The Muslims Are Coming!

by Arun Kundnani

  By 2008, a group of well-funded Islamophobic activists had coalesced. Pamela Geller’s blog Atlas Shrugs (named after Ayn Rand’s novel) had come to prominence with the Khalil Gibran International Academy campaign. She worked closely with Robert Spencer, whose Jihad Watch Web site was run as a subsidiary of the David Horowitz Freedom Center. The Los Angeles–based millionaire couple Aubrey and Joyce Chernick used their foundation to fund Robert Spencer with close to a million dollars between 2004 and 2009. (They also donated significant funds to pro-Israel lobby groups in Washington, such as the Washington Institute for Near East Policy, of which Aubrey Chernick was a trustee.) ACT! for America, an Islamophobic citizen action network led by Brigitte Gabriel, formed in 2007 and modeled itself on the National Rifle Association; by 2009, it had 573 chapters, 170,000 members worldwide, and a $1 million annual budget. According to an investigation by the Center for American Progress, seven conservative foundations donated over $40 million to Islamophobic groups between 2001 and 2009.32 A 2013 report by the Council on American-Islamic Relations identified thirty-seven US-based Islamophobic groups and estimated their combined revenue between 2008 and 2011 at $119 million.33

  These groups and individuals work together to popularize a single, shared message, a shari’a conspiracy theory to play the same role for today’s far Right that Jewish conspiracy theories had within traditional far Right ideology. For these new conspiracy theorists, Islamist terrorism is just the visible tip of a hidden jihad iceberg. Alongside the use of violence is the strategy of stealth jihad, which aims at the infiltration of national institutions and the assertion of Muslim demands through the legal system. Muslims advocating for their civil rights or seeking to win political office are therefore to be regarded not as fellow citizens but as agents of a secret plan to impose a totalitarian government on the world. Non-Muslims who stand with Muslims in challenging discrimination are dhimmis, the twenty-first-century equivalent of the cold war’s fellow travelers, who have already internalized the status of second-class citizenship within an Islamo-fascist state. The provision of halal food, shari’a-compliant finance, or prayer breaks in workplaces is creeping shari’a, the first steps toward a society ruled by Islam. (Pamela Geller called for a boycott of Campbell’s soup because halal versions are available.) Since the Islamic doctrine of taqiyya supposedly sanctions systematic lying to non-Muslims to help advance shari’a government, Muslims who say they interpret Islam as a religion of peace and tolerance are not to be trusted. Just as the early cold war produced the reds-under-the-bed phantasm of a vast network of communist agents operating in the US, the new conspiracy theorists hold almost every American and European mosque to be exploiting religious freedom to promote Islamic sedition. Underlying the whole fantasy is the culturalist belief that Islam is not a religion like Christianity and Judaism but a fanatical, totalitarian ideology aiming at political domination of the West. Shari’a—which is regarded by most practicing Muslims as a personal moral code open to multiple interpretations by different religious scholars—was taken to have only one possible meaning: a set of oppressive laws to be implemented by an Islamic state, supplanting the US Constitution.

  With Barack Obama’s selection as the Democratic Party’s presidential candidate in 2008, the propagandists who wanted to convince America there was a secret Islamic conspiracy to take over the US, enabled by a liberal, cosmopolitan elite, found the perfect image for their campaign: Obama as a crypto-Muslim. To object to Obama’s presidential bid because he is an African American would have been transparently racist. But to object to him because he is secretly in league with America’s enemies—that was just responsible citizenship. The latter strategy was effective, because its racial meanings were sufficiently submerged to deflect straightforward accusations of racism yet still close enough to the surface to connect with America’s racial imaginary.

  During the election contest, an organization called the Clarion Fund received $17 million from Donors Capital, a conservative funding organization that is able to keep donations anonymous, to distribute twenty-eight million copies of a propaganda film, Obsession: Radical Islam’s War Against the West, predominantly in swing states.34 The film reproduced all the themes of the shari’a conspiracy theory and featured most of the activists in the Islamophobia network. On her Web site, Pamela Geller described Obama simply as “the jihad candidate.” Fearful of his being associated with Islam, Obama’s campaign responded to such propaganda by ensuring he was never seen with Muslims or defending their rights. At a rally in Detroit, aides removed women wearing hijabs from the crowd behind Obama so that they were not in photos of the candidate.35 Well-known Muslim and Arab Americans, such as Keith Ellison and James Zogby, who volunteered to campaign for Obama in key states were told to stay away. A Muslim-American staffer on the campaign team resigned after a reporter for the Wall Street Journal asked about his religious background. The claim that Obama was a Muslim was described as a “smear” on the campaign’s Web site rather than simply false. At no point did Obama respond to the accusation that he was a Muslim by pointing out that Muslims had as much right to be president as anyone else.36

  After the election the far Right’s propaganda became even more outlandish. Six months into his first term, Pamela Geller wrote that President Obama was

  using all branches of government to enforce the Shariah. [His is the] first Muslim presidency, just eight years after 9/11 … Everything this president has done so far has helped foster America’s submission to Islam.

  The US government, she said, was secretly controlled by Muslim extremists

  The enemy has infiltrated every department, every division of the federal government and the Obama administration, including the White House. The State Department [is] essentially being run by Islamic supremacists.37

  Robert Spencer devised an ingenious theory to justify dismissing Obama’s self-identification as Christian.

  Barack Obama was a Muslim as a child. He has never explained when or whether he left Islam at all. He identifies himself as a Christian now but it is, I think, perhaps salient to note that a Muslim can identify himself as Christian because Jesus Christ is a Muslim prophet in the Qur’an … And so it’s not out of the realm of possibility that some individual, or possibly Barack Obama, could be a Muslim and identify himself as Christian without even meaning to say that he is a member of the classic Christian tradition at all … But certainly his public policies and his behavior are consistent with his being a committed and convinced Muslim.38

  For the first time, the shari’a conspiracy theory began to connect with significant strands of mainstream opinion. By August 2010, around a quarter of Americans thought Obama was a Muslim, according to a survey for Time magazine. When President Obama visited India in November 2010, a scheduled visit to the Sikh Golden Temple in Amritsar was canceled, because he would have been expected to cover his head, giving rise to the possibility of photographs of him “looking Muslim.” Obama’s aides reportedly came up with the idea of a modified baseball cap, in the hope that it would meet the requirement that visitors to Sikh temples cover their head while also looking suitably all-American. But the Golden Temple did not permit a baseball cap instead of a head scarf.39 By 2011, a Public Religion Research Institute survey found only 38 percent of Americans correctly identified Obama as a Christian, 18 percent believed him to be a Muslim, and the rest said they did not know.40

  At the same time, the shari’a conspiracy theory started to receive a favorable hearing in government and national security circles. Robert Spencer was invited to brief the US military, the FBI, and other intelligence agencies on jihad and Islam.41 Another advocate of the shari’a conspiracy theory—Frank Gaffney, president of the Center for Security Policy (CSP)—began to be taken seriously by elements of the national security establishment. In January 2011, senior intelligence officials attended the launch of a CSP publication, Shariah: The Threat to America. The report modeled itself on the famous neoconservative “Team B” report of 1976,
which is credited with providing the groundwork for Reagan’s abandonment of détente policy in the cold war and shift of the US toward a more aggressive anticommunist position. The authors of the CSP report hoped to achieve an equally significant policy transformation in America’s domestic war on terror, and they echoed all the usual shari’a conspiracy themes in their attempt to do so. The report made the culturalist argument that jihadist violence is “rooted in the Islamic texts, teachings, and interpretations that constitute shariah.” Beyond terrorism itself, the report claimed Islamists were engaged in “stealthy jihad tactics [to] impose a totalitarian regime [through] multi-layered cultural subversion, the co-opting of senior leaders, influence operations, and propaganda.” Many of the most prominent Muslim organizations in America were “front groups for the Muslim Brotherhood” and were succeeding “in insinuating shariah into the very heartland of America.”42 These “forces of shariah have been at war with non-Muslims for 1,400 years and with the United States of America for 200 years,” and Europe was expected to be “an Islamic continent by the end of this century, if not before.” Political correctness among academics and political and military leaders was fostering a “dhimmi” attitude in the face of this threat and hampering recognition of the ideological nature of the enemy.43 America is doubly endangered, because in the 1960s the government lost the legal powers that should have been in place to defeat communism, and even these would not have been “adequate to shield us from a totalitarian ideology cloaked in religious garb.” In response, the government needed to introduce bans on “those who espouse or support sharia [from] holding positions of trust in federal, state, or local governments or the armed forces,” and imams and mosques that “advocate shariah in America” should face prosecution for sedition.44 Since espousing shari’a, not in its caricatured form of mandating the stoning of women but as a moral code, is central to what most practicing Muslims believe, implementing these recommendations would, in effect, make believing in Islam a crime.

  Later in the year the Florida-based Citizens for National Security (CNS) organization published a similar report, entitled “Homegrown Jihad in the USA: Muslim Brotherhood’s Deliberate, Premeditated Plan Now Reaching Maturity.” A meeting on Capitol Hill to promote the report was hosted by Congressman Allen West, an Iraq war veteran who was disciplined and relieved of his post as commander of an artillery unit after beating and threatening to kill an Iraqi prisoner in 2003.45 A series of charts in the CNS presentation drew elaborate links from al-Qaeda and Hezbollah to mainstream Muslim America in an attempt to demonstrate a giant conspiracy to destroy the United States through stealth jihad. Fortunately for the survival of the free world, the Citizens for National Security had acquired the names of the six thousand active members of the Muslim Brotherhood in the US who were the agents of this conspiracy. The group had previously announced that they would release the names to the public at the meeting, but, on the day, they elected instead to share them only with select “responsible parties.”

  Allen West had repeatedly endorsed the shari’a conspiracy theory. He told a campaign meeting in 2010:

  We already have a Fifth Column that is already infiltrating into our colleges, into our universities, into our high schools, into our religious aspect, our cultural aspect, our financial, our political systems in this country. And that enemy represents something called Islam. And Islam is a totalitarian theocratic political ideology; it is not a religion.46

  He later claimed, “There is an infiltration of the Sharia practice into all of our operating systems in our country, as well as across Western civilization.”47 Peter King, chair of the House Homeland Security Committee, also dipped into the shari’a conspiracy basket in the lead-up to his 2011 hearings on the radicalization of American Muslims. On The Laura Ingraham Show, King claimed “80 percent of the mosques in this country are controlled by radical imams.” The source for this statistic was a single, unsubstantiated statement made by a Californian Muslim cleric in 1999. The cleric later admitted that his definition of an extremist mosque was one that was “focus[ed] on the Palestinian struggle.”48

  Since 2010, when Oklahoma voters passed a constitutional amendment prohibiting judges from considering foreign laws (code for shari’a) in their decisions, over two dozen states have proposed or passed similar legislation on the presumption that there is a secret plan to impose shari’a law on the US. Most of the legislation has been drafted according to templates developed by New York–based lawyer David Yerushalmi, whom we met in Chapter 2. The Oklahoma statute was later struck down by federal court judges, who pointed out that its advocates had not been able to find any actual examples of a shari’a problem to be addressed. Those claiming shari’a law was infiltrating courts across the US only ever cited one example: a 2009 New Jersey case in which a judge denied a woman a restraining order against her husband, who was accused of repeatedly beating and sexually assaulting her. The basis for the judge’s decision was that there was no criminal intent because the Muslim defendant genuinely believed his religion entitled him to sexual relations on demand (which many Muslims would deny). The decision was clearly wrong under state law, because there is no “cultural” defense for breaking the law, and the New Jersey Appellate Court reversed it.49 But this single decision became the basis for the fantasy that shari’a was covertly sweeping the American legal system, propelled by a hidden conspiracy of Islamists. An August 2011 survey found 30 percent of Americans believed Muslims in the US were seeking to replace the Constitution with shari’a law. The number is double among those who consider Fox News a trustworthy source of news.50

  By the time of the 2012 Republican primaries, candidates were hoping to pick up on the undercurrents of shari’a paranoia in the electorate. Newt Gingrich was ahead of the game; he had already said in a speech to the neoconservative American Enterprise Institute in July 2010 that shari’a “is a mortal threat to the survival of freedom in the United States and in the world as we know it.”51 Other Republican candidates tried to catch up by endorsing the conspiracy theory in more forceful ways. Herman Cain condemned what he called the “attempt to gradually ease Sharia law and the Muslim faith into our government,” said he would introduce a special loyalty test for Muslims wanting to serve in his administration, and claimed the majority of American Muslims have extremist views.52 Michele Bachmann declared that shari’a “must be resisted across the United States” and demanded that national security officials investigate Muslim Brotherhood infiltration into the highest levels of the federal government.53 In a McCarthyite letter to the State Department inspector general, she accused Huma Abedin, a top aide to Secretary of State Hillary Clinton, of being a Muslim Brotherhood “operative.” Her only evidence was that other people in Abedin’s family were “connected” to the Muslim Brotherhood.54 The irony is that figures on the Christian Right who believe religious texts should be the basis on which laws are formed have more in common with the Muslim Brotherhood’s ideology than American liberals like Abedin.

  All this adds up to what we might call, with Senator Joseph McCarthy, “a conspiracy on a scale so immense as to dwarf any previous such venture in the history of man.” And, in a sense, this is a return to what Richard Hofstadter diagnosed in 1963 as the “paranoid style” in American politics, now with an equal audience among the European far Right.55 The conspiratorial conception of power of the early cold war, or the anti-Semitic conspiracy theories that had such an influence in the twentieth century, saw their enemies as hugely powerful and able to direct world history through secret control of the media and the economy, or even through techniques of brainwashing. Anti-Semites viewed Jews as both an outcast subclass threatening the purity of the social body, and also as a secret class above society able to manipulate events to maintain its power. All racisms have some kind of double aspect. Racialized immigrants, for example, are always both lazy and stealing our jobs; they both refuse to integrate into our society while also secretly infiltrating it. But anti-Semitism was historic
ally unique in positioning Jews as constituting both a cosmopolitan superpower and a species of subhumans. For the first time, the far Right has now begun to think of Muslims in the same way. The new conspiracy theorists ascribe to Islam magical powers to secretly control Western governments while at the same time see in it a backward, seventh-century ideology whose followers constitute a dangerous underclass. The political logic of this shari’a conspiracy theory is clear: its supporters hope to pressure American liberals to abandon any remaining support for the civil rights of American Muslims on the grounds that Islam is not a religion but a totalitarian political ideology and therefore not entitled to protection under the First Amendment. Uniting behind this campaign are Christian Right groups, such as the American Family Association, right-wing Zionists, conservative foundations, and elements of the national security apparatus.

  The rising influence of far Right Islamophobia at the end of the first decade of the twenty-first century was largely responsible for creating the political atmosphere in which an upsurge in anti-Muslim violence in the US became likely. Islamophobic violence was not a spontaneous reaction to terrorist attacks. It emerged nine years after 9/11 and, while the Fort Hood shooting in late 2009 and the attempted car-bomb attack on Times Square in May the following year had given Islamophobes hooks around which to mobilize, by themselves these attacks could not have generated the worsening climate that followed. The government had for years been telling Americans to expect more terrorism, even suggesting attacks would likely involve weapons of mass destruction. When actual incidents did occur, they were, if anything, less disturbing than what had been predicted.