The true hero of Homeland is Saul Berenson, Mathison’s thoughtful CIA mentor whose cultural knowledge and fluency in Arabic are presented as enabling him to pursue terrorist enemies by cultivating reliable informants rather than launching gung-ho missions. Yet he also believes in racial profiling when necessary, on one occasion giving his team instructions on how to conduct an investigation: “We prioritize. First the dark-skinned ones.” At this point we have already been reassured that he has no problem with dark-skinned people. Following the usual cliché, his career with the agency has wrecked his relationship with his wife, Mira, who is Indian. In other words, profiling is seen as necessary for operational reasons and not the reflection of an individual agent’s racial prejudice. Galvez, a Muslim member of the CIA team, has a negligible role until he is suspected by Mathison of working with al-Qaeda, largely because of his religion. Thus both of the series’ CIA heroes find it necessary to profile on the basis of race or religion, at least on occasion. Racial discrimination is presented as a regrettable but understandable tactic that even America’s best agents are likely to succumb to when investigating terrorist threats. Torture is not the universal solution it was on 24, but it can still be an essential item in Homeland‘s counterterrorism tool kit, so long as it is used in conjunction with Mathison’s soft skills. Brody is stabbed through the hand by an interrogator, but only so that Mathison can step in afterward and present herself as the good cop, using empathy rather than force to win his cooperation.
US policies in Homeland are essentially benign but occasionally undermined by rogue cliques, who lead the government astray into counterproductive excesses. The show gives Mathison and Berenson multiple opportunities to voice their concerns about such excesses from within the national security system. But the only Muslim voices raising political issues do so as terrorists. The show’s depictions of Muslim opposition to US foreign policy involve characters trying to justify terrorism, from Brody’s martyrdom video to Mathison’s interrogation of Hammad to Nazir’s angry exchange with Mathison during her kidnapping. In line with the official radicalization narrative, political dissent and terrorism are collapsed into each other: the only Muslim voice is the terrorist voice. Indeed, Brody’s prominence as the kind of Muslim who can make it to mainstream television is telling. The reality television series All-American Muslim, which tried to portray the everyday lives of Arab-American families in Dearborn, was taken off the air after conservatives pressured advertisers to pull their support. And for a number of years until the launch of Al Jazeera America in August 2013, deep opposition prevented Al Jazeera’s English-language news channel from being allowed access to US cable networks.2
Welcome then to the latest stage of the war on terror. Muslim Americans are not automatically to be considered terrorists, but their culture remains a source of suspicion for its radicalizing effects. Their vulnerability to radicalization is understood as tied to identity conflicts and inner psychological processes that need to be tracked with widely deployed surveillance and an intelligent understanding of cultural context. The hard power of overwhelming force is complemented with soft power techniques and cultural knowledge to secure cooperation. With a liberal gloss of nuance, the war on terror continues to sustain Islamophobia, but in ways that are less susceptible to political challenge. Occasional pragmatic criticism of individual US actions as counterproductive insulates the wider structures of policy from substantial opposition. Above all, Muslim criticism of US policies is seen as no more than a precursor to terrorism, rendering absent any notion of Muslim political dissent.
The Right to Solidarity
Drive north from downtown Dallas, past the anti-Obama billboards that ask “Where’s the birth certificate?” and others with a Jerusalem skyline and the caption “Israel will protect the holy land for all,” and after thirteen miles you reach the suburb of Richardson, where a small Muslim population has made its home. On one block, amid the usual bars and burger joints, you can find a Pakistani grocery store and a Middle Eastern café where young Arab Americans sit in the courtyard smoking hookahs. This small pocket of Muslim America in the northern suburbs of Dallas, surrounded by the city’s prevailing conservative Christian culture, was home to the Holy Land Foundation, the largest Muslim charity in the United States until it was shut down by the Bush administration in the months after 9/11. The trial of the leaders of the Holy Land Foundation, the “Holy Land Five,” highlights the limits placed on American Muslim political organization from the early years of the war on terror.
The Holy Land Foundation’s purpose was to raise funds from Muslim-American communities to provide humanitarian aid to, among other groups, Palestinian charities called zakat committees—voluntary groups charged with administering the charitable donations that Islamic tradition considers mandatory. The Red Cross, the United States Agency for International Development, and the United Nations have all used Palestinian zakat committees as a way to distribute aid with low overhead. Historically, such committees have been well respected, politically neutral, and trustworthy local providers of food, clothing, and other relief to Palestinians living in the Occupied Territories. However, throughout the 1990s, Israeli officials pressured the US government to prosecute the Holy Land Foundation for its use of zakat committees. An investigation was begun in 1993 and coordinated with Israeli security agencies. Meetings of the foundation were secretly recorded by the FBI. Then, in the months after 9/11, the Treasury Department designated the foundation a terrorist organization, seized its assets, and put the charity out of business. In 2004, its leaders were indicted and accused of providing material support to Hamas. The government charged that from 1995 to 2001, the Holy Land Foundation sent approximately $12.4 million outside of the United States with the intent to willfully contribute funds, goods, and services to Hamas.3 After an initial partial acquittal, the trial was reassigned to a new judge, and the Holy Land Five were eventually convicted in 2008, receiving sentences ranging from fifteen to sixty-five years.
The charge against the five was not that they sent money directly to Hamas, or that the money they sent to help Palestinians was intended for terrorist uses. Rather, the claim was that the zakat committees were run by Hamas and that, by providing charitable support to zakat committees, the foundation helped Hamas win the hearts and minds of the Palestinian people.4 From a legal perspective, the prosecution strategy was striking for two reasons. First, to support the claim that the zakat committees were controlled by Hamas it relied on two witnesses, an agent of the Israel Security Agency and an officer of the Israel Defense Forces, who were able to testify anonymously, making it impossible for the defense to properly question them. Matthew Levitt, of the pro-Israel lobby group the Washington Institute for Near East Policy, also testified as an “expert” on Hamas. Second, the prosecution admitted dozens of documents seized from other Muslim-American activists and used these to name three hundred Muslim organizations as “unindicted co-conspirators” in the case, including some of the most prominent national Muslim organizations, such as the civil rights–focused Council on American-Islamic Relations, the mainstream Islamic Society of North America, and the North American Islamic Trust, which holds the deeds of many American mosques. The usual restrictions on hearsay evidence were put to one side, which meant that the groups on the list had allegations made against them that could not be challenged in court.
At no point were the zakat committees themselves designated as terrorist entities by the US government. And despite the hundreds of wiretapped phone calls and a mass of seized documents, prosecutors could find no firm evidence of a connection between the Holy Land Foundation and Hamas after 1995, when Hamas was designated a terrorist organization in the US and funding it became illegal. It was true that the Holy Land Foundation had been established by exiled activists who had a worldview shaped by political Islamic movements in the Middle East, such as the Muslim Brotherhood, and that Hamas was itself founded by the Palestinian branch of the Muslim Brotherhood. In the early
1990s, US-based activists in this milieu generally agreed with Hamas’s rejection of the Oslo accords; so, too, did many secular Palestinians on the grounds that the Oslo process was unlikely to lead to the creation of a viable Palestinian state. They might also have agreed with Hamas’s use of violence to resist Israel’s occupation, just as today many agree with the violent rebellion in Syria against the Assad regime, which the US government also supports. But once Hamas was designated a terrorist entity in the US in 1995, the Holy Land leaders took steps to ensure compliance with US law. Indeed, representatives of the foundation met with Treasury Department officials in the 1990s seeking guidance on the implications for charitable work in Palestine, and were given the impression that donating to zakat committees would be lawful. But prosecutors in the Holy Land trial deliberately conflated general ideological support for the Muslim Brotherhood worldview with material support for Hamas. What the trial indicated was that after 9/11 even the minimal level of solidarity with their fellow Muslims in other parts of the world that the Holy Land Foundation had attempted would, in effect, be criminalized as a form of terrorism.5 It was an eminently political prosecution that demonstrated how the widening of material support legislation could be used to convict major Muslim organizations in the US of being terrorists. It sent a message to Muslim America that after 9/11 Islamic political activism in solidarity with Palestinians had been criminalized.
In October 2012, the US Supreme Court declined to hear an appeal of the Holy Land Foundation case, marking the end of any judicial process. Four of the Holy Land Five were transferred to Communications Management units, special terrorist-holding prisons in Terre Haute, Indiana, and Marion, Illinois, where those accused of mainly al-Qaeda–related crimes face severe restrictions on communicating with the outside world. Counterterrorism officials in Washington, DC, strictly monitor telephone conversations, which are limited to two fifteen-minute calls each week, and a screen prevents physical contact with family members during the two four-hour visits allowed each month.6
As much as it set a legal precedent for criminalizing Muslim solidarity, the Holy Land trial also had the effect of inaugurating a conspiratorial view of Muslim politics in the US. The trial enabled the release of a transcript of an FBI covert recording of a meeting of Islamic activists held in Philadelphia in 1993, and of documents seized during an FBI raid of an Islamic activist in Annandale, Virginia, in 2004. These texts are held to constitute evidence of a wide-ranging Muslim Brotherhood conspiracy to take over the US and impose shari’a law, using seemingly benign national advocacy organizations as the vehicles to achieve this goal. Yet an objective reading of the material easily dispels such fantasies. The transcript of the Philadelphia meeting reveals nothing more than a conversation by a group of activists sympathetic to political Islam, frustrated by the recent Oslo accords, worried about the shifting atmosphere in the US political debate, and trying to explore how they might lawfully continue to support Palestinian charities without being demonized. Among the seized documents, the most often referred to in shari’a conspiracy theories is the so-called Explanatory Memorandum, apparently drafted by an activist called Mohammed Akram Adlouni in 1991. The document is a summary of its author’s opinions, which he requested be added to the agenda of the next meeting of a group of pro–Muslim Brotherhood activists. The group itself did not commission the document. In one paragraph the author writes:
The process of settlement is a “Civilization-Jihadist Process” with all the word means. The Ikhwan [Brothers] must understand that their work in America is a kind of grand Jihad in eliminating and destroying Western civilization from within.7
The document concludes with a list of Muslim organizations; this has been interpreted as a list of Muslim Brotherhood front groups, but the document itself does not describe them as such, instead lamenting the fact that they do not “all march according to one plan.”8 In the hands of conspiracy theorists, this document has been read as revealing a hidden extremist agenda behind a mask of Muslim moderation, demonstrating that leading American Muslim organizations are engaged in a secret plot to destroy Western civilization by infiltrating the government and manipulating the media. As such, the Explanatory Memorandum has become the Protocols of the Learned Elders of Zion of the shari’a conspiracy theory, its credibility enhanced by its being submitted as evidence in a terrorism prosecution. But even putting to one side the question of whether the views expressed in the document are shared by any actual organizations, it is clear that what is actually being proposed is the building of an organizational structure in the US that can act in political solidarity with other Muslim Brotherhood organizations around the world, while also proselytizing to Americans that Islam represents a better model of civilization than Western liberalism. All of this is lawful activity. The Muslim Brotherhood is not a terrorist organization and has never been designated one by the US government.
Convinced that a secret Muslim Brotherhood plot exists, and that the Obama administration has prevented the FBI from properly investigating it, shari’a conspiracy theorists have conducted their own freelance investigations of Muslim organizations. For example, in preparing his book Muslim Mafia: Inside the Secret Underworld That’s Conspiring to Islamize America, coauthored with Paul Sperry, P. David Gaubatz, a former special agent in the US Air Force Office of Special Investigations, had his son Chris grow a beard, pretend to be Muslim, and spend six months “undercover” as an intern at the head office of the Council on American-Islamic Relations (CAIR), one of the few national organizations that campaigns for the civil rights of Muslims in the US. Chris managed to remove a quarter of a ton of documents from the office and record three hundred hours of video footage.9 Among the shocking revelations produced by this daring investigation: CAIR engages with federal agencies to influence government policy; it advises Muslims of their rights when questioned by law enforcement officials; it provides legal assistance to individuals accused of terrorism; it organizes protests against firms accused of discriminating against Muslims; it has a public relations strategy; it owns real estate; and individuals working at CAIR have occasionally lived in the same neighborhood as a person charged with terrorism. Ironically, CAIR’s efforts to organize for Muslims to take internships on Capitol Hill is described as “spying” and “infiltration.” In conclusion, Gaubatz and Sperry recommend that “investigators and the public” should understand certain “red flags signaling extremism,” including wearing a beard that is “a fistful in length” but with a trimmed mustache, wearing a silver ring on the right hand, and wearing robes that “cut above the ankle and contain black stitching.”10 This feverishly imaginative book was endorsed by Republican congresswoman Sue Myrick, and led to a group of lawmakers demanding that the government investigate CAIR, which thereafter struggled to free itself from the stigma of suspicion. It was again accused of extremism during the congressional hearings on Muslim radicalization initiated by House Homeland Security Committee chair Peter King in 2011.
In fact, as an organization, CAIR has followed the typically American, twentieth-century tradition of using identity politics to establish a Washington interest group. It seeks to defend the constitutional rights of individual Muslims, protest against media stereotypes, and defend the reputation of Islam as a religion. Prior to the intimidating climate of the war on terror, activists in CAIR had ambitions to shift US policy on the Middle East. But since then the main emphasis has been on an antidefamation and antidiscrimination agenda that roots itself in the US Constitution, similar to that deployed by other Washington lobby groups asserting minority interests. Like many Muslim organizations, CAIR has judged that lobbying on foreign policy issues is likely to be ineffectual in the current period, and it does not even mention foreign affairs on its Web site. And it has shied away from a wider, popular mobilization in defense of Muslim political freedoms in the US.
The shari’a conspiracy theory has chimed with flawed radicalization models to generate a mood in which Muslim political organiza
tion and expression are inherently suspect. Good Muslims are implicitly expected to abandon Islamic political activism and the global solidarity it implies. Distancing oneself from political opposition to American foreign policy becomes the only way Muslims can be accepted in American culture. American national identity is usually seen as more open than Britishness, and certainly, in the US, there is nothing that directly compares to the explicit demands in the UK that immigrants and communities of color integrate into British values. But American culture has its assimilatory thrusts, too, that work in less obvious but equally powerful ways. Those tendencies have been bound up in the late war on terror with the securitization of Muslim culture and a current of official thinking on radicalization that embraces an acceptable way to be an American Muslim, one that abandons a politics of solidarity with Muslims in other parts of the world. On occasion this position has been fostered by the hard power of state criminalization, at times by the soft power of government counterradicalization initiatives. But it also results from the general Islamophobia of American political culture. The consequence is that Muslims lose the freedom to shape their identity on their own terms, and their only acceptable integration with America involves giving up affiliations with Muslims in other parts of the world.
The extent to which pro-Israel lobby groups have cultivated such an atmosphere has reflected their anxiety that the Muslim-American population is growing, and that the political influence of Muslims in the US might one day reflect their numbers, making less viable the defense of a Western foreign policy that shields Israel from sanctions for its occupation policy. The talk of Muslim infiltration betrays this anxiety that American Muslims could begin to deploy their weight in American society as equal citizens, and be able to speak as effectively in defense of Palestine as some Jews do in defense of Israel. The pro-Israel propagandist Daniel Pipes, a central figure in the American Islamophobia movement, relayed his fear of a growing Muslim-American population at an American Jewish Committee convention in 2001:
The Muslims Are Coming! Page 32