Intl Relations Book Review

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W hile it was the “Ground Zero mosque” controversy that brought the most rabid Islamophobes into the limelight, they have the Norwegian right-wing terrorist Anders Behring Breivik to

thank for making them hard to ignore. Breivik, who killed seventy-seven people in a bombing and mass shooting in 2011, cited several prominent Islamophobes in his manifesto. Robert Spencer (cofounder with Geller of SIOA) led the pack, receiving 162 mentions in the hate-filled diatribe.1

In this context, a series of articles and reports appeared in 2011 that sought to shed light on the organized nature of the Islamophobic net- work, its sources of funding, and its international scope. For instance, David Yerushalmi was featured in a lengthy New York Times report as the mastermind behind a crusade to ban the use of Sharia law in US courts.2

Steven Emerson, Frank Gaffney, and Bill French were discussed in an in- vestigative report on the Islamophobes’ sources of funds.3 And the Center for American Progress put out a detailed report titled Fear, Inc.:The Roots of the Islamophobic Network in America,4 which was covered by sectors of the mainstream media.

This was indeed a welcome development in that these and other re- ports helped to shed much-needed light on the network of hard-core Islamophobes. However, they didn’t go far enough. For instance, Fear Inc. constantly and repeatedly emphasizes the point that the Islamophobic network consists of a small, tight-knit group of individuals who have in- fluence beyond their numbers. Even while the report is quite thorough in terms of showing the connections between the extremists and the

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Chapter 10

Islamophobia and the New McCarthyism

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Kumar, Deepa. <i>Islamophobia and the Politics of Empire : The Cultural Logic of Empire</i>, Haymarket Books, 2012. ProQuest Ebook Central, http://ebookcentral.proquest.com/lib/umboston/detail.action?docID=1020727. Created from umboston on 2019-12-08 16:43:55.

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neocons, as well as other political figures, conservative foundations, and the mainstream media, it nevertheless insists that the Islamophobes are a fringe group outside of mainstream politics. At the end of the day, even while these and other reports have been useful in terms of exposing the machinations of the hardcore Islamophobes, they fall short because they fail to demonstrate the institutionalized nature of anti-Muslim racism.

This chapter sets out to situate the right-wing fanatics within the broader context in which they operate. Following David Caute, I will argue that the extremists function to create a climate of fear that bolsters the aims of empire. In his book The Great Fear, Caute showed that Mc- Carthyism wasn’t simply about one out-of-control senator, but a political system (including both Democrats and Republicans) that allowed a fig- ure like Joseph McCarthy to set the political agenda. McCarthy was a useful tool in prosecuting the Cold War—particularly in creating a cli- mate of fear where dissent could be punished and neutralized.The right- wing Islamophobic warriors play a similar role during the era of the War on Terror. They are not “alien outsiders” but emerge from within the political establishment, the security apparatus, the academy, the think tank milieu, and the mainstream media. Thus, far from “infiltrating” an otherwise good system, the new McCarthyites are a product of, and fit comfortably within, the structures of American empire; their role is to push the envelope.

The New McCarthyites

There are four interconnected groups of people who have come together to project the image of a vicious and menacing “Muslim enemy” and to generate fear and hatred. They include members of the neocon camp who have devoted themselves to ferreting out the “Islamic terrorist”; Zionists whose goal of policing criticism of Israel dovetails neatly with the logic of Islamophobia; the Christian Right, which has joined the ranks of the Is- lamophobic warriors; and a group of former Muslims (and Christians) from the Middle East and South Asia who have profited from Islam-bashing.

The Neocons and Zionists

Frank Gaffney and Daniel Pipes are two leading neocons who have fo- cused on the politics of Islamophobia. Gaffney, as stated earlier, was a Reagan-era deputy assistant defense secretary who served under Richard

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Perle from 1983 to 1987. For Gaffney, it was an easy shift from cold war- rior to Islamophobic warrior. He is a senior adviser to the group Amer- icans for Victory Over Terrorism (AVOT), which is a subsidiary of Project for the New American Century (PNAC).5 AVOT, headed by conserva- tive William Bennett, states on its website that it is “dedicated to victory in the War on Terrorism” through “the shaping of public opinion, the encouragement of a foreign policy based on the founding principles of America, increased research about Islam and Islamism and a steadfast commitment to attacking those who would blame America first.”6

This statement captures the strategy adopted by the neocons to “win” the War on Terror. A crucial part of this strategy is the battle for public opinion. Within the journals of the foreign policy establishment, the neocons have forcefully put forward their vision and polemicized against other foreign policy paradigms such as those of the realists (see chapter 7). The pivotal 1996 Kristol-Kagan piece about “benevolent global hegemony”7 not only argued against realism and stressed that American domination of the world would be benevolent and in the in- terests of all nations, but also underscored the point that the American public would have to be won over to this idea; they had to be “educated” and “inspired” to accept their special responsibilities as citizens of empire.8

This meant not only serving in the military but also developing an ide- ological “sense of mission” in imperialist interventions, based on a faith in “American greatness.”9

What better way to promote this ideology than to create an over - arching enemy, the Muslim “evildoers”—and later the “Islamofascists”— against whom America, the great and good, should make war? September 11 provided the neocons with the enemy they needed to promote their vision.As Cooper states, the neoconservatives are “most comfortable when they have . . . an ideological competitor against which they can define themselves.”10While neocons like Podhoretz celebrated the collapse of the Soviet Union, Cooper notes that, lacking a new rival, he was “clearly lost.”11This sentiment applies across the board. Dorien, interviewing promi- nent neocons for his book Imperial Designs, similarly observes that “most were anxious to find a substitute for the energizing and unifying role that the cold war played for them.”12 This new enemy has taken the form of Islam. As the AVOT statement makes clear, it is not simply the violent sec- tion of the Islamist movement that they wish to “research,” but “Islam and Islamism” as a whole. It shouldn’t be surprising, then, that simply being a

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Muslim makes you worthy of suspicion, according to this logic. Drawing a page from the McCarthyist playbook, Gaffney was one of many who claimed that Obama might be a “secret Muslim.”13 The implication, of course, is that being a Muslim is sufficient cause for not trusting him.

The last aspect of AVOT’s strategy involves silencing dissenting views. As its website proudly declares, AVOT has a “steadfast commitment to at- tacking those who would blame America first.”This is an open declaration of war on Muslims and the left. Its targets are people in Muslim-majority countries, particularly Arabs, and the left in the West, particularly the American left. Neocons have vigorously argued that the United States has been a force for good in the Middle East and that people in that region therefore have only themselves to blame for the state of their countries. This argument is peddled not just by the likes of Pipes and Lewis but also by mainstream figures like Fareed Zakaria and Thomas Friedman.14 Ayaan Hirsi Ali, a close associate of the neocons, gives legitimacy to this argument through her status as a “native informer.” Ali, who blames Islam for her difficult childhood in Somalia (and pretty much everything else), asks: “Why are Muslims so hypersensitive to criticism and why don’t they do anything with it except to respond by denying it or playing the victim?”15

In short, Muslims who attempt to place legitimate blame at the doorstep of the United States are playing the victim. Irshad Manji, another ideo- logical collaborator with empire, puts it more condescendingly when she tells her “fellow Muslims” to “grow up,” insisting forcefully that the United States has been a champion of human rights and that “neither Israel or America lies at the root of Muslim misery.”16

The attack on the left, particularly the academic left, has been led by the groups discussed in the last chapter, such as the David Project and Campus Watch. Kramer’s book Ivory Towers on Sand was followed by Unholy Alliance: Radical Islam and the American Left (2004), by the ex-leftist David Horowitz, and Andrew McCarthy’s The Grand Jihad: How Islam and the Left Sabotage America (2010). Building on Kramer’s early polemic that Mid- dle East studies departments are wrong about US policy, these books at- tempt to cast the net more widely, condemning the left as a whole and constructing a conspiratorial alliance between Islamists and the left.As we saw in chapter 7, the origins of this argument go back to the 1980s and the influential conferences organized by the Zionist Jonathan Institute.

Breivik carried this argument to its logical conclusion when he as- sassinated teenagers at a camp run by the social-democratic Norwegian

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Labor Party. Although the neocons disavowed Breivik’s actions, the ex- plicit goal of their ideological attacks is to both silence dissenting views and intimidate activists. This process of intimidation is carried out through smear campaigns and harassment on the part of the Islamo- phobes, but it is also carried out by the legal apparatus. As chapter 8 ar- gued, the law enforcement community has targeted not only Muslims and Muslim activists but progressive groups as well. These practices, ini- tiated during Bush’s regime, were extended and strengthened by the Obama administration. This should not surprise us. After all, the Smith Act, which was used to persecute the left during the Cold War, was passed under Democratic president Franklin Delano Roosevelt.

In addition to AVOT, Gaffney’s Center for Security Policy (CSP) has been instrumental in promoting anti-Muslim propaganda. As the authors of Fear Inc. write, CSP is “a key source for right-wing politicians, pundits, and grassroots organizations, providing them with a steady stream of re- ports mischaracterizing Islam and warning of the dangers of Islam and American Muslims.”17 In addition to CSP, the other leading sources of anti-Muslim racism are Pipes’s Middle East Forum, Robert Spencer’s Jihad Watch, Pamela Geller and Robert Spencer’s Stop Islamization of America, Steven Emerson’s Investigative Project on Terrorism, and David Yerushalmi’s Society of Americans for National Existence. Together, these groups have peddled the notion that that there is a conspiracy by Muslims to take over the United States and that Islamists have “infiltrated” all levels of society. They make no distinction between regular Muslims and Is- lamists, contending that Muslim Americans have ties to terrorist organi- zations and want to replace the US constitution with Sharia law. Their defense of America is as dogged as their commitment to defend Israel against Muslims and Arabs.

While these arguments managed to enter the public sphere in a sig- nificant way only after the events of 9/11, they have a longer history. In 1994, PBS aired Steven Emerson’s film Jihad in America, which argued that secret terrorist groups operating in the United States posed a grave threat to national security. Emerson made his name as a journalist working for US News and World Report, where he rose to become a senior editor in the area of national security issues, and went on to write about terror- ism for CNN. Not only did Jihad run on PBS, it also won the prestigious George Polk Award for best television documentary. Emerson then formed the Investigative Project on Terrorism in 1995 in order to more

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consistently spew out conspiracy theories about the “Islamic threat.” His books include American Jihad: The Terrorists Living among Us (2002) and Jihad Incorporated: A Guide to Militant Islam in the US (2006). For this clique, there are no “good Muslims.”When Republican governor Chris Christie appointed a Muslim to a New Jersey state judgeship, Emerson accused Christie of “having a strange relationship with radical Islam.”18 Not to be outdone, blogger Debbie Schlussel ranted that Christie was a “halal pig” and that Judge Sohail Mohammad was a Hamas supporter.19

The legal apparatus has been an important arena for the right-wing Islamophobes. David Yerushalmi works as the legal counsel for CSP. He was also actively involved in the Cordoba House controversy as legal counsel for SIOA. In June 2011, Yerushalmi wrote a widely cited report in Daniel Pipes’s Middle East Forum journal Middle East Quarterly that claimed that 80 percent of US mosques promote or support violence.20

Perhaps his most important contribution to the Islamophobia network, however, is that he laid the legal basis for the anti-Sharia campaign. Yerushalmi coauthored with Frank Gaffney a CSP report titled Shariah: The Threat to America21 that promted approximately two dozen states to consider banning use of Sharia. While Yerushalmi has played an important role in the anti-Sharia wave, as chapter 8 shows, the legal apparatus is not hostile to such positions. Yerushalmi is not so much an outsider trying to corrupt an otherwise just system as an insider and a new McCarthyite pushing the system further to the right.

David Gaubatz helped Yerushalmi gather early information by head- ing up his “Mapping Shari’a in America: Knowing the Enemy” cam- paign.22 Prior to his life as an Islamophobic warrior, Gaubatz worked in the Middle East for the US Air Force’s Office of Special Investigations. He built his career after 9/11 by arguing that Muslim civil rights groups such as CAIR are actually front groups for terrorist organizations. He is coauthor of Muslim Mafia: Inside the Secret Underworld That’s Conspiring to Islamize America (2009), which has been used by right-wing politicians to target CAIR and other groups.

David Horowitz has added his shrill voice to this crusade by going after the Muslim Student Association (MSA), a campus group with dozens of chapters in universities across the country. Horowitz claims that the MSA is “lying about its core mission—which is to advance the Islamic jihad against the Jews and Christians of the Middle East, and ul- timately against the United States. . . . Unfortunately the lies of the MSA

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(like its sister organizations CAIR and the Muslim American Society) are successful in snookering the willing accomplices of the political left and the unwitting accomplices of the inattentive middle to support and protect them.”23 In short, the logic of these far-right-wing Islamophobes is that there are no “good Muslims” and that Muslim organizations, de- spite their stated intentions, are really front groups for the Muslim Broth- erhood or the Wahhabis, who intend to attack Jews and Christians. While this rhetoric is extreme, these views are just one step removed from the FBI and NYPD “radicalization” theories discussed in chapter 8. The propaganda video The Third Jihad, which was shown to New York City police officers as part of their training, demonstrates this overlap between the new McCarthyites and the security establishment. The list of inter- viewees for this pseudodocumentary includes not just right-wing Islam- ophobes but also figures such as New York City police commissioner Ray Kelly, former New York City mayor Rudolph Giuliani, former CIA director James Woolsey, former head of Homeland Security Tom Ridge, Connecticut senator Joe Lieberman, and others.24 In their division of labor, the role for people like Horowitz is to win over public opinion through propaganda. Horowitz organized “Islamofascism Awareness Week,” which brought prominent anti-Muslim zealots to college cam- puses in 2007. His Freedom Center is affiliated with Robert Spencer’s Jihad Watch, and Spencer’s articles on jihad appear regularly in Horowitz’s Front Page magazine.

Fear Inc. shows the interconnections between various Islamophobic warriors and the extent to which they coordinate their activities. The Is- lamophobia campaign has brought neocons together with other kindred spirits such as right-wing Zionists, the Christian far right, and conserva- tive Muslims and ex-Muslims. In short, as we will see shortly, right- wingers of all stripes have united under the rubric of anti-Muslim racism. In order to carry out their attacks on Muslims, both ideological and phys- ical, they have received substantial resources from right-wing organiza- tions. Seven foundations contributed close to forty-three million dollars to these new McCarthyites between 2001 and 2009. The main funders are the Donors Capital Fund, the Richard Mellon Scaife Foundation, the Lynde and Harry Bradley Foundation, the Newton D. and Rochelle F. Becker Foundations and Charitable Trust, the Russell Berrie Foundation, the Anchorage Charitable Fund, the William Rosenwald Family Fund, and the Fairbrook Foundation.25

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Two of these foundations (Becker and Berrie) are explicitly com- mitted to promoting what they see as the interests of the Jewish com- munity (specifically Zionism), and a third, the Fairbrook Foundation, is even more extreme in its Zionist orientation. Run by Aubrey and Joyce Chernick, it “has provided funding to groups ranging from the ADL and CAMERA, a right-wing, pro-Israel, media-watchdog outfit, to violent Israeli settlers living on Palestinian lands and figures like the pseudo-aca- demic author Robert Spencer,” according to Max Blumenthal’s inves- tigative journalism.26 Chernick also contributes to WINEP and the Hudson Institute. It is important to note that these right-wing founda- tions and groups do not represent the views of the majority of Jewish Americans, even though they may claim to do so.An August 2011 Gallup poll asked respondents in various religious groups if they thought that American Muslims are sympathetic to al-Qaeda. Seventy percent of Jew- ish Americans said no; the only groups with higher “no” percentages were Muslims and atheists.27 Clearly this is about politics, not religion. Conservatives of all stripes see Islamophobia as instrumental to advancing their individual agendas.

The Christian Far Right

The Christian Right is an integral part of the Islamophobia bandwagon and ardently supports Israel. For the Christian evangelical movement, Is- rael is of crucial importance; evangelicals believe that Jews will go back to Israel before the return of Christ.And while they also believe that Jews will be converted to Christianity, they firmly support a Jewish state in Palestine.28 Thus, the Christian Right has lined up with Zionists in de- monizing Palestinians. At least since the 1980s, the Christian Right has been an important base for the Republican Party. In fact, the Christian Right and the GOP have become some of the most extreme Zionists (even if they believe that Jews can’t get into heaven). This marks a shift from the 1970s and earlier, when Israel had a “social democratic” world image and liberal Democrats were the most ardent supporters of Zionism. The events of 9/11 further solidified the Christian Right–neocon–Zionist alliance. The alignment of US and Israeli policy meant, as Hagopian writes, “defining Arab/Muslim states and/or movements within them as terrorist or supporters of terrorism.”29 For the evangelicals, “the attacks on Israel by Palestinian suicide bombers are an important test in the global fight against Islamic terrorism.”30

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Thus, evangelicals like John Hagee, Pat Robertson, Jerry Falwell, Franklin Graham, and Ralph Reed have added to the Islam-bashing. Graham has called Islam “a very evil and wicked religion.” For Graham, “true Islam” advocates the beating of wives and the murder of adulterous children and therefore “cannot be practiced” in the United States.31 In addition to these established figures, other imitators, such as the newly infamous Florida pastor Terry Jones, who rose to international promi- nence by announcing that he would burn a copy of the Koran, have cap- italized on this hatemongering.32 There are numerous connections between the religious right and the rest of the Islamophobic network, including groups such as Christians United for Israel. Also closely asso- ciated with the religious right is the Tea Party movement. State and local groups, particularly in Tennessee, California, and Florida, have enthusi- astically climbed onto the Islamophobia gravy train.33 In Murfreesboro, Tennessee, the Tea Party bigots and the religious right ganged up to stop the construction of an Islamic center, even going so far as to set a fire at the construction site.They were assisted by groups like ACT! for Amer- ica, founded by Brigitte Gabriel (a Lebanese Christian), whose members have been involved in rallies not only in Tennessee but also in Florida and other states.

People like Gabriel play an important role in the Islamophobic net- work—they legitimize the racist attacks on Muslims and Arabs through their personal testimony. Gabriel travels the country giving talks about how horrible Muslims really are, based on her supposed experience growing up in Lebanon.At a counterterrorism event at Duke University in 2004, she explained the differences between Arabs (and Muslims) and Israelis as follows: “It’s barbarism versus civilization. It’s democracy versus dictatorship. It’s goodness versus evil.”34Tellingly, her first book was titled Because They Hate: A Survivor of Islamic Terror Warns America (2006).

Ex-Muslims

A whole slew of people, mostly “ex-Muslims,” have played this role of legitimation. One such ideologue, Nonie Darwish, is the director of For- mer Muslims United, cofounded by Wafa Sultan, Walid Shoebat, and Ibn Warraq. Darwish is of Egyptian origin and was raised in Gaza. She be- lieves that Islam “will destroy itself because it’s not a true religion.”35 Her books Now They Call Me Infidel: Why I Renounced Jihad for America (2006), Israel and the War on Terror (2007), and Cruel and Unusual Punishment:The

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Terrifying Global Implications of Islamic Law (2009) have been endorsed and supported by Pipes, Spencer, and Horowitz.

Darwish and Shoebat, along with Walid Phares, a professor at the National Defense University and a Fox News contributor, regularly give lectures to the law enforcement community on “terrorism.”36 Phares leads seminars for government employees and addresses law enforcement and homeland security conferences. He offers courses on terrorism for the Centre for Counterintelligence and Security Studies (CI CENTRE), one of several far-right-wing operations that populate the antiterrorism training industry. As Thom Cincotta writes, this antiterrorism training industry consists of “a panoply of companies that offer instruction in sur- veillance tactics, cyber-security, bomb detection, school safety, and critical infrastructure.”37 A subset of this industry consists of groups that offer courses to law enforcement agencies on “jihad” and the threat it poses to national security. Phares fills the minds of his audience with his con- spiracy theories about a jihadist strategy to infiltrate key institutions in the United States such as the defense sector, the academy, and community organizations. His books include Future Jihad: Terrorist Strategies against America (2005), The War of Ideas: Jihadism against Democracy (2007), and The Confrontation: Winning the War against Future Jihad (2008).

Shoebat similarly tells his audiences that CAIR and the Islamic So- ciety of North America are “the terrorist arms of the lawmaker: Sharia, Koran and Hadith.”38 Shoebat is even more extreme than his fellow ex- Muslims. His newfound Christian beliefs hold that during the “end times” of biblical prophecy, Muslims will fight alongside Satan on earth.39

Despite these outlandish claims (or perhaps because of them), he is en- thusiastically promoted by his colleagues in the Islamophobic network. Gaffney gushed, “In the twenty-five years I have been in Washington I have never heard anything so extraordinary and the truth told so elo- quently by someone like this.”40 In 2011, he was paid five thousand dol- lars by the Department of Homeland Security to spout his nonsense at a South Dakota law enforcement conference.41

“Education” and Media Propaganda

The promotion of such extremists as “educators” to the law enforcement community prompted Cincotta and Political Research Associates to issue a report on three counterterrorism training organizations: the Interna-

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tional Counter-Terrorism Officers Association, Security Solutions Inter- national, and the CI CENTRE. These groups employ right-wing Islam- ophobes and regularly organize conferences for law enforcement personnel. In this environment the right-wing Islamophobes don’t stick out like sore thumbs; in fact, they fit quite comfortably within the es- tablished legal and political structures and often share a stage with main- stream figures from the security establishment. Thus, CI CENTRE’s 2010 “Spy Cruise,” an intelligence-themed conference held on a cruise ship, listed former CIA directors Porter Goss and Michael Hayden as speakers. (Goss’s speech had the telling title “Radical Fundamentalism and (Judeo-Christian) Western Civilization are Irreconcilable.”)42 When the FBI uses the work of Robert Spencer and the Orientalist Raphael Patai in its trainings, it does so because that work fits with its existing ideological framework, or—to be precise—with the views of conserva- tive sections of the FBI and the security apparatus (see figure on p 191). Wired found and exposed a PowerPoint presentation by the FBI’s Law Enforcement Communications Unit that drew from the Islamophobic warriors’ highly distorted view of Islam.43 In response to this and perhaps other revelations, the Obama administration called for a reexamination of the counterterrorism material used by his agencies.44 Indeed, there are differences among various branches of government about how to view “Islamic terrorism,” as the previous chapters illustrated.

In addition to this “educational” role within the security apparatus, the Islamophobic network broadcasts its views to the public. It does so not only through the right-wing media, such as the Christian Broad- casting Network, Fox News, and the rest of the Murdoch empire, but also in the mainstream media, where its extremist views go mostly un- challenged. Apart from a few reports such as those by Anderson Cooper of CNN, who did an exposé on Walid Shoebat,45 and a few stories on NPR, this disturbing trend has been largely ignored. In fact, people like Emerson have easy and ready access to the mainstream media. Leading newspapers have quoted him as a “terrorism expert,” his columns have appeared in the Wall Street Journal, and NBC employed him as a terrorism analyst—featuring him fifty times in just the first two months after 9/11.46 Similarly, Pipes, between September 2001 and September 2002, appeared 110 times on television and did 450 radio interviews.47

One example illustrates how Islamophobic propaganda is amplified in the mainstream media. The new McCarthyites have long claimed that

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80 percent of mosques are controlled by jihadists. In 2004, Republican congressman Peter King stated on the Fox News network’s Sean Hannity Show that “eighty to eighty-five percent of mosques in this country are controlled by Islamic fundamentalists.” He backed up his claim by citing the research of Emerson and Pipes.48 This nonsense was repeated again and again by the Islamophobes, even in the mainstream media. In 2010, Pamela Geller stated that “four out of five mosques preach hate” on CNN.49 In March 2011, King held his “green scare” hearings on the supposed radicalization in American Muslim communities. A few months later, in June 2011, Yerushalmi made the same claim in the spu- rious report mentioned above. Gaffney immediately endorsed the find- ings in his column in the Washington Times.50 The upshot of this propaganda is that few in the media challenged the King hearings, giving credence to the notion that Muslims are in fact being “radicalized” and need to be questioned and monitored in ways similar to the “reds” in the Cold War era.

The overall dynamic is one in which the right-wing media are the hubs of Islamophobic propaganda, which then spills over into the main- stream media either directly, via the Islamophobic warriors, or through sympathetic politicians like King, Newt Gingrich, Michele Bachmann, Allen West, and others. As we saw in the last chapter, during the mis- named “Ground Zero mosque” controversy, the Democrats only added fuel to the fire and helped to bring Islamophobic rhetoric into the main- stream, albeit in less crass ways. Several mainstream figures have also played this role, and to them we turn next.

Mainstream and Liberal Enablers

The more sophisticated counterparts to Gabriel, Shoebat, and Phares are people like Ayaan Hirsi Ali, Fouad Ajami, Azar Nafisi, Irshad Manji, Kanan Makiya, and Ibn Warraq.These individuals have much more access to the mainstream media because their language is more “reasonable” and they are promoted by powerful political figures. Hamid Dabashi, in his book Brown Skin, White Masks, argues that these people, to whom he refers as “native informers,” reinforce anti-Muslim and anti-Arab racism through their dismal accounts of their countries of origin. He states that in the “im- mediate aftermath of 9/11, comprador intellectuals [native informers will- ing to aid the US, particularly of Iranian, Arab, and Pakistani origin] were

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actively sought out by the militant ideologues of the US empire. Their task was to feign authority, authenticity, and native knowledge by informing the American public of the atrocities taking place in the region of their birth, thereby justifying the imperial designs of the United States as a lib- eration.”51 He adds that this logic “has been at times explicit, as in the writ- ings of Fouad Ajami and Kanan Makiya during the build up to the invasion of Iraq; at times implicit, as in the cases of Nafisi and Hirsi Ali.”52

Ayaan Hirsi Ali had a short career in Dutch politics before accepting a position at the neocon-dominated American Enterprise Institute think tank. Ali, who is originally from Somalia, was forced to resign her seat in Parliament after it was revealed that she lied in her application for political asylum in the Netherlands.53The neocons welcomed her with open arms, and her book Infidel became a New York Times bestseller for a few weeks. After her journey across the Atlantic, she penned Nomad: From Islam to America;A Personal Journey through the Clash of Civilizations (2011), recycling the tired myths of the supposed clash of values between Islam and the West.

Azar Nafisi similarly journeyed from Iran to the United States, where she became a protégée of Bernard Lewis, a colleague of Fouad Ajami at Johns Hopkins, and an employee of Paul Wolfowitz.54 Her memoir Read- ing Lolita in Tehran is the story of how she saved seven students in Tehran by inviting them to her house to teach them about Nabokov’s Lolita and other literary classics of the Western canon. In so doing, Nafisi succeeds in rewriting Iran’s history and turning its people into caricatures. As Dabashi writes, the “entirety of Iran as a nation, a culture, a society, a re- ality fades out behind the tale of a self-indulgent diva very pleased with her heroic deeds and quixotic victories.”55 The book was on the New York Times bestseller list for more than a hundred weeks. It was translated into dozens of languages and has been widely adopted into course syllabi on campuses across the United States.

Ali, Nafisi, and Manji (a Canadian of Egyptian and South Asian de- scent) have contributed most to the argument that the United States should defend human rights and women’s rights in the “Muslim world.” To quote Dabashi again:

Next to national-security interests, human rights and women’s rights in particular are now routinely cited as principal objectives of Amer- ican imperial interventions. The role of Hirsi Ali, Nafisi, Irshad Manji, and their ilk is to speak on behalf of such insights as integral to the humanitarian mission at the heart of American imperialism. Offering,

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in English for the American and European market, a fierce critique of women’s rights in Iran (Nafisi) or genital mutilation in Africa (Hirsi Ali) or gay and lesbian rights in Islam across the board (Irshad Manji) places the authority to right those wrongs in the hands of foreign readers and their elected officials, rather than the societies affected.56

Rather than stand in solidarity with men and women in Muslim-majority countries who are fighting for rights of various kinds, Nafisi and company attempt to invoke the rhetoric of the white man’s burden.

The discourse of human rights has been central to the neocon prop- aganda war. It is therefore important to recognize that such liberal rhet- oric isn’t simply the bastion of the liberal imperialists but is at the heart of neoconservatism as well. What is different in the rhetoric of the liberal imperialists is that it attempts to separate Islam from Islamism as seen in the work of the late Christopher Hitchens, Paul Berman, Martin Amis, Nick Cohen, Bernard-Henri Lévy, and Andrew Anthony.57 Arun Kund- nani writes that these

new liberals (correctly) put aside these arguments about the nature of Islam and the patterns of Islamic history [as articulated by Lewis and the Orientalists] and, instead, focus their attention on Islamism, a modern political movement, which they (incorrectly) take to be analogous to Stalinism or fascism. Islamism is regarded as an appro- priation of modern European totalitarianism that is basically alien to “traditional Islam.”The distinction between Islam and Islamism is important, for it insulates this discourse from straightforward charges of Islamophobia—its target, after all, is a twentieth-century political ideology with European roots, not an oriental religion.58

Hitchens, once a regular columnist for the Nation, became in his later years an outspoken liberal Islamophobe. In his book God Is Not Great, he takes aim at all religions, arguing, much like Voltaire, that religion “poisons everything” and is responsible for creating tyrannical regimes in both an- cient and modern times. His criticisms, however, are selective: he indicts Saddam Hussein for using Islam for political gain but has nothing to say about the born-again George W. Bush and his recourse to religion to jus- tify his policy objectives. Hitchens audaciously goes on to blame Islam for the horrible state of Iraq after the US-led invasion and occupation. In the final analysis, despite his equal-opportunity critique of the world’s major religions, his book serves to prop up US foreign policy. This is hardly sur- prising given that he “gravitated towards the neoconservatives, [was] fea-

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ture[d] frequently on right-wing talk-shows, and [was] regularly seen with David Horowitz,” as Richard Seymour has observed.59

In contrast, other liberal imperialists like Michael Ignatieff and Paul Berman are more hesitant to be openly associated with the neoconserva- tives.60 Berman, who is part of what he calls the “anti-totalitarian” left, sup- ported the 2003 war on Iraq because “al-Qaeda . . . and Saddam’s Baath Party are two of the tendencies within a much larger phenomenon, which is a Muslim totalitarianism.”61 As Kundnani notes, Hitchens shared with Berman the view that “as soon as the West had won its historic battle against communism, a new totalitarianism—Islamism—emerged as a political force. The West, it is argued, is morally obliged to expunge this totalitarian threat both in the Islamic world and among its own Muslim communi- ties.”62 Thus, although the liberal imperialists use more subtle language, they ultimately end up making a similar argument to the neocons (see, for instance, Podhoretz’s World War 4: The Long Struggle against Islamofascism) and the Islamophobic warriors. Daniel Pipes has similarly argued that “what Nazism or fascism was to World War II and Marxist/Leninism was to the Cold War, militant Islam is to this war [the War on Terror].”63

Systemic Racism

A wide range of people and groups have participated in constructing a di- abolical “Islamic threat.”What we have seen in this chapter is that the new McCarthyites aren’t aberrations in an otherwise fair and neutral system, despite their rabidly racist views; their role is to push the envelope. To recap, the first group of new McCarthyites discussed in this chapter was a segment of neocons who have devoted themselves to anti-Muslim advocacy through various groups and organizations. However, given that they are part of the foreign policy establishment or from the military, the CIA, the Department of Defense, or other branches of the security apparatus, their ideology is echoed and endorsed by others who share their views but may not explic- itly identify as neocons. Other Islamophobic warriors include right-wingers of various stripes—Zionists, Christian fundamentalists, and right-wing ex- Muslims and Christians from the Middle East and South Asia. Their argu- ments are made more palatable by the liberal Islamophobes who populate the academy, the mainstream media, and various think tanks.

The chart on page 191 attempts to capture these sources of Islamo- phobia and their impact on public discourse. The reader will notice that

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there is no separate box for the Islamophobes. This is because, as was shown above, they are part of the establishment and exist within foreign policy think tanks, universities and colleges, the political class, and the se- curity apparatus (defined as the branches of government that prosecute the War on Terror abroad and as well as at home). Think tanks have played an increasingly important role in shaping foreign policy as we saw in chap- ter 7. As Lawrence Davidson argues in his book Foreign Policy: Privatizing America’s National Interest, the best-funded think tanks play a decisive role in shaping foreign policy and setting the terms of public discussion through their members’ frequent appearances as “experts” in the main- stream media. Academics are another source of ideas often connected to think tanks and to politicians. Political figures from both the Republican and Democratic parties have tied their policy aims to the rhetoric of Is- lamophobia, and many Republicans have used anti-Muslim racism to fur- ther their electoral campaigns. Finally, the security establishment has individuals who pursue their own visions for national and domestic se- curity and are often sought out by the media as “experts.” Wired’s inves- tigative reporting found that the “U.S. military taught its future leaders that a ‘total war’ against the world’s 1.4 billion Muslims would be neces- sary to protect America from Islamic terrorists.”64 Among the various op- tions put forward were to wipe out whole cities (as was done with Hiroshima) and to target the “civilian population wherever necessary.” While the Pentagon has since suspended such training, the officer respon- sible for giving these lectures maintains his position within the military: the “commanders, lieutenant colonels, captains and colonels” who took his course and listened to his rants have since been promoted to higher- level assignments.65 Finally, it must be noted that all of these groups in- teract with one another. For instance, the CSP report Shariah: The Threat to America features articles by Gaffney, Yerushalmi, McCarthy, and other Islamophobes, but also by military generals (William Boykin, Edward Soyster), FBI and CIA people (John Guandolo, James Woolsey), and oth- ers from the security establishment who share their views.66The lines be- tween various boxes are intended to show these connections.

From this analysis it can be discerned that the McCarthyism of the twenty-first century isn’t the product of just one individual: it is the col- lective effort of right-wingers in the academy, the think-tank milieu, the political sphere, and the security establishment. But the green scare, just like its twentieth-century counterpart, is supported and endorsed by lib-

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erals in every sphere who share with conservatives a common commit- ment to US imperialism. It is, however, worth noting that Islamophobia is less potent as an agent of fear than its red counterpart. During the Cold War, the Soviet Union was indisputably a powerful nuclear armed threat to the United States. The same cannot be said of radical Islamist groups, as even members of the security establishment freely admit. The “green scare” can be effective only up to a point; it must constantly be rehashed in public memory through media spectacles in order to keep the fear alive. Both conservatives and liberals participate in these efforts.

At times, however, these two wings of Islamophobia do come into conflict. As we saw above, the Pentagon stopped its rabid Islamophobic training; the Obama administration called for an investigation into coun- terterrorism training. These conflicts are due to differences in strategy. For instance, when Florida pastor Terry Jones threatened to burn the Koran on the ninth anniversary of the 9/11 attacks, the Obama admin- istration had to rein him in. This had less to do with Obama’s commit- ment to fighting Islamophobia and more to do with his administration’s emphasis on winning hearts and minds in the “Muslim world.” After re-

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inforcing the notion that the United States was a nation built on reli- gious tolerance, Obama said of Jones, in a television interview, that “I just want him to understand that this stunt that he is pulling could greatly endanger our young men and women in uniform who are in Iraq, who are in Afghanistan.”67 The turn to counterinsurgency meant that obvious provocations of this kind had to be managed even while the logic of empire was reinforced.

Yet what pushed the likes ofTerry Jones back was not the actions of liberal imperialists but ordinary people in Florida who organized and demonstrated against his bigotry. Grassroots groups such as the Gainesville International Socialist Organization, Students for Justice in Palestine, Stand Up Florida, Amnesty International, and Gainesville Stu- dents for a Democratic Society mobilized against Jones and brought out hundreds on September 11, 2010, to stop the Koran-burning outside Jones’s church. They were successful; no Korans were burned that day.68

The box in the chart that represents social movements is placed next to the box marked “the public,” because it is from the ranks of ordinary people that activists emerge to challenge racism in all its forms. Progres- sive movements have the ability to reshape the discussion and push back against racism, influencing what political figures say and even pushing them to the left. Liberal and radical students and faculty have long been a part of such movements, and their participation often spills over into their research and teaching. It is through such grassroots activism that racism can be successfully fought and an entire society transformed.

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