Today in Islamophobia

Today in Islamophobia: In the United States, Muslims in the U.S. say they are facing levels of Islamophobia worse than directly after 9/11 – and blame Republican politicians for driving anti-Islam sentiment, meanwhile in Texas, starting in the 2030-2031 school year, new state-mandated history textbooks will shift to making Bible passages required reading, highlighting Christianity’s positive attributes and referring to early Islam’s military campaigns as “brutal”, and lastly in Sweden, ahead of the country’s general election on Sunday, a group of Swedish Muslims have launched the Ask-a-Muslim campaign in order to dispel myths and shed light on their faith as for years the far-right has been spreading dangerous rhetoric, falsely linking Swedish Muslims with crime and civil discord. Our recommended read of the day is by Guthrie Graves-Fitzsimmons for the Center for American Progress (CAP) on how events between America’s founding, the 25th anniversary of 9/11, and today illustrate both the promise of, and the threat to, religious freedom for those who call America home. This and more below:

United States

Islamophobia Betrays American Values | Recommended Read

Americans are sitting between two major anniversaries: 250 years since the Declaration of Independence was adopted and 25 years since the September 11, 2001, terrorist attacks. Each prompts Americans to ask deep questions about what it means to be an American and our place in the world. The United States’ commitment to religious freedom for all is one of our proudest achievements. Being American is not based on a particular religious identity, but rather the freedom to practice a religion, or not, without government interference. This fundamental right to religious freedom must be inclusive of American Muslims, or it is not religious freedom for all. In the years since 9/11, waves of anti-Muslim bigotry have inhibited the free exercise of religion for Muslims. There is another wave today vilifying New York City Mayor Zohran Mamdani and other Muslim Americans running for and holding public office. Where does this hate come from? In 2011, the Center for American Progress released a landmark report that documented “[h]ow a tight network of anti-Muslim, anti-Islam foundations, misinformation experts, validators, grass roots organizations, religious right groups, and their allies in the media and in politics profoundly misrepresent Islam and American Muslims in the United States.” CAP found that seven charitable foundations spent $42.6 million between 2001 and 2009 on spreading Islamophobia. read the complete article

‘We felt someone was watching us’: author Rozina Ali on the untold story of Islamophobia in the US

“I kept telling my parents: ‘This is America. This is not Pakistan. We are living in the United States of America,’” Ali recalled. “And they kept telling me: ‘This country is at war, and Muslims attacked this country, and we are all going to be under suspicion.’” It wasn’t until years later, when she was reporting on the impacts of the war on terror on Muslim communities in the US, that Ali would realize how right her parents had been. The result is a book she never intended to write – an ambitious attempt to trace the history of Islamophobia in this country, starting decades before 9/11. Seasons of Fury, out now, is a chilling tale of suppression and paranoia, which Ali unspools through the stories of four families. One notable profile follows Abdeen Jabara, an Arab American lawyer who, in the 1970s, uncovered one of the largest government surveillance efforts in US history. Jabara would eventually become known as the first American citizen surveilled by the National Security Agency. Ali’s book also explores the nuanced experiences of Muslim men who were convicted of terrorism in the wake of 9/11. Ten years since she first began her research, Ali says Islamophobia in the US feels more present than ever. read the complete article

Does the Republican Party have an ISLAMOPHOBIA problem?

Does the Republican Party have an Islamophobia problem? Muslims in the US say they are facing levels of Islamophobia worse than directly after 9/11 - and blame Republican politicians for driving anti-Islam sentiment. Texas is home to the Anti-Sharia caucus, and its governor wants to ban foot washing stations in its airports. And as the Republican convention kicks off in Dallas, TrumpWorld looks at the Islamophobia emanating from the state, and asks how a fringe issue has become rife in the Republican party. In this episode Matt Frei and Anushka Asthana are joined by Mobashra Tazamal, who researches Islamophobia at Georgetown University’s Bridge Initiative. read the complete article

"Let's Just Round Them Up": The Rise of Islamophobia in the Post-9/11 Domestic War on Terror

The attacks on September 11, 2001, unleashed a wave of Islamophobia in the United States that resulted in widespread harassment and persecution of Muslim Americans. In addition to vigilante attacks targeting Muslims or those perceived to be Muslim, there was also state repression including police roundups, community surveillance, prosecutions on often flimsy terrorism charges and mass deportations. Meanwhile, the wars launched by the United States in the aftermath of 9/11 have killed close to 1 million people in Afghanistan, Iraq, Pakistan, Yemen and elsewhere, according to the Costs of War Project at Brown University. read the complete article

Continuing Furies: A new book by Rozina Ali asks us to reckon with decades of Islamophobia in the United States and the media’s role in it.

In Seasons of Fury, she traces the long arc of Islamophobia in politics and the media. “The War on Terror was a policy decision made by the Bush administration,” Ali writes, “but many journalists, even if subconsciously, treated it as an inevitable order of the world.” The book follows four families of different backgrounds, ethnicities, religious practices, and political views. There is the story of a Michigan-born Arab American lawyer and pro-Palestine activist who was surveilled by the federal government long before 9/11. There’s the Pakistani-born family whose son gets ensnared by a police informant and is eventually sentenced to thirty years in prison for conspiring to plant explosives at New York’s Thirty-Fourth Street/Herald Square subway station. There is Ali Chaudry, the small-town New Jersey Republican mayor who goes from being a “reassuring Muslim” to discovering the limits of integration when he tries to establish a mosque. And there is the Palestinian American family who experiences the terror of living next to an Islamophobic neighbor. Together, these portraits show that Islamophobia didn’t begin with 9/11, much less with developments to follow. “I actually decided that I wanted to write this book when Trump first became president,” Ali told me. “I kept seeing descriptions of his administration in the news as the most Islamophobic president in US history. It was just astonishing to me that we could just erase that so quickly and focus on Trump as a unique phenomenon.” Her reporting details how a longer history of surveillance, counterterrorism, immigration policy, suspicion of support for Palestine, and pop-culture and media narratives has placed American Muslim life under constant scrutiny. read the complete article

What the Post-9/11 Newsroom Still Takes From Arabic-Speaking Reporters

I moved from Morocco to New York City to study journalism. It was a little over a year after the 9/11 attacks. The tragedy didn’t impact me directly. I didn’t lose a friend or a family member at the time. I lived thousands of miles away. However, it would eventually shape the journalist I would become. During my second year in college, I interviewed for a broadcasting internship in New York City. The interview was with one of the network's investigative units. It was highly competitive and, as I walked into a room full of applicants, I felt prepared to pitch story ideas and demonstrate my eagerness to work in a newsroom. I naturally assumed they would ask about story ideas or about my journalistic skills. Coming from a country where journalists are jailed and hunted by the State, having the chance to work in an environment that was safe felt like a luxury. Instead, the interviewers only cared to know whether I spoke Arabic. Entire careers emerged from the demand to explain a part of the world that many Americans knew little about. The expansion was reactive to breaking news; it wasn’t a steady build of coverage, sourcing, and knowledge. Reporters who spoke little or no Arabic suddenly became authorities on Iraq, Afghanistan, counterterrorism, political Islam and, later, ISIS. As a young reporter, I benefited from that appetite for regional expertise. I was ambitious, and for a while all I saw were the doors that my language, identity and background opened for me. Eventually, it became clear that this need didn’t translate into respect or recognition. The lack of linguistic fluency isn’t the biggest flaw in how the industry is built. Rather, it’s the pattern I’ve seen of the systemic exploitation of those who know more and yet are the least trusted to lead the storytelling. But the post-9/11 newsroom created an enormous demand for people whose knowledge would be extracted. The quiet and insidious ways in which this power imbalance works in a reporting relationship eventually determine how ideas and public opinion are shaped. read the complete article

Sept. 11-spawned surveillance is ravaging the country

Twenty-five years ago, my family prepared to move out of the West Ridge home where I had grown up. We hadn’t yet closed on our new house, so we had plans to stay put and rent our old place for six months from the new owners. But after Sept. 11, 2001, the buyers informed my Pakistani American Muslim family that we needed to vacate the home by the end of the month. With my brother and me out of town for college, my parents were forced to pack up our lives by themselves and move into my uncle’s basement. In the mad rush to empty the house, my parents started throwing out personal belongings they couldn’t take. Some suspicious neighbors scrutinized their activities and started digging through our trash. After stumbling upon the flight logs from dad’s flying lessons from the mid-1970s, a neighbor called the FBI. On the day my parents handed the keys to the new homeowners, my dad was forced to make a trip Downtown to the Rock ‘n’ Roll McDonald’s where he explained to FBI agents that flying was a hobby he took up during his early years in Chicago. My mom, on her way to my uncle’s, was terrified that my dad would be disappeared, like so many other Muslim men in the aftermath of 9/11. My dad, who had previously worked as an engineer for Pakistan International Airlines, was free to go once the FBI agents realized he wasn’t a threat. The nosy neighbors never apologized. Neither did the FBI. That was my family’s first taste of the emerging surveillance state, which enveloped our country after 9/11 and has been normalized ever since. As the so-called global war on terrorism expanded, surveillance became more sophisticated. Busybody neighbors have been replaced by Big Tech conglomerates digging through our online data instead. From the USA Patriot Act to the National Security Agency’s illegal wiretapping of activists, most Americans have grown accustomed to our government spying on them. read the complete article

Texas curriculum change will portray Islam as 'radical' and 'brutal'

The Texas State Board of Education greenlit a new social studies curriculum on Friday that will teach high school students about how Islam is "radical" and "brutal". The move followed several hours of testimony by hundreds of people before the Republican-dominated board made its 8-4 decision about how to amend the way religions are taught across public schools in the state. The new curriculum will affect some five million students. Starting in the 2030-2031 school year, when the textbooks are phased in, the focus will shift to making Bible passages required reading, highlighting Christianity's positive attributes, and referring to early Islam's military campaigns as "brutal" despite not using the same term to describe wars waged by Christians. Teaching early Islam will be specifically framed through a lens of slavery and female captivity, the Fox4 Dallas-Fort Worth news channel reported. The attacks of 11 September 2001, carried out by Saudi hijackers and largely planned by al-Qaeda, will be taught as motivated by "radical Islam" rather than political causes or agendas. Critics slammed the decision. "Selective history is not education. Texas students deserve history that is accurate, complete, and fair," Salman Bhojani, a Muslim lawmaker in the state house, wrote on X ahead of the vote last week. read the complete article

The “War on Terror” Was a War of Terror

“Terrorism is not an enemy. It cannot be defeated. It’s a tactic,” retired U.S. Army General William Odom told C-SPAN viewers in 2002. “It’s about as sensible to say we declare war on night attacks and expect we’re going to win that war. We’re not going to win the war on terrorism.” But the American military crusade became more about persisting than winning. The ultraviolent momentum became its own reason. The destructive search for enemies created more. As years went by and the “war on terror” label faded, U.S. warfare was so normal in so many places that it no longer needed a name or much of a rationale. But 25 years ago, the impulse to avenge the horrors of 9/11 was instant. Fear and rage blended into high octane for war machinery. Suddenly, overwhelming public emotions were fully in sync with the psychology of a military-industrial complex set for large-scale killing. In effect, even as the trauma of the terrible day eased for the general public, 9/11 continued to serve as a political license to kill without an expiration date. Through it all, the ongoing war effort that began in autumn 2001 had an implicit throughline in dominant media and politics: while American lives really matter, the victims of American firepower really don’t. The “war on terror” brand has gone out of fashion, but underlying military boosterism remains intact. read the complete article

United Kingdom

25 years on, UK Muslims remember how 9/11 changed their lives

Twenty-five years ago this Friday, al-Qaida members hijacked four US passenger planes. Two were flown directly into the twin towers of New York’s World Trade Center at 8.46am and 9.03am, killing nearly 3,000 people and injuring many thousands more. It was the deadliest terror attack on US soil. Within weeks, President George W Bush had sent troops to Afghanistan as part of what was dubbed the “global war on terror”. The UK followed the US there in November 2001; British forces would remain in the region for 20 years. But 9/11 also ushered in a new era of suspicion and surveillance for Muslims in the west. For many, political rhetoric about terrorism and extremism led almost immediately to violent attacks, abuse and discrimination. A mosque in Edinburgh was firebombed. News coverage of Muslims and Islam soared, much of it conflating faith with threats to national security via poorly understood terms such as “Islamism” and “jihad”. Former prime minister Margaret Thatcher criticised Muslim leaders for not, as she saw it, condemning the terror attacks strongly enough. The effects of 11 September 2001 remain with us to this day, both globally and domestically. We asked five UK Muslims from different walks of life how the attacks and their aftermath affected them and their communities. read the complete article

Sweden

‘They poison the population’: Swedish Muslims challenge far right ahead of election

For years, Sweden’s far right has peddled its own, distorted view of Islam, portraying it as being at odds with Swedish values. The Ask-a-Muslim – or Fråga en Muslim – campaign, conceived by Virk in 2017, was his way of fighting back. With the help of dozens of volunteers from the Ahmadi Muslim community, the campaign had called in at more than 150 farmers markets, squares and city centres, inviting strangers to strike up a conversation in hopes of dispelling myths and shedding light on Islam. “We have some radical parties and people are genuinely afraid about Islam,” said Virk. “Sometimes people get very rude. But most people in Sweden are lovely, friendly and interested – they want to learn more.” Ahead of Sweden’s general election on Sunday, polls show the centre-left opposition has a narrow lead, suggesting that the rightwing minority-run coalition supported by the far-right Sweden Democrats could be ousted. During the government of the centre-right prime minister Ulf Kristersson, the far-right Sweden Democrats have used their leverage to steer policies on migration and crime, seizing on the spotlight to spread rhetoric linking the two and scapegoating migrants, Muslims and other minorities for all that ails the country. read the complete article

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