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Lucy Moore

Aidan Clement

SOC-101

April 25, 2014

One Direction Facing Mecca: Post-9/11 Islamophobia, the Media, and Fear of the Other

But Im not guilty, said K. theres been a mistake. How is it even possible for someone

to be guilty? Were all human beings here, one like the other. That is true, said the priest,

but that is how the guilty speak.- Franz Kafka, The Trial

Since September 11, Islam has become more prominent in American society. There are

two ways Islam is presented: either as a malevolent force bent on destroying the American way

of life and subjugating all non-Muslims, or as a benign religion that has been hijacked by

extremists. Both are reductionist views that position Muslims as the eternal Other and do not

take into account the factors that have shaped Islamic extremism and the United States role in

creating Islamic extremism. I will discuss how American law enforcement and politics and the

mass media have shaped American Islamophobia.

Politics

The Ground Zero Mosque fiasco in 2010 is probably the best known recent example of

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Islamophobia. Park51 was a planned community center/mosque that was going to be built 2

blocks from Ground Zero. It was the brainchild of Imam Feisal Abdul Rauf, who is very much

pro-American and has dedicated most of his career to easing American suspicions of Islam and

promoting interfaith dialogue. Originally, it was well-received by most people, and even Fox

News Laura Ingraham initially supported Park51. The real controversy didnt begin until May

2010, when Pamela Geller posted an angry tirade on her blog Atlas Shrugs about the mosque and

announced that she was planning a rally against the mosque. Geller had already achieved some

notoriety by publishing the Muhammad cartoons in 2006 and accusing Obama of being a crypto-

Muslim during the 2008 elections, but Park51 made her a superstar. New York Post writer

Andrea Peyser mentioned Geller and the rally in her column, Park51 went from being a minor

human-interest piece to the cornerstone of Islams plan to take over America and install a

theocracy. Suddenly, the project was under intense scrutiny, Raufs comments about the

relationship between American foreign policy and terrorism were used to paint him as an terrorist

apologist, and the projects funding was called into question. Eventually, the furor died down.

Robert Spencer, who helped spearhead the anti-Park51 campaign, is a prominent

Islamophobe in his own right. He originally studied early Christianity and wrote for Catholic

magazines, but after 9/11 he reinvented himself as a self-styled scholar of Islam. His first book,

Islam Unveiled, was published by conservative press Encounter Books, and has written books

with even more inflammatory titles. He also operates JihadWatch and writes for prominent

neoconservative David Horowitzs Front Page Magazine. His scholarship is almost laughable.

He takes centuries-old, obscure hadith, removes them from their original context, and uses them

to tar modern Muslims. Most notably, he claims that taqiyya - a self-defense mechanism that

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allows Muslims to lie about their faith in order to save their lives - is in fact proof that Muslims

are not to be trusted. What makes Spencer truly dangerous is that he is not a fringe author. He has

served as a consultant for the United States government, and the FBI recommended his books in

their counterterrorism training. Anders Behring Breivik, the infamous Norwegian shooter, cited

Spencer as an influence.

While its easy to dismiss the Green Scare as a predominantly conservative phenomenon,

liberals are still just as guilty of Islamophobia, albeit a more benign form. Whereas conservatives

do not bother to differentiate between good and bad Muslims, liberals see Islam as a

fundamentally good religion that has been hijacked by extremists and in need of reform by

moderate Muslims. This is no doubt kinder than the conservative view of Islam, and liberals are

more than willing to work with moderate Muslims. The Obama administration has discarded the

clash of civilizations view and has worked with American Muslims to combat extremism, but

they have also expanded the War on Terror into drone warfare. They downplay the death toll

from drone warfare by categorizing all military-aged men in strike zones as potential terrorists.

Liberal Islamophobia is not as outwardly hostile as the Rights Islamophobia, but it is still used

to justify American imperialism while ignoring the outward factors that lead to Islamic

extremism.

Counterterrorism and Law Enforcement

Muslims are encouraged by the FBI to report any suspicious activity, and some Muslims

do act as informants for the FBI. However, the relationship between Muslims and the FBI is

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strained. The FBI has placed Muslims who refuse to act as informants on the no-fly list, and the

California FBI used community outreach programs to gather information about Muslims.

Islamophobia is institutionalized in the FBI. In 2011, Wired Magazines Danger Room blog

began publishing leaked documents from the FBIs counterterrorism training program. The

materials claimed that all Muslims are potential terrorists, the Arabic mind is swayed more by

words than ideas and more by ideas than facts, called the Prophet Muhammad a cult leader, and

recommended Robert Spencers Onward Muslim Soldiers as a source on Islam. The FBI also has

an extensive agent provocateur program that spends more time trying to bait Muslims into

possible terrorism plots thaThe FBI began reevaluating its counter-terrorism program, but it is

doubtful if they have made any significant changes.

Amusingly, in a twist rendolent of G.K. Chestertons The Man Who Was Thursday, an

undercover sting resulted in an agent provocateur being turned in by the very mosque he was

sent to infiltrate. Craig Monteilh, a convicted felon, was hired by the FBI to go undercover at the

Islamic Center of Irvine and look for terrorists. He was given a new identity (Farouk Aziz, a

French-Syrian convert) and told how to go about trying to find jihadists. He made friends with a

group of Egyptian Muslims, and they bonded over the gym and XBox. Eventually, he began

talking about jihad more and more, and tried to get his new friends involved in a terrorist plot.

Disturbed by their newfound friends newfound terrorism, the men reported Monteilh to the FBI

and the Islamic Center filed a restraining order against him. He was able to get one person tried -

Ahmad Niazi, who reported Monteilh to the FBI - but recordings of Niazis conversations

revealed that Monteilh intentionally went after him and tried to bait him into the terrorist plot,

and the case was eventually dropped. While the Monteilh case proved to skeptics that Muslims

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do care about fighting terrorism, it also made Muslims more suspicious of the FBI. They felt that

the FBI was not treating them as potential allies against terrorism, but as potential terrorists.

Media

Naturally, Islamophobia has made its way into entertainment. Earlier this year, ABC

Family planned a show called Alice in Arabia. Created by Brooke Eikmeier, a former interpreter

for the US military, Alice in Arabia was about a half-Saudi teenage girl named Alice. After a car

accident that kills her father and leaves her mother in a coma, her Saudi relatives take custody of

her and her grandfather confiscates her passport. All of the Muslim characters express anti-

American sentiment, and her grandfather views America as sinful. She is forced to live in the

womens quarter of her grandfathers home. The girls in the house are homeschooled in order

to protect them from the outside world and the differences between American society and Islamic

society are constantly emphasized, like when a Muslim girl says that women can choose between

being free or being Muslims. Womens rights in Saudi Arabia are indeed dismal, but the main

issue that people had with the show was that it focused more on the culture clash between

American and Muslim than how Saudi gender dynamics affected Saudi women. After a

social media outcry, ABC Family quickly pulled the show. When discussing Alice, it is important

to note Eikmeiers job with the U.S. military. If Islamophobia is already institutionally

entrenched in the government, it calls into question her ability to write about Islam without

falling into the Islam/America dichotomy.

Even representation of good Muslims ends up causing controversy. In 2010, TLC

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began airing a television show called All-American Muslim. All-American Muslim followed five

Muslim families in Dearborn, Michigan as they grappled with everyday life and religion.

Naturally, people still found a way to complain about it. Daniel Greenfield from Front Page

Magazine and the ubiquitous Pamela Geller complained that the show was a cynical ploy to

normalize Islam and manipulate Americans into ignoring terrorism. David Caton of the Florida

Family Association, an evangelical organization wrote to the shows sponsors urging them to

stop advertising. Lowes dropped their advertising, but they were criticized for caving to

conservative pressure. All-American Muslim was cancelled after one season because of low

ratings. The All-American Muslim controversy represents the catch-22 Muslims are caught in:

even if they are the assimilated, moderate Muslims that America demands, they will still be

viewed with suspicion.

Conclusion

I would to state I am in no way condoning extremism or problematic elements in Islam.

Those need to be addressed in the Muslim community, and are indeed being discussed amongst

Muslims. It is also foolish to assume that every Muslim extremist is just fighting back against

imperialism, as groups like the Taliban are more than willing to collaborate with American

imperialists. The problem is that Islamophobes take very real problems in Muslim communities,

strip them of any sort of context, and use them to condemn Islam as a backwards, anti-American

religion and lump together all Muslims regardless of ethnicity, sect, background, or motherland.

Even when people separate good Muslims from bad Muslims, they are still ignoring external

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factors that lead to extremism and expect Muslims to constantly condemn the actions of their

own co-religionists and always side with America. If Americans want to even begin combating

Islamic extremism, they can start by discarding the good Muslim, bad Muslim dichotomy.

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Works Cited

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Wired.com. Conde Nast Digital, 25 July 2011. Web. 01 May 2014.

Ackerman, Spencer. "FBI Teaches Agents: Mainstream Muslims Are Violent, Radical."

Wired.com. Conde Nast Digital, 12 Sept. 2011. Web. 01 May 2014.

Ackerman, Spencer. "Obama Orders Government to Clean Up Terror Training." Wired.com.

Conde Nast Digital, 27 Nov. 2011. Web. 01 May 2014.

Ali, Wajahat. "The Reality of the 'All-American Muslim' Reality TV Show." Theguardian.com.

Guardian News and Media, 17 Nov. 2011. Web. 01 May 2014.

Barnard, Anne. "Complicated Balancing Act For Imam in Mosque Furor." The New York Times.

The New York Times, 21 Aug. 2010. Web. 01 May 2014.

Boorstein, Michelle. "In Flap over Mosque near Ground Zero, Conservative Bloggers Gaining

Influence." Washington Post. The Washington Post, 19 Aug. 2010. Web. 01 May 2014.

Ernst, Carl W. "Notes on the Ideological Patron of an Islamophobe, Robert Spencer." University

of North Carolina, Chapel Hill, 2004. Web. 30 Apr. 2014.

Geller, Pamela. ""'All-American Islam' Hides the Truth about Islam"" WorldNetDaily, 15 Nov.

2011. Web. 1 May 2014.

Glass, Ira. "The Convert." This American Life. Chicago Public Media. 471, Chicago, IL, 10 Aug.

2012. This American Life. Web. 30 Apr. 2014. Transcript.

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Harris, Paul. "The Ex-FBI Informant with a Change of Heart: 'There Is No Real Hunt. It's Fixed'"

Theguardian.com. Guardian News and Media, 20 Mar. 2012. Web. 30 Apr. 2014.

Jha, Rega. "ABC Family Kills "Alice In Arabia"" Weblog post. BuzzFeed. N.p., 21 Mar. 2014.

Web. 30 Apr. 2014.

Jha, Rega. "We Got A Copy Of The Script For "Alice In Arabia" And It's Exactly What Critics

Feared." Web log post. BuzzFeed. N.p., 21 Mar. 2014. Web. 30 Apr. 2014.

Kafka, Franz. "Chapter 9: In The Cathedral." The Trial. N.p.: n.p., 1925. 218. Print.

Kumar, Deepa. "Islamophobia: A Bipartisan Project." The Nation. N.p., 2 July 2012. Web. 01

May 2014.

Kundnani, Arun. The Muslims Are Coming!: Islamophobia, Extremism, and the Domestic War on

Terror. London: Verso, 2014. Print.

Lean, Nathan. The Islamophobia Industry: How the Right Manufactures Fear of Muslims.

London: Pluto, 2012. Kindle.

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Dec. 2014. Web. 01 May 2014.

Markon, Jerry. "Tension Grows between Calif. Muslims, FBI after Informant Infiltrates

Mosque." Washington Post. The Washington Post, 05 Dec. 2010. Web. 30 Apr. 2014.

McDonald, Danny. "The FBI Is Trying to Recruit Muslims as Snitches by Putting Them on No-

Fly Lists." VICE. Vice Magazine, 23 Apr. 2014. Web. 01 May 2014.

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Potts, Kimberly. "Mia Farrow, Russell Simmons Urge Lowe's Boycott After Muslim Ad Drama -

TheWrap." TheWrap. The Wrap, 12 Dec. 2011. Web. 01 May 2014.

Shane, Scott. "Killings Spotlight Anti-Muslim Thought in U.S." The New York Times. The New

York Times, 24 July 2011. Web. 01 May 2014.