".
This focus on doctrine meant the state intervened to promote correct belief. Muslims were categorised as "extremists" or "moderates", although no link has been proved between extremist ideas and terrorist violence. The clumsy binarism sometimes went further – Salafis were extremist, Sufis were moderate – although most Salafis are quietists and some Sufis fight jihad against America. Those labelled moderate were quickly reclassified if they spoke out on foreign policy.
The emphasis on ideology led to the criminalisation of certain ideologies, and to the new crime of "glorifying terrorism" (as opposed to inciting violence). Increasingly, young Muslims were imprisoned for their reading matter. Thus the more liberal approach ended by assaulting liberal freedoms, and culture was transformed into a battlefield. By turning comparatively new (and by no means universal) values such as gender and sexual equality into icons of superior westernism, "liberalism became a form of identity politics". (Reformism is heavy with bleakly absurd contradiction. For the sake of cultural sensitivity in Ramadan, hunger-striking Guantánamo prisoners are force-fed only at night.)
In one of several illuminating character sketches, Kundnani shows that the radicalisation of Yemeni-American Anwar al-Awlaki, killed by a US drone in 2011, involved no psychological crisis or theological shift (as the reformist literature would have it), but only experience of the war on terror, domestic and external, including his American-inspired arrest and abuse by Yemeni police. The preacher's newly violent language mirrored not the Qur'an so much as war on terror discourse itself.
This failure to engage with the real roots of violent alienation has ramifications going far beyond security. Both culturalism and reformism neglect what Kundnani calls "the basic political question thrown up by multiculturalism: how can a common way of life, together with full participation from all parts of society, be created?" Those British Muslims who "ghettoised" didn't do so by choice but as a result of industrial collapse, discriminatory housing policies and the fear of racist violence. Identity politics was promoted and funded by local government in response to a 1970s radicalism (for instance the Asian Youth Movements, modelled on the Black Panthers), which linked anti-racism to anti-capitalism. Home secretary Willie Whitelaw supported "ethnic" TV programming on the grounds that "if they don't get some outlet for their activities you are going to run yourself into much more trouble". Multiculturalism, then, was not a leftist plot but a conservative move bringing together the state and community "uncles" against a much more subversive alternative. And in the last decade, while "anti-terror" resources have flowed into Muslim communities, benefiting the usual gatekeepers and provoking the envy of equally deprived non-Muslim communities, young, alienated Muslims, as likely obsessed by the Illuminati as the caliphate, are deterred from speaking – and being challenged – in public.
Kundnani provides detailed, well‑contextualised accounts of the entrapment of vulnerable African-American Muslims as well as the criminalisation of the (already traumatised) Minnesota Somali community (for its opposition to the US-backed Ethiopian invasion of Somalia). Arab-Americans, who had either identified as white or as a "model minority" (patriotic, bourgeois, less troublesome than black people or Latinos), suddenly found those options closing. In comedian Dean Obeidallah's words, "I go to bed September 10th white, wake up September 11th, I am an Arab." Anti-Muslim hysteria was whipped up by the media, the entertainment industry, and a state vocabulary that considered pipe bombs "weapons of mass destruction" when used by Muslims. Anti-Muslim violence in America increased by 50% in 2010.
The book closes with discussion of the new European far-right's embrace of Zionism – it is now Islamphobic rather than antisemitic. In "creeping-shari'a" scaremongering, the tropes of classical antisemitism are clear. Rightists "ascribe to Islam magical powers to secretly control western governments while at the same time [seeing it as] a backward seventh-century ideology whose followers constitute a dangerous underclass".
In Britain the English Defence League was born; in the US a media-based Islamophobic campaign fed existent conservative movements. Both peddle varieties of the "Eurabia" conspiracy theory, whereby a corrupt European political class has signed the continent over to Muslim domination through immigration, birth rates and multiculturalism. At one extreme, this brand of "anti-terror" politics soon arrives at its own, Anders Breivik-style terrorism.
Arun Kundnani is one of Britain's best political writers, neither hectoring nor drily academic but compelling and sharply intelligent. The Muslims Are Coming should be widely read, particularly by liberals who consider their own positions unassailable. "Neoconservatism invented the terror war," Kundnani writes, "but Obama liberalism normalised it, at which point, mainstream journalists stopped asking questions."
http://www.theguardian.com/books/2014/apr/03/Muslims-are-coming-islamophobia-extremism-domestic-war-on-terror-review
The assumptions and silences of the counter-radicalisation industry end up telling us far more about particular ideological subsections of Anglo-American culture than they do about the Muslims targeted. The two dominant security approaches to Muslim citizens described by Kundnani – "culturalist" and "reformist" – highlight ideology rather than sociopolitical grievances.
Culturalism's best-known proponent is Bernard Lewis, Dick Cheney's favourite historian, who locates the problem as Islam itself, a totalitarian ideology-culture incompatible with democratic modernity. So Mitt Romney explains the vast divergence between Israeli and Palestinian economies thus: "Culture makes all the difference" – and decades of occupation, ethnic cleansing and war make no difference at all. Writer Christopher Caldwell believes residents of the Paris banlieue rioted in 2005 because they were Muslims (although many weren't), and not because of unemployment, poor housing and police violence. Perhaps the silliest culturalist intervention was Martin Amis's essay "The Second Plane", where Amis breezily admitted he knew nothing of geopolitics but claimed authority nevertheless from his expertise in "masculinity" – 9/11 was explained by Muslim sexual frustration. Such discourses are part of an influential tradition. In 1950s colonial Kenya, psychiatrist JC Carothers understood the Mau Mau uprising as "not political but psycho‑pathological".
More charitable than culturalism, reformism identifies the problem as a perversion of Islamic doctrine. With General Petraeus's Iraqi "hearts and minds" campaign, reformism came to dominate the post-Rumsfeld Pentagon; what started in counter-insurgency was soon considered as relevant to Bradford as Basra. It involved an accumulation of anthropological "knowledge" through surveillance (David J Kilcullendescribes counter-insurgency as "armed social science"), and it underlay the assumption of Obama's 2009 Cairo speech that positive recognition of moderate Muslim culture could solve political conflict. Qur'an-reading Tony Blair shared the notion that terrorism's "root cause" was "a doctrine of fanaticism".
This focus on doctrine meant the state intervened to promote correct belief. Muslims were categorised as "extremists" or "moderates", although no link has been proved between extremist ideas and terrorist violence. The clumsy binarism sometimes went further – Salafis were extremist, Sufis were moderate – although most Salafis are quietists and some Sufis fight jihad against America. Those labelled moderate were quickly reclassified if they spoke out on foreign policy.
The emphasis on ideology led to the criminalisation of certain ideologies, and to the new crime of "glorifying terrorism" (as opposed to inciting violence). Increasingly, young Muslims were imprisoned for their reading matter. Thus the more liberal approach ended by assaulting liberal freedoms, and culture was transformed into a battlefield. By turning comparatively new (and by no means universal) values such as gender and sexual equality into icons of superior westernism, "liberalism became a form of identity politics". (Reformism is heavy with bleakly absurd contradiction. For the sake of cultural sensitivity in Ramadan, hunger-striking Guantánamo prisoners are force-fed only at night.)
In one of several illuminating character sketches, Kundnani shows that the radicalisation of Yemeni-American Anwar al-Awlaki, killed by a US drone in 2011, involved no psychological crisis or theological shift (as the reformist literature would have it), but only experience of the war on terror, domestic and external, including his American-inspired arrest and abuse by Yemeni police. The preacher's newly violent language mirrored not the Qur'an so much as war on terror discourse itself.
This failure to engage with the real roots of violent alienation has ramifications going far beyond security. Both culturalism and reformism neglect what Kundnani calls "the basic political question thrown up by multiculturalism: how can a common way of life, together with full participation from all parts of society, be created?" Those British Muslims who "ghettoised" didn't do so by choice but as a result of industrial collapse, discriminatory housing policies and the fear of racist violence. Identity politics was promoted and funded by local government in response to a 1970s radicalism (for instance the Asian Youth Movements, modelled on the Black Panthers), which linked anti-racism to anti-capitalism. Home secretary Willie Whitelaw supported "ethnic" TV programming on the grounds that "if they don't get some outlet for their activities you are going to run yourself into much more trouble". Multiculturalism, then, was not a leftist plot but a conservative move bringing together the state and community "uncles" against a much more subversive alternative. And in the last decade, while "anti-terror" resources have flowed into Muslim communities, benefiting the usual gatekeepers and provoking the envy of equally deprived non-Muslim communities, young, alienated Muslims, as likely obsessed by the Illuminati as the caliphate, are deterred from speaking – and being challenged – in public.
Kundnani provides detailed, well‑contextualised accounts of the entrapment of vulnerable African-American Muslims as well as the criminalisation of the (already traumatised) Minnesota Somali community (for its opposition to the US-backed Ethiopian invasion of Somalia). Arab-Americans, who had either identified as white or as a "model minority" (patriotic, bourgeois, less troublesome than black people or Latinos), suddenly found those options closing. In comedian Dean Obeidallah's words, "I go to bed September 10th white, wake up September 11th, I am an Arab." Anti-Muslim hysteria was whipped up by the media, the entertainment industry, and a state vocabulary that considered pipe bombs "weapons of mass destruction" when used by Muslims. Anti-Muslim violence in America increased by 50% in 2010.
The book closes with discussion of the new European far-right's embrace of Zionism – it is now Islamphobic rather than antisemitic. In "creeping-shari'a" scaremongering, the tropes of classical antisemitism are clear. Rightists "ascribe to Islam magical powers to secretly control western governments while at the same time [seeing it as] a backward seventh-century ideology whose followers constitute a dangerous underclass".
In Britain the English Defence League was born; in the US a media-based Islamophobic campaign fed existent conservative movements. Both peddle varieties of the "Eurabia" conspiracy theory, whereby a corrupt European political class has signed the continent over to Muslim domination through immigration, birth rates and multiculturalism. At one extreme, this brand of "anti-terror" politics soon arrives at its own, Anders Breivik-style terrorism.
Arun Kundnani is one of Britain's best political writers, neither hectoring nor drily academic but compelling and sharply intelligent. The Muslims Are Coming should be widely read, particularly by liberals who consider their own positions unassailable. "Neoconservatism invented the terror war," Kundnani writes, "but Obama liberalism normalised it, at which point, mainstream journalists stopped asking questions."
http://www.theguardian.com/books/2014/apr/03/Muslims-are-coming-islamophobia-extremism-domestic-war-on-terror-review
Guest- Guest
Re: The Muslims Are Coming!: Islamophobia, Extremism, and the Domestic War on Terror
by Guest Sat Apr 05, 2014 10:35 am
the Muslims are their own worst enemy when it comes to bad press, it is in most papers on a daily basis around the world..
no one seems to make a great deal of their attitude towards women, homosexuals or other faiths, even the UN could not put pressure on them to stop killings based solely on sexuality...
no one seems to make a great deal of their attitude towards women, homosexuals or other faiths, even the UN could not put pressure on them to stop killings based solely on sexuality...
Guest- Guest
Re: The Muslims Are Coming!: Islamophobia, Extremism, and the Domestic War on Terror
by Guest Sat Apr 05, 2014 11:38 am
Godisgoodallthetime wrote:the Muslims are their own worst enemy when it comes to bad press, it is in most papers on a daily basis around the world..
no one seems to make a great deal of their attitude towards women, homosexuals or other faiths, even the UN could not put pressure on them to stop killings based solely on sexuality...
That is the problem though for a start, proving by your post how badly people perceive Muslims as the article stated. Daily we hear about extremists, which have grown in numbers dramatically since the Iraq and Afghanistan conflicts. Don't me wrong more Muslims have to stand up and be counted to argue against these extremists, but as seen you club them all together off the back of extremists. With your logic, because the Catholic church has done so many wrong, all Christian groups would be culpable, because they are Christian, which of course would be silly, but that is how you present your posts, with illogical views.
I am all for progression, treating a group of people as isolated from the rest of us, causes a divide and is not the brightest plan yet some no doubt want this, progression just as happened in the West came from a few individuals from within who inspired others and brought about change. In time Muslim countries will follow the same, with more people experiencing freedoms, and that life does not have to be as some Muslim nations are, but how nations can be formed from the bases of that faith as our own British nation is, being the Queen is the head of the Church here as well as our Queen, but not interpret as many do with the views on sharia to be the bases for criminal law., when it should play no part on criminal laws
If people think by continually castigating a group of people is the problem, then they again learn nothing from history, as are we still not today having many people look back with guilt and prejudice over wrongs ours and other nations did in the past, like for example with the slave trade how this still invokes so much passion today, proving the answer to a problem is not through prejudice or dislike
Guest- Guest
Re: The Muslims Are Coming!: Islamophobia, Extremism, and the Domestic War on Terror
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