Gender and Islam

Article

Manufacturing Islamophobia: Rightwing Pseudo-Documentaries and the Paranoid Style

Arlene Stein1 and Zakia Salime1

Abstract

Rightwing organizations in the United States have produced and circulated a number

of videos which exaggerate the threat Islamic militants pose to ordinary citizens in

the West. These videos owe a great deal to the frames established two decades

earlier in religious right campaigns against homosexuality. This article provides a

textual analysis of these videos and their production, showing how they manifest

“heated exaggeration, suspiciousness, and conspiratorial fantasy,” which Richard Hofstadter characterized as the “paranoid style.” We term these films “pseudo-documentaries” because while they utilize some of the conventions of the documentary genre—claims to “fairness and accuracy,” the use of “experts,” and the incorporation of news footage, testimonies, and “facts”—they are produced by political interest groups and are expressly made to persuade and mobilize through

distortion. A comparison of homophobic and Islamophobic videos reveals continu-

ities in rightwing rhetoric, as well as strategic shifts, and indicates the emergence of

an increasingly fragmented, pluralized, and privatized political sphere.

Keywords

documentary film, ideology, knowledge production, racism, stereotype

Journal of Communication Inquiry

2015, Vol. 39(4) 378–396

! The Author(s) 2015

Reprints and permissions:

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DOI: 10.1177/0196859915569385

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1Department of Sociology, Rutgers University, New Brunswick, NJ, USA

Corresponding Author:

Arlene Stein, Department of Sociology, Rutgers University, 26 Nichol Avenue, New Brunswick, NJ

08901, USA.

Email: arlenes@rci.rutgers.edu

A Palestinian man whose face is covered with a kefeyya emblazoned with Arabic writing points his Kalashnikov at the viewer. Images of crescents, red stars, Kalashnikov rifles, al-Qaeda, Hamas, and Hezbollah move across the screen. A quote from conservative philosopher Edmund Burke proclaims: “The only thing necessary for the triumph of evil is for good men to do nothing.” So begins the film Obsession: Radical Islam’s Threat to the West, which warns of the threat of a global Jihad arrayed against western, liberal values and reports that Islam is the “most dangerous force since the rise of Nazism.”

Rightwing organizations have produced this and other videos to articulate a sense of identity and immediacy—spotlighting a minority group which is poorly understood by the vast majority of American citizens, amplifying its outsider nature, and suggesting that its growing public visibility and power, and indeed its very existence, pose a threat to core American values.1

These documentaries circulate as objective knowledge, though they tend to be produced by political organizations whose express purpose is to mobilize adher- ents. Seeking to galvanize supporters through acts of cultural appropriation, they draw upon highly resonant themes.

In the following, we analyze these videos, contextualizing them in conserva- tive rhetoric in the United States. We characterize these films as “pseudo-documentaries” because while they utilize some of the conventions of the documentary genre—claims to fairness and accuracy, the use of experts, and the incorporation of news footage, testimonies, and facts—they are produced by political interest groups and are expressly made to persuade and mobilize through distortion techniques.2 Pseudo-documentaries blur fact and fiction, drawing legitimacy from the authority of so-called “objective” experts, while relying on the confessions of insider-witnesses who openly renounce their par- ticularistic affiliations and encourage others to do the same. They use misinfor- mation in the service of politicization, obscuring their political agenda—how they are financed, what political organizations supported them, and what cam- paigns they are meant to influence.

Appealing to viewers to act immediately in order to stave off the others’ influence and protect their families and nation, these pseudo-documentaries declare: We are engaged in a war for the very survival of our way of life, a culture war that threatens the foundation of our civilization. Eschewing overtly hateful language, they use both coded and explicit appeals cloaked in objective assessments of threat. To make their case, the videos offer dramatic images of violence and subversion, balanced by “reasonable, calm, and objective” testimony by so-called “experts.” Seemingly benign minority groups, they suggest, are in fact part of well-orchestrated movements that have designs on our children, our values, and our very civilization. Death- metal music, linked to images of angry mobs, is used to provoke anxiety and dramatize the sense of threat, which derives from Muslims’ outsider nature, and their proximity, promiscuity, and familiarity. The videos, in short, identify “the

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other,” stoke fears, and invite viewers to become involved in action (“do some- thing about it”).

Over 50 years ago, historian Richard Hofstadter (1964) described the qualities of “heated exaggeration, suspiciousness, and conspiratorial fantasy” circulating on the right, which he characterized as the “paranoid style” (p. 77). These videos exemplify that style, revealing continuities in rightwing rhetoric, even as the target of their ire has shifted, together with conceptions of political action, in an increasingly fragmented, pluralized, and privatized political sphere. Over a decade after the September 11 attacks, as crimes against Muslims (or perceived Muslims) increase, these videos constitute a form of “hate speech.”

In the following, we offer an analysis of two principal Islamophobic pseudo- documentaries, Obsession (2006) and The Third Jihad (2008), including the contexts in which they came to be produced and distributed, and how they work to mobilize and consolidate different publics. Together, these films show that the discourse of fear is a consistent weapon in the ideological arsenal of the right. They are products of emergent strategic alliances on the right dur- ing the War on Terror—among religious conservatives (Christian and Jewish), neoconservatives, rightwing foundations, and security analysts—and are facilitated by technological changes, especially the rise of the Internet. In an age of securitized citizenship, these videos, and the campaigns they are part of, seek to make identifying, categorizing, and denouncing “the other” a test of citizenship.

Mediated Demonologies

Historically, the right has drawn much of its strength, collective identity, and legitimacy from its ability to construct a coherent, visible enemy, an “other,” and demonize the enemies within. While the shape of this rhetoric is somewhat con- sistent over time, the demons change, shifting according to the needs of the moment, and have included, at various times, communists, Jews, African Americans, Catholics, and homosexuals. Indeed, the Islamophobic videos we discuss here follow the general template of videos produced by rightwing organ- izations in the United States in campaigns against gay/lesbian rights in the 1980s and 1990s and have been funded by many of the same foundations (most not- ably, the Lynde and Harry Bradley Foundation; Volksy, 2011).3

Politicized homophobia emerged in the United States in the 1970s and 1980s as Christian right organizations mobilized against LGBT civil rights, positioning themselves as moral guardians of the family against the perceived excesses of homosexuality. In the early 1990s, Christian right organizations in the United States actively used videos to make their case against homosexuality. Perhaps the most famous of the films produced and distributed by the Washington, DC- based Family Research Council was The Gay Agenda (1992). The Oregon Citizens Alliance, a statewide political organization, distributed this video

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mainly through conservative churches, as part of their campaign for Ballot Measure 9, against so-called “special rights” for gays, lesbians, and bisexuals.

The Gay Agenda (1992), a 20-minute video, uses the conventions of docu- mentary filmmaking—testimonies from scientific experts, facts, and figures (the percentage of those “in the gay lifestyle” who engage in sadomasochism, have syphilis, etc.)—and presents itself as objective and neutral. It claims: They have an agenda; we are simply telling the truth. There is no mention of the political sponsorship of the film or of its conservative Christian agenda. The “documen- tary” was part of a Christian right cultural genre—books, videos, special reports—which was dedicated to identifying the “gay threat” and calling Christian believers to arms; dozens of Christian conservative organizations devoted themselves to antigay activities, and antigay discourse came to encom- pass an attack on the status of homosexuals as a “minority” group deserving equal rights under the law. This marked a shift on the right from a focus on the immorality of homosexuality to the attribution of superior power to gays, who were positioned as undeserving special interest groups that had won “special rights” by appealing to liberal empathy and manipulating electing officials. At the same time, religious conservatives began to usurp the rhetoric of victimhood, redefining themselves in the language of interest group liberalism and identity politics.

This pseudo-documentary features a series of clips of male, leather-clad sado- masochists and drag queens flaunting “perverse” sexuality in public. The foot- age, culled mainly from gay pride parades, is a highly selective sampling of the most “extreme” images—gay men mainly, though there are a few images of topless lesbians, with ominous “death-metal” music playing in the background. A series of “experts”—psychotherapists, doctors, lawyers, and former members of the gay subculture, all white men—comment on different aspects of the threat posed by homosexuality, such as harmful sexual activities (such as “rimming”) which have dangerous public health consequences, including increased rates of syphilis.

The Gay Agenda depicts gay men as hypermasculine, leather-clad sadomaso- chists who flaunt their aggressive sexuality in public, refusing to feel shame for their desires. They represent undisciplined male sexuality, free of the civilizing influence of women. They are metaphoric vampires: immature individuals who must replenish their ranks by seducing (read: sucking the blood) of young men in order to win new converts. Testifying to this are former members of this sub- culture, who speak of being caught in an unhealthy lifestyle, who speak of the “desperation” of the “gay lifestyle,” the furtive, compulsive nature of their sexual desires.

Echoing traditional anti-Semitic propaganda that deliberately inflated the power of Jewish bankers and spoke of imagined international Jewish conspira- cies, The Gay Agenda suggested that gays are not an oppressed group; they are actually powerful and dangerous. Paradoxically, while purporting to warn of

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signs of evil in our midst, antigay films closely resemble propaganda devised by the Nazis in its war against the Jews. The video ends with a plea to its audience to take action against an imminent threat: “Will the gay agenda continue to triumph? Will society be forced to surrender its standards? Will the tide be turned? You decide,” it implores viewers. We must wake up, they proclaim: doing nothing—or appeasement—is not an option.

The video suggests that the most ominous threat gay men pose is to children, dramatized through clips of a NAMBLA (North American Man Boy Love Association) contingent marching in a parade, juxtaposed against “expert” talk- ing heads. Childhood symbolizes the contamination of nature by a deviant cul- ture of sexual promiscuity. It is the site where the immorality, promiscuity, and animalism of the other is illustrated and made intelligible. Images of homosexual men who prey on boys are coupled with the argument that homosexuals them- selves are like children—immature products of arrested development, who are capable of reforming themselves. Interviews with reformed ex-gays suggest that homosexuality is a choice: Individuals can exercise control over their desires and ultimately leave the subculture behind. Indeed, these reformed homosexuals occupy the privileged role of reformed insider, who bear witness to the activities of the perverse subculture, and suggest the possibility of renouncing membership in that subculture, reversing one’s homosexual identities—and even desires. Though ostensibly differentiating between “good gays” and “bad gays,” the film, in effect, blurs the two, suggesting that gays cannot be trusted, and that the only “good gay” is an “ex-gay.”

In summary, The Gay Agenda proclaims that the United States is in the midst of a culture war between those who would openly claim a perverse sexuality and those who are trying to hold the line against it. In an effort to broaden its potential audience beyond Christian conservatives, it couches its argument in scientific rather than religious grounds, making use of “expert” witnesses—re- formed homosexuals and scientific experts who attest to the harmfulness of the “gay lifestyle.” But the film operates at the level of fantasy as well, seeking to create a sense of threat and instill fear of a coming Holocaust-apocalypse that portends civilizational collapse if bystanders do not take action. It conjures a dystopic vision of an American culture where homosexuality is normalized, suggesting that homosexuals (defined primarily as hypermasculine gay men) are bent upon aggressively destroying Christian American, redefined as “civil society.” The film’s paranoid style, constructed through images and music, ref- erences (homo)sexual disgust, the diminished power of Christian, God-fearing Americans, and even the nightmare fantasy of mass death and oblivion, in an effort to mobilize citizens to cast votes for anti-gay ballot initiatives.

The Gay Agenda established a number of tropes central to rightwing pseudo- documentaries during the 1990s: The idea that Americans are engaged in a culture war, the belief that there is a clear division between “good” minorities and “bad” minorities (the former represented by reformed antagonists who serve

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as witnesses), and the threat of a Holocaust-apocalypse if bystanders do not take action. They warned “ordinary” Americans that a well-organized “homosexual agenda” posed a threat to Christian values. Twenty years later, a new genre of rightwing videos emerged which echo many of these themes, focusing instead, on fighting the “Islamic threat” (Freedman, 2011). As the culture wars of the 1980s and 1990s gave way to the War on Terror, rightwing pseudo-documentaries of the new millennium dramatize the belief that the principal threat facing Western democracies is now radical Islam.

The Rise of Islamophobic Discourse

In the late 1990s and early 2000s, anti-Muslim rhetoric emerged in many parts of Europe including Austria, Holland, Denmark, Switzerland, and the extreme right gained tremendous appeal by articulating anti-immigrant and anti- Muslim sentiment in electoral campaigns. In the aftermath of the 9/11 attacks, attention turned toward the supposed domestic threat posed by Islam. In the United States, particularly after September 11, 2001, conservative Christian, neoconservative, pro-Israel organizations, and anti-immigrant groups formed strategic alliances to oppose the construction of mosques and the supposed growing power of Sharia law.

This growing tide of fear, hostility, and discrimination against Muslims has been described as “Islamophobia” (Sheehi, 2011). In 1997, Britain’s Runnymede Trust defined Islamophobia as “unfounded hostility toward Muslims, and there- fore fear of all or more Muslims.” The report listed a number of features of Islamophobia, including seeing Islam as monolithic, static, and unresponsive to new realities rather than diverse and dynamic; separate and other rather than similar and interdependent; inferior to the West—barbaric, irrational, primitive, sexist rather than different but not deficient; violent, threatening, and terroristic; and politically manipulative rather than a sincere religious faith (Runnymede Trust, 1997).

A major theme within Islamophobic discourse, Bunzl (2005, p. 502) argues, is “the question of civilization, the notion that Islam engenders a worldview that is fundamentally incompatible with and inferior to Western culture.” Edward Said’s landmark work, Orientalism (1979) laid the groundwork for understand- ing the entanglement of culture, race, religion, and geopolitics, in the 19th cen- tury Western writing and art about the “Orient.” While Said’s work has not been without its critics, its importance, many have argued (Abu El Haj, 2005; Abu Lughod, 2002), lies in the ways it demonstrates how representations of the Orient operate in the European imagination and colonial enterprise.4

If orientalism had legitimated the European colonial enterprise in the 19th century, a resurgent Islamophobia in the United States speaks to the era of the “New American Century,” (“Project for the New American Century,” 2014) characterized by an American missionary political style, aggressive imperialism,

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and the growing visibility of evangelical and neoconservative groups. The “clash of civilizations” thesis (Huntington, 1993; Lewis, 1990) championed by these groups converts old Orientalist talk about the supremacy of the West and its universal civilizational mission into new cultural pedagogies of Islamophobia and media warfare. The surge of Islamophobic sentiment also follows a path of political tensions around the U.S. geostrategic interests in the Muslim world. The 1979 Iranian revolution and hostage crisis, the Palestinian struggle for statehood, the fall of the Berlin Wall, and most importantly, the September 11 attacks have all been a fertile ground for breeding Islamophobic discourse in the United States at the wake of the 21st century (Kumar, 2012).

After September 11, well-funded pressure groups like Jihad Watch, ACT for America, and Stop Islamicization of America began to champion the so-called Muslim threat in America, integrating neoconservatism, the evangelical right, state security concerns, and grassroots Islamophobia. Collectively, these groups sought to paint a nightmare scenario of covert jihadis working to usurp the law of the land and replace it with Islamic rule, where a caliphate will rise on the ashes of the Constitution, Americans will be forced to pray in mosques, and judges will mete out stonings and amputations. They warned of the threat of “Islamofascism” (Lob, 2007).

Islamophobic pseudo-documentaries were funded and distributed by a stra- tegic alliance of neoconservatives, religious conservatives (both Jewish and Christian), and policy hawks, aided by freelance rightwing bloggers. They were produced and distributed by the Clarion Fund, a New York-based group that identifies itself as a “non-profit organization that produces and dis- tributes documentaries on the threats of Radical Islam.” Between 2005 and 2011, Clarion released three videos: Obsession: Radical Islam’s War Against the West, The Third Jihad: Radical Islam’s Vision for America, and Iranium, which were designed to foment cultural polarization and which exemplify the “paranoid style” of political discourse on the right.5 The rise of digital technol- ogy has made these videos easy to reproduce and distribute. Our analysis of these videos focuses on Obsession and The Third Jihad.

Middle Eastern Obsessions

In 2008, 26 million copies of Obsession were inserted in 70 different newspapers, including The New York Times, and dropped on doorsteps in swing states, timed to coincide with the seventh anniversary of the September 2001 attacks, and the Republican National Convention. It was screened on college campuses, on Capitol Hill, in churches and synagogues, and aired on Fox News several times in November 2006. It is also readily available on the Internet, via YouTube and Netflix.

Obsession features footage taken from the Israeli-based nongovernmental organization Palestinian Media Watch and includes fragments of speeches by

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Imams, Palestinian activists, and radicalized individuals who speak of the legit- imacy of Jihad. The footage is edited to draw parallels between the Holocaust and Islamic terror, juxtaposing interviews with former Hitler Youth members and individuals who are identified as Islamic terrorists. The Palestinian struggle, which is central to the movie’s master narrative, is seen as the work of religious fanatics who share little other than a hatred of Jews.

Obsession remaps the Middle East through what Mamdani (2000) calls “cul- ture talk,” connecting images of crowds praying in Mecca, the confessions of former “terrorists” and “reformed” Muslims, and authoritative “experts”—neo- conservatives, Christian Zionists, and security agents. Images of horrific scenes from the Holocaust alternate with images of Hamas and Hezbollah training camps, media appearances by Osama Bin Laden, and speeches by Hassan Nasrallah and Iranian clergy. Footage of jihadist groups making anti- American and anti-Israeli statements are juxtaposed with images of Hitler and Nazi Germany, the 9/11 attack, and attacks on European cities, India, and elsewhere. Obsession links Arabic scripts and sound, images of violence, calls to prayer, crowds in Mecca and individual calls for Jihad, and statements by known or unknown Imams and “religious leaders,” and even school kids, all of whom celebrate Jihad.

The Third Jihad echoes the neo-Orientalist themes of Obsession, but with a focus on “homegrown” terror. The video was directed by Wayne Kopping and Erik Werth, produced by Werth and Raphael Shore, a Canadian-Israeli filmmaker, producer and rabbi, and funded by the Clarion Fund. In one of the opening sequences of the movie, the main narrator, Zuhdi Jasser, a self- identified Muslim American, describes how Americans “share” public spaces with ordinary Muslims in “shopping malls, airports, highways,” urging them to practice “vigilance” and report any “suspicious behavior” while continuing to look for information to protect themselves from imminent yet hidden infiltra- tion. Various sequences of the video identify Muslims as agents of this infiltra- tion and expose their methods (funding schools, teaching in mosques, and converting prisoners in U.S. jails), while detailing the plots and deceptions perpetrated on unsuspecting citizenry.

These videos instruct viewers how to make sense of the others in our midst. While both Obsession and The Third Jihad warn viewers against confusing Muslims with a few terrorists, they still blur distinctions between “radical Islam,” their explicit focus, and Islam tout court. The Third Jihad declares at the start: “this is not a film about Islam.” It tells the viewer, “Only a small percentage of the World’s 1.3 billion Muslims are radical.” Obsession similarly instructs us that “it is important to remember, most Muslims are peaceful and do not support terrorism.” However, it questions the idea that only a small number of Muslims support terrorism.

In Obsession, Daniel Pipes asserts that “ten to fifteen percent of Muslims support terrorism,” to which Khaled Abu Tomaeh responds: “When one says

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there is fifteen percent that support terrorism, this is a huge number, this is as big as the United States of America and the bad thing about it is that they are spread all throughout.” Politicians support the claim of imminent threats, including former New York City Mayor Rudy Giuliani, who speaks about an attack on “our way of life,” as well as Senator Joseph Lieberman, and several former Central Intelligence Agency agents. High-profile neoconservatives, including Richard Pearle, Daniel Pipes, David Horowitz, along with historian Bernard Lewis, warn of “the cosmic nature of jihad.” Indeed, these videos offer a popular version of the “clash of civilizations” thesis. Arguing that Muslims are engaged in a stealth Jihad, they question their loyalty to their state and their collective ability to integrate, and suggest that Islam is incompatible with dem- ocracy. They seek to further consolidate the War on Terror and the “state of exception” constituted by the Patriot Act, discrediting due process, human rights obligations, and constitutionality.

In The Third Jihad, Lewis joins Zuhdi Yassir, arguing that radical Islam predates 9/11, the Arab-Israeli conflict, and the Cold War and sees itself in a global cosmic struggle of civilizations that will end only with their triumph. War infuses the history of Islam as a religion, Lewis suggests. “The clash of Islam and Christendom” has been taking place “for more than fourteen centuries,” with the advent of Islam shaping the era of the First Jihad, he says. A world map displayed on the screen shows in red stars the expansion of Islam throughout most of the “Christian” world—the Second Jihad. It marks the era of Ottoman expansions. Lewis defines the various wars that have been affecting Muslim populations in “Iraq, Afghanistan, Chechnya, and Palestine,” as religious wars that “will end only when Islam dominates.” A map of the region conflates the history of Islam with its geography, stoking fears about its global nature, suggesting that a “Fourth Jihad” will occur if nothing is done to stave it off—an argument bolstered by visual images of mobs, parades, explosions, hostage taking, blood, and tears.

Like The Gay Agenda before them, these pseudo-documentaries draw legit- imacy from the authority of experts while eliciting the confessions of insider- witnesses. A number of these experts are former Muslims. These and other apostasy narratives play an important role in Islamophobic discourse more gen- erally.6 In Obsession, Muslim and Arab-born spokespersons include Noonie Darwish, Brigite Gabriel, Walid Shoebat, and Khaled Abu Toameh. Darwish is a very vocal Egyptian-born, evangelical convert and founder of the organiza- tion Arabs for Israel (a play, perhaps on the group Jews for Jesus). She testifies as somebody who had firsthand experience with “Palestinian terrorism” when she was a child living in Gaza.7 Gabriel is a Lebanese Christian who is very active in anti-Islamic campaigns in the United States and who, along with Darwish, represents the counterimage of the voiceless Arab woman. Shoebat, a Christian-convert and self-described “former PLO terrorist,” is a career Islamophobe influential in U.S. State Department anti-terrorism programs,

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providing training for security agents and briefings for policy makers about Islam. Toameh, an Israeli-Palestinian journalist at the Jerusalem Post, identifies as a Muslim who is “extremely worried and ashamed” about the in action of “the silent majority.”

While these videos suggest that most “ordinary” Muslims just want to live their lives, a succession of images says precisely the opposite, identifying Muslims by their appearance (veils, beards), modes of worship (aligned bodies during collective prayers), distinctive way of life (veiled, oppressed women), and sensibility (violence and secrecy). They thematize white fears of contamination via images of brown male terrorists and liberated brown women. They predict a clash of civilizations, culminating in a racial-religious war with apocalyptic con- sequences. And they utilize a series of “reformed Muslims” to make their case.

Zuhdi Yassir, a self-defined devout Muslim, and a central figure in The Third Jihad, is a medical doctor who served in the U.S. Navy. He speaks on behalf of the “silent majority” of Muslims and their “leadership in America,” declaring: “we all know about terrorism, this is the war you don’t know about.” It is, he explains: “a strategy to infiltrate and dominate America.” Conflicts in India, Chechnya, Gaza, Indonesia, Iraq, Somalia, and others, he suggests, share “the same roots”: global Jihad’s quest to take over the world.

Fear of a Brown Planet

Islam is a religion, not a race, and Muslims encompass a wide range of ethnic, national, and perceived racial backgrounds. Nevertheless, Islamophobia is also a form of racism; at its center is a “racialized caricature of Islam and Muslims” (Love, 2013; Dittmar, 2004). It is not simply an expression of bigotry toward Islam as a religion; it is also a form of racialized bigotry, in which race is a floating signifier. By including dark-skinned, reformed “good Muslims,” as the main spokesperson about the nature of Islam, Islamophobic videos bracket overtly racist claims and posit anti-Islamic talk as racially neutral. This is not about race, it is about religion, the videos proclaim. Yet, it is a racialized understanding of religion, in which brown hordes threaten Christian/western civilization.

For instance, in The Third Jihad, Islam is represented as the faith of brown men, including converts in U.S. jails. Indeed, the video shows images of black detainees wearing beards, representing Islam as the religion of black criminality. Tom Ridge, the former Secretary of Homeland Security, calls the prison popu- lation a “fertile ground for recruitment” of black inmates by radical Muslims. Black pastor Eugene Rivers states that though he “has known what was hap- pening in prison for many years, no one was paying attention” The double criminalization of black inmates is complicated by the case of other dark- skinned men and women, who have crossed the line of race to join the club of whiteness. These enlightened ones denounce the faith of their parents, testifying to their previous contamination and exposure to Islamic terror and freedom

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from it, by the working power of secular feminism, liberal values, or Christian conversions.

The Muslim-insider not only contributes to this visual industry of Islamophobia but also constitutes the boundaries of what Mamdani describes as a division between “good Muslims” and “bad Muslims” (Esposito, 2012; Mamdani, 2004). Exemplified by Zuhdi Yassir, the insider-informant reduces the plurality of subject positions for Muslims living in the West to a binary of good and evil—the patriotic, liberal Muslim —or the terrorist. Both documen- taries suggest that “good Muslims,” though rare, could help forge strategic alliances with the West. In Obsession, Daniel Pipes, founder of Campus Watch, urges the West not to “throw the moderates back with the barbarians.” Nevertheless, by selecting a handful of (former) Muslim men and women as spokespersons, the video silences the majority of Muslims who do not fit into neoconservative, polarized definitions of “bad” and “good” Muslims. Absent are those Muslims who oppose religious radicalism, bigotry, and anti-Semitism, for example. (Obsession represents the flip side of All-American Muslim, a reality television show that aired in 2011, which followed the daily lives of five Lebanese-American Muslims families in Dearborn, MI, the largest Muslim com- munity in the United States. It portrayed Muslim Americans in a “positive” light: as patriotic, “normal” Americans who at times, too, were subject to ter- rorist acts from “bad” Muslims.) While celebrating multiculturalism as an American virtue, Obsession dismisses the diversity of American Muslims, sug- gesting that even those who appear to be peaceful are not in fact so, often using female spokespersons to make these claims.

After the invasion of Afghanistan, Abu Lughod (2002) named “colonial fem- inism” as one of the sites of feminist identification with Afghan women, provid- ing legitimation for U.S. military intervention. In The Third Jihad and Obsession, former Muslim and Arab women do the “work” of legitimating colonial femin- ism. Ayaan Hirsi Ali, Noonie Darwish, and Brigitte Gabriel are living examples of Arab and Muslim women who broke the chain of an overtly patriarchal and violent religious culture. Darwish, Gabriel, and Ali symbolize modern categories of freedom, democracy, and rationality, foreclosing other alternatives, including women’s subjectivity within Islam as a faith and a cultural universe (Jiwani, 2002).

Hirsi Ali is a particularly interesting case. A well-known anti-Islamic cam- paigner, her notoriety is rooted in her status as an acclaimed survivor of Islam and Islamic radicalism in her adopted country, the Netherlands. She became even more (in)famous when she played the role of the battered woman in Theo Van Gogh’s film, Submission. Having escaped from an arranged marriage in her previous life in Somalia, and rescued by her personal agency and the power of her confession—which she placed at the service of major televisions networks in Europe and the United States—Hirsi Ali makes sense as a prominent narrator in The Third Jihad. Her symbolic and physical border-crossing from Somalia to the

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Netherlands, and her identity as an atheist who “has been there” gives her par- ticular credibility. Unlike Darwish, an evangelical convert, Hirsi Ali’s racial crossing is not contingent upon her adoption of Christianity, but rather on her distance from and renunciation of Islam.

Hirsi Ali’s statements in The Third Jihad speak to this distance. “As a woman, if you are an individual woman with a strong character and you rebel against this kind of life,” she testifies, “you are more than any one else likely to be bitten, abused, and your spirit been killed by your own family, by your own loved ones.” Hirsi Ali confesses her “astonishment” about those who choose to adhere to Islam. “It seems so preposterous and so unbelievable,” she says, “but yet thousands, millions of people follow this and takes it seriously.” Having survived Islam’s culture of hatred, misogyny, and terror, Hirsi Ali desta- bilizes race and politics as useful categories for understanding anti-Islamic sen- timent in the West.

While The Third Jihad focuses on Islam as a domestic threat, Obsession is more heavily about the Israeli-Palestinian question. Here, the image of the “reformed” woman, epitomized by Nonie Darwish, is contrasted with the Palestinian mother who does not value her child’s life. As Darwish asks, “how can you trust these people with the life of my children when they send their own children to death?” The image of the suicide bomber/martyr is juxtaposed against the “innocent child” (in a move that parallels The Gay Agenda’s contrast between homosexual predators and innocent children). Central to Islamophobic discourse is the claim that children are being sacrificed and contaminated by a violent culture. In Obsession, much like The Gay Agenda before it, the threat to childhood innocence is a harbinger of looming civilizational collapse. The costs of inaction, it proclaims, are death, destruction, and even apocalypse, Holocaust.8

Obsession goes to great lengths to conflate images of 9/11 and bombing attacks in Europe with suicide bombing in Israel, and images from Nazi parades and concentration camps, with Hamas fighters and Hezbollah training camps. If The Gay Agenda made the threat of “homo-fascism” implicit, Obsession articulates the threat of Islamofascism (Berman, 2004) very explicitly, juxtapos- ing images from Nazi mobs and those of the Islamic world and the Middle East. Comparing Nazi Germany to the Palestinian intifada and Hamas, these videos, and the Islamophobia they seek to foment, suggest that it is our responsibility to prevent a second Holocaust, and not be passive bystanders. At the same time, it suggests that the suffering of Palestinians lies outside of our moral universe.

Recent Washington, DC bus ads activate a similar trope, blurring Holocaust, Islam, and the Palestinian question (Pamelageller.com, 2014). As Pamela Geller (Pamelageller.com, 2014) of American Freedom Initiative (AFDI), which produced the ads, suggested: “We find ourselves incapable of dealing with the gravest threat this nation faces. The problem is that we can’t talk about

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the problem. The American people are being disarmed and defeated by our own elites. These ads change that.”

Mobilizing Fear in an Age of Securitized Citizenship

“American politics has often been an arena for angry minds,” historian Richard Hofstadter (1964) wrote in the context of anti-communist fervor (77). While angry minds on the right focus their sights on the “other” within, the demons are constantly on the move. As we have argued, during the past few decades, homosexuals and Muslims have been the demons of choice in rightwing media that draws upon the documentary form to make politically charged arguments designed to enflame the passions of ordinary citizens. The anti-Muslim pseudo- documentaries we have described here, much like the homophobic videos that preceded them, use fear for the purpose of political polarization.

The decline of the newspaper industry and the growth of online nonprofes- sional news sources have opened up public discourse to an infusion of this kind of “ideologically motivated misinformation” (Alterman, 2011). In a digital age where there is easy access to the Internet, it does not take a tremendous amount of resources to amplify marginal voices. While we do not wish to exaggerate the power of these videos, we do want to suggest that they do important political work. What impact might these videos have, and to whom do they speak? Clearly, there are a number of audiences they seek to engage: religious conser- vatives, both Jewish and Christian; rightwing populists, neoconservatives, as well as naı̈ve general viewers, particularly those who are victims of growing economic inequality.

Such videos play on viewers’ resentments and fears, offering them a way to connect their affective grievances to a series of targets that are both amorphous and recognizable. By identifying the “others” in their midst, they can participate in the “civilizing mission” of the West against the rest and transform their ambient fears and sense of rage into a sense of moral superiority and security. “Losers of rigged games,” writes Robert B. Reich, “can become very angry, as history has revealed repeatedly” (Reich, 2013). Widening economic inequality in the United States helped ignite the Know-Nothing and Anti-Masonic move- ments before the Civil War, as well as rightwing John Birch Society; today, it is helping to fuel Islamophobic sentiment. In order to sustain itself, the right must identify new enemies, replacing those which become irrelevant, such as Soviet-era communists, or even, increasingly, homosexuals. Today, Muslims, pictured as global jihadists, join immigrants, working women, abortion pro- viders, and secular humanists and other favored rightwing targets. As Reza Aslan put it,

Islamophobia has become so mainstream in this country that Americans have been

trained to expect violence against Muslims—not excuse it, but expect it. And that’s

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happened because you have an Islamophobia industry in this country devoted to

making Americans think there’s an enemy within (Freedman, 2012).

Publicly funded counterterror trainings for public servants, orchestrated by private firms, have at times made use of Islamophobic videos (Cincotta, 2011). The Third Jihad received endorsements from former New York City mayor Rudolph Giuliani, U.S. Senator John Kyl, U.S. Representatives Trent Franks and Sue Myrick, among others. The video includes an interview with Commissioner Raymond W. Kelly and was shown, according to internal police reports, “on a continuous loop” between three months and one year of training. During that time, at least 1,489 police officers, from lieutenants to detectives to patrol officers, saw the video (Powell, 2012).

Islamophobic discourse, and the discourse of fear, works to consolidate a sense of us and them, mobilizing and consolidating different publics and stra- tegic alliances (Butler, 2010). During the neoliberal era, the “security state” manufactures Islamophobia in part to consolidate itself (Grandin, 2009). Islamophobia has also been deployed to cement alliances between conservative Jews and Christians, and buttress support for Israel. The image of a prophecied Holocaust resonates with Christian fundamentalist beliefs in apocalyptic “end times,” in which a final showdown leads to mass death, and later to a process of purification, in which saved Christians will enjoy an everlasting life (Dittmer & Sturm, 2011). The Holocaust-apocalypse trope fuses memories of Jewish trauma with resonant Christian conservative themes, evoking the biblical prophecy that Jesus will appear, followed by Armageddon, a battle between good and evil, and by his one thousand year reign on Earth. At times, Islamophobia has even been used to drive a wedge into traditional liberal constituencies, forging alliances between the right and some sectors of the feminist and LGBTQ movements.9

While these videos seek to legitimate U.S. interventions in the Middle East, and in the War of Terror, at the same time they shift the task of policing dif- ference and manufacturing threat from the state to the individual self-reliant subject. Securitized citizenship discredits state institutions such as the educa- tional system, the legal apparatus of human rights, as well as progressive groups, and the so-called “liberal” media. Calling upon ordinary citizens to be on the alert, the videos offer viewers a way of identifying threats, extending the security state via the individual sovereign actor. The consequences for not being vigilant, they argue, are potentially dire: terrorist violence, cultural domination, and even mass death, a Holocaust-apocalypse in which hidden truths will be revealed and the world dramatically reshaped (Berlet, 2012). The videos suggest that viewers can act to stave off this fantasized threat, and they seek to move the viewer from his/her presumed ignorance and innocence, to political action.10

These pseudo-documentaries embody overlapping rhetorical styles, marshal- ling “expert” witnesses, especially reformed antagonists, to sound a call of alarm

Stein and Salime 391

about the internal threat posed by a de-humanized “other” (Steuter & Wills, 2009). They mobilize an economy of affect in which bodily gestures, cultural markers (Dittmar, 2004), and embodied signs become part of the sensual, cog- nitive and affective experience of otherness—including gazing, seeing, hearing, and feeling. The “other,” they suggest, could be a friend, a teacher, or a neigh- bor. By repeatedly suggesting that Americans are ignorant about “what hap- pening in their backyards,” “hav[e] no clue,” are “naı̈ve” and “unaware,” these videos constitute viewers as subjects in need of protection, denouncing the state and its institutions for failing to protect them.

By stoking fears, such videos may contribute to the rise in racially motivated crimes against Muslims in the United States in recent years. While the number of such attacks had been falling steadily, from nearly 500 in 2001 to 107 in 2009, in 2010, according to Federal Bureau of Investigation records, the number leapt by 50%, to 160. Several states have passed statues outlawing Shariah, and mosques (and Sikh temples mistaken for mosques) have been attacked (Freedman, 2012). Anti-Muslim sentiments are arguably even more intense in Europe (Nussbaum, 2012). In his 1,500-page “Declaration of European Independence,” Anders Nehring Breivik, who murdered 77 Norwegians in July 2011, claimed to be a Templar Knight, a modern-day Christian crusader fighting to cleanse Europe of Islam. While Breivik may have acted alone, his freelance war on Islam was aided by a proliferating industry of hate, and his writings mention the influence of Obsession.

In this context, such pseudo-documentaries constitute a type of hate speech.11

By offering ordinary citizens a way of identifying the others in their midst, these videos make identifying, categorizing, and denouncing “the other” a test of citizenship. In so doing, they seek to regulate the presence of unfamiliar others in public spaces, much like antigay videos did in an earlier period, nor- malizing control over unruly subjects. The pedagogy of fear they represent is the latest version of a long-running paranoid style.

Declaration of Conflicting Interests

The authors declared no potential conflicts of interest with respect to the research,

authorship, and/or publication of this article.

Funding

The authors received no financial support for the research, authorship, and/or publication of this article.

Notes

1. In this article, we use the terms “right,” “rightwing,” and “conservative” interchange- ably, to broadly characterize a mode of political discourse which emerges out of a shifting alliance of social movement organizations. The particular strains of rightwing

organizing we focus on may at times be termed the radical right, as they are to the right

392 Journal of Communication Inquiry 39(4)

of mainstream Republican Party formations and emerge out of more extremist strains of rightwing populism, which have historically focused on conspiracist scapegoating

(Berlet & Lyons, 2000). 2. We use the terms “video” and “film” interchangeably in this article. 3. Documents a report by the Center for American Progress that found links between

the two campaigns. 4. Critics of Said claim that he portrayed a monolithic West and a homogeneous Orient

(Brechenridge & Van Der Veer, 1993), selectively using European and postcolonial writers and Marxism to make his point across historical periods and political contexts

(Ahmad, 1992). 5. Obsession was produced by the Clarion Fund, and cowritten by South African Wayne

Kopping and Canadian-Israeli Rabbi Raphael Shore. Shore is also the founder of the

Clarion Fund and served in senior posts at Aish HaTorah, a Jerusalem-based organ- ization that provided the funds for the mass distribution of the video. According to the Web site of the Secretary of State for New York, Clarion is incorporated in New

York as a Delaware-based foreign not-for-profit corporation. Robert (Rabbi Raphael) Shore, Rabbi Henry Harris, and Rebecca Kabat incorporated Clarion Fund and are reported to serve as employees of Aish HaTorah International. The

incorporators of the Clarion Fund used Aish HaTorah’s New York City address. See ObsessionforHATE.com, http://www.obsessionforhate.com/thefunders.php. About the funds and the organizations, see Shatz (2008), Berman (2007).

6. On WikiIslam.net, for example, apostasy narratives present Islam as irrational, false,

morally corrupt, as well as misogynist and violent. See Enstedt and Larsson (2013). 7. On Nonie Darwish, see http://electronicintifada.net/content/nonie-darwish-and-al-

bureij-massacre/7586

8. See discussions of these ties at http://www.youtube.com/watch?v¼TMDsV-z_wG8 and http://www.thejewishweek.com/news/new_york/new_consensus_seen_emerging_ israel_education; ww.lobelog.com/defender-of-clarion-fund-linked-back-to-aish-

hatorah. The Holocaust frame has been a feature of rightwing rhetoric at least since the 1970s, when lesbian/gay activists tried to revise the historical record to reflect the extent of homosexual victimization during the Holocaust and draw par- allels between contemporary lesbian/gay oppression, and the targeting of Jews. In the

early 1990s, Christian right activists entered into a “frame dispute” to counter gay victim claims: gays, they proclaimed, are not victims, but are in fact perpetrators (Stein, 2001).

9. In Europe, it is not uncommon to find strong anti-Muslim sentiments expressed on the left, including by LGBTQ activists at times. The case of Pim Fortuyn, the gay anti-Muslim politician in the Netherlands, is the most famous example of this; the

figure of the “homophobic migrant” has also emerged in leftist rhetoric. (See Haritaworn, 2012). In Israel, pro-LGBT politics has at times been used to “pinkwash” human rights abuses, according to some pro-Palestinian activists. See

Haritaworn (2012) and Schulman (2011). 10. Obsession and The Third Jihad are structured to strengthen the “viewers’ conscious-

ness” about their privileged position as “situated viewers”. 11. The United States is one of the few Western liberal democracies that does not punish

such speech, on the grounds that it would constitute censorship. Even detestable

Stein and Salime 393

speech is permitted so long as the speaker does not threaten violence or incite others to commit violence, and their existence is constitutionally protected as free speech.

See Waldron (2012).

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Author Biographies

Arlene Stein is a professor of Sociology and on the graduate faculty of Women’s and Gender Studies at Rutgers. Her latest book is Reluctant Witnesses: Survivors, Their Children, and The Rise of Holocaust Consciousness (Oxford University Press, 2014).

Zakia Salime is an associate professor of Sociology and Women’s and Gender Studies at Rutgers. She has published Between Feminism and Islam: Human Rights and Sharia Law in Morocco (University of Minnesota Press, 2011).

396 Journal of Communication Inquiry 39(4)