The Muslims Are Coming!

by Arun Kundnani

  5 Phone interview with Andrew Arena, April 7, 2011.

  6 “Report Re: Death of Imam Luqman Ameen Abdullah,” Civil Rights Division, United States Department of Justice, October 13, 2010.

  7 Malcolm X Grassroots Movement, “Black People Executed without Trial by Police, Security Guards, and Self-Appointed Law Enforcers, January 1—June 30, 2012,” July 16, 2012.

  8 The Obama administration has not completely ended extraordinary rendition but seeks to legitimize the practice by using antitorture diplomatic assurances from recipient countries and posttransfer monitoring of detainee treatment. Amrit Singh, Globalizing Torture: CIA Secret Detention and Extraordinary Rendition, Open Society Foundations, New York, 2013, 7.

  9 “Establishing a New Normal: National Security, Civil Liberties, and Human Rights under the Obama Administration—An 18-Month Review,” American Civil Liberties Union, July 2010.

  10 Hillary Clinton, “Remarks on the Killing of Usama bin Ladin,” Treaty Room, Washington, DC, May 2, 2011.

  11 “Lawfulness of a Lethal Operation Directed against a US Citizen Who Is a Senior Operational Leader of al-Qa’ida or an Associated Force,” Department of Justice (undated).

  12 “Empowering Local Partners to Prevent Violent Extremism in the United States,” White House, August 2011.

  13 Mark Mazzetti, Charlie Savage, and Scott Shane, “How a US Citizen Came to Be in America’s Cross Hairs,” New York Times, March 9, 2013.

  14 Nasser al-Awlaki, “The Drone that Killed My Grandson,” New York Times, July 18, 2013, A23.

  15 “Obama’s Top Adviser Robert Gibbs Justifies Murder of 16-year-old American Citizen”, wearechange.org (October 23, 2012), available at http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7MwB2znBZ1g, accessed April 7, 2013.

  16 Erik Nisbet, Michelle Ortiz, Yasamin Miller, and Andrew Smith, “The ‘Bin Laden’ Effect: How American Public Opinion about Muslim Americans Shifted in the Wake of Osama bin Laden’s Death,” School of Communication, Ohio State University, July 20, 2011.

  17 Christopher Hitchens, “Londonistan Calling,” Vanity Fair, June 2007.

  18 Samuel P. Huntington, Who Are We? The Challenges to America’s Identity, New York: Simon & Schuster, 2004, 262.

  19 Mahmood Mamdani, Good Muslim, Bad Muslim: America, the Cold War, and the Roots of Terror, New York: Doubleday, 2004.

  20 Alana Lentin and Gavan Titley, The Crises of Multiculturalism: Racism in a Neoliberal Age, London: Zed Books, 2011, 69.

  21 “Fighting Anti-Muslim Racism: An Interview with A. Sivanandan,” IRR News, March 15, 2010, irr.org.uk, accessed July 25, 2013.

  22 FBI Counterterrorism Division, “The Radicalization Process: From Conversion to Jihad,” May 10, 2006, 10.

  23 Mitchell D. Silber and Arvin Bhatt, “Radicalization in the West: The Homegrown Threat,” New York Police Department Intelligence Division, 2007, 85.

  24 Charlie Rose, This Morning, CBS News, January 11, 2013.

  25 See, for example, Glenn Greenwald and Spencer Ackerman, “How the NSA Is Still Harvesting Your Online Data,” Guardian, June 27, 2013.

  26 Gianfranco Sanguinetti, On Terrorism and the State: The Theory and Practice of Terrorism Divulged for the First Time, London: B. M. Chronos, 1982.

  27 United States Senate, “Final Report of the Select Committee to Study Governmental Operations with Respect to Intelligence Activities,” April 26, 1976, 11.

  28 United States Senate, “Final Report of the Select Committee to Study Governmental Operations with Respect to Intelligence Activities: Cointelpro—The FBI’s Covert Action Programs Against American Citizens,” April 23, 1976.

  29 Ward Churchill and Jim Vander Wall, The COINTELPRO Papers: Documents from the FBI’s Secret Wars Against Dissent in the United States, Cambridge, MA: South End Press, 2002.

  30 Tony Shaw, “The Russians Are Coming! The Russians Are Coming! (1966): Reconsidering Hollywood’s Cold War ‘Turn’ of the 1960s,” Film History, 22: 2, 2010, 244.

  31 Ibid., 244.

  32 Ibid., 245–46.

  33 The phrase “The Muslims Are Coming!” was the title of a 1990 National Review article by Daniel Pipes, which claimed “Western European societies are unprepared for the massive immigration of brown-skinned peoples cooking strange foods and maintaining different standards of hygiene … All immigrants bring exotic customs and attitudes, but Muslim customs are more troublesome than most.” National Review, November 19, 1990, 28–31.

  34 Katrina Trinko, “GOP Congressman: ‘Increase Surveillance’ of Muslim Community,” National Review, April 19, 2013.

  35 Alison Sullivan, “Gohmert: US Should Deport Chechen Immigrants with Violent Proclivities,” Houston Chronicle, April 19, 2013.

  36 Indictment, United States of America v. Dzhokhar A. Tsarnaev, aka “Jahar Tsarni,” United States District Court for the District of Massachusetts, June 27, 2013, 5.

  37 “House of Commons,” Hansard, June 3, 2013, col. 1235.

  38 Ibid., col. 1245.

  39 Vikram Dodd and Andrew Sparrow, “Theresa May’s Plans to Tackle Extremism Face Backlash,” Guardian, May 27, 2013.

  40 Boris Johnson, “By Standing United, We Can Isolate the Virus of Islamism,” Telegraph, May 26, 2013.

  41 Indictment, United States of America v. Dzhokhar A. Tsarnaev, 4.

  42 Janet Reitman, “Jahar’s World,” Rolling Stone, July 17, 2013.

  43 Leo Hickman, “Woolwich Attack Witness Ingrid Loyau-Kennett: ‘I Feel Like a Fraud,’ ” Guardian, May 27, 2013.

  44 Rachel Shabi, “British Tolerance Is Never a Given: Post-Woolwich, It Must Be Defended,” Guardian, July 2, 2013.

  45 Eqbal Ahmad, “Terrorism: Theirs and Ours,” in Carollee Bengelsdorf, Margaret Cerullo, and Yogesh Chandrani, eds, The Selected Writings of Eqbal Ahmad, New York: Columbia University Press, 2006.

  46 Ed Moloney, “Rep. King and the IRA: The End of an Extraordinary Affair?” New York Sun, June 22, 2005.

  47 Randy Blazak, “Isn’t Every Crime a Hate Crime?: The Case for Hate Crime Laws,” Sociology Compass, 5: 4, 2011, 248.

  48 Arun Kundnani, “Blind Spot? Security Narratives and Far-Right Violence in Europe,” International Centre for Counter-Terrorism, The Hague, May 2012, 3.

  49 National Consortium for the Study of Terrorism and Responses to Terrorism, “Far-Right Violence in the United States: 1990–2010,” University of Maryland, August 2012.

  50 Thirteen people were killed in the Fort Hood shooting in November 2009 that was carried out by Nidal Malik Hasan, an American citizen. In June 2009, Abdulhakim Mujahid Muhammad, an African American who changed his name from Carlos Bledsoe after he converted to Islam, shot at a military recruiting office in Little Rock, Arkansas, killing Private William Long and wounding Private Quinton Ezeagwula. One person was killed in the July 2006 shooting at the Jewish Federation of Seattle, which was carried out by Naveed Afzal Haq, who grew up in Washington State. Three passengers were killed in the 2002 Los Angeles airport shooting; the perpetrator, Hesham Mohamed Hadayet, was a permanent resident of the US. One person was killed in the 1997 Empire State Building shooting, carried out by Ali Hassan Abu Kamal, who had been living in the US on a nonimmigrant visa. The murder of Rashad Khalifa in Tucson in 1990 by two members of the Jamaat ul-Fuqra group appears to have been politically motivated and carried out by US citizens. The term “jihadist” is, of course, inadequate to describe the various motivations involved in these murders.

  51 Jorge Rivas, “CNN’s John King Fails to Explain His ‘Dark Skinned’ Comment on Twitter,” colorlines.com, April 19, 2013, colorlines.com, accessed July 24, 2013.

  52 “Hardball with Chris Matthews,” MSNBC, April 18, 2013.

  53 Josh Halliday, “Woolwich Attack: BBC’s Nick Robinson Apologises after ‘Muslim’ Description,” Guardian, May 23, 2013.

  54 “UK Mosque Bombing Suspect Also Accused of Muslim Man’s Murder,” Reuters, July 20, 2013.

  55 Garrett M. Graff, “Homegrown Terror,” 5280, November 2011.

  56 Brian Michae
l Jenkins, “Stray Dogs and Virtual Armies: Radicalization and Recruitment to Jihadist Terrorism in the United States Since 9/11,” RAND Corporation, 2011, 6.

  57 Kim Murphy, “Is Homeland Security Spending Paying Off?” Los Angeles Times, August 28, 2011.

  58 Charles Kurzman, “Where Are All the Islamic Terrorists?” Chronicle of Higher Education, July 31, 2011.

  59 John Mueller, “Six Rather Unusual Propositions about Terrorism,” Terrorism and Political Violence, 17: 4, 2005, 488.

  60 “Draft List of Deaths Related to the Conflict from 2002 to the Present”, http://cain.ulst.ac.uk/issues/violence/deathsfrom2002draft.htm, accessed April 15, 2012.

  61 “Human Costs of War: direct War Death in Afghanistan, Iraq, and Pakistan, October 2001–February 2013,” Costs of War Project, Watson Institute for International Studies, Brown University, http://costsofwar.org/sites/default/files/HMCHART_2.pdf, accessed September 12, 2013.

  62 Gilbert Burnham, Riyadh Lafta, Shannon Doocy, and Les Roberts, “Mortality after the 2003 Invasion of Iraq: A Cross-Sectional Cluster Sample Survey,” Lancet, 368, October 21, 2006, 1421.

  1. AN IDEAL ENEMY

  1 Interview with Farasat Latif, Luton, June 3, 2011.

  2 Phone interview with Farasat Latif, May 7, 2002.

  3 Ibid.

  4 Keith Poole, “Attack on Afghanistan: We’ll Drive Extremists Out, Say Moderate Muslims: Luton,” Evening Standard, October 31, 2001, 7.

  5 Humayun Ansari, “The Infidel Within”: Muslims in Britain Since 1800, London: Hurst & Company, 2004, 235.

  6 David Docherty, David E Morrison, and Michael Tracey, Keeping Faith? Channel Four and Its Audience, London: J. Libbey, 1988, 11.

  7 Figures supplied by the Institute of Race Relations, http://www.irr.org.uk/news/deaths-with-a-known-or-suspected-racial-element-1991-1999, accessed October 19, 2012.

  8 Virinder Kalra, From Textile Mills to Taxi Ranks: Experiences of Migration, Labour and Social Change, Aldershot: Ashgate, 2000, 210.

  9 Peter Ratcliffe, Breaking Down the Barriers: Improving Asian Access to Social Rented Housing, Coventry, Chartered Institute of Housing, 2001; “Racism in Oldham Housing,” Campaign Against Racism and Fascism, no. 18, January/February 1994, 15.

  10 Arun Kundnani, “From Oldham to Bradford: The Violence of the Violated,” Race and Class, 43: 2, October 2001.

  11 Herman Ouseley, Community Pride, Not Prejudice: Making Diversity Work in Bradford, Bradford: Bradford Vision, 2001.

  12 Interview with Muhammad Najeib, Hull, UK, April 2, 2001.

  13 Frantz Fanon, The Wretched of the Earth, London: Penguin, 1990, 190.

  14 Ibid., 198.

  15 Ibid., 255.

  16 Suha Taji-Farouki, A Fundamental Quest: Hizb al-Tahrir and the Search for the Islamic Caliphate, London: Grey Seal, 1996, 187.

  17 Olivier Roy, Globalised Islam: The Search for a New Ummah, London: Hurst, 2004.

  18 Tariq Ramadan, Western Muslims and the Future of Islam, Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2004, 22, 35.

  19 Shiv Malik, “My Brother the Bomber,” Prospect, no. 135, June 2007.

  20 David Cameron, Speech to Munich Security Conference, February 5, 2011.

  21 Anne-Marie Bradley, “Bomber Was Huddersfield Drug Dealer,” Huddersfield Daily Examiner, August 8, 2005.

  22 Marc Lacey, “ ‘Haboobs’ Stir Critics in Arizona,” New York Times, July 21, 2011.

  23 Muslim Americans: Middle Class and Mostly Mainstream, Washington, DC: Pew Research Center, May 2007, 1; Karen Leonard, “American Muslims: Race, Religion, And Nation,” ISIM Newsletter, Leiden, Netherlands: International Institute for the Study of Islam in the Modern World, April 2004.

  24 Hishaam D. Aidi and Manning Marable, “Introduction: The Early Muslim Presence and Its Significance,” in Manning Marable and Hishaam D Aidi, eds., Black Routes to Islam, New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2009, 1.

  25 Moustafa Bayoumi, “East of the Sun (West of the Moon): Islam, the Ahmadis, and African America,” in ibid., 73.

  26 Sherman A. Jackson, “Black Orientalism: Its Genesis, Aims, and Significance for American Islam,” in ibid., 35.

  27 Manning Marable, Malcolm X: A Life of Reinvention, New York: Viking Penguin, 2011, 103, 154.

  28 Yvonne Yazbeck Haddad, Not Quite American? The Shaping of Arab and Muslim Identity in the United States, Waco, TX: Baylor University Press, 2004, 2–3; Pew Research Center, Muslim Americans: Middle Class and Mostly Mainstream, 1.

  29 Dan Georgakas, “Arab Workers in Detroit,” MERIP Reports, no. 34, January 1975.

  30 Mary Bisharat, “Yemeni Farmworkers in California,” MERIP Reports, no. 34, January 1975.

  31 Interview with Rachid Elabed, Dearborn, Michigan, April 1, 2011.

  32 Pew Research Center, Muslim Americans: Middle Class and Mostly Mainstream, 18.

  33 Vijay Prashad, Uncle Swami, New York: New Press, 2012.

  34 John Tehranian, “Selective Racialization: Middle-Eastern American Identity and the Faustian Pact with Whiteness,” Connecticut Law Review, 40: 4, May 2008.

  35 “Revisions to the Standards for the Classification of Federal Data on Race and Ethnicity,” White House, Office of Management and Budget, October 30, 1997, http://www.whitehouse.gov/omb/fedreg_1997standards, accessed October 31, 2012.

  36 Haddad, Not Quite American?, 20.

  37 Elaine Hagopian, “Minority Rights in a Nation-State: The Nixon Administration’s Campaign against Arab-Americans,” Journal of Palestine Studies, 5: 1/2, Autumn 1975–Winter 1976.

  38 Erik Skindrud, “Twenty Years Later, Still No Charges in Alex Odeh Assassination,” Electronic Intifada, December 6, 2006, http://electronicintifada.net/content/twenty-years-later-still-no-charges-alex-odeh-assassination/6582, accessed October 31, 2012.

  39 David Cole, Enemy Aliens: Double Standards and Constitutional Freedoms in the War on Terrorism, New York: New Press, 2005, 165.

  40 Judith Gabriel, “Palestinians Arrested in Los Angeles Witch-Hunt,” MERIP Middle East Report, no. 145, March–April 1987, 41.

  41 Benjamin Netanyahu, ed., Terrorism: How the West Can Win, New York: Farrar, Straus, Giroux, 1986, 80–81.

  42 Joseba Zulaika, “The Self-Fulfilling Prophecies of Counterterrorism,” Radical History Review, no. 85, Winter 2003, 195.

  43 Claire Sterling, The Terror Network : The Secret War of International Terrorism, New York: Holt, Rinehart, and Winston, 1981.

  44 Lisa Stampnitzky, Disciplining Terror: How Experts Invented “Terrorism,” Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2013, 117–22.

  45 Edward Said, “Identity, Negation and Violence,” New Left Review, no. 171, September–October 1988, 47.

  46 Reader List, A List on Media and The City, Information Politics and Contemporary Culture http://mail.sarai.net/pipermail/reader-list_mail.sarai.net/2001-September/thread.html, accessed October 25, 2012.

  47 Suhail A. Khan, “America’s First Muslim President,” Foreign Policy, August 23, 2010.

  48 Interview with Linda Sarsour, Brooklyn, New York, October 22, 2010.

  49 Haddad, Not Quite American?, 33, 44.

  50 Jean-Paul Sartre, Anti-Semite and Jew, New York, Schocken Books, 1948, 69.

  51 Muslim Americans: No Signs of Growth in Alienation or Support for Extremism, Washington, DC: Pew Research Center, August 2011, 41.

  52 Interview with Ghulam Bombaywala, Houston, Texas, April 16, 2011; phone interview with Ghulam Bombaywala, August 16, 2011.

  53 Interview with Mahdi Bray, Washington, DC, October 21, 2010.

  54 Interview with Dawud Walid, Detroit, March 29, 2011.

  55 Interview with Rachid Elabed, Dearborn, Michigan.

  56 Sikh Coalition Bay Area, Civil Rights Report 2010, 3.

  57 Interview with Imam Johari Abdul-Malik, Falls Church, Virginia, January 24, 2011.

  58 Haddad, Not Quite American?, 51.

  59 Mucahit Bilici, “Homeland Insecurity: How Immigrant Muslims Naturalize America in Islam,” Comparative Studies in Society and History, vol. 53, no
. 3, 2011, 616.

  60 https://www.soros.org/voices/911-10-religious-diversity-common-commitment, accessed November 1, 2012.

  2. THE POLITICS OF ANTI-EXTREMISM

  1 Bernard Lewis, “The Roots of Muslim Rage,” Atlantic Monthly, September 1990.

  2 Ibid., 60.

  3 Samuel P. Huntington, “The Clash of Civilizations?” Foreign Affairs, Summer 1993, 22, 31–32, 35.

  4 Mahmood Mamdani uses the term “culture talk” and Verena Stolcke uses the term “cultural fundamentalism” to refer to the same kind of thinking. See Good Muslim, Bad Muslim: America, the Cold War, and the Roots of Terror, New York: Doubleday, 2005; Verena Stolcke, “Talking Culture: New Boundaries, New Rhetorics of Exclusion in Europe,” Current Anthropology 36: 1, 1995.

  5 Philip Rucker and Joel Greenberg, “Romney Faces Palestinian Criticism for Jerusalem Remarks as He Heads to Poland,” Washington Post, July 30, 2011.

  6 Mehdi Semati, “Islamophobia, Culture and Race in the Age of Empire,” Cultural Studies 24: 2, March 2010.

  7 W. E. B. Du Bois, The Conservation of Races, Washington, DC: American Negro Academy, 1897; Alana Lentin and Gavan Titley, The Crises of Multiculturalism: Racism in a Neoliberal Age, London: Zed Books, 2011, 69.

  8 Étienne Balibar, “Is There a ‘Neo-Racism’?” in Tania Das Gupta, Carl E. James, Roger C. A. Maaka, Grace-Edward Galabuzi, and Chris Andersen, eds., Race and Racialization: Essential Readings, Toronto: Canadian Scholars’ Press, 2007, 85.

  9 Samuel P. Huntington, Who Are We? The Challenges to America’s Identity, New York: Simon & Schuster, 2004, 262.

  10 Edward Said, Orientalism, New York: Vintage Books, 1978.

  11 Edward Said, Covering Islam, New York,: Fodor’s Travel Guides, 1996.

  12 Eqbal Ahmad, “Islam and Politics,” in The Selected Writings of Eqbal Ahmad, New York: Columbia University Press, 2006.

  13 Deepa Kumar, Islamophobia and the Politics of Empire, Chicago: Haymarket Books, 2012, 81–94.

  14 George W. Bush, Speech to Joint Session of Congress, September 20, 2001.

  15 Todd S. Purdum, “Bush Warns of a Wrathful, Shadowy and Inventive War”, New York Times, September 17, 2001, A2.