Aziz Rana: In legal and political practice, you can see how Islamophobia actually operates both at the international level of American foreign policy and at the domestic level. It is a joint project of the Democratic and Republican parties and long precedes the rise of white nationalism and Trump. So, for example, if you look at counterterrorism policy in the United States as prosecuted by both the FBI and the NYPD, a lot of the focus is on this idea of radicalization. The idea is that people from Muslim communities are inherently pre-radicalized. In other words, they are already on a path towards violence, and the way in which they get activated is through religious devotion or engaging in various forms of politicization and political dissent. And what that facilitated is an entire approach to counterterrorism that is based effectively on the mass surveillance of Muslim communities: the use of informants, the mapping of mosques, and so on. And the basic thought is essentially that when Muslims become religious or politicized, they necessarily are part of a conveyer belt toward dangerousness and threat. You see the same kind of general frame of a community as suspect and therefore legitimately subject to violence and surveillance in foreign policy.
[…] I think it is really important not to separate the foreign and the domestic, or to think of radicalization as a matter of national security policy and assimilation as just a question of immigration. These two things are deeply interconnected. You can see this in Bill Clinton’s speech at the Democratic National Convention. His effort to reach out to Muslim communities and be inclusive, as opposed to the Trump approach, was to say, “Muslims”—and here I am paraphrasing—“if you believe in freedom, if you are opposed to terrorism, come and fight with us.” And, effectively, the judgment was that assimilation is predicated on support for the national security state. And that is a really deep point. It speaks to something profound that Muslim communities are struggling with. It is not really clear that there is anything that Muslim populations can do to be fully assimilated as Americans. You can emphasize that the religion is a religion of peace, you can hold out your Constitution like Khizr Khan did at the Democratic convention. But the basic problem is really a problem about where American power operates. The relevant hot zones of American power today are in the Middle East. And as long as the United States is involved in continuous interventions that end up producing indigenous and local oppositions, creating the need for yet more efforts of pacification, you are going to inevitably have a domestic conversation along the lines of, “What is it about these communities that makes them dangerous? Why is it that they are not peaceable?” And it is really American foreign policy practices that are generating the tit-for-tat practices of violence and response.
You can tell the same story about Asians who were viewed as threats in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. What is it that transformed Chinese and Japanese immigrants from being seen as culturally inassimilable threats to national security to what we today describe as “model minorities”? It really had nothing to do with shifts in Chinese or Japanese culture, but instead with a shift in where American power operated. And it was the total defeat of Japan, and the shift of America’s focus from the Pacific to what ends up being the Middle East, that transformed the nature and the meaning of those communities. This really highlights that the question of assimilation is not about the intrinsic characteristics of any of these communities, but about how American global power operates to construct particular sites of instability and then justifies the exclusion of those communities based on the idea that they are responsible for that instability in the first place. More here.