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Sometimes the unconscious mind tells us just what we truly want to say about our world. That happened to Senator Mitch McConnell only the other day. He was speaking to reporters after fellow Senate Republicans (with the help of Joe Manchin and Kyrsten Sinema) had blocked the Democrats' voting rights bill. When asked what he would tell voters in minority communities who fear newly minted Republican restrictions might keep them from the polls, he oh-so-classically answered, "The concern is misplaced, because if you look at the statistics, African-American voters are voting in just as high a percentage as Americans."
And yes, it was undoubtedly a slip of the tongue as he essentially claimed later. He insisted that he meant to put an "all" in front of "Americans" and added that criticism of him for his statement was both "offensive" and "total nonsense." And that was hardly surprising, since the Republican Party he leads almost certainly rejects the very idea of the unconscious mind as, like critical race theory, a Democratic lie. In the meantime, TomDispatch regular Juan Cole, the creator of the Informed Comment website (where, miraculously enough, he writes a new column every day), points out just how willing McConnell and crew have been to give "Americans" meaning, in this case, white nationalists of various kinds plenty of latitude, no matter the nightmares they were brewing up.
But Muslim Americans? Not on your life! For them, in some sense, every day has been the equivalent of the day after 9/11. Muslim Americans continue to be treated as if they were the potential equivalents of those 19 mostly Saudi hijackers. If, however, you want quite a different vision of Muslim Americans, check out Cole's piece today or, to better understand Islam, consider the just-published book he's edited, Peace Movements in Islam. Tom
Islamophobia and the Capitol Insurrection
How the FBI Ignored White Radicals While Spying 24/7 on Muslim Americans
By Juan Cole
Fox News anchor Tucker Carlson excused one of the leaders of the extremist Oath Keepers organization implicated in the January 6th insurrection by describing him as "a devout Christian." It's safe to surmise that he wouldn't have offered a similar defense for a Muslim American. Since September 11th, and even before that ominous date, they have suffered bitterly from discrimination and hate crimes in this country, while their religion has been demonized. During the first year of the Trump administration, about half of Muslim Americans polled said that they had personally experienced some type of discrimination.
No matter that this group resides comfortably in the American mainstream, it remains under intensive, often unconstitutional, surveillance. In contrast, during the past two decades, the Department of Justice for the most part gave a pass to violent white supremacists. No matter that they generated more terrorist attacks on U.S. soil than any other group. The benign insouciance of the white American elite toward such dangerous fanatics also allowed them to organize freely for the January 6th assault on the Capitol and the potential violent overthrow of the government.
Donell Harvin was the chief of homeland security and intelligence for the government of the District of Columbia in the period leading up to January 6th. He assured NBC News's Ken Dilanian that the FBI and the Department of Homeland Security seemed completely oblivious about the plans of white supremacist hate groups to violently halt the certification of Joe Biden's presidential victory, despite plentiful evidence on social media that they were preparing to bring weaponry to the Capitol.
Consider now the treatment that the very same agencies offered distinctly inoffensive Muslim Americans. Rutgers law professor Sahar Aziz has argued that many white Americans see Muslims not merely as a religious group but as a racial one and have placed them on the nethermost rung of this country's ethnic hierarchy. Muslim Americans are regularly, for instance, profiled at airports and subjected to long interrogations. Over many years, the New York City Police Department gathered intelligence on more than 250 mosques and student groups. The FBI even put field officers in mosques not only to spy on, but also to entrap worshipers who, alarmed by their wild talk, sometimes reported them to" the FBI.
Aziz notes that Donald Trump campaigned in 2016 to register all Muslim Americans in a database, institute widespread surveillance of mosques, and possibly exclude Muslims from the country. Even non-governmental far-right groups like discredited ex-journalist Steve Emerson's "Investigative Project on Terrorism" have spied on Muslim Americans. As with everything else in the contemporary U.S., a partisan divide has emerged regarding them, with 72% of Republicans holding the self-evidently false belief that Muslims are more likely to commit violence than adherents of other faiths, while only 32% of Democrats say this.
Apparently, though, our concern over the potential commission of violence in this country should actually focus on Republicans. A recent Washington Post-University of Maryland poll found that 34% of Americans now believe that violence against the government is sometimes justified, a statistic that rises to an alarming 40% among Republicans. In other words, this country's worries about violence should be focused most on the right-wing extremist fringe, exemplified by groups like the Oath Keepers, 11 of whose leaders were arrested by the FBI in mid-January for "seditious conspiracy" in their paramilitary invasion of the Capitol in 2021. More people have perished in political killings in the past 20 years here at the hands of far-right radicals than those of any other group, including extremists of Muslim heritage. Still, this country's security agencies continue their laser focus on monitoring Muslim Americans, even as they grossly underestimate the threat from white supremacists.
Collectively Punishing Muslim Americans
What most characterizes the American Muslim community, which at nearly four million strong makes up more than 1% of the population, is diversity. It includes white and Hispanic converts, African Americans, Arab Americans, and South-Asian Americans whose families hailed from the Indian subcontinent. Three American Muslims are serving in Congress and even President Trump appointed a Moroccan-born American immunologist, Moncef Slaoui, to head Operation Warp Speed that produced the Moderna vaccine for Covid-19. Last summer saw the confirmation of the first Muslim-American federal judge and President Biden has just nominated the first Muslim-American woman to the federal bench. There are also striking numbers of Muslim-American peace activists, either with their own organizations or involved at interfaith centers, as well as many environmentalists and community organizers, but the media and academics seldom focus on this dimension of the religion.
In my new book, Peace Movements in Islam, my colleagues and I did something remarkably rare in these years: we explored this peaceful dimension of the faith of a fifth of humankind. We focused, for instance, on the Muslims active alongside Mahatma Gandhi in nonviolent noncooperation to end British colonial domination of India. Closer to home, contributor Grace Yukich explores the Muslim-American reaction to the rise of the virulently Islamophobic Trump administration and finds that many responded by promoting the progressive dimensions of their faith, while working against racism and for the rights of immigrants and the poor.
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