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SearchToday in Islamophobia: In the US, former President Donald Trump vowed to restore his “Muslim Travel Ban”, one of the most widely-criticized policies of his first administration, while new reporting by NPR shows that many Muslim American voters say they feel politically homeless, not understood or welcomed by either Republicans or Democrats, and some Arab American and Muslim voters have become so angry at U.S. support for Israel’s offensive in Gaza that they are shunning Democrat Kamala Harris in the presidential race to back third-party candidate Jill Stein, a move which could deny Harris victories in battleground states. Our recommended read of the day is by Representative Ilhan Omar (D-MN) for The Guardian on the normalization of Islamophobic rhetoric within U.S. political discourse, as evident by recent bigoted remarks made by Senator John Kennedy during a committee hearing telling an Arab American witness to “hide [her] head in a bag”. This and more below:
United States
If US senators are openly Islamophobic, what hope is there? | Recommended Read
On Tuesday, Senator John Kennedy told the only Muslim American witness during a committee hearing to “hide [her] head in a bag”. The intended purpose of Tuesday’s historic Senate judiciary committee hearing was to bring attention to the rise in hate against Muslim, Jewish, and Palestinian Americans. The rise of antisemitism has sparked many hearings in Congress. In contrast, this was the first hearing since 7 October that addressed hate targeting Arab, Muslim, and Palestinian Americans. Fighting bigotry requires us to condemn it wherever we see it. For far too long, hate speech made against Arab, Muslim and Palestinian Americans goes ignored. The increase in threats, hate speech and violence across the country demands serious attention. Instead, Kennedy used his time to verbally attack the witness, Arab American Institute executive director Maya Berry, for her identity. It was telling that Kennedy along with his Republican colleagues could not avoid actively engaging in anti-Muslim hate speech during a hearing about the rise in hate crimes. As unfair remarks were hurled at her, the American people witnessed the very purpose of the hearing in plain view for all: the normalization of hate speech is alive and well. Regrettably, we know that espousing anti-Muslim, anti-Arab and anti-Palestinian bigotry resonates well within the base of the current Republican party. read the complete article
Muslim voters say they don't feel understood or welcomed by Republicans or Democrats
There are nearly 4 million Muslims in the United States, including about 240,000 in Michigan. In the 2020 presidential election, American Muslims were a big part of why Joe Biden won Michigan by just 155,000 votes. This year some say they feel politically homeless, not understood or welcomed by either Republicans or Democrats. Nargis Rahman of member station WDET reports. NARGIS RAHMAN, BYLINE: At a Yemeni coffee house in Dearborn called Haraz, Hamza Ashfaq and his wife are chatting over lattes. Ashfaq is a recent medical school graduate. He says this presidential campaign has been challenging because neither candidate fully reflects his values or political priorities. HAMZA ASHFAQ: Everybody's going to play the lesser of the two evils vote. In the end, it's, you know, not going to be good for us either way. RAHMAN: Ashfaq says he is voting for Kamala Harris despite his concerns about the Biden-Harris administration's positions on Israel's war in Gaza. Michigan was at the epicenter of the uncommitted national movement that protested President Biden during the Democratic primaries. And this idea that neither party reflects their moral values came up again and again in interviews with Muslims in Detroit. Palestinian American Mahmoud Muheisen is a recent graduate of Wayne State University. Muheisen, who is 24, says he has never voted in a U.S. election before. But he feels obligated to vote this year. MAHMOUD MUHEISEN: The people that - they share my faith. They share my name. They share my blood. I think it would be inhumane to just dismiss it, especially as a Palestinian Muslim American. RAHMAN: Muheisen says he plans to vote for the Green Party's candidate, Jill Stein. read the complete article
Some Muslim Americans moving to Jill Stein in potential blow to Kamala Harris
Some Arab American and Muslim voters angry at U.S. support for Israel's offensive in Gaza are shunning Democrat Kamala Harris in the presidential race to back third-party candidate Jill Stein in numbers that could deny Harris victories in battleground states that will decide the Nov. 5 election. A late August poll conducted by the Council on American-Islamic Relations advocacy group showed that in Michigan, home to a large Arab American community, 40% of Muslim voters backed the Green Party's Stein. Republican candidate Donald Trump got 18%, with Harris, who is President Joe Biden's vice president, trailing at 12%. The poll, conducted by text message more than two weeks before the Harris-Trump Sept. 10 debate, showed Harris leading Trump 29.4% to 11.2%, with 34% favoring third-party candidates including Stein at 29.1%. The Green Party is on most state ballots, including all battleground states that could decide the election, except for Georgia and Nevada, where the party is suing to be included. Stein also leads Harris among Muslims in Arizona and Wisconsin, battleground states with sizable Muslim populations where Biden defeated Trump in 2020 by slim margins. read the complete article
How 9/11 influenced American life, from pop culture to politics
Beck was 14 when the attacks occurred and the “forever wars” began, and he brings a millennial’s gaze — and taste — to the long-form narrative tradition of explainers on the war on terror, a once-prolific genre of authoritative doorstoppers, practiced by the likes of Thomas Friedman and George Packer. It seems to have fallen out of fashion, and Beck reincarnates it for a new generation. In 500 ambitious pages of pop culture, urban design, automotive trends, surveillance metadata and Batman, Beck constructs a sprawling portrait of why 9/11 is still at the heart of American life. He traces its influence and its tentacles in everything from our presidential politics to economic inequality, from military technology to streaming TV. Deeply researched and generously footnoted — with a ring of armchair analytics where original reporting could have been — “Homeland” is an expansive tome about how Americans became the anxious, hateful and paranoid citizens of a permanent security state. “Floating in and out of awareness, with all of the military violence occurring overseas even as the threat of sudden mass death permeated life at home, the war on terror was simultaneously everywhere and nowhere, a kind of water that people noticed just every so often even though they spent their lives swimming in it,” Beck writes. In the spirit of biographical disclosure, I was always going to be among this book’s target audience. I was 18 on that Tuesday, and I’m still trying to make sense of the America in which I became an adult, especially as someone of Muslim heritage. It was the defining experience of my Pakistani American community and molded everything, including how we traveled and practiced politics and how we publicly presented ourselves in a society primed to fear us. I was deeply moved by the time and space Beck dedicates to the Islamophobic origins of our contemporary politics of borders, homelands, enemies and Otherness. “The result was the steady exclusion of Muslims and Arabs from public life in the United States, a degradation of citizenship that would eventually be expanded to other populations as well,” he writes. read the complete article
"We're not taking them from infested countries": Trump promises to bring back Muslim ban
Former President Donald Trump vowed to restore one of the most widely-criticized policies of his first administration on Thursday in a Washington D.C. speech on combatting antisemitism. Trump told a crowd at the Israeli American Council’s annual conference that he’d bring back his infamous Muslim ban, which barred entry to the U.S. from a list of Muslim-majority countries. “I will ban refugee resettlement from terror-infested areas like the Gaza Strip,” Trump said. “We will seal our border and bring back the travel ban. Remember the famous travel ban? We didn’t take people from certain areas of the world.” Trump accused "foreign jihad sympathizers" of "ripping down and burning our shopping centers" and "killing people." read the complete article
International
The Chris Hedges Report: The Origins of Islamophobia (w/ Peter Oborne)
Since the turn of the 21st century, the world has become deeply familiar with the global “war on terror.” Framed by the West’s ostensibly patriotic and “civilized” political narrative that conveniently expands their national security power and geopolitical interests, it also pins Muslims as savage, and Islam as a barbaric religion of people that want nothing but the destruction of the West. This perception of Islam—and its followers—as wicked and violent, spread wide and far, especially in the United States, Great Britain and other allied countries. This doesn’t happen without the help of the media and influential public figures, who shape public opinion and reinforce stereotypes. Peter Oborne, a renowned British journalist and author, has done much work throughout his career to challenge these myths that marginalize an already historically repressed group. He joins host Chris Hedges on this episode of The Chris Hedges Report to discuss his latest book, “The Fate of Abraham: Why the West is Wrong About Islam.” “It’s perfectly okay to smear Muslims in Britain,” Oborne tells Hedges. “Because that press arena is captured by people who regard Muslims as second class, third class… citizens, if not barbarians, there’s no mainstream corrective to a very dangerous narrative, and it’s getting more and more frightening.” Oborne, for the work he has done on this issue, has himself experienced the consequences of Western Islamophobia. While working at The Daily Telegraph, Oborne’s editors refused to publish a lengthy investigation he conducted that exposed how “senior Muslim figures in [Britain] were having their bank accounts just taken away from them without any reason given.” read the complete article