We developed that fear of when will they come knocking on our door. When will they come and interrogate you or harass you. They can start at any time. You don’t know if there’s a pending case against you, even though you know you didn’t do anything.
Another adds:
There was the McCarthy era against communism. There was Vietnam, and the Viet Cong. There is now Islamophobia. And as Muslim Somali youth, we have so many things stacked up against us. For instance, we are black, we are immigrants, we’re Muslim.
The conversation soon turns to foreign policy.
If you look at the foreign policy of America, the East African region, and especially Somalia since the 1980s, 1990s, even before that, in the cold war time, you see that America does not really show that it cares for us by its policies. It shows it wants to take resources, take what we have. That’s somehow what is going on throughout the world to the Muslim people. There is a sense of discrimination in this policy.55
One of the consequences of treating radicalization as the central problem, and thereby broadening the focus of counterterrorism from individuals engaged in political violence to a wider set of attitudes or beliefs, is that the political opinions of many young Somali Americans, as expressed above, came to be seen as indicators of risk and could not be given legitimate public outlets. The prominent community leaders these young people see supposedly speaking on their behalf say nothing of foreign policy, discrimination, or civil liberties. One of the group said:
It’s actually pitiful to say, but the Somali community has a lot of sellouts who portray themselves as Somali advocates or community leaders. They get the most air time because pretty much what they preach is what the government wants them to preach. I feel as if anybody that does try to step up gets intimidated and they recant from their earlier statements. You see all these people that are locked up without just cause, without due process. And then you start getting worried. It could be you, just because you spoke out. And to be honest, most of us feel that we don’t have that so-called freedom of speech.56
This is where the counterradicalization paradigm ultimately led: to young people feeling their political views could not be freely expressed. As a consequence, the possibility of generating a radical politics that could provide a genuine alternative to al-Shabaab’s fundamentalist violence was closed off.
CHAPTER 8
Twenty-First-Century Crusaders
Historian T. R. Fehrenbach once observed that my home state of Texas and Israel share the experience of “civilized men and women thrown into new and harsh conditions, beset by enemies.”
—Texas governor Rick Perry, 2011
Katy is a neighborhood in the western suburbs of Houston, Texas. It takes its name from the old K-T railroad linking Kansas and Texas, which first made it possible to establish a settlement around what had until then been a mosquito-ridden creek. Today it is one of the wealthiest parts of the city and the center of Houston’s energy corridor, where oil and gas corporations are headquartered. Their demands for technically skilled employees have brought a number of Muslim immigrants to the neighborhood, and in 2006, three brothers purchased an eleven-acre plot of land where they planned to build a mosque. Four years later a temporary structure, to be used as a prayer hall, and a playground were opened. Most mosques are built in multiracial, inner-city areas, where land is cheap. But in Katy, the site was located amid some of the most expensive residential real estate in the city.
Meanwhile, in the summer of 2010, a national debate raged on about whether the Cordoba Initiative, a New York–based Muslim organization, should be allowed to build a community center, known as Park51, in lower Manhattan. Though it was neither a stand-alone mosque nor located at ground zero, Islamophobic blogger Pamela Geller dubbed Park51 the “ground zero mosque” and cast it as an insult to the victims of 9/11, as if Muslims were collectively responsible for the terrorist attacks and could not therefore be welcome anywhere near the 9/11 site. Rupert Murdoch’s New York Post and Fox News picked up the story and, with Newt Gingrich and Sarah Palin weighing in, the issue hit the mainstream media.
In Houston, Michael Berry, a talk show host on KTRH radio, said that if the center was built in New York, “I hope somebody blows it up … I hope the mosque isn’t built, and if it is, I hope it’s blown up, and I mean that.”1 Some residents of Katy had already begun to worry about the new mosque building springing up in their neighborhood and made attempts to pressure city officials to deny the necessary permits. But now the mood of animosity intensified. A businessman who lived next to the mosque and owned land surrounding it constructed posts around its perimeter, onto which he placed Christian crosses and stars of David, presumably to defend Judeo-Christian civilization from the newcomers. Then he began organizing pig-racing competitions on the land adjacent to the mosque, in a deliberate attempt at provocation. Hesham Ebaid, the president of the Muslim American Society of Katy, which runs the mosque, pointed out: “The pigs are not offensive. We just can’t eat pigs. We are not offended by the animal. It’s just an animal.”2
Other incidents were more serious. Incendiary devices and beer bottles were thrown onto the mosque’s driveway, and the words “Islam is evil” were painted onto a wall around the corner, where they remained two years later.3 At the nearby Beckendorff Junior High School, an Arab-American eighth-grader needed surgery to repair his jaw after he was the victim of an attack, during which he was taunted with the words “terrorist,” “Muslim, go home,” and “you blow up buildings.”4 Located a short distance from the mosque is a barbeque restaurant famous locally for having a poster of a lynching. The man being hanged from a tree has had a Middle Eastern face superimposed on it. The caption says: “Let’s play cowboys and Iranians.” Hesham Ebaid acknowledges, “It’s a challenging environment,” but his efforts at courteous engagement—knocking on doors in the neighborhood to reassure locals, sending out dinner invitations on religious occasions, and organizing open days—seem to have calmed most of the neighbors.5
What was happening in Katy was a microcosm of a widespread pattern that unfolded across the US beginning during the summer of 2010. The American Civil Liberties Union reported at the end of 2010 that forty mosques were facing organized opposition. From Los Angeles to Brooklyn and from Seattle to Miami, existing and newly planned mosques were facing vandalism, harassment, angry protests, and attempts to deny building permits on spurious pretexts.6 In Orange County, California, as congregants, including children, arrived at a mosque event in early 2011 to raise money for women’s shelters and homeless people, hundreds of anti-Muslim protesters jeered, “Go back home”; “Terrorists”; and “U-S-A.” A local councilwoman speaking at the protest said: “I know quite a few Marines who would be very happy to help these terrorists to an early meeting in paradise.” Another protester said: “You’re messing with Americans now. We’re not England. We’re not British. We’re Americans.” This referenced the canard that Britain’s excessive multicultural tolerance had already enabled the country’s submission to shari’a law.7 In Portland, Oregon, a man who fire-bombed the Salman Alfarisi Islamic Center told police officers: “Jihad goes both ways. Christians can jihad too.”8
Some perpetrators of Islamophobic violence had the courtesy to check the religious identity of their victims first. In August 2010, Ahmed H. Sharif, a Bangladeshi cabdriver, was stabbed in Manhattan after a passenger asked him: “Are you a Muslim?” When Sharif replied that he was, the passenger said, “Consider this a checkpoint”, then before pulling out a knife and slashes the driver’s throat, face, and forearms. Had the cut to Sharif’s throat been any deeper or longer, the driver would have died, said doctors.9 In a bar in St. Petersburg, Florida, Bradley Strott struck up a conversation with Samad Ebadi, who happened to tell him he was Muslim. Strott responded by grabbing him by his shirt and stabbing him in the neck with his pocket knife.10 In November 2012, seventy-two-year-old Ali Akmal was walking in Queens, New York, in the early hours, when two men approached him an
d asked, “Are you Muslim or Hindu?” When he responded, “I’m Muslim,” they beat him viciously, leaving him in a critical condition, unable to walk or talk.11 Earlier in the same month, fifty-seven-year-old Bashir Ahmad was walking up the steps to open the front door to al-Saaliheen mosque in Queens when he was approached from behind, stabbed several times, and bitten on the nose by an assailant yelling anti-Muslim slurs.12
In other cases, simply looking South Asian was sufficient. In December 2012, forty-six-year-old Sunando Sen was killed by an oncoming train after being pushed onto the rails at a Queens subway station by a woman who told officers she “pushed a Muslim off the train tracks because I hate Hindus and Muslims. Ever since 2001 when they put down the twin towers I’ve been beating them up.” The attacker was wrong to think Sen a Muslim; he had a Hindu background.13 Sikh men—whose turbans fit the stereotyped image that many Americans have of Muslim terrorists—are often the most visible of targets for Islamophobic attacks. In April 2011, two elderly Sikhs out walking in the Sacramento suburb of Elk Grove, California, were shot at. Surinder Singh was killed and his neighbor Gurmej Atwal seriously wounded. Six months earlier, in the same neighborhood, a Sikh cabdriver had been beaten by two men who yelled anti-Muslim slurs.14 The following year a neo-Nazi, who had spent time in the white supremacist music scene, went on a shooting rampage at a Sikh temple in Oak Creek, Wisconsin, killing six people.15 Although the story made national headlines, there was little reflection on the wider pattern of racist violence that the shootings were an example of. The next day, in Joplin, Missouri, a mosque was burned to the ground—the second arson attack on the building in two months.16 Later in the same month a homemade bomb exploded outside an Islamic school in Chicago while fifty worshippers, including children, were attending a prayer service. The perpetrator had attempted to throw the bomb through a window.17
According to FBI statistics on hate crimes, after a dramatic increase following 9/11, the number of incidents of anti-Muslim violence declined steadily—until 2010, when it soared by 50 percent, and rose again the following year.18 As Farhana Khera, director of the civil rights group Muslim Advocates, notes, “The FBI’s hate crimes tracking system, which relies on voluntary reporting by local police departments, is deeply flawed,” and likely to record much less than half the number of actual incidents.19 But whatever the absolute numbers, the statistical trend of an upsurge from 2010 was consistent with a worsening Islamophobic mood in America’s political culture—from antimosque campaigns, to mobilizations to ban shari’a law, to the stigmatization of President Obama as a secret Muslim, to high-profile congressional hearings on the radicalization of American Muslims.
“The English Lion Has Awoken”
In September 2009, the English Defence League (EDL) released a video on YouTube to help publicize a major demonstration in Manchester the following month. Filmed in a disused warehouse in Luton, the video shows around twenty men dressed in black lined against one wall of a large empty room, their faces concealed behind balaclavas. One of the men reads a prepared statement while another sets fire to a Nazi flag that has been hoisted in front of the men. The EDL spokesman says burning this flag will prove his organization is not a far Right group motivated by racism but simply opposes those he calls Islamic extremists. Addressing himself to these extremists, he announces: “We the English Defence League will contest your kind, as our forefathers did, relentlessly pursuing you in our quest to see all shari’a banished from our great democratic country. Long live the free.” Anyone can join the EDL if they share this stance, he says, even antiextremist Muslims. Behind the men hang placards with the slogans “Black and white, unite and fight” and “We support Israel’s right to exist.” After the spectacle of the flag burning, the camera zooms in on one section of the EDL members to demonstrate from the skin color of their forearms that this gathering includes black men as well as white. In the description that accompanies the video on YouTube, a supporter has written: “How anyone can call this group far right fascist Nazis is beyond belief. Since when were Nazi groups multi-race? It’s not racist to oppose Islamic Extremism!”
When this video was released the EDL had been in existence for just a few months. It had been formed following events in Luton earlier that year. In March 2009, Anjem Choudary, the leader of a small group that had taken various names since its original incarnation, al-Muhajiroun, was disbanded in 2004, organized a protest against a parade through Luton’s town center of British troops recently returned from Afghanistan. His protest prompted a furious reaction from bystanders; a coalition of angry locals, members of violent football fan groups, and seasoned far Right activists came together to form the organization that would soon call itself the English Defence League. Making good use of the online and offline networks that already linked violent football fans and the far Right across the country, and picking up a significant number of young people via Facebook and YouTube who seemed to relate to its style of politics, the EDL was soon organizing demonstrations in several towns and cities across England, attracting up to two thousand people. The slogans at these early demonstrations included “Muslim bombers off our streets”; “Extremist Muslims go to hell”; “British voters say no to shari’a law”; “LBC [Luton Borough Council] sell out cowards”; “Our troops are heroes”; “We demand a St. George’s Day parade”; “Ban preachers of hate”; and, more prosaically, “We are sick of this shit.” Their demands included a ban on the building of mosques, a ban on wearing burkas, a ban on renaming Christmas, and the creation of a new criminal offense: calling for the introduction of shari’a law.
The EDL’s September 2009 video is striking for a number of reasons. First, its format and style places the YouTube clip within a genre of video communiqués issued by various terrorist organizations since the 1970s. In its style of presentation, the EDL video imitates the very extremism it ostensibly opposes. And there is more unintended mimicry when one of the reporters who was invited to the warehouse suggests that the EDL’s appearance in balaclavas might seem intimidating. The EDL leader replies by saying: “It’s exactly the same as a burka.” Second, in its graphic imagery of anti-Nazism, its reference to “forefathers” who also fought against extremism (presumably in World War II), and, most strikingly, in its appropriation of the socialist slogan “Black and white, unite and fight” (no longer against the bourgeoisie but against Muslim radicals), the video plunders antifascist imagery in an attempt to construct a popular front against Islamic extremism. Similarly, the reference to Israel’s right to exist aims at announcing a rejection of the anti-Semitism that was central to far Right politics in the twentieth century and at establishing a new alignment of forces to confront the Islamic extremist enemy. Hence the formation within the EDL of a Jewish division, a gay division, and the prominence of a Sikh activist, Guramit Singh, at EDL demonstrations. The EDL thus went to great lengths to present itself as an organization that was not racist and as able to include within its ranks groups who are normally the targets of far Right violence. The concept of extremism was central to this positioning. By claiming to attack Muslim extremism rather than Muslims per se, the EDL hoped to dispel the suspicion that it was just another fringe, racist, far Right group.
In another EDL video, released shortly before its October 2009 demonstration in Manchester, another set of symbols is mobilized. To a pounding soundtrack, the video opens with pictures of sword-wielding crusaders, the red crosses on their shields and breasts mirroring the St. George cross that forms the EDL logo. “The English lion has awoken,” announces the video. “The time has come to defend our land from 1,400 years of jihad that has finally washed up upon our shores.” This is followed by a series of images of newspaper headlines which are arranged to suggest that Britain is on its way to “Islamification” within thirty years.
Do you want your children and grandchildren to grow up under Islamic rule in this your Christian homeland? Second-class citizens in the place your forefathers fought and died for for you to live free.
The viewer is told that “Islam religiously teaches Moslems to convert Nations into Islamic rule” and that the government has been too politically correct to face up to this danger. Only a movement of English patriots taking to the streets can save the nation from shari’a. The Manchester demonstration will be a “day of reckoning.” Apart from its crusader imagery (which, given the anti-Semitic violence of the crusades, tends to undermine the EDL’s claim to be inclusive of Jews, let alone nonextremist Muslims), the power of this video lies in its sampling of newspaper headlines. There is little in the way of commentary or interpretation added to the headlines. Indeed, none is needed. The Express, Mail, and Star newspapers articulate a narrative wholly consistent with the EDL’s own, with their daily diet of cartoon Muslim fanatics, secret shari’a courts, forced Islamic conversions, and no-go areas for non-Muslims—all tolerated by a politically correct, liberal, multicultural elite that has even abolished Christmas so as not to offend the enemy within.
There is ample evidence that the EDL’s activities are accompanied by overt racism. EDL demonstrations have been marked by Nazi salutes, racist chanting, and racist violence. EDL activism overlaps significantly with that of the membership of the racist British National Party (BNP). Indeed, both of the EDL’s senior leaders, Stephen Yaxley-Lennon (aka Tommy Robinson) and his cousin Kevin Carroll, were previously members of the BNP and have been convicted of criminal violence. Members of the West Midlands Division of the EDL have taken photographs of themselves standing in front of Ulster Volunteer Force flags, carrying imitation firearms.20 At a demonstration on September 3, 2011, through the largely Muslim area of Tower Hamlets, East London (a favorite location for far Right mobilization since the Battle of Cable Street in 1936), Yaxley-Lennon told the crowd:
The Muslims Are Coming! Page 28