Jasbir Puar: Often, the charge of anti-Semitism linked to critiques of Israeli state policies is rendered in Islamophobic, anti-Muslim language. Those making the accusation of anti-Semitic, hateful, or irresponsible speech then feel free to e-mail the most astonishingly vulgar, racist, misogynist, homophobic, Islamophobic screeds. Some go as far as to threaten mutilation, sexual violence, stalking, kidnapping, torture, and death. These e-mails typically referred to the female body in a range of ways, including comments about my categorical dirtiness and ugliness, my genitalia, and even my mother’s genitalia. Several insisted that Rutgers terminate my tenured job, demand justification for allowing me to teach young minds, or avowed that they will start a major campaign to get me fired.
Many of the people engaged in hate speech against me assume I am Arab and/or Muslim—I am neither—thus projecting me, in racist fashion, into the ubiquitous brown terrorist body. In the press I have been referred to as a “raving crackpot” and as a “Scaredy Cat Bomb Thrower.” The escalation and normalization of Islamophobic slurs is a constitutive and sanctioned mechanism of the “war on terror.” Islamophobic expression on college campuses and beyond rarely causes concern. While there is plenty of public space and freedom of speech for Donald Trump’s endless racist screeds against Arabs and Muslims and Mexicans, a legitimate analysis of the horrors of the Israeli occupation lead to vicious forms of silencing and slander. More here.