Understanding Why Islamophobia is on the Rise
October 15th, 2007By
Phyllis Bennis
Institute
for Policy Studies/U.S. Campaign to End the Israeli Occupation
15
October 2007
Download the Speak Out! Against "Islamo-Fascist Awareness Week" here.
Right-wing
and neo-conservative political forces are calling for campus mobilizations 22 –
26 October 2007 for “Islamo-Fascism Awareness Week” events. They deliberately
use the provocative term "Islamo-Fascism," linking Islam (and
blurring the religion, the countries where it is a majority, and its adherents)
with the most despised political movement in history -- fascism. They do
so despite the disdain with which the most violent and extremist versions of
political Islamism holds both the nation-state and corporations, both of which
fascism holds sacred. Their call predicts “the biggest conservative campus
protest ever” and identifies their goal as “to confront the two Big Lies of the
political left: that George Bush created the war on terror and that Global
Warming is a greater danger to Americans than the terrorist threat.”
The very
language of their goals makes clear that this is not solely a racist assault on
Muslims, Arabs, Arab-Americans, South Asians and anyone viewed as sympathetic
towards those communities. Certainly this Islamophobic crusade, led by the
neo-conservative
There is
an understandable instinct to roll one’s eyes at these risible assertions, and
to dismiss the grandiose mobilization claims as just one more fringe right-wing
nut job, but such a response would be a serious mistake.Not because the “claims” are anything other
than preposterous, but rather because there is far too much public belief in
these preposterous assertions for anyone concerned with public education and
mobilization to blithely write them off.And with the clear links between Islamophobia and support for war, the
stakes are simply too high to ignore.
It is
clearly no coincidence that the areas that are the ultimate targets of the
so-called “war on terror,” countries where Islam is preeminent as majority
populations and often the basis for governance, are the same countries and
regions where strategic resources – most notably oil and natural gas – are
concentrated.It is also no coincidence
that both the 2002 and 2006 versions of the Pentagon’s “Quadriennial Review”
demonized Muslims, Islamic countries and Islam, in various guises, as grave
threats to
The call
for “Islamo-Fascism Awareness Week” uses rhetoric that recalls 1950s-era anti-communist
attack and innuendo, saying that “In the face of the greatest danger
Americans have ever confronted, the academic left has mobilized to create
sympathy for the enemy and to fight anyone who rallies Americans to defend
themselves. …Islamo-Fascism Awareness Week is a national effort to oppose these
lies and to rally American students to defend their country.”
The
political framework of this “Global War on Terror” has tweaked the idea of a
“clash of civilizations” to refer to something slightly different. Now the Bush
administration speaks not of that clash between civilizations, but
rather a clash within a civilization – specifically within the Muslim
world.It is a “clash,” administration
officials warn, in which “we” must prevail.This has shaped the latest version of how the
The
“global war on terror” framework thus serves the Bush admininistration’s goal
of permanent war – a permanent war economy, permanent reliance on preventive
and preemptive wars, and permanent control of the world through a network of
military bases and expansion of military force.It is a Manichean world-view, a view of good vs bad, white vs black, and
ultimately “us” vs “them.”
This is a
throwback to the language of totalitarian regimes.Nazi propaganda chief Joseph Goebbels bragged
that if you repeat a lie often enough, the people will believe it. And Hitler’s
Reich-Marshal Hermann Goering, while recognizing that “naturally the common
people don’t want war,” went on to remind the world how easy it was to convince
people to support war.“All you have to
do,” he said, “is to tell them they are being attacked, and denounce the pacifists
for lack of patriotism and exposing the country to danger. It works the same in
any country.”
This call
for an “Islamo-Fascism Awareness Week,” shocking in its explicitness, is an
effort to mobilize support for a carefully crafted campaign, designed to use
familiar racist imagery to bolster the Bush administration’s key strategic
foreign policy objective:strengthening
the so-called “global war on terror.”
The
campaign aims to reach a wide swath of
There is
a clear link, for instance, between Columbia University president Lee
Bollinger’s statement (featured at the center of a full-page New York Times
ad purchased by the American Jewish Committee) equating what he called “the
mission” of Israeli and U.S. universities, and his leading role in insulting
the Iranian president when Mahmoud Ahmadinejad appeared to speak before
Columbia students.Not quite willing to
openly reverse Ahmadinejad’s invitation to his university, Bollinger was
prepared to employ a novel kind of censorship-through-humiliation:acquiesce to the appearance of an unwanted
guest, but control the discourse through rudeness and humiliation
This is
hardly the first time the
The World
War II campaign to disparage and defame all Japanese was broadened to include
Japanese-Americans, and of course that led to the infamous
It is no
coincidence that racism against other communities is at the core of the work of
such the David Horowitz “
The
targeting of Muslim and Arab communities has an earlier history. In 1987 a
secret report of the inter-agency “Alien Border Control Commission” was leaked
to the Los Angeles Times.Coordinating the work of the Justice Department, FBI, immigration
services and several other related agencies, the ABCC outlined a plan for the
internment of
During
the years of the Cold War, the word “communism” served as a convenient basis
for mobilizing popular support for war, hysterical fear that shut down critical
thinking, and the wholesale violation of U.S. Constitutional rights.While many Americans didn’t really know what
communism was, during the McCarthy period anti-communism still succeeded in
creating new fears, demonizing whole communities, and legitimizing the notion
that an accused communist was guilty till proven innocent.
Are we
surprised that years later equivalent assumptions shape the treatment of Muslim
detainees accused of “terrorism” and held for months or years in Abu Ghraib, in
These are
some of the major reasons why we must not laugh “Islamo-Fascism Awareness Week”
away or brush it under the carpet.
- Refuse to hire or deny tenure to numerous academics whose work challenges what is defined as “acceptable” mainstream dogma on Middle East and U.S. policy issues;
Despite the rise of
racist, anti-Arab Islamophobia, it is clear that public opinion (however
slowly) is actually beginning to shift away from accepting such propaganda. In
fact it is arguable that the escalation of racist attacks is actually a
response to those changing popular views.
Those changes have been
brought about through a number of factors. Former President Jimmy Carter’s
book, Palestine: Peace Not Apartheid has had a major impact. Its
stunning title has brought new legitimacy to the once-demonized analysis of
Israeli policy as a new form of apartheid. Others, including the U.S. Campaign
to End Israeli Occupation (www.endtheoccupation.org),
are highlighting evidence of how Israeli policies towards Palestinians in the
occupied territories and inside
The work of Professors
Stephen Walt and John Mearscheimer on the pro-Israeli lobby, culminating in
their recent book The Israel Lobby, has broken a longstanding taboo on
bringing the role and influence of the lobby into public discussion. While Walt
and Mearscheimer were hardly the first to write about the lobby, their original
article (refused by the Atlantic Monthly, which had originally
commissioned it, but eventually published by the London Review of Books)
reached a much broader audience than any earlier critical analysis because of
the impeccable academic and political credentials of the two scholars. Their
tenured positions at Harvard and the
Whatever the weaknesses or
limitations of these two important books, their publication has enabled a level
of nuance long made impossible in mainstream discussion of these issues.
Organizations such as Jewish Voice for Peace (www.jvp.org)
are rising, bringing Jewish opposition to Israeli occupation to new visibility.
These sustained voices are resisting the efforts to shape an intellectual
climate in which challenging Israeli occupation policies is equated with
anti-Semitism and discussion of “dealing with” Iran is limited to the choice
between crippling economic sanctions or nuclear attack.The traditional efforts to narrow or
circumscribe the debate no longer go unanswered.
[1] See also “Horowtiz’s Latest Hate Campaign Heads for Campus,” by Gary Leupp in Counterpunch, 10 October 2007 (counterpunch.com) and “The Mother of All Pretexts” by Uri Avneri at http://zope.gush-shalom.org/home/en/channels/avnery/1192288533/
See the excellent analysis and materials on http://www.defendcriticalthinking.org/” and then follow with the rest. And also under reasons for optimism could we add “A coalition of academics and scholars has come together to defend academics and freedom of speech at http://www.defendcriticalthinking.org/ and has compiled several useful resources for campus activists