Edited by Sam Thielman
DOHA, Qatar—I’m actually back in Brooklyn while I write this, but at major newspapers, it is acceptable to dateline your copy in such circumstances if what you’re reporting takes place within the dateline. Feels dishonest, but that is journalistic convention!
At the invitation of Georgetown University’s Doha campus, I spent the weekend in Qatar as part of the Hiwaraat Conference Series’ two-day symposium on the Global Histories & Practices of Islamophobia. My slice of the conference came on Sunday, when I joined two colleagues for whom I have abiding respect, Laila al-Arian and Sana Saeed of al-Jazeera, to discuss Islamophobia in the media with Mohamad Elmasry of the Doha Institute for Graduate Studies. Al-Jazeera’s Jamal Elshayyal was our moderator.
It doesn’t seem like our panel is online. That’s a shame, because the printout of my remarks was full of excited scribbles jotted down after Laila, Sana and Mohamad said smart things, and after checking through my luggage in the hope of finding examples for you, it looks like I threw out my papers. That means you’re stuck with my prepared remarks as a window into our hour-and-forty-five-minute presentation, and I even revised those on the same paper I apparently threw away. But since I don’t often do media criticism, here’s me doing some of that.
But first, Doha. The last time I was in Doha was 19 years ago, for al-Jazeera’s first-ever international media summit. Believe me when I say Doha looked very different. To the best of my recollection, getting from the airport to the hotel on the Arabian/Persian Gulf involved passing through vast expanses of undeveloped land. Now Doha looks like Miami.
It was 2004 and I was in my early 20s, which meant that it sounded like a good idea to me and three Chinese journalists I met for us to share a post-midnight handle of whiskey during an impromptu swim in the Gulf, determined to see the sun rise, until an agitated hotel employee sprinted to the shoreline to tell us that under no circumstances could we do that. This time, in my early 40s, I enjoyed grown-up conversations around dinner tables, hotel lobbies and a karak truck with journalists, activists and academics. I recommend the awe-inspiring Museum of Islamic Art, housed in a building designed by I.M. Pei. At this point, as a city, I’m pro-Doha. Proha.
OK. My remarks are going to follow the paywall, since I need more of you to pay for a subscription to FOREVER WARS! If you want to hear me discuss this some more, check out an upcoming episode of Arsalan Iftikhar’s podcast Unpacking Islamophobia. Special shout to Hamza, a FOREVER WARS reader who introduced himself at the Doha conference and let me know our comic-book references don’t land well for non-comics people.
MEDIA IS A PERMISSION STRUCTURE as much as a communication mechanism. We saw for the past 22 years how mainstream journalism, in respectable outlets and from distinguished reporters, gave permission for casually and structurally Islamophobic messages, messages that perhaps weren’t vulgar but nonetheless carried the implication that 9/11 had a civilizational explanation. These messages communicated that Islam, particularly in America, represented a collective threat to American national security. It’s important to emphasize that oftentimes these messages were carried by respectable news organizations, not fringe or avowedly right-wing media.
One aspect of how this worked is, I think, underappreciated. Muslim civil rights organizations, particularly the Council on American-Islamic Relations, were treated as the thin edge of the wedge of terrorism. Sympathy for the Palestinians amongst board members was sufficient for news organizations to either fear platforming Muslim civil rights activists or to treat those perspectives as tantamount to antisemitism and terrorism. We learned from Edward Snowden that several were put under direct government surveillance without any criminal predicate. The media version of that was either malign neglect or outright hostility. Organizations dedicated to maligning Muslims have had little trouble getting quoted in news outlets.
Consider a case study from 2010, when a media event turned violent. The subject will be known forever as the Ground Zero Mosque and never the name by which it wished to be known: Cordoba House.
I’m sure more than a few of you here remember this episode, but it’s just far enough into the past that recounting it feels like entering an alternative reality. Two prominent Muslim New Yorkers, one of them an imam known for his interfaith efforts, sought to renovate a property destroyed on 9/11 into an Islamic version of the 92nd Street Y, which is a civic space in Manhattan that’s nominally religious but acts as a cultural forum. The right deliberately stoked outrage over the very idea of the property, treating it as an act of civilizational conquest. They called it the Ground Zero Mosque—it is neither at Ground Zero nor was the mosque the primary function of the planned space—and Rupert Murdoch’s New York Post and Fox News devoted endless airtime and column inches to calling it a civilizational affront to the 9/11 dead.
Mainstream outlets ignored or euphemized the substance of the objections—which at their heart were about restricting Islam’s access to public space—and covered it like a circus, treating the outrage as an authentic expression of patriotism rather than a deliberately manufactured one. They saw its quick admixture with the nativist Tea Party Movement but hesitated to address the implications, let alone to connect the outrage to frustrations on the right about the War on Terror becoming a humiliating quagmire. That’s what I mean by structurally Islamophobic messages in mainstream presentation. Meanwhile Imam Rauf, who had written a book called What’s Right With Islam Is What’s Right With America, had to constantly defend himself against being a terrorist.
Most significantly, while a big Ground Zero Mosque protest was happening, one of the agitated people stabbed a cab driver named Ahmed Sharif, telling Sharif he was manning “a checkpoint.” Sharif’s assailant was a film student, not a veteran. Not a single news outlet called this “radicalization.” They rarely reported on the law enforcement consultants, politicians and media figures who spread a theory called Civilization Jihad, which held that Sharia law was coming to replace the Constitution and Muslim immigration was an invasion. It was, in beta test, what we now understand as the White Genocide narrative.
A lot of people think Islamophobia has faded in relevance as hatreds against other American minorities have crested and proven politically advantageous. But Islamophobia was also a beta test for them, and a demonstration effect in how much respectability could be granted to persecution of an internal minority, backed by the terrifying force of the U.S. national security state. The persecution would be justified in the papers as a response to a legitimate security threat, and rarely would the media beyond the margins challenge it. Remember Donald Trump and Mike Pence lying about a migrant caravan containing Middle Easterners to justify a military deployment to the southern border—a deployment that continues to this day and through into 2024? The press treated that as an embarrassment for the White House, a departure from factual reality, leaving unchallenged the driving force of the narrative, which is that militarizing the border would be necessary if there really were Muslims amongst the caravan. The function of that narrative is to ensure that the U.S. doesn’t address how U.S. destabilization—security, economic, and climatological—created so many refugees in the first place, and how it continues to create them.
Meanwhile, the media treats the War on Terror as finished because President Biden withdrew from Afghanistan. Yet the authorizations, operations and institutions of the War on Terror remain mostly in place, especially those with repressive applications domestically. There’s a lawsuit right now challenging the no-fly and other watchlists that are full of Muslim names. The DHS has never purged the NSEERS database of at least 80,000 Muslims, which means this functional Muslim database can be reactivated. I could go on, but Islamophobia is institutionalized in the U.S. government and normalized in U.S. media.
There’s going to be a War on Terror memorial on the National Mall in Washington. Never before has a memorial been constructed to a U.S. war while it’s still being waged. What sort of messages will it send about who the enemy was, and where the enemy still is? What role will the media class play in arbitrating between permissible messages and impermissible ones? Thank you.
BEFORE BIDEN WON THE ELECTION, I did a piece pressuring his campaign to tear down the Wall along the southern border, because without pressure, I figured it simply would remain. It won’t shock you to learn that Biden’s people were noncommittal. But you don’t have to be surprised to be disgusted to see his DHS affirmatively expand work on it, much as I wrote above that the Biden Pentagon has extended the active-duty military deployment along the border. The Wall is both a barrier to people and a monument to MAGA, and to sacrifice the former to the latter is to compound betrayals.
LEE HARRIS, whose wrongful conviction I wrote about for The Guardian years ago, is suing those in the Chicago Police Department responsible for railroading him. Chief among the defendants is Richard Zuley, who tortured black people in Chicago before torturing Muslims at Guantanamo. They can never give Lee back the 33 years of his life that they stole, but perhaps at least Lee can have some measure of justice.
THE SOMALI NATIONAL SECURITY ADVISER is predicting to the Wall Street Journal that Somalia will “finish off” al-Shabab “before August next year.” There’s also some very bad history in this piece, particularly the part where the U.S.-supported Ethiopian invasion in 2006 to oust the Islamic Courts Union turned the ICU’s youth wing, al-Shabab, “from a small, relatively unimportant part of a more moderate Islamic movement into the most powerful and radical armed faction in the country.” But I’m sure there’s nothing to learn from history when a U.S. client is promising total victory over an entrenched adversary in a war that has lasted 16 years and counting.
JOHN KELLY‘s reputational rehabilitation continues with this unfortunate CNN piece that doesn’t mention his role in stealing people’s children, something he actually kinda-sorta announced in 2017 on CNN. You also don’t get anything in this one about Kelly’s vindictive actions at Guantanamo to break the 2013 hunger strike, or his vicious 2010 St. Louis speech taking aim at opponents of the war—REIGN OF TERROR has you covered—because the point is to let Kelly posture as if Trump is horrifying to him, rather than showing how Kelly foreshadowed the presidency Kelly himself would serve.
“What can I add that has not already been said?” Kelly said. “A person that thinks those who defend their country in uniform, or are shot down or seriously wounded in combat, or spend years being tortured as POWs are all ‘suckers’ because ‘there is nothing in it for them.’ A person that did not want to be seen in the presence of military amputees because ‘it doesn’t look good for me.’ A person who demonstrated open contempt for a Gold Star family—for all Gold Star families—on TV during the 2016 campaign, and rants that our most precious heroes who gave their lives in America’s defense are ‘losers’ and wouldn’t visit their graves in France.”
Half of Kelly’s list of awful Trump things, the stuff about John McCain’s POW status and the attack on the Gold Star family of Cpt. Humayun Khan, happened before Kelly chose to serve Trump as secretary of Homeland Security and White House chief of staff. And as chief of staff, Kelly, the nation’s senior-most Gold Star father, had no problem protecting Trump when the widow of slain Army Sgt. La David Johnson told ABC about Trump’s inability to remember Johnson’s name. Kelly now sits on the board of a company that staffs his special prisons for babies. But hey, he’s willing to say Orange Man Bad now, right?
THE PRIVACY & CIVIL LIBERTIES OVERSIGHT BOARD came out, in divided fashion, for a FISA Court-issued warrant requirement for FBI searches through the National Security Agency’s 702 data troves. The PCLOB is a joke that in 2014 spared Section 702 when it faced constitutional challenges in federal courts. What it’s done here is the government-advisory-panel equivalent of pleading to a lesser charge—in this case, recognizing that 702 surveillance tramples privacy rights but putting a band-aid on it. The FBI has for more than a decade violated FISA Court-imposed processes; they’ll do the same thing with a surveillance-warrant requirement. My guess is that PCLOB couldn’t get 3 votes for its recommendation without a recognition that 702 is in real trouble. Let it die!
SPEAKING OF, the NSA’s AI Security Center is open. The War on Terror’s enormous grants of surveillance authorities filled the NSA data troves that will now feed these AI models.
I WORKED WITH NBC’S BEN COLLINS at The Daily Beast and think very highly of him as a reporter and as a human being. Read his piece about Elon Musk’s apparent template for how to transform Twitter, which Ben traces to a website run by a white-nationalist-adjacent Trump veteran. Whatever template Elon is using, I would simply observe that the data Twitter possesses, from DM contents to social-graph connections, are extremely useful for any institutionalized effort at suppressing MAGA’s enemies should the broader MAGA movement return to power, whether through Trump or after Trump.
CAROL ROSENBERG writes about renewed efforts for freedom and accountability on behalf of the Guantanamo forever-prisoner known as Abu Zubaydah.
AS LONG AS WE’RE TALKING MEDIA CRITICISM, I found myself nodding along to a whole lot of this Hamilton Nolan piece. This part articulates a value (ethic?) I hold:
[T]here is a strain of media criticism that attempts to define what does or does not qualify as real “journalism,” which I have always disliked. Journalism is an action. If you go out and find stuff out and then write it down and publish it and do your best to make sure it’s true, you are doing journalism. It is possible for an average citizen to Do Journalism very well and it is possible for a professional journalist to Do Journalism very poorly. It is possible for a news outlet to do great journalism one day and shitty journalism the next. Thanks to the First Amendment, you do not need a laminated press pass to be an Official Journalist. You just go do it. Every day you do it anew. Every day, a new chance to do well or fuck it all up. The regular citizen and the professional reporter have this in common. Fancy titles don’t define it.
IF YOU’VE READ THIS FAR, you deserve Superchunk’s cover of “In-Between Days” by The Cure, which was just released on streaming platforms and which I had on repeat as I wrote this edition. I know the link here goes to the YouTube video, but don’t listen to it on laptop speakers, you’re worth more than that.
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