SUBSCRIBE TO OUR FREE NEWSLETTER
Daily news & progressive opinion—funded by the people, not the corporations—delivered straight to your inbox.
5
#000000
#FFFFFF
5
#000000
#FFFFFF
muslims
Israeli Government Social Media Urges Europe to 'Remove' Muslims
"What would the reaction would be if an Arab state wrote this about synagogues and Jews?" asked one critic.
Aug 27, 2025
Israel faced backlash this week after its Arabic-language account on the social media site X published a message warning Europeans to take action against the proliferation of mosques and "remove" Muslims from their countries.
"In the year 1980, there were only fewer than a hundred mosques in Europe. As for today, there are more than 20,000 mosques. This is the true face of colonization," posted Israel, a settler-colonial state whose nearly 2 million Muslim citizens face widespread discrimination, and where Palestinians in the illegally occupied territories live under an apartheid regime.
"This is what is happening while Europe is oblivious and does not care about the danger," the post continues. "And the danger does not lie in the existence of mosques in and of themselves, for freedom of worship is one of the basic human rights, and every person has the right to believe and worship his Lord."
"The problem lies in the contents that are taught in some of these mosques, and they are not limited to piety and good deeds, but rather focus on encouraging escalating violence in the streets of Europe, and spreading hatred for the other and even for those who host them in their countries, and inciting against them instead of teaching love, harmony, and peace," Israel added. "Europe must wake up and remove this fifth column."
Referring to the far-right Alternative for Germany party, Berlin-based journalist James Jackson replied on X that "even the AfD don't tweet, 'Europe must wake up and remove this fifth column' over a map of mosques."
Other social media users called Israel's post "racist" and "Islamophobic," while some highlighted the stark contrast between the way Palestinians and Israelis treat Christian people and institutions.
Others noted that some of the map's fearmongering figures misleadingly showing a large number of mosques indicate countries whose populations are predominantly or significantly Muslim.
"Russia has 8,000 mosques? Who would've known a country with millions of Muslim Central Asians and Caucasians would need so many!" said one X user.
Israel's post came amid growing international outrage over its 691-day assault and siege on Gaza, which has left more than 230,000 Palestinians dead, maimed, or missing and hundreds of thousands more starving and facing ethnic cleansing as Operation Gideon's Chariots 2—a campaign to conquer, occupy, and "cleanse" the strip—ramps up amid a growing engineered famine that has already killed hundreds of people.
Israel is facing an ongoing genocide case at the International Court of Justice, while Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu and Yoav Gallant, his former defense minister, are fugitives form the International Criminal Court, where they are wanted for alleged war crimes and crimes against humanity including murder and forced starvation.
European nations including Belgium, Ireland, and Spain are supporting the South Africa-led ICJ genocide case against Israel. Since October 2023, European countries including Belgium, France, Malta, Portugal, Slovenia, the United Kingdom, Ireland, Norway, and Spain have either formally recognized Palestinian statehood or announced their intention to do so.
Keep ReadingShow Less
25 Islamic Clerics Urge Muslims Across US to Defeat Trump
"Knowingly enabling someone like Donald Trump to return to office, whether by voting directly for him or for a third-party candidate, is both a moral and a strategic failure."
Oct 07, 2024
Balancing grave concerns over the Biden-Harris administration's support for Israel's yearlong assault on Gaza against the dire prospects of a potential second administration of former Republican President Donald Trump, a group of 25 U.S. Islamic clerics on Sunday urged American Muslims to "consider the broad picture" and vote for Democratic Vice President Kamala Harris.
"We are all heartbroken and in deep pain over the war in Gaza and the escalation in Lebanon. We stand with the global-wide outcry to immediately stop the continued genocide against the Palestinian people," the religious leaders, who include numerous imams, wrote in a letter to Muslim voters. "The collective conscience, inherent soul, and sense of justice of all humanity [are] assaulted, disturbing the peace of all. We are all one in our frustration to the point of anger."
"What's popular is not always right and what's right is not always popular. In our estimation, the present-future benefits of voting for Vice President Harris far outweighs the harms of the other options."
"We are taught by our beloved Prophet Muhammad to 'resist becoming angry,' for it eats up goodness and overrides rational thinking," the letter states. "Our lives in these United States of America are not in a vacuum, and as such the election choices, the decisions that we make are not either. They don't just affect us, but all American citizens for years, maybe decades to come."
"We are to be future-oriented, strategic, and rational rather than just focus on the present," the clerics asserted. "Thus, it is an imperative that we elect leaders who have committed to a cease-fire, an independent Palestine, stabilizing our democracy, and who stand with our community."
The letter continues:
In assessing the candidates for president, for us it's not the lesser of two evils. For us, as people of faith, specifically as Muslims, it's the measure or estimate (Qadar) of the Harm (Sharr or Darri) and the Benefit (Khayr or naf'ee). When faced with a choice, we are expected to carefully assess the potential benefits and harm involved, prioritizing actions that bring better and minimize negative consequences...
What's popular is not always right and what's right is not always popular. In our estimation, the present-future benefits of voting for Vice President Harris far outweighs the harms of the other options. Let's consider the broad picture in addition to the one in our immediate vision.
Turning their attention to Trump, the clerics said that "our community is in pain, but we must also remember that we cannot allow our country to return to Jim Crow America, this is not a reality our community can afford."
"Knowingly enabling someone like Donald Trump to return to office, whether by voting directly for him or for a third-party candidate, is both a moral and a strategic failure," they stressed. "Particularly in swing states, a vote for a third party could enable Trump to win that state and therefore the election."
"In 2016, Trump won Michigan by merely 11,000 votes mainly because of votes cast for third-party candidates. This enabled Trump to inflict great harm on our communities and country in numerous ways," the letter says. "Trump is funded by pro-settlement donors who support Israeli annexation of the West Bank, he has promised to give [Israeli Prime Minister Bemjamin] Netanyahu what he needs to 'finish the job' in Gaza, and even promised to deport pro-Palestinian students and activists who he refers to as 'jihadists.' Jared Kushner, his son-in-law, has promised to turn Gaza into 'lucrative beachfront properties.'"
"Given his well-documented history of harming our communities and country, as well as what he has promised he will do to Muslims and Palestinians should he return, it is incumbent upon us not to allow our high emotions to dictate our actions to our detriment," the clerics argued.
Trump's anti-Muslim animus far predates his presidency. In 2011 he said the U.S. "absolutely" has a "Muslim problem." While campaigning in 2016 he said that "Islam hates us" and that it is "very hard" to differentiate between "radical Islam" and the entire Muslim faith.
As president, Trump ordered multiple bans on people from predominantly Muslim countries. The U.S. Supreme Court—three of whose right-wing members were appointed by Trump—upheld a version of the ban. On the international stage, Trump followed through on his campaign promise to "bomb the shit out of" the so-called Islamic State and "take out their families." Thousands of civilians were killed in U.S. attacks on seven predominantly Muslim nations, matching the number of countries bombed by former President Barack Obama and exceeding the six nations attacked during the presidency of George W. Bush.
"We cannot turn our backs on our diverse Muslim community at home and those abroad who are impacted by U.S. policies in our moment of pain and anger," the letter contends. "And we have a responsibility, an amana, not to place our community in harm's way."
The clerics said that Harris and her Democratic running mate, Minnesota Gov. Tim Walz, "see a new way forward and are not going back."
"We stand with moving forward," they concluded, "and call on other imams and our communities to move forward with us."
The letter stands in stark contrast with the stance of Abandon Harris, a swing state, Muslim-led coalition that says it seeks to hold the Biden-Harris administration "accountable for the Gaza genocide." The campaign endorsed Green Party candidate Jill Stein on Monday.
While the Uncommitted National Movement—a coalition of pro-Palestine, peace, and progressive groups that urged people to vote "uncommitted" in Democratic primaries in a bid to pressure the Biden administration to push Israel for a Gaza cease-fire—is not endorsing Harris, the group stressed that it opposes Trump and that voting third-party "is a mistake."
Keep ReadingShow Less
White House Needs a Strategy for Combating Islamophobia, Say Rights Groups
"Any genuine attempt to combat Islamophobia must start with the government acknowledging the harm it continues to inflict both domestically and internationally, and offering adequate redress to affected communities at home and globally."
May 08, 2024
Nearly 100 organizations joined Muslims for Just Futures on Tuesday in calling on U.S. President Joe Biden to introduce a White House Islamophobia Strategy that centers government accountability and solidarity with Muslim and Arab American communities, demanding that the Biden administration honor the "lived experiences" of people who have faced Islamophobic attacks that have ramped up since Hamas attacked southern Israel last October.
The coalition's 26-page community memorandum, dated April 2024, was publicly released on Tuesday, the same day Biden spoke about fighting antisemitism in a speech marking the U.S. Holocaust Memorial Museum's Days of Remembrance.
Biden's conflation of antisemitism with protesters' and voters' demands to end U.S. support for Israel in order to save the lives of Palestinians in Gaza, said the community memorandum, has had "profound negative effects" on Muslim and Arab Americans.
The coalition said that organizations involved in drafting the memorandum—including Afghans for a Better Tomorrow, American Muslim Bar Association, and the Center for Constitutional Rights—"emphasized the direct role of the White House in perpetuating Islamophobia, anti-Palestinian racism, and anti-Arab racism through its ongoing support for the genocide and occupation in Palestine," among other military campaigns.
"Any genuine attempt to combat Islamophobia must start with the government acknowledging the harm it continues to inflict both domestically and internationally, and offering adequate redress to affected communities at home and globally," reads the memorandum.
The document includes a number of recommendations for agencies across the federal government, including a call for all agencies to vet potential employees "for affiliation with white nationalist or white supremacist" groups.
In the first weeks of Israel's bombardment of Gaza last fall, one high-profile alleged Islamophobic attack was perpetrated by a former State Department official who had served in the Obama administration and was filmed harassing a food cart vendor in New York.
The document makes other recommendations including:
- Biden to call for an immediate and permanent cease-fire in Gaza and end U.S. support for Israel's bombardment of the enclave;
- The closure of the Guantánamo Bay detention center;
- The U.S. intelligence community to "stop weaponizing Section 702 of the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act against Black, Arab, Muslim, Middle Eastern, and South Asian (BAMEMSA) communities by surveilling citizens and non-citizens and collecting communications without a warrant;
- The Department of Justice Civil Rights Division to consult with Black, Muslim, Arab, Palestinian, and South Asian communities about their needs and concerns, amid a surge in Islamophobic attacks that was recorded by the Council on American-Islamic Relations last year;
- The Federal Bureau of Investigation to end its use of "secret and discriminatory watchlists," which includes 1.5 million people in 2019—95% of whom had Muslim names; and
- The government to ensure that universities and schools end the targeting of "Muslim, Arab, Palestinian, and allied students supporting Palestine," who have been "discriminated against by their universities, and physically attacked, doxxed, and intimidated in efforts to silence their advocacy for Palestinian rights and opposition to Israel's genocide."
The memorandum was released as a research scholar at Arizona State University, Jonathan Yudelman, was reported to be on leave after cellphone video last weekend captured him intimidating and yelling at a women wearing a hijab.
Other Islamophobic attacks in recent months have included the stabbing of a young Palestinian American man in Austin, Texas and the shooting of three Palestinian students in Burlington, Vermont.
"By embracing a framework that honors lived experiences and acknowledges the diverse impacts within Muslim and related communities, we can begin the urgent task of dismantling systemic barriers that harm Muslim communities and those racially perceived as such," said Muslims for Just Futures. "Additionally, the government must take decisive action to dismantle policies that perpetuate Islamophobia while actively involving affected communities in decision-making processes."
Keep ReadingShow Less
Modi Slammed for 'Direct Attack on Muslims of India' in Campaign 'Hate Speech'
"Modi's rhetoric against Muslims is extremely divisive and dangerous," warned one critic. "It would only fuel more hate and violence against the already battered community."
Apr 22, 2024
Critics on Monday condemned far-right Indian Prime Minister Narendra Modi for what one group called a "hateful and dangerous" campaign speech in which he claimed that Muslim "infiltrators" would steal Indians' wealth if the opposition wins parliamentary elections that began last week.
Speaking to supporters at a rally in the western state of Rajasthan on Sunday, Modi said that the manifesto of the opposition Indian National Congress (INC) party details how to calculate "the amount of gold that mothers and sisters have" so that it can be redistributed to Muslims.
"When they were in power, they said Muslims have first right over resources," the prime minister claimed out of context. "They will gather all your wealth and redistribute among those who have more children. They will distribute it among infiltrators. Do you think your hard-earned money should be given to infiltrators? Would you accept this?"
Prime Minister Narendra Modi's rhetoric against Muslims is extremely divisive and dangerous. It would only fuel more hate and violence against the already battered community. pic.twitter.com/KT36FVpS6u
— Raqib Hameed Naik (@raqib_naik) April 21, 2024
Members of Modi's ruling Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP)—which does enjoy the support of a significant number of Indian Muslims—have often portrayed Muslims as outsiders. BJP officials have also pushed a baseless conspiracy narrative roughly analogous to U.S. white supremacists' "great replacement" theory, in this case positing that Muslim migrants and rapidly reproducing Indian Muslims will eventually outnumber Hindus—who make up around 80% of the country's 1.4 billion people.
Modi's remarks came a day after India's seven-step election of 543 members of the Lok Sabha, or lower legislative house, began. Modi is running for a third consecutive term. He's being challenged by INC President Mallikarjun Kharge, leader of the opposition in the Rajya Sabha, the upper legislative house. Results will be announced on June 4.
Kharge responded to Modi's remarks by blasting the "panic-filled" address as "not only a hate speech but also a well-thought-out ploy to divert attention" by the prime minister, the BJP, and Rashtriya Swayamsevak Sangh (RSS)—a fascist-inspired political and paramilitary movement whose brand of Hindu supremacy heavily influenced the rise of the BJP.
"Lying for power, making baseless references to things, and making false accusations on opponents is the specialty of the training of RSS and BJP," Kharge said, adding that Indians "are no longer going to fall prey to this lie."
Indian journalist and
Washington Post opinion columnist Rana Ayyub said on social media that "this is not a dogwhistle, this is a targeted, direct, brazen hate speech against a community."
Thousands of Indians petitioned the country's Election Commission seeking punitive action against Modi.
"The prime minister, while campaigning... made a speech on April 21 in Rajasthan that has disturbed the sentiments of millions of Constitution-respecting citizens of India," one petition states. "The speech is dangerous and a direct attack on the Muslims of India."
Muslim groups around the world also slammed Modi's speech, which the U.S.-based Council on American Islamic Relations (CAIR) called "hateful and dangerous."
"It is unconscionable, but not surprising, that far-right Hindutva leader Narendra Modi would target Indian Muslims with a hateful and dangerous diatribe despite his role as the leader of a nation with such a diverse religious heritage," said CAIR national executive director Nihad Awad.
"We again call on the Biden administration to declare India a 'country of particular croncern' over its discriminatory and violent policies targeting Muslims and other religious minorities," Awad added. "Global Islamophobia is alive and well in India and must be confronted before it escalates to something even worse."
South Asia historian Audrey Truschke, a professor at Rutgers University in New Jersey, accused Modi of "straight-up fascism."
"Modi had a history of encouraging mass violence against Muslims," Truschke added. "So we should all take his words seriously."
Modi was chief minister of the western state of Gujarat in February 2002 when a train full of Hindu pilgrims was set ablaze, killing 58 people. The cause of the disaster remains disputed, but Modi was quick to blame Muslims for the fire. In a three-day paroxysm of intercommunal bloodletting, Hindu mobs murdered at least hundreds—and perhaps thousands—of Muslim men, women, and children. Many women and girls were raped. More than 250 Hindus were also killed during what came to be called the Gujarat riots, during which an estimated 150,000 people were also forcibly displaced.
A team sent by the British government concluded that Modi was "directly responsible for a climate of impunity" that enabled the pogrom. However, a special investigation commissioned by the Indian Supreme Court cleared him of complicity in 2012. Modi's alleged role in the massacre led to a U.S. visa ban during the George W. Bush administration that was lifted during the tenure of former President Barack Obama after Modi became prime minister.
Deadly violence against religious minorities and others has increased during BJP rule. And while the U.S. State Department has perennially criticized the Indian government's human rights record, Modi was courted by both the Trump and Biden administrations. Last year, the White House literally rolled out the red carpet for Modi, who was lavishly feted by President Joe Biden and invited to speak before a rare joint session of Congress. Several progressive lawmakers boycotted the address.
Earlier this year, Progressive International's (PI) executive body used Modi's consecration of a highly controversial Hindu temple on the former site of a 16th-century Muslim mosque destroyed by a Hindu nationalist mob as an opportunity to issue a warning about the accelerating erosion of democracy in India.
"The Modi government has made a decisive move to overthrow India's secular constitution in the name of a new Hindu supremacist nation," PI's statement asserted. "As prime minister, Modi has pushed this Hindu nationalism as India's dominant political force: banning the hijab in schools, introducing 'anti-conversion' laws, abusing municipal forces to demolish Muslim households and shops in cities, and pushing for a 'uniform civil code' in law."
Anti-Muslim speech has also increased dramatically in India, according to a report published earlier this year by the U.S.-based India Hate Lab. The publication detailed 668 incidents in 2023—75% of which occurred in BJP-ruled states.
Keep ReadingShow Less
In 'Tense' Meeting, Arab Leaders in Michigan Warn White House to Change Course on Gaza
"If President Biden wants a shot here in Michigan, he's going to need to do something different," said one leader.
Feb 09, 2024
A week after Arab American and Muslim leaders in Michigan refused a meeting with U.S. President Joe Biden's campaign over the White House's continued support for Israel's bombardment of Gaza, several representatives of the community met Thursday with a group of top Biden aides—but came away unconvinced that the administration understands the stakes involved in its failure to listen to demands for a cease-fire.
"If President Biden wants a shot here in Michigan, he's going to need to do something different," Abbas Alawieh, a senior Democratic strategist and spokesperson for Listen to Michigan, a group that is urging cease-fire supporters in the state to vote "uncommitted" on primary ballots on February 27, told HuffPost.
Alawieh's comments came after he, state Rep. Abraham Aiyash (D-4), Dearborn Mayor Abdullah Hammoud, Wayne County Deputy Executive Assad Turfe, and others met with administration officials.
Alawieh told the outlet that the meeting was "very tense," with attendees informing U.S. Agency for International Development head Samantha Power and senior presidential adviser Tom Perez, among other officials, of specific demands.
The group reiterated its call for Biden to make a direct demand that Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu agree to a permanent cease-fire and for the U.S. to immediately reinstate funding for the United Nations Relief and Works Agency for Palestine Refugees in the Near East (UNRWA).
The suspension of UNRWA funds have left the agency risking a "complete collapse" of its humanitarian response in Gaza, where at least 27,947 Palestinians have been killed by the Israel Defense Forces since October 7. More than one million displaced Palestinians have taken shelter in UNRWA shelters, where aid workers are struggling to provide food, medical care, and potable water in the face of Israel's near-total blockade.
Hammoud said on social media after the meeting that the views of Arab Americans and the majority of Democratic voters who support a cease-fire and increased aid for civilians "have not been accurately captured by mainstream media and have failed to reach the highest office in our government" over the past several months.
"This meeting was held to ensure that the White House and those with the ability to change the course of the genocide unfolding in Gaza very clearly hear and understand the demands of our community, directly from us," said Hammoud.
In the meeting, said the mayor, the local and state leaders "remained uncompromising in our values and our demands."
"As citizens of the United States of America and representatives of the city of Dearborn, we have done our duty; now it is incumbent upon the president to do the same," said Hammoud.
But the meeting adjourned without the White House aides giving assurances that Biden would do so, even though a growing number of leaders in the state—both within the Arab American and Muslim communities and outside of it—have signed on to the Listen to Michigan campaign.
By voting "uncommitted" in the primary, supporters are hoping to send an urgent message to Biden that his refusal to meet the demands of the community—and 7 in 10 Democrats in an Associated Press-NORC Center for Public Affairs Research poll released last week—could be a grave miscalculation and cost him crucial votes in the general election in November.
Shadb Singh, an organizer with Listen to Michigan, reported Wednesday that the campaign appears to be taking off with voters based on the attendance of a mass mobilization call.
Biden won Michigan, a key swing state, by just 154,000 votes in 2020, and the Muslim population in the state includes 200,000 registered voters.
Last month, before Hammoud and other leaders refused to engage with Biden during his campaign stop, the president dismissed a question from a reporter about his cratering support among Arab Americans amid his backing of Israel.
"We understand who cares about the Arab population," he said, comparing himself to former President Donald Trump, who is running for the Republican presidential nomination and has easily won several primary contests so far.
Alawieh said the White House officials were "lucky to be hearing from the expertise of people harmed by the very policies the Biden administration is championing," but the attendees were skeptical that the president's team understood the risk Biden is running by assuming he has the support of Arab Americans.
"This was about ensuring the administration sees the real impact of its policies, not just on foreign soil but right here, affecting our people, our families," Turfe told HuffPost. "We made it clear that any future engagement with the administration is conditional upon real action. The developments in Gaza will serve as the benchmark for evaluating the effectiveness of the administration’s actions. The Biden administration must act swiftly and decisively to end this violence, honoring the principles of justice and human rights."
Keep ReadingShow Less
'Relentless Hate': Late 2023 Saw Surge in Anti-Muslim Crimes, Discrimination
"The way to stop the hate is to end the apartheid, occupation, and genocide occurring in Palestine," said one CAIR leader.
Jan 29, 2024
Nearly four months into Israel's war on the Gaza Strip, the largest Muslim civil rights and advocacy group in the United States on Monday highlighted that the U.S. saw a dramatic rise in Islamophobic hate during the final three months of 2023.
In line with data released last month, the Council on American-Islamic Relations (CAIR) revealed that it received 3,578 complaints from October through December—a 178% jump from a similar three-month period the previous year.
The highest reported categories last quarter were employment discrimination (19%), hate crimes and incidents (13%), and education discrimination (13%), according to CAIR, which plans to release a full analysis and dataset in the months ahead.
Victims of high-profile incidents have included six-year-old Wadea Al-Fayoume, who was stabbed to death in Illinois; three university students shot and wounded in Vermont; and a New York City food cart vendor harassed by a former U.S. State Department official.
"Despite this disturbing wave of bias targeting the Muslim, Arab American, and Palestinian communities, we are witnessing an impressive resilience in the face of bigotry."
"Despite this disturbing wave of bias targeting the Muslim, Arab American, and Palestinian communities, we are witnessing an impressive resilience in the face of bigotry," said CAIR national executive director Nihad Awad in a statement.
CAIR's Monday release comes as the death toll in Gaza has topped 26,600 people—including at least 11,500 children—with over 65,300 others injured and thousands more missing. The vast majority of Gaza's 2.3 million residents are displaced and hungry.
Despite the International Court of Justice (ICJ) on Friday ordering Israel to "take all measures within its power" to prevent genocide in Gaza, the U.S.-backed Israeli assault on the besieged enclave continues, and fears of a wider regional war keep mounting.
The ICJ's initial ruling last week also emboldened supporters of a cease-fire, who have repeatedly taken to the streets around the world since Israel launched its current military campaign against Gaza in retaliation for a Hamas-led attack on October 7.
"In the face of relentless hate and bogus smears, American Muslims, Arabs, and a broad coalition of Jewish, Christian, African American, Asian Americans, and others continue calling for justice for Palestine," CAIR research and advocacy director Corey Saylor said Monday. "This coalition knows the way to stop the hate is to end the apartheid, occupation, and genocide occurring in Palestine."
As Common Dreams reported earlier this month, since Israel declared war, there has also been a significant rise in antisemitism in the United States and worldwide—though reliable figures have been hard to come by, as some individuals and groups conflate protests against the war or criticism of the right-wing Israeli government with hostility toward Jews.
U.S. Attorney General Merrick Garland said in the early weeks of the war that the Department of Justice was monitoring the increase in threats against Jewish, Muslim, and Arab communities nationwide and the Department of Homeland Security last month released resources to help houses of worship and faith-based groups enhance their security.
However, the United States also gives Israel $3.8 billion in annual military aid, and since October 7, U.S. President Joe Biden has sought a new $14.3 billion package while also bypassing Congress to arm Israeli forces—degrading many Arab and Muslim Americans' trust in the Democrat, who is seeking reelection in November.
As a federal court on Friday held a hearing for a case accusing Biden, Secretary of State Antony Blinken, and Secretary of Defense Lloyd Austin of complicity in genocide, some local leaders in Michigan—a key swing state with the nation's biggest Arab American population—refused to meet with a delegation from the president's campaign.
Dawud Walid, the executive director of CAIR's Michigan chapter, told CNN on Saturday: "There is no possibility of repair while he is supporting an act of genocide. So, there is no reason to have communication."
Keep ReadingShow Less
What Will It Take To Stop Hatred Towards Muslims?
Muslims are loving, peaceful people. Our holy book, the Quran, explicitly states that taking a life is the same as killing all of humanity, and saving a life is the same as saving all of humanity.
Jan 26, 2024
My faith tradition, Islam, has always taught me to speak up for justice, condemn hate, and value our shared humanity. For this reason, I have spent almost my entire career working for causes that advance social justice.
In the post-9/11 era, I chose to work for a Muslim civil rights organization. As a spokesperson for the organization, I became a target of hate groups and received hate emails and threatening messages. During the Trump Administration, I staunchly opposed the Muslim Ban and worked to reunify immigrant families, and faced backlash throughout. And now, as thousands of Muslims get killed overseas, I’m working to dismantle the forces of Muslim hatred here at home, and am once again experiencing opposition.
I’m holding out hope for a better tomorrow. But with every major period of hatred towards Muslims, my hope shakes. Despite decades of advocacy, most policymakers, leaders, and influencers are still fearful to speak in support of Muslims – or worse, they embrace blatant discrimination.
It’s mind-boggling that it is controversial to condemn hate against Muslims. The fact that we can’t even do that—the absolute bare minimum—reveals just how dangerous it is to be a Muslim in America and how far away we are from true acceptance.
While Muslim Americans are being violently attacked nationwide, some people believe that it is not the right time to combat Islamophobia.
Muslims in America face hatred in all aspects of their lives: School, work, banks, airports, houses of worship, interactions with law enforcement, polling locations, social media, and more. Muslims are among the most likely of all minority groups to be subject to hate incidents, according to research conducted by the Institute for Social Policy and Understanding (ISPU) between 2016 and 2022. It’s mentally and physically grueling.
Muslim civil rights organizations are also reporting that there has been an exponential increase in hate crimes and bias incidents against Muslims, especially Palestinians, since October 7th. And blood has been shed. A landlord in Illinois who was radicalized by elected leaders and the media killed his 6-year-old Palestinian tenant Wadea Al-Fayoume. Weeks later, three Palestinian students - Tahseen Ali Ahmad, Kinnan Abdalhamid, and Hisham Awartani – were shot in Vermont.
I recently drafted a resolution to condemn and combat Islamophobia along with my co-author Sami Shaban, a Palestinian American. I introduced the resolution to the Princeton community, where I have lived for almost two decades. I thought the process would be simple. After all, why would there be backlash to a statement that simply condemns hate against Muslims?
I was taken aback when the resolution faced opposition. A community leader felt that given the events of October 7th, it was not the right time to pass such a resolution without an equivalent for antisemitism. They also felt that there had not been sufficient condemnation of the attacks of October 7th.
It was painful, gut-wrenching opposition. Allies, including an LGBTQ+ community leader, and I explained that Princeton had already passed a resolution to condemn and combat antisemitism some time ago—and that the Islamophobia resolution was actually modeled after it. I also felt the need to state that as a Muslim, I am against all violence and that violence is never a solution, especially to a political problem.
After much negotiation, the community leader eventually supported the resolution. And in December, Princeton Mayor and Council elected leaders—who supported the resolution throughout wholeheartedly—unanimously passed it.
This experience was just a microcosm of what’s happening all over the country. While Muslim Americans are being violently attacked nationwide, some people believe that it is not the right time to combat Islamophobia. And, just as in this situation, many national leaders are seizing the opportunity to pit Jewish and Muslim communities against each other. That’s deeply troubling.
As a Muslim, I am against all violence and that violence is never a solution, especially to a political problem.
Muslim and Jewish communities are natural allies. Muslims love Moses as a prophet of God, and the Torah is one of our holy books. And right now, both of our communities are experiencing unbearable pain and hatred here at home. It is important, in our support of one another's communities, to recognize that while we must acknowledge and combat the hatred against both groups, we must not be conditional in that support.
The event was also a painful reminder that despite my decades-long work to advance justice for all marginalized communities, for some people, I will always be seen as a terrorist sympathizer. While every religion has its share of terrorists – those who claim to commit horrible acts falsely in the name of their religion – I don’t know that any other community has to constantly defend itself. It is exhausting for Muslim Americans to constantly state, “I condemn terrorism,” and to be held responsible for any acts of terrorism committed around the world by terrorists claiming to be Muslims. In fact, to demand and expect such condemnations of us is a perpetuation of Islamophobia and is harmful to the Muslim community because we continue to only be seen through the lens of terrorism. This is very traumatizing for the Muslim American community.
Muslims are loving, peaceful people. Our holy book, the Quran, explicitly states that taking a life is the same as killing all of humanity, and saving a life is the same as saving all of humanity. As we gear up to introduce this resolution nationwide, I hope that our leaders will acknowledge the plight of Muslim people and treat us with the respect and dignity we deserve.
Keep ReadingShow Less
Anti-Palestinianism Is Not a Word in American English—But It Should Be
Thoughts on three Palestinian men shot this week in Vermont.
Nov 29, 2023
As Peter Beinart correctly argues, anti-Palestinianism is not a word in American English. I can tell since the internet helpfully underlines it in red to mark it for correction whenever I write it. Of course, it ought to be a word. It can become a word. It needs to become a word so that the phenomenon to which it points can be acknowledged.
Hateful anti-Palestinian feelings almost certainly are implicated in the shooting of three Palestinian-American students in Burlington, Vermont, this weekend. Of the three, Hisham Awartani, Kinnan Abdalhamid and Tahseen Ahmed, two are American citizens, and the third is a legal resident. Hisham Awartani, a student at Brown University, has a bullet lodged in his spine and may never walk again. He and one other are still in critical condition. One student has been released, but his identity has not be revealed for the sake of his own safety.
That’s right. This young man is not safe in America even after surviving a gunshot wound. Sounds like hate to me.
Anti-Palestinianism is real... It must cease.
All three of these young men were graduates of a Quaker high school in the Palestinian West Bank city of Ramallah. They were taught by people who believe in nonviolence.
They were visiting their aunt and their uncle (Rich Price) and had just been to a party for Price’s 8-year old sons. They went for a walk in the neighborhood and then were shot down. Two were wearing kuffiyehs, scarves typically worn by Palestinians though not exclusive to them, and they were speaking in a mixture of Arabic and English.
Burlington Police Chief Jon Murad said, according to Kathy McCormack at AP, “In this charged moment, no one can look at this incident and not suspect that it may have been a hate-motivated crime. And I have already been in touch with federal investigatory and prosecutorial partners to prepare for that if it’s proven.”
Although the alleged shooter, Jason J. Eaton, 48, has not yet be charged with a hate crime enhancement, prosecutors are seeking the information that would allow them to apply that enhancement to the charges.
The families of the three young men said in a posting to X, “We are extremely concerned about the safety and well-being of our children. We call on law enforcement to conduct a thorough investigation, including treating this as a hate crime. We will not be comfortable until the shooter is brought to justice.”
Awartani, from his sickbed, issued a statement on the shooting for a candlelight vigil held at Brown University:
-
“It’s important to recognize that this is part of the larger story. This hideous crime did not happen in a vacuum. As much as I appreciate and love every single one of you here today, I am but one casualty in this much wider conflict.
Had I been shot in the West Bank, where I grew up, the medical services that saved my life here would likely have been withheld by the Israeli army. The soldier who shot me would go home and never be convicted. I understand that the pain is so much more real and immediate because many of you know me, but any attack like this is horrific, be it here or in Palestine.
This is why when you say your wishes and light your candles today, your mind should not just be focused on me as an individual, but rather as proud member of a people being oppressed.”
Palestinians, Arabs, and Muslims are the last groups that it is all right to hate in the United States. The leader of the Republican Party, Donald J. Trump, has tried to gain popularity by defecating on these groups with his big mouth. President Joe Biden has contributed to the demonization of Palestinians by purveying misinformation about the current conflict in the Mideast. He devalued Palestinian lives by baselessly and falsely calling into question the validity of the Gaza Ministry of Health professionals’ careful estimates of Palestinian deaths under Israeli bombardment. He erased the dead bodies of over 5,000 Palestinian children and over 10,000 noncombatant women and men. For all his citation of his Irish heritage and culture, Biden’s instincts are to side with the equivalent of the British in any anticolonial struggle.
American Zionists of whatever religious persuasion (Biden is a Catholic) have also played a role in the diminution of Palestinian humanity. Their line has been there there is no such thing as a Palestinian, though that isn’t a talking point into which Biden buys. This line seems to conflict with their other frequent assertion, that there are no innocent Palestinian civilians, which recognizes the Palestinians’ existence only to configure them as a terrorist people whose children are also terrorists and who all deserve to be killed or driven into the desert. That seems like a lot for people who don’t even exist in the first place.
My colleague Margaret Somers in her seminal book Genealogies of Citizenship discussed how the Nazis deliberately took citizenship away from German Jews so as to turn them into human flotsam and jetsam, unloved and unlovely on the world stage. The Nazis taunted their critics who decried state Antisemitism in the early 1930s, asking who now would take in these stateless people. The answer: almost no one. Certainly not Roosevelt’s America, where Washington officials feared riots if they let in large numbers of refugees at a time when 25% of Americans were unemployed. And virtually no one else stepped up, not even Brazil. Those Jews who were able to flee were dumped in a poor, dusty Third World British colony, not admitted to so-called “the civilized world.”
The Israelis are nothing like the Nazis in most respects. But they also have a policy of keeping the Palestinians in the Occupied territories, including Gaza, stateless. Prime Minister Binyamin Netanyahu just argued to his Likud Party that they should not dump him as leader because he is the only one who can handle Biden and fend off international demands for a Palestinian state– i.e. that he is the only one who can keep the Palestinians stateless.
Statelessness makes people look suspicious. Many Romani suffer from the same problem. The settled, rooted, citizens are afraid of those uprooted and made stateless. Somers quotes Hannah Arendt and Justice Earl Warren to the effect that citizenship is the right to have rights.
Because the Israelis ethnically cleansed 750,000 Palestinians in 1948, who have grown into millions of descendants today, they lost everything—their property, their crops, their homes, and their right to have basic human rights. Some 70% of Palestinians in Gaza are from such dispossessed families, and they have now been ethnically cleansed for a second time, in 2023—a million and a half of them, which Biden and Tony Blinken say is just hunky dory. In the West Bank, Israeli squatters steal Palestinians’ land at will, as the Israeli army looks on or even actively helps.
Some Palestinians turned to violence (a remarkably small minority given what has been done to them) as a result of the injustices the Israelis visited on them. Their very violence was used to further impeach them as worthless specimens of humanity, as though the Zionist movement had not spawned violent terrorist groups and militias who killed thousands and expelled hundreds of thousands of people, who blew up the King David Hotel in Jerusalem and engaged in assassination. Once the Zionists had a state, they gained the legitimacy of statecraft, and state terror is almost never punished. The exception is where, as with the U.S. struggle against Russia’s invasion of Ukraine, the terrorism of a state can be deployed against it for geopolitical purposes by a rival.
Americans have painted their anxieties on the Palestinians. In the Cold War, conservative burghers like Yasser Arafat and his PLO were painted as Communists. Hollywood’s favorite villains have been Arabs and Palestinians. In George Burns’ comedic film “Oh God, You Devil” (1984), when images of the satanic are flashed on the screen, Yasser Arafat’s face was one of them. It is difficult to distinguish Arafat’s and the PLO’s motives, however, from those of George Washington and the insurrectionists against the British in the eighteenth century (except that the British hadn’t done anything to the colonists like what the Israelis have done to the Palestinians).
Then in the era of Bush’s War on Terror, the Palestinians were scooped up under that label, even though by that time the PLO had recognized Israel and had been screwed over by the Israelis as a result.
There are hundreds of thousands of Palestinian-Americans, who deserve the same right to life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness as all other Americans. They also have a right to wear a kuffiyeh, to speak the beautiful and divine language of Arabic in public, and to critique the colonialism that has impelled their diaspora.
Anti-Palestinianism is real. It is, as Beinart remarks, a commonplace of the discourse of U.S. members of Congress. It must cease. Michael Connelly’s tough-as-nails detective, Hieronymous Bosch, has as his motto, as a fierce defender of victims, “Everybody counts or nobody counts.” That’s what Hisham Awartani was saying from his hospital bed. He, tragically, has likely lost the use of his legs. His plight, of being shot for walking while Palestinian, however, is all too common in Occupied Palestine itself. Americans have to care about Palestinians both here and there, because if they don’t they make hollow the ideals of the U.S. Constitution and Declaration of Independence. They create a situation where nobody counts, really. Because someone, the one with the kuffiyeh, doesn’t count.
Keep ReadingShow Less
'Unspeakable': Cops Say 6-Year-Old Palestinian American Boy Stabbed to Death by Landlord
"Let's be clear. This was directly connected to the dehumanizing of Palestinians that has been allowed over the last week by our media, by our elected officials," said one Illinois state lawmaker.
Oct 16, 2023
U.S. civil rights defenders on Monday condemned the fatal stabbing of a 6-year-old Palestinian American boy in Illinois, an alleged hate crime that occurred amid Israel's massive bombardment of Gaza and the incendiary dehumanization of Palestinians in countries including Israel and the United States.
The Will County Sheriff's Office (WCSO) said on Facebook that Wadea Al Fayoume was stabbed 26 times Saturday by his family’s landlord, 71-year-old Joseph Czuba, in Plainfield Township, Illinois, about 35 miles southwest of Chicago. According to WCSO, Czuba used a "12-inch serrated military-style knife that has a seven-inch blade."
Hanaan Shahin, the slain boy's 32-year-old mother, was also stabbed more than a dozen times, WCSO said, adding that she is "recovering from her injuries at a local area hospital and is expected to survive this brutal attack."
WCSO said that "Czuba was charged with first-degree murder, attempted first-degree murder, hate crime... and aggravated battery with a deadly weapon."
"Detectives were able to determine that both victims in this brutal attack were targeted by the suspect due to them being Muslim and the ongoing Middle Eastern conflict involving Hamas and the Israelis," the department added, referring to the surprise October 7 attack on Israel by Gaza-based militants that left over 1,400 Israeli civilians and soldiers dead and Israel's massive bombardment of Gaza that has killed nearly 3,000 Palestinians.
The FBI is also investigating the killing as a hate crime.
Democratic Illinois Gov. JB Pritzker, who attended Al Fayoume's funeral Monday, said in a statement that "to take a 6-year-old child’s life in the name of bigotry is nothing short of evil."
"Every single Illinoisan—including our Muslim, Jewish, and Palestinian neighbors—deserves to live free from the threat of such evil," he added.
U.S. President Joe Biden and First Lady Jill Biden also condemned the attack:
This horrific act of hate has no place in America, and stands against our fundamental values: freedom from fear for how we pray, what we believe, and who we are.
As Americans, we must come together and reject Islamophobia and all forms of bigotry and hatred. I have said repeatedly that I will not be silent in the face of hate. We must be unequivocal. There is no place in America for hate against anyone.
At a Sunday news conference, Illinois State Assemblyman Abdelnasser Rashid (D-21)—who is Palestinian American—said: "Let's be clear. This was directly connected to the dehumanizing of Palestinians that has been allowed over the last week by our media, by our elected officials who have lacked the moral compass and lacked the courage to call for something as simple as de-escalation and peace."
"Let's not sugar-coat it," Rashid wrote on X, formerly Twitter, "this hate crime is a result of the dehumanizing, one-sided media coverage of Palestinians and irresponsible statements from elected officials."
"Israeli spokespeople have been using genocidal language about Palestinians on news channels every day for the past week," he added. "The Israeli military has killed over 2,600 Palestinians in the last week, including more than 700 children, and the numbers increase by the hour."
By Monday the death toll in Gaza approached 3,000, more than 1,000 of whom are children. That's the most Palestinians ever killed by Israeli forces during a war on Gaza. At least 47 entire Palestinian families have been wiped out.
Responding to Al Fayoume's murder, NAACP president and CEO Derrick Johnson said in a statement that "once again, the proliferation of misinformation and hateful conspiracy theories has resulted in a life lost far too soon."
"Today, the NAACP grieves the loss of 6-year-old Wadea Al Fayoume. No one should face the threat of violence in their own home, and we must do everything in our power to stop hate wherever it rears its ugly head," Johnson added. "There is no place for hate in a democracy."
Ahmed Rehab, executive director of the Chicago branch of the Council on American-Islamic Relations (CAIR), said that "we have testimony from the mother as to the harrowing moments that unfolded in terms of what was done and said—and it is our worst nightmare."
"We have full confidence in the authorities to investigate this heinous incident as a hate crime and to do so swiftly," Rehab added.
"The Islamophobic rhetoric and anti-Palestinian racism being spread by politicians, media outlets, and social media platforms must stop," CAIR national said in a statement.
On Monday, the FBI released its annual hate crime statistics. According to the bureau, antisemitic offenses rose 25% percent from 2021 to 2022, accounting for more than half of all reported religion-based hate crimes. Hate crimes targeting Latino people soared nearly one-third. Anti-LGBTQ+ hate crimes increased 16%, while Muslim and Black Americans continued to be disproportionately affected.
Keep ReadingShow Less
No End in Sight for This Dehumanizing Drone Warfare
Imagine, for a moment, what Americans might do if their family members were regularly being killed by drones because another government claimed “near certainty” that they were terrorists?
Sep 05, 2023
“I no longer love blue skies. In fact, I now prefer gray skies. The drones do not fly when the skies are gray.”
That’s what a young Pakistani boy named Zubair told members of Congress at a hearing on drones in October 2013. That hearing was during the Obama years at a time when the government had barely even acknowledged that an American drone warfare program existed.
Two years earlier, however, a Muslim cleric, Anwar Al-Awlaki and his 16-year-old son Abdulrahman, both American citizens, were killed by U.S. drone strikes in Yemen just weeks apart. Asked to comment on Abdulrahman’s killing, Obama campaign senior adviser Robert Gibbs said: “I would suggest that you should have a far more responsible father if they are truly concerned about the well-being of their children. I don’t think becoming an al-Qaeda jihadist terrorist is the best way to go about doing your business.”
Those are two of all too many grim tales of the brutality with which the United States has carried out its drone warfare program. Post-9/11 reiterations by the government of the danger we now live in (because the U.S. was attacked), have made the collective responsibility of Muslims and the callous dismissal of their deaths a regular occurrence.
Twenty-two years later, drones continue to be instruments of civilian slaughter and the language deployed by successive administrations to describe such slaughter has served to sanitize that fact.
In 2023, this country’s drone warfare program has entered its third decade with no end in sight. Despite the fact that the 22nd anniversary of 9/11 is approaching, policymakers have demonstrated no evidence of reflecting on the failures of drone warfare and how to stop it. Instead, the focus continues to be on simply shifting drone policy in minor ways within an ongoing violent system.
The Inherent Dehumanization of Drone Warfare
In February 2013, White House Press Secretary Jay Carney justified drone strikes as a key tool of American foreign policy this way:
“We have acknowledged, the United States, that sometimes we use remotely piloted aircraft to conduct targeted strikes against specific al-Qaeda terrorists in order to prevent attacks on the United States and to save American lives. We conduct those strikes because they are necessary to mitigate ongoing actual threats, to stop plots, prevent future attacks, and, again, save American lives… The U.S. government takes great care in deciding to pursue an al-Qaeda terrorist, to ensure precision and to avoid loss of innocent life.”
More aggressively endorsing the use of such drones, Georgetown Professor Daniel Byman, who has held government positions, emphasized the necessity of such warfare to protect American lives. “Drones,” he wrote, “have done their job remarkably well… And they have done so at little financial cost, at no risk to U.S. forces, and with fewer civilian casualties than many alternative methods would have caused.”
In reality, however, Washington’s war on terror has inflicted disproportionate violence on communities across the globe, while using this form of asymmetrical warfare to further expand the space between the value placed on American lives and those of Muslims. As the rhetoric on drone warfare suggests, the value of life and the need to protect it are, as far as Washington is concerned, reserved for Americans and their allies.
Since the war on terror was launched, the London-based watchdog group Airwars has estimated that American air strikes have killed at least 22,679 civilians and possibly up to 48,308 of them. Such killings have been carried out for the most part by desensitized killers, who have been primed towards the dehumanization of the targets of those murderous machines. In the words of critic Saleh Sharief, “The detached nature of drone warfare has anonymized and dehumanized the enemy, greatly diminishing the necessary psychological barriers of killing.”
In his book On Killing: The Psychological Cost of Learning to Kill in War and Society, retired Army Lieutenant Colonel Dave Grossman focuses on the “mechanical distancing” of modern warfare, thanks to “the sterile Nintendo-game unreality of killing through a TV screen, a thermal sight, a sniper sight, or some other kind of mechanical bugger that permits the killer to deny the humanity of his victim.” Scholar Grégoire Chamayou describes this phenomenon in even starker terms. Thanks to the distance between the drone operator and the victim, “One is never spattered by the adversary’s blood. No doubt the absence of any physical soiling corresponds to less of a sense of moral soiling… Above all, it ensures that the operator will never see his victim seeing him doing what he does to him.”
Needless to say, drone technology has rendered those in distant lands so much more disposable in the name of American national security. This is because such long-range techno-targeting has created a profound level of dehumanization that, ironically enough, has only made the repeated act of long-distance killing, of (not to mince words) slaughter, remarkably banal.
In these years of the war on terror, the legalities of drone warfare coupled with the way its technology capitalizes on an unfortunate aspect of human psychology has made the dehumanization of Muslims (and so violence against them) that much easier to carry out. It’s made their drone killing so much more of a given because it’s taken for granted that Muslims in “target sites” or conflict zones must be terrorists whose removal should be beyond questioning — even after a posthumous determination of their civilian status.
Responsibility, Not Accountability
At a 2016 press conference, President Barack Obama finally responded to a question about the increasing numbers of drone strikes by admitting: “There’s no doubt that civilians were killed that shouldn’t have been.” Then he added, “In situations of war, you know, we have to take responsibility when we’re not acting appropriately.”
Rare as such admissions of “responsibility” have been, however, they remain quite different from accountability. In Obama’s case, all that was offered to the survivors among those who “shouldn’t have been” killed in such drone strikes was an utterly minimal acknowledgment that it was even happening.
While the use of drones in the war on terror began under President George W. Bush, it escalated dramatically under Obama. Then, in the Trump years, it rose yet again. Halfway through Trump’s presidency, drone strikes had already exceeded the total number in the Obama era. Though the use of drones in Joe Biden’s first year in office was lower than Trump’s, what has remained consistent is the lack of the slightest accountability for the slaughter of civilians.
In 2021, as the U.S. was withdrawing chaotically from its 20-year Afghan War disaster, its military surveilled a white car driving around Kabul, believed it to be carrying explosives, and launched its final drone strike of that conflict, slaughtering 10 Afghans. Two weeks later, after reporting by the New York Times revealed what really happened, the Pentagon finally admitted that only civilians had been killed, seven of them children (but penalized no one).
Defense Secretary Lloyd Austin later apologized to the families of those killed and offered compensation — one of the few times American officials had even bothered to acknowledge wrongdoing in Afghanistan in the last 20 years. True to form, however, the government’s pledge to compensate the impacted families has gone unfulfilled, a grim reminder that in none of those years has there been any semblance of justice for civilian survivors of such drone strikes.
A few weeks ago, thanks to a Freedom of Information Act request, the Biden administration was forced to release a redacted version of a presidential policy memorandum, signed in October 2022, that detailed the administration’s latest approach to drone warfare globally. At least some details about it were known prior to its release, however, thanks to an anonymous senior administration official.
The Washington Post editorial board, among others, celebrated the memo, arguing that the restrictions in place are “smart rules of engagement” and a significant improvement over the Trump years when it comes to limiting civilian damage from drones. In reality, however, Biden’s memo is likely to do little to stem future drone warfare nightmares. In essence, the memo represents a return to Obama-era rules, including the supposed need to have “near-certainty” that the target of a drone strike is a terrorist and “near-certainty” that non-combatants won’t be injured or killed. The memo also includes other criteria that (at least theoretically) must be met before an individual is targeted, including an assessment that capture is not feasible.
In the case of Anwar Al-Awlaki, while the U.S. claimed his capture wasn’t possible, members of his family disputed this. In a Democracy Now interview, Al-Awlaki’s uncle Saleh bin Fareed stated, “I am sure I could have handed him over — me and my family — but they never, ever asked us to do that.” Needless to say, the lack of transparency has made it impossible to know if such standards are being met before a strike takes place and, worse yet, there’s no method of accountability if they aren’t.
That Biden administration memo does ban signature strikes that target individuals whose identities are unknown based on behavior suggesting they might be involved in terrorist activity. Still, we shouldn’t mistake a modestly better policy for a truly legal, moral, and ethical one, especially since the drone strike “mistakes” of the past haven’t led to any genuinely meaningful overhauls of the program.
Minimizing Civilian Deaths?
On September 20, 2001, nine days after the 9/11 attacks, President George W. Bush delivered a speech to a joint session of Congress in which he first used the phrase “war on terror,” while announcing a domestic and global campaign to be fought without borders or time constraints. Previewing what, years later, would become known as this country’s “forever wars,” he advised Americans that they “should not expect one battle, but a lengthy campaign unlike any other we have ever seen. It may include dramatic strikes visible on TV and covert operations secret even in success.”
Cameroonian political theorist Achille Mbembe’s theory of necropolitics — that is, the politics of death – catches the essence of the war on terror Bush launched as a way of life (and death) — “the capacity to define who matters and who does not, who is disposable and who is not.” With the invasion of Afghanistan and the designation of entire largely Muslim parts of the planet as the enemy, the Bush administration began a “war” in which Muslim deaths were necessary for the protection and preservation of American ones. This set a precedent for the value of Muslim life when the act of killing them could be equated with the security of Americans and the protection of “the homeland.”
Twenty-two years later, drones continue to be instruments of civilian slaughter and the language deployed by successive administrations to describe such slaughter has served to sanitize that fact. Whether it’s the use of “target” or “collateral damage,” both minimize the reality that human beings are being murdered. Taken together with a larger war-on-terror narrative in which Muslims have been strikingly demonized and criminalized, the result has been the production of killable bodies whose deaths elicit neither guilt, remorse, nor accountability.
We should all reject a war on terror committed to the disposability of Muslims because no one (including Muslims) should have to mourn the killing of civilians the U.S. has targeted for far too long.
In his 2014 State of the Union address, President Obama explained why he put “prudent limits” on drone warfare, pointing out that Americans “will not be safer if people abroad believe we strike within their countries without regard for the consequence.” And how right he was.
As yet, however, there have been zero consequences for the air-strike deaths of tens of thousands of civilians globally and, as Obama’s statement suggests, the only real concern this caused American officials was the fear that too many such killings might, in the end, harm Americans.
Grieving Muslim Lives
In Sana’a, Yemen, a wall with graffiti art shows a U.S. drone under which someone has written in blood-red paint, “Why did you kill my family?” in English and Arabic. The relentless American drone campaign has indeed left all too many civilians in Muslim-majority countries asking the same question. The only answer offered in Washington over all these years is that such killings were unavoidable collateral damage.
But imagine, for a moment, what Americans might do if their family members were regularly being killed by drones because another government claimed “near certainty” that they were terrorists? You know the answer, of course, given the response to the 9/11 attacks: this country would undoubtedly launch a catastrophic war of epic proportions with no conceivable end in sight. In contrast, Muslims targeted by American drones have been left to pick up the all-too-literal pieces of their loved ones, while risking the possibility of also being killed in a double- or triple-tap strike — a level of violence that should never be justified.
We should all reject a war on terror committed to the disposability of Muslims because no one (including Muslims) should have to mourn the killing of civilians the U.S. has targeted for far too long. Muslim lives have inherent value and their deaths are worth grieving, mourning, and above all valuing. Drone warfare will never change that fact.
Keep ReadingShow Less
See More
Most Popular
To inform. To inspire. To ignite change for the common good.
News & Opinion
Trending
Common Dreams, Inc. Founded 1997. Registered 501(c3) Non-Profit
Privacy Policy