Islamophobia research paper + annotated bibliography

Israel Studies 24.2 • doi 10.2979/israelstudies.24.2.12 144

Miriam F. Elman

Islamophobia

Over the 2018 Labor Day weekend, the islamic socieTy of North America (INSA) held its 55th national conference where, as with its gatherings in prior years, “Islamophobia” was a major topic of discus- sion. According to media reports of the convention, some speakers “linked Islamophobia’s origins to white supremacy” while others expressed the view that condemning honor crimes in Muslim-majority societies—violence directed against women by their families in order to spare the family’s “honor”—should be considered as a form of “liberal Islamophobia”.1

Also, significantly broadening the concept of Islamophobia at this year’s INSA conference was adjunct professor of law Amer Zahr, who equated criticism of Palestinian governmental authorities and the prevailing public opinions in Gaza and the West Bank—including official incitement and the glorification of violence and support for violence and terrorism within Palestinian society,2 as manifestations of anti-Muslim bigotry and prejudice. Specifically, Zahr reportedly claimed that “For 70 years the pro- Israel lobby has been saying things like ‘the Palestinians teach their children to hate.’ That’s a form of Islamophobia. That they send themselves out to kill people. That is a form of Islamophobia.”3

I argue that Zahr, and others at the INSA conference, who used the term Islamophobia as a blanket label to condemn any criticism of Palestinian leaders or society are engaging in a form of conceptual stretching that social scientist Giovanni Sartori long warned against. In this instance, the conceptual stretching of the term—applying Islamophobia to cases for which it is not appropriate—has generated a discourse in which increasingly any criticism of Palestinian governing agencies or societal actors is inter- preted as an expression of genuine anti-Muslim or anti-Islam prejudice. In addition, due to this conceptual stretching, the writings of those supportive of the Palestinian cause, including work that may adopt a virulent anti- Israel narrative or even traffic in antisemitic canards and tropes, becomes immunized from criticism because it is those who are raising the charge of antisemitism who are cast as hopelessly bigoted.

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I highlight the ways in which the concept of Islamophobia has been “stretched” in recent years and provide several examples of how it now serves as a vehicle for discrediting and discounting the work of scholars and activists who seek to expose vehemently anti-Israel discourses. I argue that the unhelpful way in which Islamophobia is today wielded as a blunt cudgel to stifle critical analyses of Palestinian politics hinders the potential for peace by undermining the capacity for scholars and practitioners to effectively focus attention on the urgent need for Palestinian societal and governmental reforms. In addition, this conceptual stretching makes it more difficult to identify and address genuine instances of Islamophobia.

ISL A MOPHOBI A: OR IGINS A ND EVOLUTION OF A CONCEPT, A ND A CA LL TO ACTION

The term “Islamophobia” is today a widely used concept in both public and scholarly domains, but it’s important to note that it has had a long pedigree. French colonial administrators, for example, were criticized with the use of the word islamophobie for their treatment of Muslim subjects.4 Sanjeev Kumar discusses how the West long viewed the Muslim world as a menace and a “problem for Christian Europe” and “looked at Muslims with a mix- ture of fear and bewilderment”.5 Reflecting on bigotry and discrimination directed towards Muslims in the United States, including the codifying of the image of a fanatical and dangerous Middle East, Erik Love remarks that “Islamophobia” is the latest term for a centuries-long history of American state policy, cultural discourses, and discriminatory practices that enforce racial boundaries around Middle Easterners in America.6

Many note that today’s anti-Muslim discourse is a “phenomenon of the late twentieth and early twenty-first centuries”, fueled largely by the unprecedented movement of millions of Muslims to Europe and to other parts of the Western world.7 It is in this contemporary time period that a biased projection of Islam as a violent religion has worked to brand Muslims as “terrorists, traitors, non-democrats and threats to social cohesion and global peace”.8

The contemporary popularization of the term “Islamophobia” is often charted back to the series of studies produced in the 1990s by the Runnymede Trust, a left-leaning UK think tank. A 1997 report produced by the group and entitled “Islamophobia: A Challenge for Us All” docu- mented prejudice against British Muslims including “perceptions of the religion as a single bloc that is barbaric, sexist, and engaged in terrorist

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activities.”9 Subsequently, in the late 1990s and 2000s, political activists, NGOs, and the media increasingly drew attention to the harmful rhetoric and to violence directed at Muslims and Islam in the United States and Europe.10 The term has also been used by international organizations. The European Union through its European Monitoring Center on Racism and Xenophobia has issued a number of reports on the topic; the 2004 UN conference titled “Confronting Islamophobia” is also an indication of how mainstream the term has become.

Islamophobia has traditionally been defined as both a prejudice and hostility toward Muslims that manifests as a distorted simplification of Islam and the Muslim world, and as an irrational hatred, alarmism, dread, and fear of the faith and its followers. Most formulations of the term emphasize fear as a key component that leads people to make blanket judgements of Islam and Muslims as a dangerous “other”. Considerable scholarship on this anxiety and “shorthand” shows how it can involve a number of issues, for example: viewing most terrorists as Muslims or most Muslims as terrorists; associating Muslims and Muslim-majority states with aggression and belligerence and holding them uniquely responsible for violence and a disrespect for human rights; and assuming a monolithic “Muslim world”, which fails to allow for diversity among a billion Muslims exhibiting a multiplicity of faith-based traditions and interpretations along with a “myriad of ethnicities and social groups”.11

Sanjeev Kumar states:

Most significantly it must be brought to bear that Islam as a religion and culture has nothing to do with violence and terrorism  . . . But the popular tendency for the last more than two decades has been to consider that any Muslim who becomes a terrorist is spiritually or theologically influenced by the religion of Islam . . . Such fallaciousness is colour blind, as it fails to rec- ognize the multifaceted character of Islam and attempts to cull into a single salad bowl all forms of expressions in Islam  . . . All of these collapse into a monolithic metaphor of the barbaric/medieval/anti-modern/anti-West/ regressive extremists. With this, the term Islam, its followers, the Muslims and its scriptural sources, in a way, become synecdoche for violence and all forms of barbarism.12

In the literature on Islamophobia, much of the focus is on this stereo- typing of Muslims as terrorists and the ways in which this puts the rights and liberties of all Muslims into jeopardy. A great deal of work emphasizes the negative consequences of this vilification: violence against Muslims

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in the form of physical assaults; harassment and prejudices in the media; ostracism and the exclusion of Muslims from political, social, and economic affairs; unfair discrimination against Muslim individuals and communities with regard to employment and the provision of services; and the vandal- izing of property including mosques, Islamic schools, and cemeteries.13

Scholars and analysts have pointed to the ways that negative per- ceptions and widespread prejudice against Islam can result in the dehu- manization and demonization of Muslims14 with the sharp rise in hate crimes directed against Muslims (and those perceived to be Muslims) in the months following the September 11 terror attacks on the United States pre- sented as a case in point.15 Yet, even during this relatively brief and “intense spasm” of anti-Muslim hate crimes in the aftermath of 9/11, Islamophobic incidents paled then too in comparison to religiously-motivated violence against American-Jews, with anti-Muslim hate crime remaining only half the rate of hate crime directed at Jews. While there continues to be consid- erable media focus on anti-Muslim violence and Islamophobia in recent years, attacks against Jews in both the United States and Europe are increas- ing at a higher rate and are “significantly more violent” with Jews facing threats from the white supremacist far-right and from left-wing extremist perpetrators.16

Many discussions of contemporary manifestations of Islamophobia also point to the “normalization of hostility towards Islam” and the inabil- ity to see Islam as a positive force.17 Here, representation of Islam as a threat to the West and its values, including freedom, democracy, and the rights of women and minorities, and concomitant efforts to reverse Muslim immigration and integration in Europe, the United States, and other Western countries is frequently noted.18 Yet, according to other scholars, Islamophobia is best defined as a prejudice and hostility toward Muslims and should more accurately be considered an “anti-Muslimism”. Tanya Basu and Fred Halliday, for instance, argue that today’s attacks are less against Islam as a faith and far more directed against Muslims as a people. Similarly, Bleich views Islamophobia as undifferentiated, unnu- anced, and “indiscriminate negative attitudes or emotions” directed at all or most Muslims:

Islamophobia has taken root in public, political, and academic discourse, and there is no putting the genie back in the bottle. It exists not only for political reasons but also because it attempts to label a social reality—that Islam and Muslims have emerged as objects of aversion, fear, and hostility in contem- porary liberal democracies.19

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Another common feature of the contemporary literature on Islamophobia is a tendency to view it as institutionalized rather than merely individual bigots acting on their own.20 Analyses of Islamophobia point to the ways in which individuals are “bombarded by the biased media” and with stereotypical images of Muslims. But they also frequently refer to an “institutionalized Islamophobia” that reflects government policies and is embedded into law. It is in this sense that Islamophobia has become increasingly equated with antisemitism, which also involves a set of nega- tive attitudes directed against individuals on the basis of their perceived membership in a defined group or category.21

ISL A MOPHOBI A IN THE DISCOURSE ON THE ISR A ELI-PA LESTINI A N CONFLICT

The study of Islamophobia has generated a rich interdisciplinary literature that identifies the nature of this specific form of bigotry; traces its manifes- tations in different global contexts; and offers a wide variety of strategies for countering it. The problem is that virulently anti-Israel scholars and activ- ists are today perverting this crucial term by using it in ways that stretch far beyond the contours of the extant literature. Both overused and misapplied, Islamophobia has become a vehicle for silencing legitimate criticisms of Palestinian politics, leaders, and societal actors. Instead of these criticisms being addressed head on, they are conveniently dismissed by smearing the reputations of those who raise the criticisms in the first place.22

It is important to understand that these efforts are part of a wider cam- paign to whitewash radical Islamist groups. In the literature on Islamophobia noted above, for example, Love castigates those who condemn Hamas as mired in an anti-Muslim mindset that portrays Arabs and Muslims as “enemies of civilization”.23 Mustafa Sway also slams scholar Daniel Pipes as an anti-Muslim bigot for his legitimate criticism of the militant group Hizb-ut-Tahrir’s activism on British university campuses.24 Such stretching of the concept of Islamophobia to include critiques of religiously-motivated terrorism is also an increasingly common tactic on U.S. campuses too. For example, last year at Stanford University when best-selling author Robert Spencer was scheduled to talk on “Jihad and the Dangers of Radical Islam: An Honest Discussion”, a coterie of far-left campus organizations claimed that the talk’s focus rendered him an Islamophobic racist.25

Similarly, in the Fall 2018 semester a planned speaking event at Rutgers University featuring journalist and Rutgers alumna Lisa Daftari

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was canceled after some students accused her of Islamophobia.26 Daftari was scheduled to discuss free speech on college campuses until the presi- dent of the university’s Progressives student organization reportedly started a petition charging that her work on the Middle East reflected anti- Muslim bigotry. Like Spencer, much of Daftari’s reporting distinguishes between Muslim people and the distortions of Islam by terror organiza- tions. Specifically, she has focused on how jihadist groups use Islamic texts and teaching to justify terror and to recruit Muslims. Daftari has claimed that she recommends that state agencies collaborate with Muslim faith- based community leaders in America so as to isolate extremism. Here too then, even someone who seeks to protect Muslims from harm and has reported on the human rights abuses that Muslims often face is branded a hater of Muslims.

A recently released study of Islamophobia produced by The Carter Center offers a sobering example of how work designed to combat the unfair demonization of Muslims stretches the concept of Islamophobia so far that other groups and individuals are stigmatized as bigots in the process. According to the study’s contributing authors, Islamophobia has become an “industry” in which a well-funded and well-connected network of primarily Zionist institutions and donors work together to stoke fears of Muslims.27 In the words of San Francisco State University’s Rabab Ibrahim Abdulhadi:

Islamophobia must be seen as an institutionalized, structural and systemic war on Muslim people and anyone who is seen as associated with Islam, Muslim- ness, and Muslim issues. As such it constitutes a systemic form of racism and racial discrimination  . . . [this] Islamophobia industry corresponds to and overlaps with a powerful Israel lobby industry, a network of Zionist groups that is well-funded and politically well-connected.28

Abdulhadi argues that these Zionist groups “utilize racism and fear- mongering” and rely on their “powerful funders and political connec- tions” to “silence, intimidate and bully” those who advocate for “justice in/for Palestine”. In her essay for The Carter Center report, she goes as far as to suggest that self-determination of the Jewish people and the “cre- ation of the State of Israel” should be construed as Islamophobic because anti-Muslim bigotry is “rooted in and integral to European colonial and settler colonial projects”.29 With these broad brushstrokes, Abdulhadi is able to slander a host of Zionist organizations and individuals for employ- ing “white supremacist” and “Islamophobic rhetoric and anti-Palestinian

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hostility”. The individuals and groups that she targets include Alan Dershowitz, Daniel Pipes, Robert Spencer, the American Israel Public Affairs Committee, Scholars for Peace in the Middle East, StandWithUs, the Simon Wiesenthal Center, and the AMCHA Initiative.30 In sum, Abdulhadi’s essay is a good example of how anti-Israel scholar-activists today twist the term Islamophobia in order to smear those who con- demn left-wing antisemitism’s eliminationist stance against Zionism and Israel.31

In addition to work on Islamophobia that is increasingly becoming unmoored from initial understandings and usage of the term, this sort of concept stretching is also happening more and more in non-academic arenas in the public sphere. For example, at the 2018 annual ISNA con- vention, the prominent anti-Israel activist and Women’s March leader Linda Sarsour used her time at the podium to assail the Anti-Defamation League—America’s leading organization that fights against hate, bias, and discrimination—as a “purveyor of Islamophobia”.32 Sarsour specifically referenced the ADL’s longstanding U.S.-Israel exchange programs, which bring U.S. police chiefs and other high-ranking law enforcement officials to Israel:

If you are part of a criminal justice reform movement, if you believe in the idea of ending police brutality and the misconduct of law enforcement officers across the country, then you do not support an organization that takes police officers from America, funds their trips, takes them to Israel so they can be trained by the Israeli police and military, and then they come back here and do what? Stop and frisk, killing unarmed black people across the country.

Many reviewers of these exchange programs, and the police chiefs who have participated themselves, have rejected these inflammatory claims noting that the trainings focus on counterterror and active shooter situations and involve meetings with diverse members of Israel’s civil society. Furthermore, Sarsour’s charge is unsubstantiated. There is sim- ply no evidence that these week-long programs influence U.S. policing practices with regard to implicit bias, procurement, over-policing, or coercive techniques—the claim that they do is based solely on innuendo and conjecture.

Nonetheless, as has been noted by critics, including those highly critical of Israeli policy vis-à-vis the Palestinians, Sarsour’s accusation that Israel and American Jewish organizations are uniquely responsible for

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institutionalized racism in America and policing problems in its inner cities is not only empirically inaccurate. It also is a form of anti-Jewish bigotry akin to a modern-day blood libel because it traffics in conspiracist theories about Jewish power and monied influence and assumes that Jews cause harm to society and to other minorities through the manipulation of state agencies.33

In this sense it is important to note here the extent to which Islamophobia has become untethered from the initial operationalization of the term. Wielded by virulent anti-Israel activists like Linda Sarsour, it has ceased to have any tangible meaning for identifying anti-Muslim hate and how this form of bigotry can best be countered. Basically, in the hands of the movement arrayed against Israel, the concept of Islamophobia has been reduced to a mere slogan and rallying cry—an instrument for smearing the Jewish state and its supporters and for rendering apologias for the anti-peace policies of Palestinian governing agencies and radical societal groups.

CONCLUSION

In its initial conceptualization, Islamophobia was considered more than just intemperate speech. In particular, scholars and analysts writing in the post 9/11 period rightly noted the extent to which anti-Muslim bigotry has become institutionalized and used to discriminate against the Muslim minority community and to silence their voices in Western societies. As such, Islamophobia is not just a “Muslim problem” but is an affront to our common human rights and to human dignity. It also needs to be addressed and countered along with other forms of racism and xenophobia.

Unfortunately, however, increasing abuses of the term, especially in the context of a virulently anti-Israel discourse both on and off cam- pus, is today working to hinder our understanding of anti-Muslim hate and the effective means for addressing it. As I have argued in this essay, within discourses on the Israeli-Palestinian conflict, today the concept of Islamophobia is misused to silence debate and legitimate criticism of Palestinian politics and the role that governing agencies, societal groups, and prevailing norms and narratives in the West Bank and Gaza play in stymying peace efforts. It is in this sense that use of the term and concept of Islamophobia has become deeply interconnected with other discourses of the anti-Israel movement, which ultimately move us further away from peace and conflict resolution.

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Notes

1. IPT News, “ISNA Speaker Decries Focus on Palestinian Incitement as ‘a Form of Islamophobia,” The Investigative Project on Terrorism, 10 September 2018. https:// www.investigativeproject.org/7609/isna-speaker-decries-focus-on-palestinian

2. Daniel Polisar, “What Do Palestinians Want?” Mosaic Magazine, 2 November 2015. https://mosaicmagazine.com/essay/2015/11/what-do-palestinians-want/

3. IPT News, 10 September 2018. 4. Pascal Bruckner, “There’s No Such Thing as Islamophobia,” City Journal, Summer

2017. https://www.city-journal.org/html/theres-no-such-thing-islamophobia -15324.html; Sanjeev Kumar, “Responding to Western Critiques of the Muslim World: Deconstructing the Cliché of Islamophobia and the Genealogies of Islamic Extremism,” British Journal of Middle Eastern Studies 42.4 (2015): 583.

5. Kumar, “Responding to Western Critiques of the Muslim World,” 583. As noted by Houda Abadi, “The Carter Center Works to Understand and Counter the Islamophobia Industry,” in The Carter Center, Countering the Islamophobia Industry: Toward More Effective Strategies, 2018, 5–7. https://www.cartercenter .org/resources/pdfs/peace/conflict_resolution/countering-isis/cr-countering-the -islamophobia-industry.pdf. Muslims are often reduced to the three B’s: billion- aires, bombers, and belly dancers. The image of Muslims is laden with “crude and exaggerated stereotypes” that underpin notions of a “Muslim threat”.

6. Erik Love, “Confronting Islamophobia in the United States: Framing Civil Rights Activism Among Middle Eastern Americans,” Patterns of Prejudice 43.3–4 (2009): 405.

7. Matti Bunzl, “Between Anti-Semitism and Islamophobia,” American Ethnologist 32.4 (2007): 502; Junaid Rana, “The Story of Islamophobia,” Souls 9.2 (2005): 149.

8. Kumar, “Responding to Western Critiques of the Muslim World”, 579–80, 591–4.

9. Tanya Basu, “What Does ‘Islamophobia’ Actually Mean?” The Atlantic, 15 October 2014. https://www.theatlantic.com/international/archive/2014/10/is -islamophobia-real-maher-harris-aslan/381411/; Erik Bleich, “What Is Islamophobia and How Much Is There? Theorizing and Measuring an Emerging Comparative Concept,” American Behavioral Sciences 55.12 (2011): 1581–1600.

10. Bleich, “What Is Islamophobia.” 11. Fred Halliday, “Review Article: ‘Islamophobia’ Reconsidered,” Ethnic

and Racial Studies 22.5 (1999): 892–3, 896–7. Halliday suggests that the term Islamophobia actually obscures the diversity within Islam and rather “indulges conformism and authority within Muslim communities”. Specifically, he warns against stigmatizing criticisms of Islam or castigating Muslim liberals and reformers as Islamophobic on the grounds that they are challenging conserva- tive interpretations or readings of the faith. On this point see also Bleich, “What

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Is Islamophobia,” 1585–6; Bruckner, “There’s No Such Thing as Islamophobia”; Kumar, “Responding to Western Critiques of the Muslim World”; and Rana, “The Story of Islamophobia.”

12. Kumar, “Responding to Western Critiques of the Muslim World”. 13. See Bleich, “What Is Islamophobia”; Christopher D. Stonebanks, “The

Inescapable Presence of ‘Non-existent’ Islamophobia,” Counterpoints 346 (2010): 29–48; Love, “Confronting Islamophobia in the United States”; Mustafa Abu Sway, “Islamophobia: Meaning, Manifestations, Causes,” Palestine-Israel Journal of Politics, Economics, and Culture 12.2–3 (2005): 15–23.

14. Stonebanks, “The Inescapable Presence of ‘Non-existent’ Islamophobia,” 36–7.

15. Jeffrey Kaplan notes, however, that this uptick in Islamophobic hate crimes was short-lived. Kaplan attributes the quick decline in anti-Muslim hate crimes to effective leadership by former President Bush; federal and local law enforcement interventions; grassroots outreach to American-Muslims by civil society groups; and increasing moral ambiguity surrounding the global war on terrorism in general and the war in Iraq in particular, “Islamophobia in America? September 11 and Islamophobic Hate Crime,” Terrorism and Political Violence 18.1 (2006): 9.

16. Abigail R. Esman notes that rising antisemitism in the United States and Europe is often viewed as a form of political protest, the “inevitable byproduct” of Israel’s policies in the Middle East. This claim is itself antisemitic as it holds Jews responsible for the terrible things that are done to and said about them. She rightly points to the fact that while attackers and their Islamophobic hate tend to be faulted when it comes to anti-Muslim hate crimes, the abuse of Jews is said to be the fault of the Israelis—“Israel . . . is regularly blamed for inspiring attacks against the world’s Jews,” “‘Islamophobia’ Gets the Headlines Despite Trailing Anti- Semitic Violence,” IPT News, 18 December 2017, https://www.investigativeproject .org/7093/islamophobia-gets-the-headlines-despite-trailing.

17. Sway, “Islamophobia: Meaning, Manifestations, Causes.” 18. Maleiha Malik, “Anti-Muslim Prejudice in the West, Past and Present: An

Introduction,” Patterns of Prejudice 43.3–4 (2009): 207–12. 19. Bleich, “What Is Islamophobia,” 584. 20. Sway, “Islamophobia: Meaning, Manifestations, Causes.” 21. Bleich, “What Is Islamophobia”; Bunzl, “Between Anti-Semitism and

Islamophobia,” 499–508. Critical of this trend is Pascal Bruckner, who, in “There’s No Such Thing as Islamophobia”, argues against representing Islamophobia as equivalent to antisemitism on the grounds that anti-Jewish animus focuses less on the Jewish religion that on the existence of Jews as a people—even unbelieving Jews are detested by anti-Semites. In addition, he rejects the analogy as false because there is no Jewish equivalent for radical Islamist global terror campaigns. In his view, equating antisemitism with Islamophobia is merely a ploy to render Islam and Islamists immune from criticism.

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22. In this sense, anti-Israel activists and scholars are here acting similarly to when they dismiss charges of antisemitism by failing to take the accusations seriously, instead branding those raising the antisemitism charges as duplicitous and acting in bad faith. As David Hirsh rightly argues, such moves constitute a refusal to actually enter into a reasoned examination of antisemitism within the progressive left. Here too, casting those who criticize Palestinian narratives and actions as Islamophobic bigots, and maligning them with a bad-faith smear, has the same effect—it works to “refuse a hearing” of the arguments. “How Raising the Issue of Antisemitism Puts You Outside the Community of the Progressive: The Livingstone Formulation,” in From Antisemitism to Anti-Zionism: The Past & Present of a Lethal Ideology, ed. Eunice G. Pollack (Boston, 2017), 2–28.

23. Love, “Confronting Islamophobia in the United States.” 24. Sway also argues that criticism of Yasser Arafat and the Palestinian leader-

ship’s open calls for aggressions against Israel are “crude and vile Islamophobic statements” that are ultimately aimed at “discrediting the Palestinians and their just cause” in “Islamophobia: Meaning, Manifestations, Causes.”

25. Ruthie Baum, “Stanford University’s Duplicitous Morality Police,” Gatestone Institute, 22 November 2017. https://www.gatestoneinstitute.org/11403/robert -spencer-stanford-university; The same student groups that smeared Spencer as an “established Islamophobe” for desiring to put an end to radical Islamist terror- ism, most of which targets Muslims for harm, had no compunctions in hosting at Stanford the son of Palestinian terrorist Marwan Barghouti, who is serving five life-sentences in an Israeli jail for orchestrating deadly attacks during the second intifada. At the time when Barghouti spoke, there was reportedly no uproar—no protests or hysterical calls for the event’s cancellation, and no safe spaces opened up nor statements from administrators offering support.

26. Aaron Bandler “Sarsour Calls ADL ‘Purveyor of Islamophobia,’ Report Says,” Jewish Journal, 25 September 2018. http://jewishjournal.com/news/nation /239401/sarsour-calls-adl-purveyor-islamophobia-report-says/

27. See Abadi Houda, “The Carter Center Works to Understand and Counter the Islamophobia Industry,” in The Carter Center, Countering the Islamophobia Industry: Toward More Effective Strategies, 2018, 5–7. https://www.cartercenter .org/resources/pdfs/peace/conflict_resolution/countering-isis/cr-countering -the-islamophobia-industry.pdf; Rabab Ibrahim Abdulhadi, “The Islamophobia and Israel Lobby Industries: Overlapping Interconnection, Anti-Racist Policy Recommendations,” in The Carter Center, Countering the Islamophobia Industry: Toward More Effective Strategies, 2018, 14–22. https://www.cartercenter.org /resources/pdfs/peace/conflict_resolution/countering-isis/cr-countering-the -islamophobia-industry.pdf; Heidi Beirich, “Anti-Muslim Hate Groups: A Primer,” in The Carter Center, Countering the Islamophobia Industry: Toward More Effective Strategies, 2018, 11–12. https://www.cartercenter.org/resources/pdfs/peace /conflict_resolution/countering-isis/cr-countering-the-islamophobia-industry.pdf; Chip Berlet, “Islamophobia and Right-Wing Movements in the United States: From

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Theories to Action,” in The Carter Center, Countering the Islamophobia Industry: Toward More Effective Strategies, 2018, 78–82. https://www.cartercenter .org/resources/pdfs/peace/conflict_resolution/countering-isis/cr-countering-the -islamophobia-industry.pdf; Khaled A. Beydoun, “Islamophobia: Toward a Legal Definition and Framework,” in The Carter Center, Countering the Islamophobia Industry: Toward More Effective Strategies, 2018, 28–39. https://www.cartercenter.org /resources/pdfs/peace/conflict_resolution/countering-isis/cr-countering-the -islamophobia-industry.pdf; The contributors to the study appear unaware of how the project plays into classic tropes and canards about collective Jewish power. After all, undue influence wielded by Jews covertly acting in concert for malicious and nefarious purposes is the central myth of antisemitic conspiracy theorizing. For more on this point see, for example, John-Paul Pagano, “How Anti-Semitism’s True Origin Makes It Invisible to the Left,” The Forward, 29 January 2018. https://forward.com /opinion/393107/how-anti-semitisms-true-origin-makes-it-invisible-to-the-left/

28. Abdulhadi, ibid., 14. 29. Ibid. 30. Ironically, Abdulhadi was herself accused of engaging in anti-Jewish big-

otry by a number of these groups after she lashed out on social media at SFSU’s President Leslie Wong for her statement welcoming Zionist students to the campus. Abdulhadi wrote on Facebook that this amounted to “a declaration of war against Arabs, Muslims, Palestinians and all those who are committed to an indivisible sense of justice on and off campus.” The post, which appeared on a university message board, also featured a photo that stated “I am anti-Zionist. I am NOT anti-Jew. So DON’T call me anti-Semitic.”

31. Sean Matgamna, “What is Left Antisemitism?” Fathom Journal, 19 September 2018. An additional example of this appears in a recent article by Hatem Bazian, who is co-founder and professor of Islamic Law and Theology at Zaytuna College and lecturer at the University of California, Berkeley. In his piece, Bazian argues that “70 percent of the funding for Islamophobia pro- paganda comes from pro-Israel or Zionist sources”. He condemns the “orga- nized American Jewish community” for their Zionism, which he suggests causes them to exhibit “the most reactionary and racist discourse when it comes to Palestinians, Arabs, Muslims and their allies”. See Hatem Bazian, “Foundations promoting ‘brand Israel’ also funding Islamophobia,” Daily Sabah, 17 October 2018, https://www.dailysabah.com/columns/hatem-bazian/2018/10/17/foundations -promoting-brand-israel-also-funding-islamophobia

32. This wasn’t the first time that Sarsour called the ADL Islamophobic. In an April 2018 Facebook post, after it was announced that the civil rights group would participate in an anti-bias training program for Starbucks, she expressed her oppo- sition to the training by stating that the ADL was “an anti-Arab, anti-Palestinian organization that peddles Islamophobia and attacks America’s prominent Muslim orgs and activists” (Bandler, 2018). For more on Sarsour’s anti-Israel activism see, for example, Miriam F. Elman, “Linda Sarsour is only the 2nd most inappropriate

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speaker at New School antisemitism event,” Legal Insurrection, 21 November 2017. https://legalinsurrection.com/2017/11/linda-sarsour-is-only-2nd-most-inappropriate -speaker-at-new-school-antisemitism-event/

33. Ibid., see also Elman “With ‘Deadly Exchange’ Campaign, Jewish Voice for Peace Moves from Enabling to Promoting Antisemitism,” Legal Insurrection, 9 July 2017. https://legalinsurrection.com/2017/07/with-deadly-exchange-campaign -jewish-voice-for-peace-moves-from-enabling-to-promoting-antisemitism/; Andrew Mark Bennett, “JVP’s Anti-Semitic Obsession with Jewish Power,” The Forward, 9 January 2018. https://forward.com/opinion/391783/jvps-anti -semitic-obsession-with-jewish-power/; Mira Sucharov, “Jews Drive U.S. Police Brutality Against People of Color? JVP Crosses Over Into Anti-Semitism,” Ha’aretz, 10 July 2017. https://www.haaretz.com/opinion/has-jewish-voice-for -peace-crossed-the-line-into-anti-semitism-1.5492843; For the ADL’s response to these charges and its condemnation of the campaign seeking to shut down U.S.- Israel police exchanges see ADL, “Jewish Voice for Peace: Increasing Anti-Israel Radicalism,” The Anti-Defamation League, 19 July 2017. https://www.adl.org/blog /jewish-voice-for-peace-increasing-anti-israel-radicalism

PROF. MIRIAM F. ELMAN is Associate Professor of Political Science at the Maxwell School of Citizenship & Public Affairs, Syracuse University. Her recent publications include: “Jerusalem Studies: The State of the Field,” Israel Studies 21.3 (2016); Democracy and Conflict Resolution: the Dilemmas of Israel’s Peacemaking, co-edited with Oded Haklai and Hendrik Spruyt (Syracuse, NY, 2014); Jerusalem: Conflict and Cooperation in a Contested City, co-edited with Madelaine Adelman (Syracuse, NY, 2014).

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